Terry thought he didn’t have a whole lot of time or a whole lot of strength left. But maybe he was where he needed to be, when he needed to be there. He put his hand on the grip and found the trigger.
He sucked in his breath and rolled over to bring the gun up, and as the man caught the movement and started to turn Terry squeezed the trigger just as he used to do on the firing range in Oklahoma City. The bullet went in low on the left side, a few inches away from the spine, and when he felt the jagged ripping pain Jeremy knew he was in deep shit, because it had been a killing shot. He staggered, and he heard Gunny give a sigh of exasperation, as if this was the stupidest thing that could ever have happened in the world, but Jeremy thought Gunny had been too busy crowing about killing that girl to be watching his back.
Terry tried to pull the trigger again, but his finger and hand would not obey. His arm gave it up too. The pistol fell to the ground. Jeremy walked to him, more angry at Gunny than anything else. He thrust the .45 out at Terry’s face, about to blow the head apart, and then he saw Terry faintly smile and Terry’s eyes glaze over as he died.
Fucker looked like he was hearing something that could not be heard.
Gunny told him to get in there and finish it, because now he knew where the gun was. Kill the girl, Gunny said. Okay, kill them all, but kill the girl first.
Jeremy nodded. He could feel the blood running out of him. His shirt was wet back there. Maybe a nicked artery. Sonofabitch. Fucking amateur had gotten off a pro shot. He wanted to laugh, but he feared he might start crying, and that was not how he wanted to go out. Besides, he did have the mission to finish. But he wasn’t getting to Mexico in this lifetime. Neither in this lifetime would he be working for the federales, or have a house on the beach, or find a new career as a hit man, or be much of anything in a very short while.
He did cry, just a few tears. He was crying when he walked to the edge of sun and shadow, and he saw them in there because they had nowhere else to go. Most of the roof had fallen in and the timbers and rubble blocked the way to the windows at the rear. The man with the shattered elbow was lying with his back against the stones, his face bleached by pain, a glass cut bleeding over his right eye, one arm supporting the shattered elbow. His polo shirt used to be white. The drummer girl was beside him, her eyes fixed upon Jeremy with terror. In her hand was a rock, like she was about to throw it. He said, “Don’t do that.” His voice sounded distant.
Nomad shifted his position. He was standing where he’d been desperately trying to dig through the debris to one of the windows, but it was hopeless. His right ankle had twisted as he’d tried to support Terry, and had twisted more severely when he’d helped True. Beside him was Ariel, her hands scraped and dirty from working at the same mound of rubble.
Jeremy sighed. He decided he would not finish them with the pistol after all. They were not Blue Falcons, and so he would take them out with respect. The pistol was so ugly, but the rifle was a work of art. He pushed the .45 into his jeans, and touched the wound at his back. His hand came back looking like a crimson glove. He chambered a round and saw with disgust that he was getting blood all over his weapon.
On the ground, True said hoarsely, “Jeremy. Sergeant Pett. No.”
< >
Kill the girl first, Gunny instructed, as if Jeremy had forgotten already.
Ariel had realized two things: Jeremy Pett was probably bleeding to death from the wound Terry had delivered, and he was going to kill them all.
Those were the facts. Another fact was: she knew what had brought him here.
Though her knees trembled and she peed a little bit in her panties, Ariel stepped forward.
“You want me,” she said.
Because it was the truth, and it was the only way.
“Ariel!” Nomad reached for her and limped after her but she didn’t even look at him. When he grasped her shoulder and tried to turn her to face him, she pushed him back.
“Yes, you do,” she told Jeremy. Her voice was calmer, now that she’d decided. She could look him right in the eyes and accept it. “I am what you want to kill. You and whatever’s with you.”
“Shit,” he said, amazed. “That’s Gunny. Can you see him?”
Ariel said. “I’ll go with you, out of here. If you kill me, would you let my friends live?”
A trick, Gunny said with a wary sneer. Kill her where she stands.
But Jeremy, who felt his time streaming from him, frowned and said, “Maybe.”
“No way! No way!” Berke’s face was streaked with tears. She stood up, still gripping her rock.
It had occurred to Ariel that if she could get him far enough away from the others, even if he killed her—when he killed her—he might not be able to get back.
“I’m ready,” Ariel told Jeremy. Her voice threatened to crack; she wouldn’t allow it. “The thing that’s with you wants me dead. So if you need to do that, I’m ready. I’m just asking you… please, to let my friends live.”
A trick, Gunny repeated.
< >
Nomad picked up a board with nails sticking out of it. His face was gray and bits of glass were caught in his hair. He tensed, about to lunge forward as fast as he could—if he could—and start swinging. Ariel saw Jeremy’s bleary eyes fix on him, and she said quietly, “John, don’t.”
She came closer to Jeremy Pett. She came right up next to him. She looked into his face without fear, and she said the three hardest words she’d ever spoken in her life.
“Walk with me.”
She reached out to take his bloody hand, and to guide him away from her family.
Jeremy stepped back.
Something is wrong here, he thought.
Something was all mixed up. The good and the bad and the weak and the strong, all mixed up. It seemed to him that she should be sobbing and begging for her life. He had the rifle. She had nothing. He didn’t understand this; it went against all his training, that a weak unarmed enemy could look at a rifle and see their death in it, and not fall terrified before it. And she was weak. She was a weak, dark-spirited…
…liar?
He felt like he was about to pass out. It was close on him, this oncoming darkness. He could feel himself not only bleeding, but filling up with blood on the inside. He was a bladder, and something was about to burst.
I did kill a child, he thought. I did. I committed murder. I did.
It had eaten at him for so long. It had chewed and chewed at him, down in the belly of the beast. It had misshapen him, and warped time into a long midnight that never moved. It had driven itself into his bones, and made a nest in his heart.
It was pecking at him, even now. It never stopped.
Peck.
Peck.
Peck.
God had punished him for that murder. He was certain of it. Call it fate, if you wanted to, but it was God who made him pay. But Jeremy thought, as the world began to slowly turn around him and the taste of blood was thick in his mouth, that if only…if only he’d been able to tell someone about it. To tell Karen, and ask her to pray for him, but the accident took her away before he could. To tell his father, and get a kind hand on the shoulder, but it would only be another fist. To tell any of the officers, or the men, or any of the doctors at the hospital where he hoped one Wednesday somebody would ask him how he was doing. To have someone…anyone…listen, and say what he needed to hear most in this world. But, as the Christian In Action had said, our meeting never happened.