After Death(66)
If Michael’s analysis of Aleem’s psychology is on the mark, the creep is more likely to be on the second floor of Special Accounts than anywhere else. There he has the best view of the entire common area and can particularly monitor Whole Fruit, where he seems to be aware that Nina and John have hidden.
The gable wall features three windows on the second floor. None is any longer graced with glass. Michael stands at an angle to all three. He has the clearest view of the southernmost window and an okay line on the middle one, but the farthest offers him little or nothing. If he’s been fortunate enough to deduce Aleem’s response to the death of his four lieutenants, maybe luck will be with Michael a little longer, just long enough to send Aleem Sutter to Hell with the others.
The owl rustles its wings again and scratches with its talons at whatever perch it occupies.
The moist draft continues to flow out of the night and through the room. The air seems to have the faint scent of blood on it, but that odor is the product of his imagination and his irrational but entirely human sense of guilt for having killed even those who would have killed him.
As rain slants inside and patters on the floor, he shifts his attention from the nearest Special Accounts window to the middle one, and it’s at the latter that at last he sees movement, a shape. Too nervous or too eager for vengeance, the man can’t hold himself back at a prudent distance. Whether he’s Aleem or the other bastard not yet held to account, he’s one of them and must be eliminated. Then he actually leans out of the window to take a quick and better look north and south. He isn’t hooded, and his identity is no longer in doubt. Aleem.
Michael brings up the rifle, sites in, and squeezes off four rapid rounds. The first is a hit, maybe only in the left shoulder, and the screaming starts after the second, but it stops abruptly with the third, which might or might not have scored. The fourth shot is wasted on the place where Aleem had been.
Disoriented by the crash of gunfire, the owl swoops around the room, feather-dusting the walls, and Michael ducks, and the bird finds the window, soaring away in search of safer shelter.
Aleem is either dead or down and in bad shape, but the eighth man is still out there. Whether the remaining thug is in a position to see what just happened or instead must rely on sound alone to determine the situation, he is likely to know from where Michael took those shots. Depending on his appetite for confrontation after all that has occurred, he might be coming. So get out now, get out fast.
Michael returns to the stairs. Switches on his light. Rolls it down the old, canted steps to illuminate the way. He quickly follows the spinning beam, left hand on the barrel handguard of the rifle, right hand on the pistol grip, finger light on the trigger. On the landing, with one foot, he sends the light rolling again, down the lower flight of steps. At the bottom, he takes one hand off the AR-15 to retrieve the light from the murky water, clicks it off, shoves it in a deep patch pocket of his jacket.
Having entered the building from the back, he leaves by the front, stepping into the common area, sweeping the rifle left and right. Nobody there. Nobody obvious. He’s not crossing to Special Accounts, not going to climb to the second floor and confirm that Aleem is dead. There’s no time for that, and the risk is too great to be taken. If Aleem isn’t dead, he will be in minutes. He’ll bleed out. There’s no one to call the EMTs, no medical help near enough to save him. Michael keeps moving fast, dodging, head ducked, making as difficult a target as he knows how, heading toward Whole Fruit next door. One guy is still out there somewhere, but it’s a fool’s game to go looking for him on sloppy ground that doesn’t preserve tracks, among these buildings that constitute a three-dimensional spider’s web of traps. Let the enemy do the searching. The bastard knows where Nina and the boy have taken refuge, so he’ll go there just like Michael’s going there, the location of the showdown ordained, if not the outcome.
He steps around the cross-lighted quartet of dead gangbangers and moves boldly into the building, the compass in the corner of his vision now glowing blood-red. He retrieves the flashlight and holds it loosely in the hand with which he grips the forward handguard on the rifle, which isn’t ideal but the only choice he has. He splashes through the shallow flood and arrives at a series of rooms on the right, at a door that makes the compass needle throb. He throws the door open. Without venturing across the threshold, he declares, “It’s me, Michael.”
In the influx of light, a length of opaque plastic billows. A moldering slab of plywood topples. Nina and then John crawl out from under what seems to be a solid mass of trash. The sight of mother and son stirs in Michael emotions that he doesn’t fully understand, that speak of something more than the satisfaction of having done for them what Shelby would have wanted to do if he had lived.
Whatever else he is feeling and whatever it means, he will have to delay consideration of it until they are out of the orchard and on their way to a refuge where they can safely put the past behind them. In that place, he can also determine how to use his gift to unwind the coils of destruction that humankind has wound about itself during decades of progress from reason to unreason.
A TROUBLED GUEST ON THE DARK EARTH
Curtained by the rain, shrouded by the night, cloaked likewise by a shadow of deception that is provided by the prince of this world to those who serve his violent purpose, Orlando Fiske slinks unnoticed, staying close to the wall of the packing plant, toward the common area where the dead lie. He pauses only when the shooter, rifle in hand, departs the building from which he killed Aleem and crosses the mouth of the wide passageway, crouched and quick, to the front of this same packing plant.