Maybe one of these days I’ll look back on that ten minutes under the August sun in backwoods Pennsylvania and laugh about it. Maybe it’ll become one of those anecdotes soldiers tell when they want to story-top the last guy. Or, maybe when I think about it I’ll get the shakes and go crawling off to find a bottle.
Everyone was shooting at everyone.
I’ve never seen anything like it. Don’t ever want to see anything like it again.
One team was dead. That left five teams of shooters, sent by God only knows who. Three of the teams were Middle Eastern, I could tell that much, and that made sense. Then I heard someone yelling in Russian. Someone else was yelling in Spanish.
I was yelling in every language I could curse in . . . and I am fluent in a long list of languages.
I crouched down behind the open door of the SUV, reached around with the M4 and opened fire. I wasn’t aiming. No-damn-body was aiming. But everybody was sure as hell capping off a lot of rounds. My hearing will never be the same. Ditto my nerves.
I think I even screamed for a little bit. I’ll admit it, I’m not proud.
I fired the magazine dry, dropped it, slapped in another, fired, swapped it out, fired. The effort of holding the gun was rattling the bones in my arm to pieces and I don’t think I hit anything with the first four magazines. The mist was chest-high now and the men out there were crouched down. It was like trying to fight in the middle of a blizzard.
So, I set down the gun and dug into the bag for one of Top’s “party favors.” An M67 fragmentation grenade.
“Come to Papa,” I murmured.
The M67 looks like a dark green apple, but instead of juicy sweetness the spherical body contains six and a half ounces of composition B explosive. When it goes boom, the body bursts into steel fragments that will forever change the life of anything within fifteen meters. I lobbed one out through the gaping hole that had been the front wall of the house. I never heard it bounce, never heard it land.
Everyone heard it when it blew. A loud, muffled whumph.
And everyone heard the screams that followed.
Another thing I’m not too proud to admit. I enjoyed those screams. Part of me did. The Killer that shares my mind with the Civilized Man and the Cop. That’s the part of me that’s always waiting in the tall grass, face grease-painted green and brown, eyes staring and dead, mouth perpetually caught in a feral smile.
The Killer wanted more, so I popped the pin on two more party treats and threw them out. More bangs, more screams.
Then I was up, laying the M4 over the hinge of the open door. Hot shell casings pinged and whanged off of the SUV’s frame and smoke burned my eyes. All I could taste in my mouth was blood and gunpowder.
The smoke from the grenades wafted away on a breeze and I could see one of the cars belonging to one group sitting on flat tires, its sides splashed with blood, windows blasted out. Two ragged red things lay sprawled on the gravel, and a travel of blood led away toward the tall corn. The second vehicle was sitting askew in the ditch that lined the driveway, its windshield and driver’s side polka-dotted with hundreds of bullet and pellet holes.
“Hey, Cap’n!” yelled Top from upstairs. “I’m running out of wall to hide behind.”
“I’m open to ideas,” I yelled back.
I think I heard him laugh. Top’s a strange guy. Like Bunny. Like me, too, I suppose. As much as the Civilized Man inside my head was cringing and whimpering, the Killer was totally jazzed. I’m kind of glad I didn’t have Kevlar and a ballistic shield, or I might have done something stupid.
Luckily, someone else did do something stupid.
No, correct that, a bunch of people did a bunch of stupid things, and that’s why I’m still here to tell you about it.
It spun out this way . . .
The team that came in on the ATVs were yelling something in Farsi and trying to cut their way to the house. No way to tell if the guys who came in the cars were their enemies, or simply business rivals. In either case, the ATV guys came rolling in, firing over the handlebars with their AKs, chopping the cars to pieces and ripping up the last three car guys. If this was a two-way fight, or even a three-way fight, they might have won. They were the biggest team.
Eight men on four ATVs.
I leaned out and sighted on them and started to pick them off. I got both men in the lead vehicle with four shots, and the ATV twisted and fell over onto its side, slewing around with one of the men still in the saddle. The second ATV hit that one at about forty miles an hour and the driver and passenger tried to leap to safety. “Tried” wasn’t good enough.
Suddenly a shooter stood up out of the mist and aimed a pump shotgun at me. He caught me flat-footed while I was watching the ATV wreck. He was twenty feet away, right outside the shattered wall, and I saw his face crease into a wicked smile as he raised the barrel.
Suddenly the fog around him changed color from a milky white to a bright red. The shooter’s fingers jerked the trigger and the double-ought buckshot blew downward harmlessly into the gravel. The man canted sideways and fell and as he dropped I saw another figure move like a dark shadow through the mist. The figure was small and, at first, I had the irrational thought that it was Simon Burke, but this figure moved with oiled grace.
I aimed my M4 at him. Whoever he was, he belonged to one of the teams sent to take Burke. I mean, thanks for saving my life and all that, but this is one of those incidents where the enemy of my enemy wasn’t necessarily my friend.
I unloaded half a magazine at him, but the bullets swirled the fog without hitting anything. The figure had faded out of sight.
There was a crash behind me and I spun to see Bunny come running in from the kitchen. A fusillade of shotgun blasts were tearing the back of the house to kindling. Bunny overturned the oak dining room table and crashed a breakfront down on top of that. It would give him a few seconds of cover, but these guys had enough firepower to chew through anything.
He threw me a wild grin. “America’s Haunted Holidayland,” he yelled. “We’ll scare you to death.”
I nodded to the SUV. “That’s our last fallback. The armor should hold for a bit.”
He made a face, but nodded. A “bit” wasn’t much.
Bullets continued to hammer the house from all directions. But there were also occasional screams.
I cupped my hands and yelled, “You’re my hero, Top!”
His face immediately appeared at the top of the stairs. “Not me, Cap’n. They’re doing a good job on each other. Maybe we should try and wait this out.”
Before I could answer, two men came charging in through the open doorway. Both were firing AKs, and I had to do a diving tackle to save Bunny from the spray of bullets. We hit the floor and rolled over behind the couch. There was an overlapping series of shots, definitely from a different caliber, and I peered around the edge of the couch to see the two shooters sagging to their knees, both of them already dead from headshots that had taken them in the backs of their skulls and blown their faces off. As they fell forward I caught another glimpse of the slim, dark figure vanishing into the fog.
Only this time I saw the shooter’s face.
Just for a moment.
“Hey, Boss,” said Bunny, “was that . . . ?”
“I think so.”
“He on our side, or is he with one of the teams?”
I shook my head.
We crawled out and I hurried over to the crumbling wall to recover my bag of grenades.
It wasn’t there.
The killer in the mist had taken it.