Page 69 of The Beast
He'd come the farthest. Made it almost down to the crosswalk, almost toher,and now he stood maybe fifteen feet off her prone body. Something in him had broken loose. Sweat pouring off him, soaking the camo dark. Eyes wild and glassed and too wide, pupils blown—high, I'd have bet, cranked up onwhatever they'd fed these poor, dumb bastards to point them at a crowd. He had his rifle and he had a decision to make and you could see he didn't have the wiring left to make it well.
"Drop it!" The standing cop, screaming now, gun up and shaking. "Drop the weapon, drop it, drop it!"
No chance. I knew it the way I know weather. A man with eyes like that doesn't drop anything. The yelling just gave him a clock—two seconds, maybe three, to land somewhere. I watched him spend it the only way men like that ever do.
He swung the muzzle off her and onto me.
I didn't hesitate. I have never once hesitated, that's the whole curse of me. I walked straight at him, measured steps, sights settled, and I emptied what I had left into the center of him, round after round, steady as a metronome, closing the distance as I fired so the last shots went in from almost touching range.
He came apart and went down—and his trigger finger clenched on the way, one last wild burst climbing up the face of the parking structure, stitching concrete and glass, and then dropping as he dropped, the muzzle dragging a line of sparks across the deck before the rifle died under him.
And then, it was quiet.
The terrible after-quiet. Ears ringing, cordite thick, the whole departures lane gone still except for the crying and the moaning and somebody's car alarm going off down the line. I stood in the middle of it with an empty gun and that level, righted,correctfeeling settling into my chest like it always does. I did not look at it. I never look at it. I looked at the work instead.
"Search them!" I shouted at the standing cop, who was staring at me like I'd dropped out of the sky. "All of them—gather the weapons, check for pulses, make sure every one isdone.You hear me? Move!" Whatever he thought I was, he did it. Shock makes men obedient. He went shooter to shooter doing what Itold him, and I trusted the dead to stay dead because I'm good at my job, but you confirm, always, you confirm.
Then, I let myself go to her.
She was face down on the crosswalk, not moving, arms still locked over her head. For three of the longest steps of my life, I did not know. I crossed to her and dropped to a knee and put my hand on her back, light, and said her name.
She turned.
Alive. Her face came around streaked and wet, eyes blown wide with terror. They found mine and something broke open in them—relief and horror both, too much of both to hold.
"He saved me," she said.
I followed her eyes to the place just beside her.
Daniel Whitaker lay on the concrete with his arms still half around the space where she'd been. He'd put himself over her. Covered her with his own body, the decent man, the careful man who drove the speed limit—he'd thrown himself across the woman who left him and taken what was meant for her.
His face was peaceful. That was the thing I'd carry. Not a mark of fear on it. Just gone, easy, like he'd lain down to rest in the worst possible place. The rest of him was ruin—the good suit black and soaked, the blood spreading wide and slow across the crosswalk, more of it than a man can lose and stay.
Damn,I thought. That was all I had.Damn.
There wasn't time for more and there wasn't more in me to give him, not there, not with her shaking under my hand and sirens finally rising in the distance and a curb full of dead militia and screaming strangers and a thing about to come down on this airport that no Dominion Hall on earth could make disappear.
So, I did the only thing left that I knew how to do.
I got my arms under Mary Catherine Donovan and I lifted her up off the bloody concrete, and she came, boneless, her face going into my neck. I turned my back on the death and thewreckage and Daniel Whitaker's peaceful face, and I carried her away from it.
31
MARY CATHERINE
There was concrete under my feet.
That was the first thing I knew with any certainty—that the ground was solid and I was on it, upright, though I couldn't quite account for the transition from lying flat on the crosswalk to standing beside a low concrete barrier with Brock's hand at my back and the world reduced to a series of images that refused to organize themselves into sequence.
People running. Or had been running. Now mostly stopped, standing, the stunned stillness of a crowd that has survived something and hasn't yet processed what that means.
Glass on the ground. A lot of it.
A car alarm going off somewhere, cycling, nobody attending to it.
Brock's voice, low and steady: "Stay right here. Don't look left. Eyes on me."
I looked left.
