I’d pulled the fridge out and turned it into a shooting blind. As the four climbed into the room, Bunny’s shotgun and Top’s grenade went off at almost the same moment. The shooters turned left and right. I was in the middle. Their guns were pointing the wrong way. Mine was not.
I hosed them with armor-piercing rounds. I emptied an entire magazine into them. You burn through a mag pretty fast. The tungsten-core cartridges didn’t give a wet shit about Kevlar body armor. Not generally, and not at that range.
Then I was up and moving, hurling a flash-bang out the window because I didn’t want to kill Gunter. I went out the window, tucked, rolled, and came up with my rifle, but damn it if one of the Silentium assholes wasn’t down on the deck. The other shooter was. How the last man evaded the flash-bang is something I’ll never know. He was three feet in front of me and tried to shoot me in the face, but he wasn’t set for it. He fired a heartbeat too soon and the world seemed to explode inside my head. His own accidental version of a flash and bang. But I was already moving, bringing my gun up to try to stitch him from balls to brains. He swung at my gun with his own, which was not the brightest move in the world. He managed to knock my gun away, but the swing moved his barrel too far, so when he fired again he missed. Again.
Then we were chest to chest, our long guns too clumsy for that kind of fight.
In movies these fight scenes go on and on. Not in combat. You either end the bad guy or you get ended yourself.
I released my rifle and struck him in the throat with the open Y formed between the stiffened index finger and thumb. Before he could even react I kicked his knee and blew it apart. He dropped and I clubbed him down to the dirt with a pile-driver punch between his shoulder blades. Even through the body armor I could feel bones break. My rifle had slewed around on its strap, so I drew my sidearm and shot him in the back of his right shoulder and the back of his left thigh. Then I pivoted toward the other shooter, who was trying to get to his feet while shaking off the effects of the flash-bang. I had a clear head shot, but I needed to ask some questions. So, for the same reason I didn’t kill the guy I’d just shot, I didn’t kill this asshole, either.
He was nine feet away and I’m a good shot. I shot him in that gap between the protective thigh pads and the hard-plastic kneecap. Aim at the center of the leg and you explode the base of each femur. Which I damn well did.
Top and Bunny came running around the building and into the driveway.
But our slice of the war with the Silentium was over.
Almost.
We took the weapons away from the two screaming men.
We even put field dressings around their wounds. Didn’t want them to bleed out. This was in no way a kindness.
Bunny took Gunter into the building, and he kept the Lab crew away from the windows. Top and I dragged the surviving cultists around behind the lead Humvee. We used our knives to cut away their body armor. I heard the TV go on. Some kind of science fiction movie with loud dinosaur roars. The volume went all the way up. Bunny understood.
The wounded men were terrified. They were in agony. They cursed at us. They spat at us.
I knelt in front of the one I’d shot first. He was a white guy. Big and tough. His face was running with greasy sweat, and his eyes were jumping with pain.
“Silentium,” I said.
I saw what that word did to his eyes. They widened. They shifted away. And I knew I was right.
“Do you speak English?” I asked mildly.
“Go . . . fuck yourself . . .” he growled. His accent was pure New Jersey. Fair enough.
“This is going to make it easy,” I said. “I’ve got a whole bunch of questions, and I bet you know a whole bunch of really useful stuff. Names. Locations. Timetables. Stuff like that.”
I think I was grinning. Not sure.
He wasn’t. Top wasn’t. And I doubted anyone inside the Lab or at the TOC was grinning. I probably was.
“We’re doing . . . this . . .” he gasped, fighting the pain, “to . . . save the world.”
I patted his cheek.
“Who gives a fuck?” I said. I drew my Wilson Tactical Combat Rapid Response knife from my pocket and with the flick of my wrist snapped the blade into place. That blade is only three and a half inches long. Length is relative, though. Scalpels are much shorter. It’s all about how something is used.
“Names,” I repeated. “Locations. And timetables.”
He shook his head.
People think they’re tough. They think they are able to endure. Gunter hadn’t been able to resist them. This guy knew that. Why, I wondered, did he think he’d be able to resist me?
But . . .
He told us everything he knew. Every last bit. Who was running Silentium. Where the next strikes were planned. How they got the bioweapons. My friend there was very willing to talk. So, as it turned out, was his friend, who told the same stuff to Top.
As I said, we are good men, but we are not nice ones.
Nice ones don’t save the world.
Nice ones can’t.
8.
PHOENIX HOUSE
OMFORI ISLAND, GREECE
We sat in the mess hall back at Phoenix House, watching the news.
The lead story on every network was the dismantling of Silentium. It was, according to Jake and Wolf and Anderson and Sean and Rachel, a joint effort on the part of governments that set aside politics and fought for the common good. Sure. That’s a good version of the story to tell. It’ll be great when someone makes a movie. A feel-good story.
What’s that old saying? When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. Sure. In the news, the only monsters were the millenarian cultists who wanted to destroy lives in order to create a version of the world they wanted. They were the monsters of the piece.
Top, Bunny, and I were not mentioned at all.
And that, I suppose, is how we all sleep at night.
NOT IN THIS LIFETIME
SHARON SHINN
Lili doesn’t believe me when I tell her we were friends many times in the past, but she likes to hear the stories anyway.
“Where did we live last time?” she asks.
“New York City. We were waitresses then, too.”
“When was it?”
“Nineteen sixty-five.”
“So were we out marching for civil rights? Did we go to consciousness-raising sessions and burn our bras?”
I laugh. “No. We got stoned and listened to the Grateful Dead.”
“Did we go to Woodstock?”
“That was 1969.”