“I remember this,” one of the others said. “The game itself was in Washington; the streets were fucking alive!”
“No it wasn’t,” another man said. “They played in Michigan.”
“It was Washington, I tell you. I was there on business; I know. When I picked up the SEATAC shuttle, the driver wouldn’t even let me on unless I confirmed for him that I was a Seahawks fan.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Reza said. “Washington or Michigan, it’s all long gone now. My God, it seems so long ago.”
He struggled to find the point he’d intended to make, but it had escaped him.
“Those referees were on the take,” someone muttered. “Fucking thieves…”
“Carlo, what is it?” Reza asked. His friend had left the warmth of the fire to walk out toward the darkness and Reza feared some emotional crisis was afoot.
Carlo stopped at the boundary of the campfire’s influence and stood quietly with his back to the men. His posture was curious.
“Carlo?”
Carlo lifted his arm to point at Patricia’s trailers. “Where is Paul? Has anyone seen where he went?”
The others fell silent and looked around at each other. They had not seen where Paul went.
“Paul?” Carlo called. “Paul!”
The valley twitched with the hissed echo of a single rifle shot, the shriek of the bullet pitching up an octave as it descended. The men around the fire all flinched, several dropping to their knees at the sudden disturbance, and then Carlo was on the ground. He screamed and writhed, clutching his leg.
“Jesus Christ, Carlo!” Reza screamed.
The others applied bellies to dirt and began to jerk their heads in wild directions, looking for the shooter. One of them screamed, “Where is he? Was it a cabin? Where!”
Reza ran out to the screaming Carlo, repeating the word, “Christ, Christ, Christ!” as he stumbled along. Carlo rolled over, teeth grinding through the dirt he’d pulled into his mouth, and hissed, “Reza, God, help me!”
Another shot and Reza was down next to him. They lay shoulder to shoulder, head to foot, and they both screamed into the darkness.
As the others by the fire looked on, a third shot, suppressed and alien, disturbed the night air, and Carlo was dead, his head having been vaporized across Reza’s face and shoulders. Reza screamed all the louder, shaking his friend’s corpse uselessly, and then a moment later he was gone as well.
The night fell quiet. The men by the fire maintained their positions in the dirt, and they looked at each other with wide, terrified eyes. From the tent, Pap’s voice hissed, “Anybody see the sumbitch?”
No one answered.
They lay there several seconds, and some of the men shifted their gaze between the bodies at the edge of the campfire and the living close by. Collectively, they found their limbs too weak to move.
“Were they coming from above?” someone asked.
“Maybe he can’t see—” another began in a hopeful whisper.
Yet another of those godawful cracks and the man right next to the speaker expired in a small explosion of dirt and blood.
The others lost all sense of control or composure, hollering in chorus and running toward any direction leading away from the fire. Many of them took up their rifles as they ran, and all scattered to darkened corners like cockroaches. Several fired out in random directions as they departed, illuminating the night in bright, blinding flashes.
Pap emerged from his tent in the midst of the panic. His feet were naked, but he’d remembered his hat and gun belt, of course. He’d forgotten his rifle in the chaos, as well. He knew only that he had to reach Clay.
He ran into Houdini as he sprinted around the rear of the Connex homes; the old vet was running in the opposite direction toward the tents, machine gun bouncing off his hip.
“What the fuck, Pap?” he shouted, nearly getting run over by the larger, younger man.
“Gotta git Clay!” was all Pap managed.
“Fuck Clay!” Houdini called after him. “Pap! We gotta dig in and get fighting! Pap? Pap!”
But Pap had already disappeared.
“Fucking amateurs!” Houdini shouted. He spat, pivoted, and ran off in search of the others. They needed to respond to this problem as soon as possible, to consolidate and displace. He wanted the safety and darkness of the trees where he could move silently and search out muzzle-flashes, but he had to get the gang of assholes together. He had to slap together his team, double-fucking-quick, and get on the move.
Above all, they had to move. Staying in one place was death. They had to get into the trees and move. He kept telling himself this as he panted along on old, shaking legs.
They had to fucking move…
Fred was still in the process of gingerly picking his way down the last stretch of the mountain wall when Wang fired the first shot from his suppressed rifle. It was an exercise in balance and a test of his will to keep from tumbling end over end all the way to the bottom at the first report’s issue; he’d anticipated that sound throughout his descent, but it still shocked the hell out of him when it finally came. As he was not known for being light on his feet, the subject of balance was touchy at best, and as to the test of his will power, he barely passed. He perceived that first shot in the skin of his back, shoulders hitching up like a pissed-off mule, and he missed a few breaths to match the stuttering of his feet.
He threw his hands out and caught a tree trunk before his face could collide with it; used it as an anchor to arrest momentum. He stood against it, resembling a bear preparatory to a lively climb, and just took a minute to get some control; to gasp some more air into his failing lungs and give his legs a few seconds to catch up. It seemed to him as if he’d left the damned things halfway up the slope.
There were more rifle shots from somewhere high above and he spent some time wondering about the big, black soup can they’d taken the trouble to affix to Wang’s rifle. The things had been called “silencers” in old action movies; the Marines who’d left it behind insisted on referring to them as “suppressors,” and listening to the whip crack of the bullets passing by overhead, Fred wondered just what the fuck it might be that the damned thing was suppressing. So far as he could tell, it sure wasn’t the sound of that rifle. Then another thought occurred to him—the idea that the suppressor might actually be doing its job. If that was the case, how much louder might that rifle actually be?
His thoughts were cut short at the answering screams that erupted down in the bowl. He heard more gunfire, now coming from ahead rather than behind, and he figured there might be only a handful of minutes left for him to get back to a place where he could be of use before those invaders got organized and started picking his friends off. He shoved away from the tree at a run, plunging down the gentling slope like a staggering bull, and ground his teeth at the agony of knee-joints that felt packed with gravel. When he finally hit the flatness of the valley floor, the change in pitch was so abrupt and his momentum so undeniable that he plunged straight into the earth, grunting a mighty whoof as the air erupted from his lungs. He managed to save himself with a clumsy roll, wrenching his shoulder instead of dislocating it completely and surged to his feet a good six yards ahead of where he’d collapsed. Fred gave himself a quick pat-down, looking for damage, and was shocked when he realized that even his shoulder didn’t hurt nearly as bad as it should have. Sweat poured off his body in sheets, though, and the hammering of his heart told him that adrenaline, more than luck or acrobatics, carried him forward now. He’d pay dearly for this tomorrow. If he ever saw morning.