Lying flat on my back, head toward them, I raised the rifle with both hands and emptied the first magazine at that end of the store. It sounds easy, but the recoil slammed into my upraised arms and threatened to tear them out of the shoulder sockets.
The gun clicked empty way too soon; I’d guessed wrong about how many rounds were left. There couldn’t have been more than a dozen rounds left, but it bought me a second’s worth of grace, which was all I needed to swap out the magazines.
I drew a breath, then let out the loudest war cry I could. Who knows what I said or if I said anything at all? Just noise. Loud and feral, the primitive and inarticulate cry of the Warrior within as I rolled onto my stomach and came up into a low crouching run, firing from the hip, blasting on full auto as I dodged from wall to wall. I don’t know how I didn’t get shot. Battlefields are like that. Sometimes you have the best armor and the best cover and a ricochet pings off a wall and punches your ticket, and sometimes you feel painted with magic as you run through hellfire without a scratch. Bunny calls it having a Die Hard moment. Top says that it’s Madman Mojo. I don’t have a name for it, but I made it to the counter alive. I hip-checked Ghost and sent him on a nail-skittering sideways slide into the wall. He yelped in pain, but he was still on his feet and out of the line of fire.
Then the tone of the fight changed. Only one gun continued to pour fire my way; the others were shooting at something outside.
Rudy and Circe?
It sounded like a dozen guns in play out there.
I dove for cover, and my heart sank in my chest. There were more of them, and no matter how much of a Die Hard moment I was having, I couldn’t win against an army. In the movies a hero can win against unlimited odds. This wasn’t the movies. I was already slowing down and I was going to run out of ammunition very soon. And then I was going to die.
There was a scream and a crash and I looked up as one of the shooters came backward through the window, arms flung wide, chest and face exploding like fireworks.
Then I heard it.
“Echo! Echo! Echo!”
A deep, bass rumble of a shout.
Top!
The shooters at the far end turned toward the shouts, and I rose up and hosed them. But one of them spun and fired a full mag at me. I felt the wind of the first rounds as I dropped back out of sight.
There were more screams, and no more rounds came my way.
I ducked and crabbed sideways and looked down the store and saw that one shooter was gone, punched back out through the window and sprawled like a starfish on the hood of a parked Hyundai. A second man had dropped his weapon and was trying to stop his life from leaking out of a hole in the side of his neck.
The third shooter held his ground and was slapping a fresh magazine into place. I’d been waiting for that moment, and I rose up from hiding and ran at him. Ghost was right on my heels, racing along with the silent speed that a fighting dog has when blood is in the air and it’s time for the kill. The AR-15 was a burning monster that bucked and jerked in my hands as I put twenty rounds into the shooter. Vest be damned. I drilled a hole through his chest you could drive a truck through, and what was left of him pinwheeled out through the window.
Two more shooters ran past the window, heading toward the front, but I heard a fusillade of mixed-caliber reports and both men staggered back, turning and juddering as Echo Team chopped them apart. There was more movement outside and I saw Top Sims and Bunny duck down behind a car and trade fire with yet another pair of shooters. How many of the bastards did they send? I mean, I’m flattered and all that they think I’m that tough, but an entire army seemed a bit excessive.
I reached the window. The man with the neck wound wasn’t hurt near as bad as I thought and he pivoted and used a bloody hand to draw his sidearm. There was a flash of white, a fierce growl, and a sharp crunch, and then the gun arm collapsed into red junk as Ghost took him. He screamed, but Ghost growled like a monster out of myth.
“Keep!” I ordered Ghost, and the big shepherd stopped short of killing the man but didn’t let go of the mangled arm.
I crouched and did a fast look around the corner of the window. There were four shooters on my right, all of them firing over the hoods of parked cars. It was weird. You see scenes like this in Iraq and Afghanistan, not in suburban Pennsylvania. I’m sure there was a lesson in there about cultural arrogance, but I was too busy to sort out the nuances at the moment. I dropped the AR-15 and took the sidearm from the guy Ghost was babysitting. The guy didn’t seem to mind. He was busy trying not to scream.
I sighted down on the closest shooter. Top caught my eye and shook me off. I withheld my shot and then saw why. Khalid Shaheed had worked his way around to the far side and was three steps from a flanking position. One of the shooters must have spotted him and started to turn, so I blew out the windshield of the car he was hiding behind. He made the mistake of being surprised and looking up.
Khalid put a round through the guy’s ear.
The other shooters faltered, caught in a cross fire.
Top bellowed at them in his leather-throated sergeant’s voice, “Drop your weapons and step out from behind the vehicles! Do it now!”
It was a simple choice. It was their only remaining choice. An idiot could have recognized it as the only way out of the moment.
But the dumb sons of bitches went for it. They opened up on Khalid and on Top. The return fire came from Top and Bunny, from Khalid, from me, and from DeeDee, who appeared out of nowhere and took up a shooting position right outside the window. It was a four-way shit storm, and it was over in seconds. Nobody was going home from that party.
DeeDee looked up with a dazzling blue-eyed smile. “Howdy, Boss. Did you get me a vanilla latte with foam?”
I actually laughed and then I heard tires squeal. I jumped out of the window and sprinted for the front of the building with DeeDee on my six. A white van roared past us and headed for the far exit. The side door was open and I saw two men with scarves standing braced in the opening. They both had assault rifles and I was starting to pivot, reaching to push DeeDee out of the way, when there were two sharp cracks and the men pitched backward into the van. I whipped my head around and saw John Smith lying chest down over the hood of Black Bess, his sniper rifle smoking.
The van was still going, the driver hell-bent on getting his ass out of the parking lot. We all opened up on the vehicle, battering it with rounds, but the driver had the pedal on the floor and we didn’t have a good angle on him.
“Rudy!” I bellowed as I broke into a dead run.
“Here!” came a strangled croak from the other side of the building. I spun and cut across the lot to try to cut the van off. As I cleared the corner I saw Rudy on his knees, right hand clamped over his left arm, his face white as paste as blood poured from between his fingers.
What I saw behind him twisted my brain around.
Circe O’Tree stood over Rudy, legs wide in a solid shooter’s stance, holding a smoking Glock .40 in a two-handed grip, the barrel pointed right at me.
I almost shot her.
However, she wasn’t aiming at me. She was aiming past me, and I whirled and dodged sideways as she fired. Her first three bullets exploded the van’s windshield and the next two hit the driver in the face. The van suddenly swerved as the driver pitched sideways, his dead hands dragging the wheel hard over. The van missed Circe by ten feet and Rudy by less than a yard. It plowed into the back of my Explorer and crushed it like a beer can.
For one crystalline moment the entire scene was dead silent, as if we were all frozen into a photograph from a book on war. This could have been Somalia or Beirut or Baghdad or any of the other places on our troubled earth where hatred takes the form of lethal rage. We, the victors, stood amid gunsmoke and the pink haze of blood that had been turned to mist, amazed that we were alive, doubting both our salvation and our right to have survived while others—perhaps more innocent and deserving than ourselves—lay dead or dying.