“Fuckin’ bucket-head,” Gibs whispered. He looked back at Fred and asked, “You got your breath yet? How we doing, Rerun?”
“Doin’ just fine, Dilbert, aside from my knees about blown the fuck out…”
Gibs leaned in close and, despite the lack of light, was able to discern the state of his friend’s face. He saw through shadowed topography that it was lumped and misshapen.
“Whaaat the fuck happened to you?” he hissed.
“That fuckin’ redneck happened…”
“Pap?”
Fred nodded.
“Is he still out there?”
Fred shook his head. He kept sucking in air like it was going out of style.
“Good. Go-hey, what’s going on, man? You don’t sound right.”
“Think he did for some ribs…”
Gibs settled back on his hams and sighed. “Well, Jesus, Moses. When you do a thing, you do it goddamned thorough, don’t you?”
Fred lay back, grunted in pain as his torso stretched out, and whispered, “Only way I know…” He lifted his head a moment later and asked, “Hey… where’s Olivia?”
“Best I can tell, she’s hunkered back at her place,” Gibs said.
“Damn…”
“We’ll just have to hope she keeps her head down. I’m not surprised, really; the shit hit the fan right on her damned doorstep.”
Gibs looked him over a bit more and wondered if the man could even stand up again. He sure as hell wasn’t going to be carried. Gibs made a snap decision.
“Monica, trade with Davidson. Davidson, Rebecca; you’re with me and Greg.”
“What about me?” Samantha yelped.
“You’re backing up Monica and Oscar.”
“I’m not staying back here!” she shouted.
“The fuck you’re not!” Gibs yelled back, the force of it nearly flattening her against the wall. “Look, I understand the desire, but I don’t have any time for it. We’re heading into some real heat, and I need the most experienced people on my six. I absolutely do not give half a grasshopper’s shit in a windstorm how that makes you feel or whatever the hell it does for whatever the hell it is going on in there!” He made frantic, flapping gestures toward the general vicinity of her head as he spoke. “Now grab a gun, sit down, and shut up!”
He turned without waiting for an answer and made for the bedroom door. On the way, he snatched up the duffel bag, slung it over his neck like a satchel, and stuffed it with the grenades and a few extra magazines. He shouted, “Davidson and Rebecca! I am not getting any prettier!”
They rushed through the door after him. The room fell back into the relative silence of gunfire and bullet impacts for a few seconds. Suddenly, Gibs thrust his head back into the room and barked, “If they look like rushing the door, just stack Baby Huey’s ass up in front of it! They’ll need a fucking backhoe to get him out of the way.”
Then the door shut and he was gone.
50
FOUGASSE
While it was true an inebriate might sleep through a single gunshot, perhaps even two, the hurricane now swirling through the valley was something else entirely. Even so, Clay was a long time coming out of his stupor. The process of awakening was gradual, with the now constant rattle of bullets outside serving only as a kind of muted alert, like a bedside alarm too familiar and too easily ignored. He fought against that awakening; fought it bitterly. His head had been throbbing for hours, even eliciting the occasional unconscious moan as he reposed sidewise across the bed, head hanging off the edge with a runner of drool spiraling down his forearm. And as consciousness returned to Clay, so too did the resumption of the world’s spin. He drifted along a lively current, caught in a whirlpool, rotating forever around the axis of his head. His guts churned to sour mash as soon as his brain functioned enough to perceive their existence and he moaned again, wanting to go back to the numb place where feeling ceased.
As his conscious mind restored, Clay soon realized that the din beyond his window was a real thing and not just some internal buzzing incited by the throbbing of his brains. He perceived it for what it was—gunplay in the dead of night, loud and furious—and said, “Aww… Christ.”
He attempted to push up from the bed, found his arms weren’t strong enough, and so rolled to the foot like a slovenly barrel. His foot found the floor somewhere out ahead of him, and he tried to stand, but the angles were all wrong. He succeeded in surging backward into the bed’s foot and slumped to his ass, panting.
Outside, the world continued to go to hell without him. “Awright awready, hang on a minute. I’m comin’, goddamn it…” he mumbled.
He pawed under his left arm and learned he’d removed the pistol at some point, which was okay. The only other place it would be was on the hook out on the landing. He was still wearing pants, thank Christ, but his boots were across the room. He paled at the thought of bending double to pull the fuckers on and decided to just go barefoot.
Clay heaved to his feet and paused, waiting for the spinning room to stop being so much of an asshole, and then leaned forward. When his inner ear finally got the message to his brain that the whole works was either taking a step forward or going down on its damned face, the near-autonomic impulses that took over the decision making processes for such things on such occasions sent a leg out to arrest the drop and then, being so committed, sent the other leg out after.
Clay was up and walking, a bit of an achievement by itself given the circumstances. Maybe by the time he got outside, he’d be enough of himself to deal with whatever the fuck was going wrong.
The stairs were a bit of a negotiation. He had the notion halfway down that he’d blow stomach acid all along the steps but managed to keep such things were they belonged. He felt more himself with every step. So there was shooting going on out there, fine. Someone out there was showing their ass and being answered in kind. He’d just mosey out to the porch and see where he was needed.
The darkness nearly defeated him when he stepped out under the overhang. He worked on his eyes a minute, trying to knuckle vision back into them, and chided himself for leaving the goddamned candles going again. When he squinted into the darkness, his eyes began to make out the straight lines of buildings and other man-made shapes ahead in the clearing. Then he saw a burp of fire shooting forth from Victor’s bedroom window, and the intensity of the vision drew a purple line down his field of view and a throbbing ice fissure through the center of his skull.
“What the fu…?”
It took him a long time to process that flash. He kept insisting to himself that Victor was dead; that his house now stood vacant—a tremendous waste he felt the need to continually justify to his men as they lingered on in the tents, night after cold night. So someone new was in there? Right, had to be. Someone, not Victor or… Andrew? There was one among ’em had a Bible name, who the fuck was that?
An uncomfortable thought began to nag. Where those his people or theirs? He realized suddenly that he stood in the middle of a hand-to-god firefight and didn’t have the first clue regarding the “who” or “how” of it.
“Pa… agh… Pa-ap!” he croaked.
Gunfire, silence, screaming, and gunfire. No Pap.
“…jesusjosephand… PA-AAAAAP!”
He lurched forward and leaned heavily on the handrail, listening for anything out there that sounded like big, dumb, Irish cowboy. There was nothing but the chaos of the fight.
Clay hung his head, squeezed his eyes shut, and screamed, “PA-AAAAAAAAP!” His head lurched and disconnected under the strain, and he had to open his eyes again or topple under a wave of vertigo. He stood there a moment, gulping great swallows of air. As his eyes rolled about to take in his bearings, he saw the mountainous, dark mass laying in the dirt off to his left. He turned his head so he could see it with both eyes.