“Get at least four houses away,” I say. “Is there someone you trust in the neighborhood?”
The husband is uncertain, but the wife points to a green house several backyards away.
Behind us I hear men breaking through the front door and moving roughly through the living room.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” the husband says.
“Go and call the police,” I say to the woman, and she pushes her husband out the door, squeezing next to him as they pass through the bushes into the next-door neighbor’s yard.
I could follow them and get out to the street, but where would I go?
I need the black comms rectangle in the toolshed so I can contact The Program, and I need to find out who these men are.
So while the couple makes their way to safety, I slip into the backyard.
There is one man there watching the back door. Heavyset with wide shoulders.
He stands at a slight angle, his rifle cocked but trained on the ground at his feet, ready to rise at a moment’s notice. It’s a decent operational posture, but only if he has another man backing him up, watching his six.
He does not.
I slip up behind him and I choke him out with a pincer motion, catching his throat in the crook of one elbow then closing the vise by grasping my wrist with the opposing arm. It’s not the pressure that does it so much as the placement. The neck is the nexus of both the nervous and arterial systems, all of them located close to the surface. It does not take much to gravely injure a person at throat level.
I don’t have time to find out who this man is or why he is doing what he’s doing.
I only have time to neutralize him.
I do it quickly, ignoring the hiss and gurgle as his body fights for breath beneath my grip. Rather than think of these noises as a man trying to live, I’ve been taught to think of them as the sounds of danger.
When the sounds stop, the danger stops with them.
In this way, it becomes easy to protect myself, overriding the natural human instinct for compassion.
The big man goes slack in my arms. I let him fall to the ground, and I race away from the house, toward the toolshed.
I’m halfway across the lawn when I see something is wrong.
The padlock on the toolshed, the one designed to open with my digital thumbprint.
It’s missing.
I race over to the shed and throw open the doors.
There is no black rectangle, no weapon mounted on the wall.
It’s a normal toolshed packed with gardening equipment.
It doesn’t much matter now, not with danger rushing at me from the house. One man is dead, but at least two men are still here, coming for me.
The back door slaps open, and a tall man steps out in a hurry. If he were smarter, he might slip out the door carefully, but not this guy. He throws open the door and it crashes against the wood frame of the house.
Which means I have to move quickly.
I scan the shed. A bag of mulch at my feet. Small garden tools scattered about, any of which could be deadly but none of which will work effectively in this situation.
I swing around to meet the man coming out of the house, and I see it: a garden spade propped up against the door.
I grab it in both hands, and I turn.
The tall man has been distracted by his partner’s body on the ground. He’s kneeling down to check him for a pulse.
That is a mistake.
I rush him, covering the distance across the lawn in less than two seconds. By the time he looks up, the spade is already in motion. The back of the blade whacks him across the bridge of his nose. I hear a sickening crunch and blood spurts.
As he falls back, he brings up his gun to fire at me, but I step on the barrel with a free foot and the bullet goes wide. He is fast, his other arm reaching for a knife in his belt. I hear a noise inside the house then, a third man reacting to the rifle shot.
There can be no hesitation. Before the tall man can get to his knife, I swing the spade into the side of his skull, hitting him hard enough to take him out for the duration.
I fling myself against the house, waiting for the next man.
He is smarter, which is to say more cautious. He pokes the barrel of his rifle through the door first—slowly, hesitantly. A gunshot and two bodies on the ground are enough to give him pause, and the rifle barrel starts to recede back through the door.
I do not let it happen.
I grab the barrel, yanking it hard enough that the man holding it comes flying out the door, trapped by the rifle strap around his shoulder.
I think I have him, when he reaches up and hits a quick release on the strap, falling back into the house and tripping me at the same time, taking me down with him. The spade catches in the door frame and slips through my hands.
Now the fight is up close and personal, the two of us wrestling for dominance on the floor of the house. He is brutal, his muscles thick, his ability to use elbow and knee superb.
I take some punishment. But I do not flinch. Not until a young girl’s scream freezes both of us in place.
It is no more than a split second of distraction, but it is enough for me to get the upper hand, using a knee at his throat and a twisting motion to snap his neck.
I leap up, grabbing the spade as I go, and I throw myself inside the door.
There is a fourth man.
He has found the side door of the house and slipped out without my hearing him.
He’s found more than just a door.
He’s found the couple’s daughter.
She is about nine years old, in jeans and a yellow tank. The collar of the tank has little white flowers on it. Above the collar is a hand. A man’s hand.
Around her throat.
In the other hand, he holds a semiautomatic pistol.
This is the girl the wife mentioned to me. She is an innocent civilian, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, an unlucky witness to events that have nothing to do with her.
I should not care about this girl, but I do not want her harmed. I’ll have to work around her.
Then I make a mistake. I look in her eyes.
They are wide and dark brown, fear contracting the pupils. I don’t see a stranger, a witness, or a civilian.
I see someone’s daughter.
The man watches my face as I look at the girl. He is a professional. He knows I am weak now.
He glances around, noting his partners splayed on the ground around the yard and in the rear doorway.
He nods to me, almost like he’s congratulating me for doing a good job, for making it this far.
This far but no farther. Because it’s payback time.
He clamps his hand harder on the girl’s throat, and she starts to cough, an involuntary reaction to strangulation.
I put down the spade.
I put up my hands up in a nonthreatening manner, and I walk forward. He smiles. His grip lessens but does not release.
He takes the gun from her head and aims it at mine.
It’s a bit of a cowboy move, this aiming at someone head. It’s designed to create fear, and at that much it is effective. But it’s not a great shooting strategy.
Heads are small. Heads move in space. Heads can distract from the things bodies are doing.
My head does not move. I keep it still as I walk toward him, allowing him to think he has me. In a sense he does. He holds a girl by the throat, he holds a gun in his hand, and I am unarmed.
But there is an expectation here, an unspoken one that not even a trained soldier like him is aware of. I’m about to risk my life on it.
The expectation is that I’m going to stop walking.
It’s hard enough to walk toward a loaded gun, but if you do it, if you’re ordered to do it, it’s a foregone conclusion that you will get close to the gun and stop at least five feet away.
Nobody walks closer to a gun.