Page 68 of The Beast
Nothing I could point to. Nothing I could name.
You're on edge, I told myself.You have been on edge and your nervous system is running everything through a threat filter that is currently miscalibrated.
I opened my mouth to saynothing, let's go, and that was when the sound arrived.
Not the coughing engine. Something else. Something that punched through the ordinary Sunday air and rearranged it permanently. My body knew what it was before my mind did because my body dropped—pure reflex, no decision, knees hitting the crosswalk. Daniel was saying my name and someone was screaming and the sound came again, and again. I pressed myself flat against the concrete and put my arms over my head the way I had been taught to do in elementary school drills for things that were never supposed to actually happen.
The world had gone very loud and very wrong all at once.
I could hear my own breathing. I could hear the screaming multiplying, other voices joining it, the sound of a crowd discovering it is in danger—the pitch of it, human and ancient and awful. I could hear the coughing engine, still. I could hear something else I couldn't identify, a physical concussion in the air, and somewhere very close, something shattered—glass, I thought, a lot of it. I pressed harder against the ground and I thought about nothing coherent at all exceptstay down stay down stay down.
Daniel's voice, close: "Mary Catherine, don't move, stay down, I'm right here?—"
I felt rather than saw him—close, on the ground, the warmth of him nearby. Then, another sound, very close, and then, Daniel's voice stopped.
Just stopped.
I didn't understand what that meant yet. I lay on the concrete of that crosswalk with my arms over my head. The world exploded all around me.
30
BROCK
Time did the thing it does.
It went slow and wide and clear, the way it has for me since I was a teenager in a town nobody remembers, the world dropping into that cold, bright stillness where I see everything and feel almost none of it. The static went out of my head. It always goes out. And I hated it more in that second than I have ever hated it, because the one place I never wanted to feel that terrible calm was here, ten seconds from her. It came, anyway. It always comes.
I saw it all at once.
The muzzles coming up out of the wagon windows, four of them, swinging. The first burst going wide and stupid—spray-and-pray, no discipline, rounds chewing into a parked sedan and a luggage cart and the glass front of the terminal, but some of it tracking toward the crosswalk, towardher,and toward a dozen travelers who'd done nothing but pick the wrong afternoon to fly. People dropping. People running. The ugly math of a crowd when death arrives in it.
The two cops down the curb were turning, slow, their hands going to their belts a full beat behind the world. Old men. Soft through the middle. Twenty years past the last time either of them had cleared leather with intent. They were going to be no help and a hazard both, because frightened men with guns and no targets shoot the first thing that moves wrong.
And the first thing moving wrong was me—the only man on that whole curb runningtowardthe guns.
"Federal agent!" I roared it at the cops as I came, the lie that buys you a half second, the magic words that might keep two scared old patrolmen from putting one in my back. "Federal agent, the wagon,the wagon!" I threw an arm at it without breaking stride. Point them at the threat. Give the panic somewhere useful to go.
I had her in the corner of my eye—down on the crosswalk, flat, arms over her head, alive,moving. I couldn't find Daniel anywhere in the chaos and didn't have a half second to spend looking. Ran off? Didn't matter. Not now. Nothing mattered now but the men with the rifles and the fifty feet between me and them.
They were piling out of the wagon. Good. On their feet in the open they were just men, and men are a problem I have solved more times than any chaplain would forgive.
The first one came around the wagon's hood with his weapon up and his eyes on the crosswalk—on her, looking for her, not for me. I gave him my first two rounds, center mass, and watched them fold him backward over the hood he'd just cleared, the rifle clattering off into the lane. He slid down the grille and didn't get up.
One.
The second had better instincts—heard his buddy go and spun on me, bringing the muzzle around—but better instincts and trained instincts are two different animals. I'd been doingthis since before he grew the beard. I dropped low behind a parked SUV, came up off the front quarter-panel where he wasn't looking, and put one through his throat and one through the bridge of his nose. He went straight down, all his strings cut at once, a wet ruin where his face had been.
Two.
"Stay down!" I bellowed it at a man frozen between two cars with his phone still up like the screen would save him. "Down, get down, behind the car, go!" I shoved him as I passed and he went. I leapfrogged forward to the cover of his car, working car to car, engine block to engine block, the only dense steel in a soft place full of people. Screaming everywhere. A woman on the ground with her arms around a kid, both of them tucked behind a tire. I caught her eye and jerked my chin—stay, stay there—and kept moving.
The third one had found cover of his own behind the open wagon door and was firing blind around it, panicked bursts. One of his rounds finally found something that mattered—I heard a clatter and one of the old cops went down clutching his leg—but his partner, the heavyset one, the one I'd half written off, steadied his service piece across the trunk of a car and got off three rounds with more nerve than I'd credited him for. One of them got lucky. Caught the shooter high in the shoulder and spun him out from behind the door, exposed, off balance.
I finished it. Two rounds, clean, and he dropped across the threshold of the wagon he'd ridden in on.
Three. Good shooting, old man.
That left one.
