Chapter 14 Rocco #2
I saw the terrain on our approach. The slope drops off steeply behind the structure. A thirty-degree grade, covered in snow, descending into the ravine we climbed out of. It’s a slide. A chute.
"Adrian."
He looks at me. The shotgun is trembling in his hands. His glasses are spattered with wood dust. His face is white, like bone. But his eyes are steady.
"I’m going to blow this shack," I say. "When it goes, you grab Killian and you go out through the back wall. The plywood will give. Take him down the slope. Don't stop. Don't look back."
"What about Garrett?"
I look at Garrett. He’s on the floor, his back against the wall, the gauze pressed hard against his shoulder. The blood has soaked through the packing and is pooling on the floor beneath him. His face is grey. His eyes meet mine.
What passes between us is silent. Efficient. The communication of men who have operated in the same violent calculus long enough to know when the numbers don't add up.
"Go," Garrett says. His voice is steady. "I’ll hold the door."
"Garrett—"
"Give me the shotgun. Give the doctor the pistol. Go."
I don't argue. Arguing takes time, and time is the one currency we’ve already spent.
I take the shotgun from Adrian and give it to Garrett. He braces it against his right hip. Eight shells left. He positions himself facing the door with his back against the wall, the barrel aimed at the gap where the bench meets the frame.
I take the Makarov back from Adrian. Three rounds. I pick up the flare gun.
The propane tank. I unscrew the brass fitting from the hose. The gas hisses out—a pressurized stream of propane that fills the room with an invisible, heavier-than-air cloud. It smells like rotten eggs and death.
The gas sinks toward the floor, pooling, the concentration building. I have maybe thirty seconds.
I grab Killian. My left hand screams. The fresh sutures pull, tearing open inside the gauze. I hook my right arm under his shoulders and drag him off the bench and toward the back wall. Adrian is beside me, his hands under Killian’s legs, the Makarov shoved into his waistband.
"On three," I say. "Hit the back wall. Roll down the slope. Don't stop."
I point the flare gun at the propane tank. The gas is pooling at knee height. I can feel the heavy, chemical displacement of oxygen in the lower two feet of the room.
"One."
Garrett fires through the door. Boom. A body hits the porch outside with a heavy thud. A scream.
"Two."
Adrian braces. His shoulder is against the back wall. Killian is between us, unconscious, deadweight.
"Three."
I fire the flare.
The bright cartridge crosses the room in a streak of red phosphorus. It hits the propane cloud at knee height.
The world becomes white.
The explosion is a physical wall. A wave of intense heat and crushing pressure that picks me up and throws me backward. The back wall of the shack disintegrates. Plywood, nails, insulation—all of it becomes shrapnel. The corrugated metal roof peels back like the lid on a sardine can.
The sound isn't a boom; it’s a sudden compression. A vacuum collapse. A single percussive event that empties my lungs and fills my skull with a ringing so pure it sounds like a tuning fork struck inside my brain.
I’m in the air. Then I’m not.
The steep slope catches me. Snow and frozen earth and the sickening lurch of gravity pulling me downhill.
I tumble. My shoulder hits a rock. My hip catches on a thick root.
The snow fills my mouth, my eyes, my ears.
I roll, accelerate, and slam sideways into a thick tree trunk that stops my descent with a sharp crack that I feel in my ribs.
I lie in the snow.
The sky is grey above the bare branches. The ringing in my ears is so loud it has become the only sound in the world.
Smoke rolls uphill—black, chemical smoke, carrying the stink of burning propane and splintered wood. The shack is gone. Where it stood, a column of angry orange fire climbs into the grey sky.
I try to move. My left arm doesn't respond. My right hand pushes against the snow and my body rotates.
I see the slope below me. Churned snow. Broken branches. The chaotic debris field of an explosion that scattered everything within twenty feet of the blast.
I don't see Adrian. I don't see Killian.
I try to stand. My legs fold under me. The concussion has scrambled my vestibular system—the ground tilts, the trees double, my balance is a distant memory. I push myself up to my knees.
A heavy boot lands on my chest.
The force drives me flat onto my back. The boot is black, military-grade, the tread packed with snow. The man attached to it is standing over me—compact, blond, wearing a tactical vest and a balaclava rolled up to his forehead.
His rifle is slung across his back. The pistol in his hand is aimed directly at my face. A Stechkin. Russian.
A second man appears behind him. Taller. Heavier. His rifle is up, scanning the slope below for additional targets.
The blond presses the boot harder into my sternum. My ribs scream. My vision narrows to the muzzle of the Stechkin, which fills my world—a black circle, a period at the end of a sentence I’ve been writing my entire life.
"Где доктор?"
Where is the doctor?
The question tells me two things. Adrian is alive. And they don't have him.
The relief is so vast and so immediate that it does something to my face—a twitch, a shift, something the blond reads as defiance.
He drives the boot down hard. My vision flashes white.
A rib gives—I feel the snap, a discrete structural failure in my left lateral chest wall.
The pain is a cold, bright blade that slides between my lungs.
"Гde doktor?" he shouts. Louder this time.
I look up at the grey sky. The smoke from the shack drifts across it in a black column. My mouth is full of blood. My rib is broken. My hand is ruined. My body is a catalogue of damage so comprehensive that one more entry barely registers.
I don't know where Adrian is. Even if I did, the words wouldn't leave my mouth.
Because somewhere in the last two weeks—somewhere between the loading dock in Red Hook and the plywood wall of a hunting shack where I put myself inside a man who fixed me with his hands—the arrangement changed.
I’m not the dog anymore. I’m not the hammer. I’m not the blunt instrument my brother points at whatever needs biting.
I’m the man who takes the boot so the doctor can run.
The blond cocks the Stechkin. The click is small, precise, mechanical. A period. An ending.
I close my eyes. I think about his hands.
The boot presses down, and the world goes dark.