Thomas Perry - Poison Flower

She barely moved as she aimed her shotgun at the third man. He stepped up onto the floor of the hallway and raised his foot to kick in the master bedroom door. He kicked, the door swung inward, he fired at the dummy on the bed, and the other two pivoted to fire through the doorway, too. Jane pulled the trigger, and her shotgun blast killed the third man. The other two looked at him and each other, confused, half deafened by the firing in the narrow space, and their confusion gave Jane a second to pump the shotgun and fire a blast into the chest of the second man. The first man, now aware that the fire was coming from behind him, must have heard her pumping the shotgun again. He tried to spin around, but made it in time to see the muzzle flash coming from Jane's shotgun. Her shot caught him in the head, and he fell across the others.

Jane began to reload, but then there was a fourth man running up the hall toward her, firing a semiautomatic rifle. Holes appeared in the wood above her head. She fired at him, but she seemed to miss. She pumped again, but then he had disappeared into the doorway of one of the rooms. If she waited, the other four would be up here in seconds.

She stepped into the hall with her shotgun aimed at the doorway, slipped into the next room, locked the door, jumped onto the bed, and ran on it to the open window. She dropped the shotgun, threw the rope out the window, and crawled out after it. She lowered herself most of the way down, dropped, hit the ground, and ran along the house to crouch at the side of the front porch.

She drew her pistol and rested her arm on the lower part of the railing between the spokes, and took deep breaths while she waited. Two men rushed out the front door heading for the steps. She was so close to them she fired upward into them, not at them. She pulled the trigger five times.

She turned and ran back along the side of the house past her rope, toward the back door of the house. She reached the corner as she heard two more of them coming out. It was too late to ambush them, so she went low, then brought her arm around the corner of the house and fired wildly six times. She knew she hit one, because she heard him yell and fall against the house, and a rifle scraped it, then fell on the ground.

There was no way to be sure of the other, so she ran again, this time away from the house into the brush and weeds. She ran fifty or sixty feet to a thicket, dropped to the ground, replaced the magazine in her pistol, and cycled the slide to put a round in the chamber. She waited for the other man to come around, but he didn't come. He was probably trying to get a better angle to fire the rifle at her.

She had to move before he got a view of her. She would move to where he had been, because that was the one place she could be sure was clear. She would pick up the rifle of the man who had never fired, slip inside, and lie on the floor of the kitchen, where she would be able to hit anyone who came down the stairs or went to the front door. She came around the corner and stopped. There were two men with rifles, both standing up. They quickly swung around to face her, and she dashed back around the corner. She sprinted into the field, trying to dash into the deep darkness. She made it to another thicket, dropped into the weeds beyond it, and aimed at the corner of the house.

It was taking too long. At least one of them was moving to a new firing position. But what was the best firing position The upstairs window where she had climbed out and rappelled to the ground. From that elevation he would be able to see her perfectly and put a rifle bullet through her.

Jane ran toward the house until she was twenty feet below it. She imagined the man going in the door, through the kitchen, down the long hallway to the foot of the stairs, then up the stairs. He would run along the upstairs hall to the room where she had left the rope. He would kneel on the bed, prop an elbow on the windowsill, and look down the barrel.

Jane stood below the window, her pistol gripped in both hands, and aimed at the center of the small, dark square of the upstairs window. She saw the rifle barrel come out the window, and fired. She fired twice more, but there was no return shot. The rifle rested on the sill, the barrel now pointing out and upward at nothing. She turned and ran.

Behind her she heard more shots. They were rapid, but there was no overlap between them. There was only one man firing. She heard rounds crack as they passed over her faster than the sound barrier, heard thumps as they pounded into the ground. She didn't have the speed that she'd had all her life. It was frustrating and frightening, and she hated it, but she kept sprinting, trying to move as quickly as she could right now, because now was the only time that mattered, that was even real. She couldn't increase her speed, but she could strain to keep moving at the same rate in spite of the fatigue.

She stayed low, running in a particular direction, gauging her position by the tall pine tree jutting upward from the canopy of hardwoods. She crossed the game trail, veered to the right to follow it, and heard a shot hit behind her. She could hear the man now, his loud, heavy footsteps as he ran across the field to get a better shot at her, his heavy breaths coming closer in the silent night air.

Then she was at the pit, much closer than she had imagined it was, and she nearly stepped into it, her right foot dislodging a little dirt from the edge. She straightened her path, then veered to the right again beyond the covered pit. The man fired once more, but the shot went high. He was already trying to cut across her path to make the next shot easier and closer. He was not zigzagging as she was, not slowing at all.

She suddenly realized what he was doing. He had begun to think he could run her down and take her alive. As soon as they had realized she was armed and killing their comrades, the men must have assumed the best they could accomplish was to kill her. But now she was in the open and not running too fast to overtake. She wasn't shooting back, so maybe she was out of ammunition. The man was alone, but if he could catch her, he wouldn't have to split any money with partners. She was worth very little to him dead, but alive, she was priceless. He could sell her to her enemies or torture her, just as Wylie had wanted to do.

She heard it behind her, hardly daring to think it was that, and yet knowing it had to be, and then heard the voice-"Aah! Aah!" again and again, pitched higher than a man's speaking voice but still his voice. She thought she recognized the voice.

Jane slid to put her feet ahead of her, rolled over on her belly, and aimed her pistol in the direction she had come from. There was nothing to shoot at. She could see the whole marshy field all the way back to the house, but there was nothing in it taller than the weeds. She waited, stared down the sights of the pistol, but saw nothing. She stood and cautiously walked back toward the pit. She circled and approached it from the end so she could look the long way into the twelve-foot pit.

The tarp she had used to cover the pit was pushed aside off half the length of it, and the man lay on top of it. She could hear labored, raspy breathing. She could see the man's rifle had fallen about five feet from him. It seemed to be out of his reach, but that could be intentional.

She stepped closer. "I hear you up there," he shouted. "Help me." She had been right. It was Wylie's voice.

"Wylie. How bad are you"

"Bad. I've got a stake sticking in me."

"Toss your pistol out."

He didn't move. "I can't reach it. I can't hurt you now. Get a stick, something I can hold on to. Maybe I can get up."

She moved to the edge of the pit farthest from him and took the thickest and longest of the branches she had used to hide the pit. She held it out and he grasped it. She pulled.