The Reapers

Suddenly, a third sound was added to the mix: the shattering of glass, and a noise that was somewhere between a sigh and a cough. Lynott identified it immediately, and his gun was in his right hand even as he used his left to tuck his member back into his pants, ignoring the unwelcome trickle that accompanied the move. He took two steps before something impacted on the back of his skull, and then he was dead before he even realized that he was dying.

Angel resisted telling Louis that he’d told him so.

They moved along opposite sides of the cattle pens, their guns always moving, sighting down the barrels on the empty doorways, the dark windows, alert for even the slightest sign of movement.

They reached the barn unchallenged. It seemed unchanged from when they had left it, its doors closed to hide the car within. They paused and listened intently, but heard nothing. Louis signaled to Angel to open the left door, counting down from three. Angel’s mouth was dry, and there was an ache in his belly. He licked some perspiration from his upper lip as Louis’s fingers silently made the count then, as the final finger fell, he yanked the door open.

“It’s clear,” said Louis, then added, “but it’s not good.”

The car was resting too low to the ground on one side, like a lopsided smile. The tires on the right had both been slashed. The driver’s-side window had been broken, and the hood had been raised and then allowed to fall back down without locking. Louis remained at the door, keeping watch, while Angel moved inside. He could detect no movement. An empty field stretched from the back of the barn toward the forest, but he could make out little in the distance apart from the shapes of the trees.

Angel squatted in front of the car and carefully raised the hood a fraction. He took a tiny Maglite from his pocket, switched it on, and held it between his teeth before picking up a piece of wood from the ground and slowly ru

“They blew the fuse panel,” he said. “This baby isn’t going anywhere.”

“Guess we walk.”

“Kids?”

“You see the local gangbangers while we was passing through?”

“No, but this is, like, rural. Maybe they were hiding.”

“Yeah, ’cause they was so scared of the big city boys.”

Louis took one last look around, then stepped into the garage and headed straight for the trunk of the car. He put his finger upon the release button, then paused before pushing it and glanced at Angel.

“There was nothing up front,” said Angel.

“That’s reassuring. Maybe you want to take a couple of steps away, just in case.”

“Hey, if you go, I go, too.”

“Maybe I don’t want you to go, too.”

“You want someone to mourn for you later?”

“No, I just don’t want you with me for eternity. Now step the fuck back.”

Angel moved away. Louis hit the button, flinching only slightly as he did so. The trunk popped open, and Louis swore. Angel joined him.

Together, they stared into the trunk.

Weis and Blake had no music in their car, and they had long ago exhausted their store of mutual acquaintances. It did not trouble either of them. They were men who valued silence. Although, true to form, neither had said it aloud, each admired the other’s essential stillness. The inability to remain quiet and unmoving for long was one of the reasons Weis detested Lynott. Their paths had last crossed in Chad, where they had nominally been fighting on the same side, but Weis considered Lynott to be unprofessional, a thief, and a man of low morals. But then, Weis was a man who hated easily, and already he had begun to notice Blake’s breathing, which, stillness or no stillness, he felt was uncomfortably loud. There was nothing to be done about it, he supposed, short of suffocating him, and that seemed like an overreaction, even to Weis.

Curiously, Blake was thinking exactly the same thing about Weis but, unlike him, he was not a man who felt compelled to simmer quietly. He turned to Weis.

“Hey-” he said, and then the passenger-side window exploded beside Weis’s head, the roar of the shotgun almost deafening Blake in his left ear, and suddenly Weis had a head no longer. A warm redness descended on Blake as Weis’s torso toppled toward him, but by then Blake was already below window level, yanking the door handle and tumbling to the ground, his gun in his hand as he fired blindly, his vision clouded by Weis’s blood, knowing that the noise and the fear of a stray round hitting its target might be enough to buy him crucial seconds. He must have been lucky, he realized, for as he blinked the blood away he saw a man in a green and brown camouflage poncho fall to the dirt, but Blake didn’t stop to take in what he had done. All that mattered was to keep moving. If he stopped, he would die. He felt pain in his head and shoulder, and knew that some of the pellets must have hit him, but a combination of Weis and his good fortune in being seated a little farther forward than his late companion had saved him from the worst of the blast.

Shots impacted around him as he ran, and one passed so close to his left cheek that he felt the heat of its passage and thought that he could almost see the bullet as it flew, a spi

He took a deep breath into his lungs, preparing for a burst of speed that might buy him more vital time, and then his face collided with a hard object, and his nose broke and his teeth shattered, and for a moment he was blinded once again, this time by white light, not blood. He fell backward, but even as he did so his instinct for survival remained sharp, for he held on to the gun as he hit the ground and fired in the direction of the collision. He heard someone grunt, and then a body fell upon him, pi

A man’s head appeared before him, his face obscured by a black ski mask. Two blue eyes blinked curiously at him. Then a third eye appeared, black and without emotion, and this one did not blink, not even as its pupil became a bullet and brought Blake’s pain to an end.