A Wanted Woman Part 51

The LKs had a.s.sumed coming to get me on this small island would be an easy task.

Petrichor backed out, backed out fast, skidded across debris, and parked on the road.

If she had left the truck there, it could be blocked in.

I said, "Let me go alone."

"No."

"Go back home to your husband."

"You're my sister. Don't you f.u.c.king get it? You're my G.o.dd.a.m.n sister."

In front of the burning restaurant, we stepped out of the truck, weapon heavy, Petrichor carrying the backpack, both of us with our guns trained. I ate pain with each step. I wasn't moving as fast as I wanted, but my adrenaline was high enough to act as a temporary painkiller.

She whispered, "How many?"

As rain fell on flames, spinning rotors sliced though the darkened sky.

The winds. Maybe the chopper pilots weren't as skilled as I had a.s.sumed.

A simple evac had turned into a suicide mission, the weather turning on them. Rage fueled me. Had to get to War Machine, if no one else, even if it cost me my life.

Petrichor had flashlight stun guns. Winds shoved us as we moved beyond the damaged door and again it was like running into Harrison Caves during a blackout. Gravity pulled at me, made me want to collapse, my unseen enemy. We heard gunshots, men talking in sharp tones. More gunshots. Ma.s.sive chunks of stonework fell. The pavement was sticky. Blood. My gut hurt, not from Appaloosa, but from where Zenga had kicked me. Felt like a giant was standing on my gut, made standing upright a Herculean feat. If he hadn't kicked me, I would've been able to outrun them. The pain he had given me had sprung to life and slowed me down. In my mind, I was killing him, making him feel what I felt. Outside, water fell from the roof like Niagara Falls, and after more firepower, gla.s.s fell harder than the rain, mixed with the water, became invisible, fell into the curious faces and eyes of the denizens, tourists, and anyone who was stupid enough to gather here, any one of the curious drawn to get a front seat at danger.

A fury inside of me ignited and my walk became a limping trot from the first level until we circled to the darkness of the second. Men were on the next level, engaged in a firefight.

We pa.s.sed two men, smoke rising. Smelled charred flesh before we saw them. They had been burned alive. The pyromaniac had come this way. The Barbarians had come this way.

A handful of LKs had the Barbarians trapped behind concrete pillars. For neither team was this taking place as advertised by their CEOs. I wanted to kill them all with my bare hands.

Violence echoed, tested men who pretended to be brave, boys pretending to be soldiers.

Petrichor moved to their left and found her position behind a column; I took my crippled body to the right and did the same. Covered, no earplugs, heart pounding so hard it deafened me as well, we opened fire, had clear shots to the back of the LKs. Each shot echoed in these close quarters. Hysterical screams. Howls from the injured. The Barbarians realized they had a.s.sistance, and they opened fire on the LKs forced out into the open. LKs fled, inspired by our lead. The LKs were hit from front and back; they tried to return fire in a way that was impressive, but not effective. The dead littered the pavement.

I ignored the pain, but the pain didn't ignore me. I forced myself to focus.

I called out, "It's Reaper."

Dormeuil called back, "Reaper? You're joking."

"Reaper plus one, with weapons."

"Show yourself."

"f.u.c.k you. Show yourself first."

Barbarians emerged from hiding, first Zenga with his weapon aimed, then Dormeuil.

Both lowered their guns. They regarded Petrichor. She had pulled her scarf back up to her eyes. She was a shapely silhouette with gun and backpack, one they had just seen mow down men, reload her clip, and step toward them as if to say fear had no home in her heart.

There were no introductions, no quips, no jokes, just serious expressions.

Zenga and I looked at each other. It was in broken darkness, but we looked at each other. He nodded. He touched where I had taken part of his ear during our hand-to-hand battle. I put my hand on my belly. He nodded again. I didn't know what that meant, but he nodded. I returned the same ambiguous gesture and moved past him. Not allies, but not enemies at the moment, still closer to being the former than the latter, but only one pejorative from being the latter.

The pyromaniac had taken one to the head. Half of his face was gone, the top half.

Dora the Explorer danced with Satan on a muddy hill covered in brown snow.

Three other men were dead. Barbarians I had never met while they could breathe.

Zenga looked at his dead colleagues, rage lines in his face, tears in his eyes.

There was no time to comment, no time to mourn. Dead LKs and Barbarians rotting behind us, weapons high, we continued toward the roof, toward the sounds of choppers.

Dormeuil led the way. I did my best to keep up, refused to be a liability.

I didn't want Petrichor to go, but she refused to turn around and leave me with them.

As it had been for the pyromaniac, this was going to be a one-way trip.

SIXTY-ONE.

The campaign continued.

On the top level of the unfinished car park that could accommodate five hundred vehicles, the LKs had shot off the inexpensive chains and opened the insignificant metal double doors that led to the roof of City Centre. We killed the flashlights we carried and an abrupt darkness blanketed us, made the lights from the choppers exponentially brighter. Couldn't tell where men were positioned, couldn't see where the enemy waited, but they were off to the sides giving the chopper room to land, not expecting company at these double doors. They didn't expect us, not up here. We fired on them and they fired on us, but two of them dropped, another three hit, one screamed that his kneecap had been shot. Screams. Rain. Bullets popped like a firefight in Afghanistan. The exchange didn't scare the choppers away. Lights in the dark made choppers glow like UFOs hovering over Little London, so denizens who saw the whirlybirds on this side of the island probably were in awe as if they were witnessing the Concorde land on its final flight. The chopper rocked and landed under pressure. At one end of the roof, War Machine returned fire as he rushed to board a helicopter along with other men. Every time I saw them, there were more guntas, as if they had been stationed all over the island. Maybe some had already been here antic.i.p.ating this extraction. Maybe those were the ones who rammed the gate and broke the locks. Probably were the same men who had driven the island and killed the power while the others terrorized Big Guy. I was sure that some had already fled in vehicles. Others were trying to collect their injured before they were exposed, and someone had to be out there stacking up their dead. Three guns sent projectiles from the chopper. It had a gunner with a rapid-fire weapon, and the gunner shot hard and fast, chased us back into the dark hallway, made us drop to the floor, scramble across dusty concrete. Concrete walls stopped slugs, but Zenga had grabbed me, pulled me out of the way. I yanked away from him, not wanting his f.u.c.kin' hands on me, not even now. When the shots paused, we were back in the door, firing as guntas fired at us. Fewer guntas fired. War Machine's escape vehicle wasn't an R44, but a medium-size Super Puma, the largest of the four. At the other end of the car park Guerrero, Kandinsky, and another gunta were boarded on one of the R44s.

The handful of guntas waiting on the next chopper still had ammo.

We were in the open, exposed both to bullets that fell like rain and rain that fell like bullets. The Super Puma lifted into the winds, lifting into Bridgetown's blackness created by the LKs, was pushed by G.o.d and helped by the devil. The four-bladed beast thumped and we were at the entryway to that level, firing rounds. I wanted that chopper to go down in flames. I stepped out as men fired at me, stepped out and fired, fired, fired.

Bullets danced around me while I screamed and tried to kill that bird.

I shouted into the storm at War Machine, screamed into the wind and rain.

Petrichor shouted my name, unloaded her weapon as she came to get me.

I went down on one knee, reloaded, was in too much pain to get up, so I fired from that position. Guntas on the ground returned fire as a second and third chopper landed.

Again fireworks lit up the night.

When it came to war, they were brutes, men with limited vision, no plans, no schemes, just blindly going after what they had been entrusted to trap, dehumanize, and kill.

Gunfire stopped. They were Winchester. That, or pretending.

They raised their hands, but our guns remained high and kicked out lead.

Petrichor came out and grabbed my shoulder, pulled me to my feet. The Barbarians stepped up, were at my right side. I opened my bag, showed Zenga the grenades. I should have done that the moment we made it to the top level. Pain had distracted me. Zenga did his best to calculate the oscillating wind and threw the grenade and tried to get it to hit a chopper.

Petrichor and Dormeuil fired on guntas and Zenga threw grenades.

I raised my gun and joined in, each recoil sending agony back into my body.

A grenade disrupted the tail of one of the choppers as it took off. Right away, it began to spin wildly. They were already over the edge of the building, and they became an out-of-control merry-go-round. The whirlybird slammed into the bank across the street, erupted into flames, experienced a catastrophic loss of power, and plummeted, began cartwheeling.

We heard the whining, the screeching of metal as it ripped apart. Big bang. Felt the building shake, the rain and winds not muting the sounds, not stopping a big plume of smoke from rising up into the saturated air. Small explosions continued after the big bang, like the Fourth of July.

Fire spread to adjacent buildings, to the front of this structure.

A ruptured high-capacity fuel tank was better than a bomb.

In the distance, another chopper had problems, lost control in the wind. I could tell by its lights, how they rose and fell, more fall than rise. It went up one more time, then nosedived.

It vanished from sight. Then there was an explosion. Flames rose.

It wasn't the chopper carrying War Machine, but one of the R44s. Maybe a lucky shot had sliced through the winds and hurt the pilot. Maybe it was pilot error. Flying in these winds was a sign of desperation. I didn't give a f.u.c.k. I wanted all of them dead. I ached from head to toe, bled from wounds and orifices, suffered a living h.e.l.l. Six guntas had been left behind. Zenga had found two out of ammo, hiding in the darkness. Dormeuil dragged one, the boy with the busted kneecap, to the edge of the building. He made the gunta stand on his good leg, the other guntas captured, at his side. Then Dormeuil grabbed the boy's good leg and flipped him over.

As he screamed, I looked at the other guntas.

They stared at me, hands in fists, stared at the wild woman who was in pain.

I growled, "Jump, motherf.u.c.kers. Jump and pray that you grow wings on the way down."

Half-dead, they didn't move. Belligerent warriors. Men born poor and never expected to live beyond twenty-five years, boys pretending to be hardcore, righteous men with guns, abandoned and marginalized children who tried to squeeze one hundred years of living into twenty, not afraid to die, yet wanting to live for an eternity. I shot one in the head at point-blank range, the youngest of the lot.

I took a knife, sliced the back of his neck, and began pulling out his spine.

Zenga said, "Jesus f.u.c.king H. Christ."

My hands ached. Had to stop, but with half the spine removed, they got the point.

When I let the body drop, Dormeuil threw the man over the edge.

The other LKs saw their options. Fly or die without a spine. Either way, it was going to be raining men. Like San Salvadorians, they had no hearts, had been raised to be cold, merciless.

Then I repeated, "Jump and hope you land on something softer than a bullet."

They did. They cursed us all, stepped up on the ledge, arms outstretched like they were on a crucifix, and fell backward, did a skydive from darkness into the glow of the fireball below.

I limped and looked over the edge, Petrichor at my side. She held my arm at the elbow, held me as if she were afraid I might fall over, a gun in her right hand, her eyes on the Barbarians. The enemy of my enemy was not her friend, and she didn't pretend they were.

A helicopter's engine was lying on the ground. The helicopter was in a million pieces and each piece scattered up and down the road and on fire to the edges of St. Mary's Anglican Church.

A vehicle was on fire, flames rising, being spat everywhere.

I saw other glows, moving illuminations, the glows from cellular phones being used as flashlights. Plebeians fought wind and rain, came from all directions. People wanted to see. Most sane people were inside their homes, but the insane, those denizens were on the side of the road, maybe wishing they had stayed in their chattel houses and not run into the storm and found their way to a war zone out of morbid curiosity. I'd bet that many were stepping over debris and bodies and looting, bandanas covering their faces, trying to get inside of Courts to steal televisions, computers, vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, mattresses. On this side, the crash had broken open the windows on the ground level at Chapel Street. Looters were in clothing boutiques, some grabbing goods from the electronics store.

For both the malicious and the cafeteria Christians, now was the time to come up.

The tropical depression, for some, was a momentary cure for the recession. If Bajans were anything like Americans and Brits, Swan Street was being ransacked at the same time.

There wouldn't be any ambulances. Not anytime soon. Not for all the injured.

Anyone hurt might as well start wining and chipping, wukkup toward QEH.

I needed to be the grand marshal of that cavalcade featuring the walking dead.

Flames here and there. It looked like there had been a terrorist attack.

In some ways, there had been one.

I hoped Barbados had plenty of s.p.a.ce at their morgue.

I asked, "Where are the police and paramedics?"

Petrichor adjusted her wet bandana and spoke with a deep, hard, Jamaican accent, spoke like she was a West Indian Batman, said, "Barbados has never seen anything like this. Something happened in Antigua a while back, five or six years ago, but it was nothing like this, not like this s.h.i.t at all. They are freaking out, overwhelmed. Half are looting and the other half is praying. This s.h.i.t is awesome."

War Machine and a few others had escaped, vanished into the night. They saw it in reverse. They had defeated me, and I'd escaped. I could hear them cursing in the winds, War Machine cursing the loudest. The woman they would've made their all-night slave cursed into the same winds.

Dormeuil said, "We have work to do. We have a lot of work to do."

I said, "I'm not done. This is only the beginning for me."

Zenga said, "We'd better get moving."

Dormeuil said, "While it's still raining."

"While it's still dark, we need to do as much recovery as possible."

"We need to do some collections. Leave no man behind, dead or alive."

"Have to cover this up the best we can. Low on manpower."

"We still have room in the Chefette truck."

"If it hasn't been stolen."

"We'll have to put our guys in the back with the Rastafarians."

Dormeuil and Zenga had already turned around and started marching away.

Petrichor walked next to me. An Amazon who stood like she was ready to kill the world, seething, so f.u.c.king angry, so heated, that each drop of rain that touched her created steam.