“How?” Gail asked. “Tell me how one leads to the other.”
“Users are weak,” she said. “They frighten easily, and they’re anxious to blame whoever they want to be guilty. When they get angry, they go to war, and their precious stock market falls. The Users lose their precious money, and when that happens, the poor will rise and get an even chance.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Jonathan said, but then he stopped himself. This wasn’t the time for a civics lesson.
“You wait,” Colleen said. “You wait until the head is cut off of the snake. You wait to see what happens then.”
Gail scowled deeply. “Snake? What snake?”
A deep baritone voice rumbled from the living room, “Good morning everyone.”
Jonathan jumped to his feet and Boxers spun on his axis, unblocking the doorway to reveal a haggard, exhausted Kendig Neen standing just inside the front door. With his ample belly and his handlebar mustache, he might have been Santa in civvies. Jilly sat in the crook of his elbow, one arm casually over his shoulder. His free hand held a cocked pistol.
“Good thing little Jilly knows how to call the police, huh, Sam?” he said. “Poor little thing saw people with guns and was scared to death.”
“Nine-one-one is not for fun,” Jilly said, obviously pleased at her own rhyme.
“Hands away from weapons, please,” Kendig said. “I don’t-”
Jonathan moved with lightning speed, dropping to his knee and drawing his. 45 in the time it took the sheriff to bring his gun around. Jonathan fired two shots, hitting the sheriff in the ear and the eye as Neen fired off one of his own-by reflex, Jonathan imagined. Neen and Jilly fell together onto the floor of the foyer, where a river of gore instantly started to stain the wood.
Jilly screamed. And screamed.
Sam rushed to her and scooped her up in her arms. When she got a good look at the anatomical wreckage that was Kendig Neen’s head, she started screaming, too.
“Holy shit, Boss,” Boxers said, his admiration obvious to all. “I didn’t know-” He paused and nodded to a spot behind Jonathan. “Uh-oh.”
Colleen sat awkwardly in her chair, listing to the side. Bloody spittle formed at the corner of her mouth, then dripped like crimson thread onto the fabric of her coat.
“Ah, shit,” Jonathan spat. He rushed to her, but Gail beat him to it. She opened the coat and revealed the rapidly spreading stain on her shirt.
“Get her on the floor,” Boxers instructed from across the room.
In the hall, Jilly and Sam continued to wail.
Boxers whirled on them. “For God’s sake, woman, will you shut up? You’re safe now. Scream later.” Not many people in the world can deliver a message like that and have it obeyed. Boxers was one of them.
Jonathan pulled the table out of the way to make room on the floor to lay Colleen down. An instant later, Boxers was with them, and he lifted Jonathan out of the way by his collar so that he could take his place. Boxers’ combat medic skills had always been better than Jonathan’s.
With her coat already spread wide, he stripped her shirt open, and there was the bullet wound: center-right chest. The froth at her lips told them the bullet had pierced her lung, but the location probably meant liver, too. The rate of blood loss said that it was fatal.
“Well?” Gail said expectantly.
“We got nothing for this.”
Colleen reached out and grabbed Big Guy’s sleeve. “What does that mean?”
Boxers pulled his arm away as if he’d touched a spider. He stood abruptly and turned to Jonathan. “She’ll be dead in a couple of minutes,” he said, and he walked out to the hallway where Sam and her daughter stood stunned.
“What’s happening?” Sam asked. Her face showed desperation.
Boxers said, “Um, well, she’s not going to make it.”
“What have you brought to our house?” Sam shouted.
Boxers bent at the waist to look at her eye-to-eye. “A much better outcome for you and your little girl than if you’d been here alone with her when this asshole came by.”
“Michael Copley’s an asshole!” Jilly said.
In the kitchen, Jonathan and Gail kneeled next to the dying girl, Gail holding her hand. To Jonathan, she said, “There’s nothing?”
“She needs a surgeon, and there’s not enough time to get her one.” Jonathan leaned closer and raised his voice. “Did you hear that, Colleen?”
Her face had turned gray, on its way to that pale blue that always meant the end. She shifted her eyes. “I’m dying?”
“Yes,” Jonathan said. In his book, there weren’t many worse sins than telling a lie to someone who’s terminal. “And you’re dying with a lot of sins on your soul. You know that means Hell, don’t you?”
“Scorpion!” Gail hissed.
Jonathan shot her a glare that said, Shut up.
“It’s true, Colleen. You know that, don’t you?”
“Soldiers go to Heaven,” she said. Her voice had a fraction of the strength it used to. “That’s what Brother Michael said.”
“Brother Michael’s not here,” Jonathan said. “You’ve been left alone to take the bullets.”
“He had to leave us,” Colleen said. “The snake.”
Jonathan looked to Gail. “Did she say snake?”
“What snake?” Gail asked. She stroked the girl’s hair. “Stay with us, Colleen. What snake?”
“Head off the… sna…” Her features went slack and her eyes dilated.
For a long moment, neither of them moved. Friend or enemy, Jonathan had never grown used to watching people die. He found the vulnerability of those last seconds between this world and the next to be… unnerving. But it was done.
He stood. “She’s gone,” he said.
“Who are you people?” Sam yelled.
“We’re friends,” Jonathan said. “Although I understand that you probably don’t think so.”
“And what am I supposed to do with them?” She spread her arms at the carnage.
“We’ll take care of the bodies,” Jonathan said.
“Oh, no, you won’t,” Sam said.
“What, you want to keep them?” Boxers said.
“No, I don’t want to keep them. But when the police come-”
“The police are a bad idea,” Jonathan said.
“Says the home invader.”
“Says the home invader,” Jilly repeated.
Something about the absurdity of it all made Jonathan laugh.
“This is funny to you?” Sam accused.
“ No.”
“You’re still laughing.”
Gail said, “Not at you, Mrs. Shockley, and certainly not at these poor people. It’s just been a long night.”
Jonathan showed his palms as a gesture of peace. “Mrs. Shockley, I apologize for all of this. My big friend is right that you’re much better off for us being here when Sheriff Neen came around. He’d have killed you and your daughter because he’d have had to kill Colleen on the assumption that she’d shared secrets. But I don’t expect you to understand or believe any of that.”
“What the hell is going on?” Sam insisted.
“I’m afraid I can’t make you understand that, either,” Jonathan said. “I don’t know that I understand it all that well myself.”
“Who are you people?”
“Even more complicated, I’m afraid.” To Boxers, he said, “Let’s put the bodies into the trunk of the sheriff’s
