Parkowski stood there in shock.
Then she remembered she was in the middle of a running gun battle.
DePresti had gone back to the assault rifle, its thunderous report echoing throughout the old house.
She grabbed her rifle and plastered her body against the wall, then used her foot to move her NVGs close enough for her to pick up and put back on.
Parkowski peered outside of the front window.
There was movement, but it was further back to where she had first shot at the oncoming enemies.
She fired a couple of shots and paused, waiting for a violent response.
None came.
Parkowski peeked out again, this time catching the indistinct form of a person against a large boulder just at the start of the hill.
She raised the scope to her eye, aimed the crosshair at the figure, and fired.
Parkowski never expected it to hit. It did.
She had aimed at the person’s body but caught them in their left leg.
The enemy figure fell to the ground. Another figure, smaller, perhaps the woman she had fought, appeared over them.
Parkowski fired one, two, three, four, five times.
All of them went wild.
The second shooter pulled the one Parkowski had shot behind the boulder.
She ducked back, then fired again until the magazine ran out.
No shots came from the distance.
A few seconds later, Parkowski heard DePresti’s rifle go silent. She put her own down and carefully crept to the kitchen. Her boyfriend was surrounded by a horde of spent brass, glistening in the moonlight from the shattered window.
DePresti looked exhausted. He grabbed his night-vision goggles and put them on the counter.
“Are they gone?” Parkowski asked.
He nodded. “For now.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Amazingly, the firefight had only lasted an hour. But it had been an exhausting sixty minutes.
As soon as they confirmed that the mysterious enemy team of gunmen had gone, Parkowski relaxed slightly. The adrenaline had worn off. Parkowski’s injured arm hurt like hell. It had felt better over the course of the day, but firing the rifle and getting into hand-to-hand combat had aggravated it.
She dug around in Chang’s bathroom downstairs and found some prescription painkillers. Parkowski had to be careful — there were a lot of drugs in the cabinet, including some hallucinogens — but the oxycontin was clearly labeled. She popped a pair and knocked them down with a sip of water.
DePresti stayed up top, alternating between checking out the front of the house and the rear, but it appeared their opponents had departed the area.
They slept in shifts.
Parkowski took the first one, sleeping in the bed she had slept in that first night, while DePresti kept watch.
He woke her up at midnight. “I hate disturbing your sleep, but I’m about to pass out on the job.”
“It’s ok,” she responded as she slid out of the covers and off the bed. “Go get some rest.”
“Thanks,” he said as he got in.
Parkowski grabbed his AR-15 and went to the kitchen. She got out a Diet Coke — one of the last ones — and opened it. The caffeine helped. Ten minutes later she felt fine.
Both sets of night vision goggles had run out of batteries. They could go look for more in the basement, but the threat seemed to have passed.
The moon was fully overhead now. Her eyes adjusted quickly. The desert night was devoid of movement.
She sighed and sat down in a chair. The painkillers made her slightly loopy. Hopefully, there wouldn’t be another attack.
After a few minutes of sitting, Parkowski stood back up and walked to the front of the house. She now noticed that all of the windows were shattered, not just the two she had been standing near when they were shot out. Brass from her rifle littered the ground.
Interestingly, there were no footprints from her opponent in the brief hand-to-hand skirmish.
Parkowski carefully walked through the living room, taking in the scenery outside. It was still.
Deathly still.
She spent the next hour or so switching back and forth between the rear of the house and the front, looking for any signs of movement on the ridge or on the flat plain between the road and the house.
There were none.
Parkowski woke DePresti up at 3. “Ding, dong, your turn,” she told her boyfriend.
He groaned. “I was sleeping so well too.”
She handed him the rifle, climbed back into bed, and quickly fell back asleep.
Parkowski dreamed; the contents of which she forgot moments after she woke up. But what was important was a sensation of warmth, of heat, on the side of her face.
She blinked her eyes open.
The sun was coming up over the hills, warming her face and spreading its rays through the broken window.
Parkowski rolled out of bed.
She was sore, stiff, and exhausted.
DePresti was in the kitchen, drinking the very last Diet Coke.
“Mornin’,” he said in an exaggerated accent as she slowly made her way in.
“Anything exciting happen?” she asked as she took a seat.
He shook his head. “No, I would have woken you up if it had.”
“What do we do next?”
DePresti had seemingly thought this through. “Let’s go check outside. See if they left anything behind.”
They quickly ate what little food was left in Chang’s upper kitchen and went down to the lower level. Parkowski grabbed an Israeli-made Uzi, while DePresti grabbed a couple more magazines for his AR-15. The two of them then headed back up the stairs and out the front door into the cold desert morning. She wished she had brought a jacket.
Parkowski and DePresti walked out towards the road in the direction of the boulders that her opponents in the gun battle had taken cover behind.
She had an odd thought. How could they have been shot at for over sixty minutes, with their opponents expending hundreds if not thousands of rounds, and neither she nor DePresti were hit once?
She knew that they were trying to capture them, not kill them, but the odds of neither of them getting hit had to be astronomically low.
Even more shocking was the complete lack of brass around the boulders.
“There’s no way,” Parkowski told her boyfriend. “I watched them fire at me from this spot,” she continued, pointing at the rear of a large, distinct rock.
DePresti frowned. “I don’t see anything, outside of a few hits that must have been from your weapon, here,” he said as he pointed at a few small holes in the rock.
“Yes, I know,” Parkowski said. “But they were firing at me from here.”
“They must have policed their brass,” he said, crossing his arms.
“But how? They weren’t picking it up in the middle of a firefight.”
“Maybe they came back at night and swept it all up into bags,” DePresti suggested.
She was about to protest but he raised a hand. “Listen, I’m just spitballing here,” he said, “but it looks like they wanted to remove any trace that they were here.”
A few yards away they found a blood stain on the dusty desert floor.
“I hit one of them,” Parkowski told her boyfriend. “It must have been here.” Or was it? The whole previous night was a blur.
There was a short trail to the next rock, then it stopped. She knew what had happened here.
“They bandaged whoever I shot, then got them out of the combat zone,” Parkowski said.
DePresti gave a slight nod.
They looked for something, anything that they could use to identify their attackers, but there was nothing. After reaching the road, the two headed back to the house.
There was no food in the upper portion’s refrigerator, so they raided Chang’s studio apartment for some ramen and beef jerky for lunch. It wasn’t enough, but it had to do.