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 was blood and gunpowder.
The smoke from the grenades wafted away on a breeze, and I could see one of the cars sitting on flat tires, its sides splashed with blood, windows blasted out. Two ragged red things lay sprawled on the gravel, and a trail of blood led toward the tall corn. The second vehicle was 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 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 flatfooted 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 from milky white to bright red. The shooter’s fingers jerked the trigger, and the double-ought buckshot blew 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. It 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 running in from the kitchen. A fusillade of shotgun blasts tore the back of the house to kindling. Bunny overturned the oak dining room table and crashed a breakfront 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 charged 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.
Only it wasn’t there.
The killer in the mist had taken it.
“He took the frags!” I yelled, and suddenly Bunny and I were scrambling back, ducking behind the SUV. Bullets still hammered the back, and there was no cellar.
“Oh man,” whispered Bunny, and now there was no trace of humor on his face. After a while even the black comedy of the battlefield burns away to leave the vulnerable human standing naked before the reality of ugly death. We were screwed. Totally screwed, and we knew it.
When the first grenade blew, Bunny closed his eyes and clutched his shotgun to his chest as if it was a talisman that would provide some measure of grace.
But the grenade didn’t detonate inside the house.
The blast was close, but definitely outside.
There was a second. A third. A fourth and fifth, and between each blast there were spaced shots. Not automatic gunfire. Spaced, careful pistol shots.
Men screamed out in the mist.
Men died in the mist.
I saw another shape move through the gloom. Not small. This one was big, but he was only a shadow within the fog. He turned toward me and I expected to see blue eyes.
The blood froze in my veins.
The eyes that looked at me through the fog were as red as blood and rimmed with gold.
And then they were gone.
I blinked. My eyes stung from the gunpowder and plaster dust. Had I seen what I thought I saw or were my eyes playing tricks?
I didn’t want to answer that, but…my eyes don’t play tricks.
We crouched, weapons ready to make our last stand a damn bloody one.
But the battle raged around the house. Around us.
“Top!” I yelled. “Talk to me!”
“We got new players, Cap’n.”
“What can you see?”
“Not a damn thing. No, wait…oh, holy—”
Three more blasts rocked the side of the house and suddenly all the gunfire in the front ceased.
There was a moment of silence from the back, too, but then shots started up again.
A voice called out of the mist. “In the house!”
I said nothing and waved Bunny to silence.
After a pause the voice yelled again. “Hey…John Wayne…you got some injuns on your six. You in this fight or are you waiting for Roy Rogers?”
I looked at Bunny.