“I’m having trouble deciding where I’m going to shoot you next, Mister Braddock,” Prendick said, still in an odd, friendly sort of voice.
“You set up every soldier in this camp,” Andrew snapped. “They trusted you and you brought them out here to put that shit inside of them, use them as your goddamn guinea pigs.”
“Some place that won’t be immediately fatal,” Prendick continued, sounding unfazed.
“You mean like Idaho?” Andrew called back. “Because the way you shoot, that’s about all you’re going to hit, you dumb fuck.”
“Some place that’s sure to cause you excruciating pain,” Prendick said, then uttered a little a-ha! sound. “I know.”
Pivoting, he squeezed the trigger, shooting at Dani.
“No!” Andrew screamed, just as Dani’s anguished cry overlapped his own. She jerked in an erratic, convulsive dance as several of the rounds struck her, then she crumpled to the floor, laying in a sprawled, motionless heap.
“You son of a bitch,” Andrew howled at Prendick, groping at the body of the truck and kicking vainly with his feet as he struggled to rise. Again and again, his foot failed him and he collapsed. “You son of a bitch!”
Prendick smiled as he turned away from Dani and approached the truck. “I’ve done my duty at this outpost,” he said to Andrew. “Just like I’m doing it now.”
“Duty? Thomas O’Malley is dead because of you. Lieutenant Carter’s dead. All of the soldiers in Alpha squadron, everyone who was stationed here, they’re all dead now because of what you. That’s your duty?”
“The United States government expects results, Mister Braddock,” Prendick replied coldly when he stepped around the front fender. Shouldering the rifle, he took aim at Andrew’s face. “A return on their investment. Lieutenant Carter wasn’t prepared to give that to them. Nor, as it turns out, was Dr. Moore. But their failings—their weaknesses, Mister Braddock—are not my own, I assure you. I am unafraid to embrace risk in the name of duty, to suffer necessary casualties as a result of those responsibilities.”
The headlamps of a truck facing them, less than twenty feet away, abruptly snapped on, pinning Andrew and Prendick in a sudden, broad swath of bright light.
“What the—?” Prendick turned as Andrew squinted against the blinding glare, trying to shield his eyes with his hand. He heard the growl of the engine revving, the squall of its thickly treaded tires against the garage floor. Like a Rottweiler turned loose from its leash to lunge at a would-be intruder, the enormous vehicle plowed forward.
Andrew had less than a second to scrabble backwards in frantic alarm, ducking beneath the truck behind him. Flat on his belly, he clapped his hands over his head, his frightened cry drowned out by the roar of M-923 five-ton cargo truck’s diesel engine as it slammed into the one above him. When one truck’s massive bumper plowed headlong into the other’s broad, steel-plated flank—mashing Prendick like so much peanut butter in a sandwich between them—it sounded like the eruption of some great and terrible volcano, a caldera of epic and catastrophic proportions that had lain dormant for millennia, its inner stew of magma and searing gases released in a sudden, apocalyptic explosion. The floor beneath Andrew shuddered violently; a sharp blast of wind from the point of impact buffeted him and the screech of metal against metal, twisting, warping, bending, snapping, ripped through the air. The force was enough to shove the truck over Andrew’s head sideways a good three feet, and after a long moment in which he huddled against the floor, shaking and shaken, he lifted his head, wide-eyed and breathless, to find himself blinking at the scorched, stinking treads of the other truck’s left front tire. It had come to a stop less than two inches from Andrew’s head.
“Jesus,” he whispered.
With a hissing spatter, antifreeze began dribbling down in a frothy, steaming puddle from the truck’s splintered radiator. Nearby, another fluid began peppering down, slowly at first, then dripping more steadily—oil. He became dimly aware of a loud, droning BLAT; the truck horn. It rang out incessantly, as if someone had mashed their hand onto it and held it fast.
Moving slowly, keeping his teeth clenched as molten agony speared through his leg with every jostling movement of his shattered ankle, Andrew crawled out from beneath the truck. By the time he cleared the wreckage, the puddles of engine fluid had widened in broad circumferences, making him slip and slop for clumsy purchase against the slick floor.
“Dani,” he called out, his voice hoarse and warbling. With a grunt, he pawed at the step leading up to the driver’s side door, hauling himself up. Resting his weight on his uninjured leg, he pulled with all of his might, catching the side view mirror and door handle to support himself as he stood.
“Dani,” he gasped again, slapping at the door. The horn hadn’t stopped honking, which meant whoever was behind the wheel had slumped across it, either injured or worse. And because there was no other whoever in the garage to have been driving, that meant Dani had somehow managed to get into the cab and run Prendick down.
Groaning, he hooked his fingertips into the window frame and tried to drag himself upright enough to look inside. “Dani,” he pleaded, hitting the window now, leaving palm prints smeared against the glass in blood, antifreeze and grease. “Dani, open up. Can…can you…?”
When he fell, he fell hard, losing both his grip and tenuous footing simultaneously and crashing back to the floor. He barked his chin first on the fender, then again on the steel step, then crumpled into a heap beside the right front tire. His mind slipped again into a murky haze of pain-induced semi-lucidity, and when he heard the screech of door hinges from the opposite side of the truck cab, Alice’s voice crying out his name, frightened and tearful, he thought he was dreaming.
“Andrew!”
He came to being shaken, small hands clutching at his shoulders. His vision swam into bleary view, Alice’s face, her large eyes standing out in stark contrast to her alabaster skin and dark hair, which clung to her forehead and cheeks in messy, blood-smeared tangles.
“Andrew,” she pleaded, her voice choked and strained. Tears spattered in warm, wet droplets from her eyelashes and cheeks against his face.
“Alice?” he croaked. Not right, he thought, dazed. This isn’t right. You shouldn’t be here. You’re supposed to be gone. Long gone. You and your dad both.
“Andrew, please,” she pleaded, coiling her fingers in his shirt and tugging frantically. “I’m scared. Daddy’s hurt. He won’t wake up. Please.”
He felt his mind fade again, his eyelids droop, but when Alice shook him, it startled him awake again, and with a grunt, he shoved his elbows beneath him and sat up.
“Help me,” he groaned. She was a child, half his height and probably no more than a quarter of his weight, but she did much of the work and bore most of the brunt as he hobbled clumsily upright again. The moment he tried to step down onto his maimed foot, he nearly toppled again, and had to balance himself unsteadily between the truck and Alice until the pain subsided.
Beyond the crumpled front end of the truck, which looked like the lips of a menacing dog turned back in a snarl, he saw Prendick pinned at the midriff, his legs trapped beneath the mangled grill, his upper torso folded over the hood. Face-down, arms outstretched as if embracing the truck, he lay motionless, his uniform soaked with blood.
Jesus, Andrew thought. “Where’s your dad?” he asked Alice.