the trigger and the double-ought buckshot blew downward harmlessly into the gravel. The man canted sideways and fell and as he dropped I saw another figure move like a dark shadow through the mist. The figure was small and, at first, I had the irrational thought that it was Simon Burke, but this figure moved with oiled grace.
I aimed my M4 at him. Whoever he was, he belonged to one of the teams sent to take Burke. I mean, thanks for saving my life and all that, but this is one of those incidents where the enemy of my enemy wasn’t necessarily my friend.
I unloaded half a magazine at him, but the bullets swirled the fog without hitting anything. The figure had faded out of sight.
There was a crash behind me and I spun to see Bunny come running in from the kitchen. A fusillade of shotgun blasts were tearing the back of the house to kindling. Bunny overturned the oak dining room table and crashed a breakfront down on top of that. It would give him a few seconds of cover, but these guys had enough firepower to chew through anything.
He threw me a wild grin. “America’s Haunted Holidayland,” he yelled. “We’ll scare you to death.”
I nodded to the SUV. “That’s our last fallback. The armor should hold for a bit.”
He made a face, but nodded. A “bit” wasn’t much.
Bullets continued to hammer the house from all directions. But there were also occasional screams.
I cupped my hands and yelled, “You’re my hero, Top!”
His face immediately appeared at the top of the stairs. “Not me, Cap’n. They’re doing a good job on each other. Maybe we should try and wait this out.”
Before I could answer, two men came charging in through the open doorway. Both were firing AKs, and I had to do a diving tackle to save Bunny from the spray of bullets. We hit the floor and rolled over behind the couch. There was an overlapping series of shots, definitely from a different caliber, and I peered around the edge of the couch to see the two shooters sagging to their knees, both of them already dead from headshots that had taken them in the backs of their skulls and blown their faces off. As they fell forward I caught another glimpse of the slim, dark figure vanishing into the fog.
Only this time I saw the shooter’s face.
Just for a moment.
“Hey, Boss,” said Bunny, “was that . . . ?”
“I think so.”
“He on our side, or is he with one of the teams?”
I shook my head.
We crawled out and I hurried over to the crumbling wall to recover my bag of grenades.
It wasn’t there.
The killer in the mist had taken it.
“He took the frags!” I yelled, and suddenly Bunny and I were scrambling back, ducking down behind the SUV. Bullets still hammered the back and there was no cellar.
“Oh man,” whispered Bunny, and now there was no trace of humor on his face. After awhile even the black comedy of the battlefield burns away to leave the vulnerable human standing naked before the reality of ugly death. We were screwed. Totally screwed, and we knew it.
When the first grenade blew, Bunny closed his eyes and clutched his shotgun to his chest as if it was a talisman that would provide some measure of grace.
But the grenade didn’t detonate inside the house.
The blast was close, but definitely outside.
There was a second. A third. A fourth and fifth, and between each blast there were spaced shots. Not automatic gunfire. Spaced, careful pistol shots.
Men screamed out in the mist.
Men died in the mist.
I saw another shape move through the gloom. Not small. This one was big, but he was only a shadow within the fog. He turned toward me and I expected to see blue eyes.
The blood froze in my veins.
The eyes that looked at me through the fog were as red as blood and rimmed with gold.
And then they were gone.
I blinked. My eyes stung from the gunpowder and plaster dust. Had I seen what I thought I saw, or were my eyes playing tricks?
I didn’t want to answer that, but . . . . My eyes don’t play tricks.
We crouched down, weapons ready to make our last stand a damn bloody one.
But the battle raged around the house. Around us.
“Top!” I yelled. “Talk to me!”
“We got new players, Cap’n.”
“What can you see?”
“Not a damn thing. No, wait . . . oh, holy—”
Three more blasts rocked the side of the house and suddenly all the gunfire in the front ceased.
There was a moment of silence from the back, too, but then it started up again.
A voice called out of the mist. “In the house!” I said nothing and waved Bunny to silence.
After a pause the voice yelled again. “Hey . . . John Wayne . . . you got some injuns on your six. You in this fight, or are you waiting for Roy Rogers?” I looked at Bunny.
“Well . . . son of a bitch.”
And that fast we were on our feet and running back to the kitchen, firing as we went. The incoming assault was less fierce, and we made it to what was left of the brick wall. A bullet plucked my sleeve, then chips of brick dust.
We saw them. Three groups left, but only a few of each. Two burly Russians behind a stack of hay bales over to the left. Couple of Arabs right across the back lawn, using a toolshed as a shooting blind. And three Latinos off to the left, firing from behind a tractor.
The voice called out of the mist. “Game on?”
I grinned. “Dealer’s choice!” I yelled back.
I thought I heard a laugh. “You guys take scarecrow and Tim Allen. I got John Deere.”
Bunny frowned at me for a moment before he got it. Scarecrows are stuffed with hay.
Tim Allen’s comedy is all about tools. John Deere makes tractors.
Bunny said, “Yippie-ki-yay . . . ”
I swapped out for a fresh magazine. “Say it like you mean it.”
He took a breath and bellowed it into the fog.
They had the numbers. We had the talent.
I saw muzzle flashes coming from two points in the mist, catching the tractor in a crossfire. Bunny and I turned the toolshed into splinters. Top emptied four magazines into the straw.
The white hell outside became a red desolation.
The thunder of the gunfire echoed in the air for long seconds, and kept beating in my ears for hours.
The mist held its red tinge for a while, and then with a powerful blast of thunder, the rain began to fall.
When we went outside to count the living and the dead, we only found dead. Six teams. Thirty-two men.
There was no one else in the yard. No one else anywhere.
“Cap’n,” said Top as he came back from checking far into the cornfields, “that was Chief Crow and that Sweeney kid, wasn’t it?”
I said nothing.
The shapes had matched. One small figure, one big. The voice had matched Crow’s. Even the John Wayne reference.
But we never found footprints. Not a one. I blamed it on the rain.
The bullets that were dug out of the bodies of the shooters did not match any weapon found at the scene.
