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.Timing the lurch of his vehicle so as not to lose time opening the door, he pushed the door and exited, dragging the M-14 by its skinny barrel and heavy flash suppressor.Shit! Can’t see! Fucking fold in the land.Immediately he hopped on the hood and then clambered onto the roof.Now he could see.It was Joe, all right.Out of the van, running toward the State Patrol cruiser, his right arm extended.The crack and snap of shots.Jesus.Shaking, breathing all wrong; Yeager swung up the M-14.His old Corps dad made him learn to shoot offhand at 200 yards.If you can’t shoot offhand you ain’t shit!Joe running with his arm straight out, windows blowing apart in the state cruiser making it hard to see, to tell…All these shots and then Yeager squeezed off three of his own.It wasn’t fair.They had so much.So much space, this lush yellow-and-green emptiness, the tilt-a-whirl blue sky.Joseph spun like a bad dancer, shredded.He smelled the raw sewage of the camps, saw the bloated corpses again at Sabra and Shatila.The tiny children with flies crawling on them.Cholera, typhoid, diseases that never touch these fat Americans.Not fair.He collapsed deeper into a million little yellow flowers.Moist like pollen, smelling like medicine, buzzing of insects.Footfalls coming from in back.Where was the Browning? But all feeling was draining from his arms.Then gone.George and Dale would have to kill the Americans.He, Joseph, was through with them.Losing pieces of the sky and sound he thought he saw a broad white face loom over him.Lonely now.Leaving.Not sure why, he rasped his goodbye.“Ma’assalama…”Yeager stooped to hear Joe’s last words.All he got was a rattle of breath.He placed two fingers along Joe’s throat and felt for a pulse.There was none.Yeager hoisted himself up slowly.He was gasping, and starting to shake.Joe was pitched on his side so Yeager could see his back and front were both a mess.They got him coming and going.Sauer’s.45 sure tore some holes coming out.Sauer.Yeager jogged the last fifteen yards to the State Patrol cruiser.Barry Sauer was sprawled forward across the front seat.His hair and grimacing teeth were covered in white powder.His arms still extended out the shattered passenger-door window.Gently, Yeager pried the.45 from the death grip of Sauer’s clamped hands.Yeager gritted his teeth, seeing the blood at Sauer’s throat, thick above his shirt collar.On his cheeks, his nose.“Man,” Sauer gasped, “I am…sure…fucking glad…my…wife…made…me…wear…this.”With his left hand, Sauer ripped at the top buttons of his uniform shirt, tearing the cloth away to show the two deep impact impressions on his Kevlar.“You’re bleeding!” Yeager said, his voice too loud.Sauer shook his head.“Just cuts.Glass.Whole lot of stuff flying around for a minute there.”Yeager helped Sauer out of the car and supported him as they walked up to Joe’s body.Cars with flashing lights were converging.Norm’s Silverado.Cops from Towner.“I yelled for him to drop it but there was no way,” Sauer said.Then more urgent.“The van?”“I went by it.No sign of Dale.Was in a hurry.Then when I got to him he said something, couldn’t make it out.Sounded strange.Indian maybe.”Sauer grimaced and said, “Now we got some people missing.”Yeager nodded.“Damn,” Sauer said.This time he pointed at his cruiser.“Old Man Kreuger probably only had one sleeper rock in his field and I had to hit it.” He shook his head, dripping blood.“Totaled another state car.That’s the second air bag I kissed in seven days.”Yeager grinned.“Three more and they gotta make you an ace.Don’t sweat it, road dog, we’re gonna be all right.”“How’s that?”Yeager pointed at the cloud of dust kicked up by four new Border Parol Tahoes coming in a tight convoy.“The cavalry’s here.”Chapter Thirty-fiveFace into the wave.Numb, her teeth fuzzy.Hard to breathe.Nina tried to spit the taste of decay from her mouth, but she was too dry.Memory jabbed.Some drug he used.Moving.Patterns of light and shadow dappled a wall of knotty pine veneer.The morning’s shark attack all came back to her.Jane.Ace…Not now.Focus on the present.She tried to move.Spreadeagled on a bed.Not good.Resistance at her wrists and ankles.Little strength.She could move her head and she saw that her wrists were secured with double-tied bungee cords.The same for her wrists.The hooks had been crimped together tight.She strained against the cords with her wrists and legs.Some give.They were makeshift.Maybe she could defeat them.Given time, she figured, she could.But not if he kept giving her that drug.He.Dale.The other Shuster.Her mind churned, scurrying.Not okay yet.Process.Automatically, she confronted the fear.She had been trained to convert it into a manageable image.So it became a wave building in the distance.An instructor in survival training explained that extreme fear was like the ocean.Too big to get your mind around, too fast to outrun.You had to navigate it.Great, so now I’m in the fucking Navy.You had to turn into it, meet it head on, ride it out.If you froze up or ran away, it would roll you up and take you down.Orient yourself.Face into the wave.She was lashed down on a bed in the rear of a van or camper.From some calm center in her brain she recalled that Broker had in-grained in her a suspicion of vans.She twisted around to get a better look.Not the kind of bed that was built into this kind of vehicle.This was an ordinary twin bed, wooden head and footboard, sideboard, slats and springs and mattress
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Tematy
IndexCidney Swanson [Saving Mars Saving Mars (epub)
Christine Wood [Life Plan 01] A Life Plan Without You (epub)
Cheryl McIntyre [Infinitely Infinitely (epub)
Clair Delaney [Coral 01] Coral (epub)
Christine Cody [Bloodlands 01 Bloodlands (epub)
Christina Ross [Unleash Me, A Unleash Me, Vol 3 (epub)
Christine Flynn [The Hunt for Once Upon a Christmas Eve (epub
Christian Fletcher [The Left Left on the Brink (epub)
Christopher G Nuttall [Royal The Royal Sorceress (epub)
Marczyński Antoni Aloha