IN THAT MOMENT before the shot, Claire counted down: Three, two, one, fire.
She pulled the trigger.
Her words to Paul had made him hesitate as he thought through just what he was hearing. He started to say yes. He had gone along with the whole plan too easily, without the nervousness she would expect from a man unaccustomed to violent work. Then she caught the tension in his body as he prepared to move on her, and through the frosted window, she saw a shadow moving outside. It was all she needed to understand what the truth was.
The stock of her rifle was raised slightly, and she dropped her shoulder before she fired.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It’s a shooting lesson that becomes paramount as you move into the heavy calibers: the more lead you throw downrange, the harder the stock of the gun comes back at you.
The blast was deafening in the small space, and the muzzle flare was a tongue of fire reaching for the hole in the glass.
She missed. She’d wanted to miss. The stock flew into Paul’s jaw and the side of his neck as he was moving in to choke her.
Her words before the shot had been the last lie. She’d had to believe it herself to sell it to him. Paul had thought she would play along. He thought he could control her. Thought the anger would control her. He was wrong on all counts. And in his arrogance, he’d tipped his hand, and now he was going to die.
In the half second of chaos after the shot, as the gun drove into the side of his neck, she threw her right elbow into Paul’s windpipe, and he started back in a long choking inhalation.
He grabbed for the rifle, and it kicked back, sending a bullet flying. She went for his hand to lock up his arm, but as she rose up, he drove his thumb into her eye. The dusty nail dug into her tear duct. As she flinched, Paul shoved her back and drew her pistol.
She ignored the pain and clamped her hand down on his on the gun. The barrel was aimed at her face.
She twisted her hand around the meat of his thumb and the grip of the pistol and shoved it away as he pulled the trigger, deafening her with a hot breath of flame.
The bullet went wide, but she couldn’t hear anything except a high whine at the center of her skull.
He stood and brought his left hand onto the grip of the gun. She was kneeling on top of the box, and he easily forced her wrist back.
If she were standing, she could have tried blows with her knee, but she was stuck on top of this goddamn box and watching as the bore of the pistol came toward her. There was nothing she could do. He had thirty pounds on her. Slowly, slowly, he wrested control away from her.
“Claire!” he croaked. “What the hell are you doing?” A long shallow gasp. “Let go of the gun.” He brought it around, put both hands on the grip. She looked down the black eye of the barrel.
Then she dropped to one side, toward the edge of the box. With all his effort pushing the gun toward her, when she changed direction suddenly and added her strength to his, it was enough. She drew the gun toward her head and over and threw him to the side. He landed on his ribs, and the gun fell from his hands.
He leaped to his feet, and Claire was already off the box, closing in on him. She pulled a slender metal blade from her vest, and as he stood she lowered it slightly, then drove the knife into his belly.
It tore through his diaphragm and entered his heart as she raised her arm like someone hoisting a glass for a toast. He came off his feet, then slumped over her shoulder as she pinned him against the wall.
He’d believed what he wanted to believe: that she was weak, that he understood her, that she needed him. Even to the end, he’d needed to know that he could control her. Maybe he even wanted to be with her somehow, to have the old life back. He never committed, never chose a side. He wanted it all, believed in nothing but himself. He thought it made him stronger than the men below, men whose convictions were so strong they would sacrifice themselves and run toward gunfire without a second thought. But he was wrong.
“You have no idea who I am,” she said as she dropped him to the ground and moved toward the pistol.
A gunshot popped outside, and the window blew in. Stinging pain tore across her face, her eyes. She fell back, reached up, and felt the edges of skin, flaps along her eyebrows.
Blind. I’m fucking blind, she thought before she even hit the concrete. The glass had cut her. The blood pooled in her eyes. The shot had come from her left. She scrambled across the broken glass until she hit an electrical box.
She crouched behind it, the last cover she could remember. But she had no idea if the gunman had already come around to the other window and was now staring down at her helpless form.
Her fingers found the pouch of her first-aid kit, always within reach, even with one hand. She moved past the tourniquet and felt the gauze impregnated with QuikClot.
As she blinked, she could make out shapes, a dark swirl, like the room reflected in night water. She pressed the cloth to her forehead. The clotting agent burned, smelled like rusting steel. She ran her hand gently across her eyelids, fearful of making any cuts to her eyes worse, but now she could see. She blinked away the blood.
Her fingers touched the bandage, and the pain made the whole world waver; she was on the edge of blackout. It was a deep laceration around the orbital bone, but at least one of her eyes was okay.
She looked for the rifle, for her pistol, for anything. But there was only broken glass. The guns must have fallen on the far side of the box and were lying under the shattered window where the shot had come from. If she went over there, she would be in the open, an easy kill. All she had were the two mini-frags.
She could hear the gunman moving outside. The north and south windows were blown out. Another shot, and the window to her side shattered in. It sounded like a silenced pistol. Bullet by bullet, he was eliminating any cover, readying for the final kill. She had to get out. She had seconds. She pulled the ring and dropped the grenade through the window above her head, just outside the machine room.
She threw herself through the low broken window on the other side of the room and landed hard on her shoulder on the building’s roof. She rolled over, feeling the sharp edges of glass bury in the meat of her back as the frag shook the air and chunks of metal rained down.
She saw the shooter coming. It was a woman. Claire pulled the pin on her second and last frag and rolled it toward her, then stumbled around the corner of the machine room, so the wall was between herself and the bang.
She looked around for better cover as the sulfur smoke of the explosion drifted toward her. Fifty feet away, there was another concrete-block box sticking out from the roof, the stair access, and beyond that just a parapet and the hundred-and-fifty-foot drop to the street. She started to run toward the stairs, long unsteady strides, trying not to puke from pain.
The grenade blew behind the machine room. She listened for cries but heard only silence. After a moment, there were footsteps, the crunch of glass. The other woman was still alive, and armed. And Claire had only her knife and nowhere to go but down.