8. Claw
Claw
They come at three forty in the morning, nine days after I put two of them in a ravine.
I know because I am awake. I have been awake since two, lying with her hair across my arm, listening to the wind change, and there is a specific quality to the silence out there that I have not liked all night.
Coyotes stopped. That is the tell. The coyotes on the north ridge run their mouths every night of the year and tonight they shut up an hour ago.
The first trip line goes at three forty and turns the treeline white.
Stormy is up before the flash dies. No scream, no confusion, straight from sleep to standing with the knife already off the nightstand, and my heart does something complicated at the sight of her.
"How many," she says.
"More than two."
"Claw."
"Bunker. Now. Bolt the hatch from underneath and put the bar through it.
" I am already pulling the short rifle off the wall rack and dumping magazines into the drop bag.
"Rule's the same as before. Anybody comes down that hole that isn't me, you use what's in your hand and you don't stop deciding until they're on the floor. "
She goes.
She stops at the machine room door for exactly one second.
"Come back," she says.
"That's the plan."
The hatch shuts. I hear the bar go through underneath.
Then I flip the breaker and drop my entire world into black.
Here is what they know. There is a metal building with a light on and one man inside it.
Here is what they do not know.
They do not know that I have spent a month getting ready for exactly this, and that both bay doors have four inch bar stock across them on the inside, so the only way into this building is the side door or the roof.
They do not know that the side door is a sand-filled steel plate hung in a welded frame and that pulling up to it in a vehicle is the single worst idea available.
They do not know there are six flash charges in the treeline and four more in the gravel apron.
They do not know that I have zeroed every optic in this shop for twelve, twenty and forty feet, and that I could walk this floor plan blindfolded because I have, on purpose, at night, more times than I can count.
And they do not know that a week ago a woman crossed nine feet of cold concrete in the dark and chose me, and that whatever thin restraint used to sit between me and the basement got taken off its hinges that night and burned in the barrel out back.
The second and third lines go together. Two more white blooms out past the fence, and now I can hear them, shouting, that flat hard language, and the crunch of boots coming through crust.
I put on the headset and pull the mic down and key it once.
"Rooster."
"On the road. Nine minutes."
"Take too long."
"Then leave us some."
I move to the machine room.
Through the plastic curtain I have a clean lane down the length of the bay to the side door, forty feet, dark as a coffin. I go prone behind the lathe base, which is nine hundred pounds of cast iron, and I set the short rifle on the bipod and I lay the pistol beside my left hand and I wait.
They cut the fence at the northeast corner. I hear it on the sensor, a soft tone in my ear.
Then they try the bays. I hear them working on the west one, prying, and then the sound of a truck backing up, and then a hard yank and a snap as a chain parts and something falls over, and a man swears.
Then, finally, the side door.
They go at it with a halligan bar for two minutes and they cannot move it, and I lie in the dark listening to a man grunt and fail against my welding and I feel something almost like joy.
So they do the thing I built the last nine days around.
They blow it.
The charge is too big for the job, and the door goes inward off its frame and skids twenty feet across my floor, and the shock wave rolls through the building and knocks a pegboard's worth of tools off the wall behind me, and a rectangle of night appears in the wall with snow blowing through it.
Four men come in fast and stacked.
The first one is carrying a light.
That is the last mistake he ever makes. A light in a dark building tells you exactly where a man's shoulders are.
I take him and the man behind him in a second and a half.
The short barrel is savage inside four walls and my ears go to a high sustained note that will be there for a week.
The other two go sideways into the tire stacks, which is what I would have done, and which is also exactly why there are two charges taped to the underside of the third rack.
I trigger them.
The concussion lifts a hundred pounds of rubber toward the ceiling, and the noise of it is beyond noise, and in the ringing after, one of them is dragging himself toward the wall with his legs gone stupid and the other is up on one knee firing wildly into the black at nothing.
I go to the pistol for that one, because the can is quiet and quiet lets me move. Then the one on the floor.
Then I move.
Four more come through the hole. I take them from the loft ladder, from behind the parts counter, from the doorway of the office where I slept on the floor for a month, and I am not fighting them so much as I am processing them.
The building helps. Every corner is mine.
Every distance is a number I already have.
Twice I stand still in the dark two feet from a man breathing hard and let him walk past me before I do it.
Somewhere in there I catch a round through the meat of my left arm and it does not seem important, so I put it aside.
Viktor comes in last.
I know it is him because he comes in slow when the shooting has stopped, and because he has a light and does not care who sees it, and because he is talking as he comes.
"Mechanic." Big voice. Amused. A man who has run four states for twelve years and never once been on the wrong end of the math. "You have cost me a great deal of money for a piece of merchandise that will be dead by summer anyway."
I do not answer. Answering is how men get found.
"She has told you things, I am sure. Girls tell stories." His light sweeps my bay. Bikes. Blood. Toolboxes. "Come out. We will discuss a number. Everyone has a number."
He steps over the second man I killed tonight without looking down.
I come out of the dark fourteen feet behind him.
He is fast. Faster than the ones in the alley. He gets turned around and he gets his weapon up and he even gets a round off, into the ceiling, sparks off a joist.
Then I take the pistol out of his hand and break the arm it was in, and I put him down on the concrete face first and kneel on him with all my weight, and the sound he makes is one I have heard from other men and never once from the four faces on that folded photograph in my back pocket.
I put my mouth beside his ear.
"There's no number," I tell him. "You put ties on her wrists."
Then I do him with my hands, because out of every man in this building tonight he is the one that has to be done with my hands, and it takes a while, and I do not hurry any part of it.
Outside, finally, I hear pipes. A dozen bikes coming hard down the county road.
I do not wait for them.