Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“Put it down, kibble.”

Turtle unslings the shotgun, pitches it to the floor.

Brett steps forward. He says, “You’re not taking her anywhere.”

Martin ignores him. He’s looking at Turtle. He says, “Come on, kibble.”

Brett steps between them, puts his hand on Martin’s chest. “No,” he says, “I won’t let — ”

Turtle sees Martin’s face. She goes for the Sig Sauer. Her right arm isn’t working like it should. She bids for the gun desperately, and for one awful moment her shirt is in the way, bunching up over the holster’s trigger release, and she can’t get the gun up and clear, scrabbling disbelievingly, watching Martin step back to make distance between himself and Brett, Brett’s hands up and out, and then the bright muzzle flash. Brett arches forward, stooping, his back bowed out behind and the bullet bellying his shirt like a sail. Martin looks past Brett at Turtle. She sees the second muzzle flash and the bullet hits her like a sledgehammer to the cheek. She falls, seeing stars, blind in the left eye, her face white with pain, lying right on top of her shotgun. Cayenne is screaming, breaking across the carpet toward her. Then Turtle is up and running, the shotgun in her hand. Something hits her low in the back and she sees the mist of blood projected ahead of her onto the wall, the puckered bullet hole appearing at its center, small as a cigarette burn. She crashes through the doorway, and slews down the hall, her mind yellow and green with terror. She casts a look over her shoulder and she sees a flare of light, like someone striking a match, her vision patterning with green and red dots, a splattering of afterimages, and something smacks her just beneath the right shoulder blade. She hears the pock of gunfire; it seems smaller and less consequential than it should, and the sound follows after the blow. She falls onto hands and knees out into the kitchen. She grabs at her belly, the hot squirt of blood in her hands. She can hear the pock pock of more gunfire, but it is utterly disorienting. She does not know where the bullets are striking or if they are striking her. She cannot draw a deep breath.

She crawls across the kitchen floor, thinking, you have to get up. She is gasping shallowly. Cayenne is pulling on her. Turtle plants her hand in a slick of blood and it goes out from under her. She lies with her face on the granite tile. The girl drags at Turtle’s shirt. Turtle can see the shotgun beside her on the floor. She rolls over on her back, pulls her knees up, drags the Sig Sauer out from its holster and brings it up. Her aim is drifting all over the place, her vision swims, her left eye is full of blood and she closes it. She braces her wrists between her thighs just as Martin comes into view. She fires and he dives back behind the wall. She fires through drywall to drive him deeper into the hallway.

Cayenne grabs Turtle by the arm and tries to haul her across the floor and Turtle heaves herself up, boots and hands slipping on the blood-slick tiles, picks up the shotgun, and hobbles toward the door, which opens onto the back deck. Then she stops. She looks at the kitchen counter, and then lurches toward it, supporting herself one-handed along the kitchen island, the other holding on to her stomach like a runner with a stitch, the shotgun slung, the blood glugging out through her squelching fingers. Her shirt is sopping. It makes an ugly smacking sound when it swings into her stomach. She can’t take a deep breath.

“We have to go!” Cayenne is screaming. “Turtle! Let’s go!”

Turtle pulls the drawer open, and it’s right there: lightbulbs, screwdrivers, finishing hammer, nails, duct tape. Blood is falling from her face into the drawer. She keeps blinking it out of her left eye. It is just a scratch, she tells herself. It doesn’t feel like a scratch. She pulls her shirt up. It’s okay, she’s telling herself. All you have to do is do everything right. And that’s just fine.

Martin comes around the corner. Turtle lifts up the bloody shotgun one-handed and blows a hole in the wall just as he falls back. He sticks the gun around the corner and fires blindly into the kitchen, hosing the walls with automatic fire, and Turtle aims and fires again. The buckshot goes through the tile, exposing studs and electrical wires, insulation, exits out the wall, and she hears the shattering of the glass case, hears him scrabbling through the glass away from her. She swings the gun up and shoots out the kitchen light. They plunge into darkness. Then Turtle thumbs on the shotgun’s weapon-mounted strobe. The room fills with blinding, flickering illumination. It flattens all the shadows into harsh, depthless lines and all color into white sheets of glare. She knows from experience just how hard it is to shoot into that strobe. The weapon light is mounted on the barrel with quick-release tabs and she dismounts it and rolls it across the kitchen island, ten feet away from her and aimed at the hallway door.

In the nauseous, flashing light, she hitches her shirt back up. She can see the wound in her belly. The blood has sheeted down her stomach and her jeans are sodden with it and it sloshes in her boots. She tears off a strip of her shirt, wads it over the hole, and begins duct-taping over it. She is lucky Martin is using a short-barreled rifle. By the look of the exit wound, she’s been skewered right through, the bullet not fragmenting or yawing at all. With longer barrels, and higher velocities, those 5.56 bullets can peel apart or tumble. He’s careless, she thinks. He’s careless of these details and he always was. Martin is firing at the flashlight. Turtle ignores him. The duct tape is not going to do much good, but it’ll do something. That’s not true. Where she’s going, it’s going to save her life.

“Turtle!” Cayenne screams.

Turtle ignores her, taping up around her stomach and up around her chest, a tight, duct-tape girdle. Something flashes and Turtle looks up. The granite backsplash beside her ejects and lifts from the wall in shards. In the strobe there is no movement. Just single, bright white flashes. He’s no longer shooting from the doorway. He’s in the adjacent room, shooting through the wall right beside her. Turtle dives, bears Cayenne to the ground. Above them, splinters of tile and glass are constellated in the air. A scroll of particulate grit blooms outward. The girls huddle on the floor behind the island, Cayenne screaming and screaming, face to the tile. The kitchen island isn’t actually cover. The 5.56 rounds may be small, no bigger and only slightly heavier than a .22 rimfire, but they’ll still go right through it. Turtle sits up, braces herself against the cabinet, and continues wrapping the duct tape around herself. She doesn’t want to try firing back at him through the wall. She just doesn’t have enough ammunition and she doesn’t know who might be in the room with him. Then the firing stops and Turtle hears him drop the magazine, the sound of the new mag loaded into the well, the steel-on-steel sound of the bolt released forward, but something goes wrong. It is a jam. You motherfucker, she thinks, you incompetent fuck. Probably, he’d done a shitty job of retooling the gun for full auto and it’s jamming up on him. Cayenne is plastered to the floor, eyes clenched tight, convulsing wordlessly, and clawing at the tile. Turtle grabs her by the hair and heaves her up and the girl seizes Turtle’s wrist in both hands and they stagger to the deck door. The strobe destroys all depth perception and so they reel half blind through the room and Turtle fires into the doorframe ahead of them and kicks it open and steps out. More fire searches the kitchen and they pitch out on the deck and crawl awkwardly out toward the stairs. The strobe will hold him for another few seconds. Turtle grabs the railing and drags herself down onto the stairs and they descend into a rocky notch of beach covered in dried bull kelp that cracks hollowly underfoot. A stiff wind comes from the north and it picks up their hair and pulls it in streamers across their faces.