Page 59 of The Jackal

I came up off him bleeding from the shoulder and the cheek, my ears screaming that high, dead tone, Max pressed hard against my leg and favoring a back leg now—dinged somewhere in it, a graze along his flank where the vest ended, probably a line of red in the tan. Both of us marked. Both of us breathing.

I put my hand down on his head. He leaned into it, and we stood there in the wreckage and the settling dust. Some fool part of me said: that's all of them. That's six.

It was five.

I have replayed the next two seconds more times than I can tell you, and I will replay them until I die, because they are the two seconds that should have been the end of me.

The sixth man was down but the sixth man was not gone. He'd caught one of mine early and gone to the floor and lain still in the dust and the dark among his own dead. I'd counted him finished because I was tired and hurt and I had let myself, for one heartbeat, believe the dance was over.

He rose up behind me with his rifle coming to my back.

I turned into it. Too slow. I knew I was too slow the way I know the dead—cold, certain, no argument in it. I hadn’t replaced the mag in my pistol, and my body was a quarter-second behind where it needed to be. I looked down what was almost the length of that rifle at a man who had every reason and every angle, and I did the only thing there was left to do.

I stepped in front of Max.

It's the last thing I remember choosing before the window came apart. Not a heroic thing. Just arithmetic, the only arithmetic that was left—if one of us walks out of here it's the dog, because the dog is hers, because I promised a good old soldier on a kitchen floor that I'd keep her and the dog is how I keep the promise if I can't keep it myself.

Then, the world broke inward in a storm of glass.

Brock came through the second-floor window like the wrath of God with the harbor at his back, two hundred and forty pounds of Dane, and he was firing before his boots found the floor. The sixth man's rifle swung off me and never finished the trip. Brock stitched him top to bottom and the man folded down into the dust for good and did not rise again. The echo of it rolled around that ruined room and out the broken window and away over the water. And then, there was nothing.

Nothing but the ringing. The dust turning slow in the last of the muzzle-flash ghosts. My own heart, loud now that it was allowed to be. Six men on the floor of a dead admiral's house, and two of us still standing, and my brother crouched in a blown-out window frame with glass in his hair and his rifle still up, sweeping, making sure.

"Clear," Brock said. His chest was heaving. "Clear. Cash. You with me?"

The exhale came up out of me from somewhere near the floor of my soul.

"I'm with you," I said.

I sat down. I hadn't planned to. My body made the call without me, folded me down onto the dusty boards among the dead, and Max came around and pushed his bloody head into my chest. I got my good arm around him and held on, the two of us wrecked and breathing and alive in the middle of all that stillness. I could feel the men around me going out—that's the other thing nobody knows, that I feel them leave, six of them lifting off at once like a flock going up—and I did not shepherd a single one. Not tonight. Tonight, they could find the door themselves. My hands were full of the living.

Brock crossed to me, glass crunching under his boots, and went to a knee. His eyes ran over the shoulder, the cheek, the blood, the dog. Fast, expert, a brother taking inventory.

"You're hit."

"I'm fine. It's meat. He's grazed—" I ran my hand down Max's flank and he flinched and let me. "Back leg and his side. He needs a vet more than I need a medic. See to the dog first."

Brock almost smiled at that. Almost. He keyed his radio instead and I heard him call it in, heard the calm come back into his voice now that the loud part was over, the machine of my family folding this night up and making it disappear the way it made everything disappear. Then, he looked at me, and I watched him not want to say the next thing. I already knew, so, I said it for him.

"Craine."

Brock's jaw worked. He looked at the hole in the floor where a bed had been, the dark square of it, the trap door standing open on nothing.

"Gone," he said. "There was a tunnel under the drop—service run, old utility line from the base days, we didn't have it on any map. By the time Ryker's people got to the mouth of it, he was in a car and off the yard. We lost him, Cash." He said it like it cost him. "He played it clean. Whole thing. Start to finish. We walked right into it."

I sat there in the wreckage and let that land. I waited for the thing men are supposed to feel at a moment like that—the failure of it, the rage, the bitterness of a hunter who cornered his man and came away empty-handed and bleeding.

It didn't come. Something else came, instead.

A lightening in my chest. Strange and sweet, like a held breath let go. I noticed, far off and unbothered, that the blood running down my arm had stopped being a trickle a while back. Brock was saying my name. His voice was going thin, drawing away down a long hall, and I couldn't remember why it mattered.

My vision narrowed to a bright sliver, and I thought, without alarm, that maybe I'd gone blind. I reached for my eyes. My arm wouldn't listen. Neither would the rest of me.

And down I tumbled.

Down and down, the way you fall in the first hard drop of sleep, except this drop had no bottom I was afraid of. Down the familiar well. Down past the noise and the dust and my brother's fading voice, down through the floor of the world I've kept one hand pressed against my whole life. Down to the forever. Down to the in-between—the wide, warm country I've carried in me since I was a boy at the bottom of a mine, and have wanted, God, help me, every day since.

It knew my name. It always has.