38

“THIS IS GOING to go smooth and easy,” the lady yelled over the jumbled-up shouts of Zombie and Cassie. “Smooth and easy.”

Zombie was looking at Ringer, who was looking at Evan Walker, and Cassie was looking at Ringer, too, and then his sister said, “You bitch.”

“Weapons, over there,” the lady said. Her voice still had a smile in it. “Stack ’em by the fireplace. Now.”

They disarmed, one by one. Cassie said, “Don’t hurt him.”

“Nobody’s getting hurt, sweetheart,” the lady said, smiley-voiced. “Where’s the other one?”

“The other what?” Cassie asked.

“Human. There’s one more. Where is it?”

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“Cassie,” Evan Walker said. But he was looking over Sam’s head at the lady’s face. “Go get Megan.”

He saw his sister mouth to Evan Walker, Do something.

Evan Walker shook his head no.

“She won’t come out of her room,” Cassie said.

“Maybe she’ll change her mind if you tell her I’m going to blow your little brother’s brains out.”

Zombie’s face was pale and caked in dried blood, so he looked like a real zombie. “That’s not going to happen,” Zombie said. “So what now?”

“Then she shoots Nugget and keeps shooting people until Megan comes out,” Ringer said. “Zombie, trust me on this.”

“Oh, sure,” Cassie said. “Terrific idea. Let’s all trust Ringer.”

“She’s not here to hurt anyone,” Ringer said. “But she will if she has to. Tell them, Constance.”

“Me,” Evan Walker said. “You’ve come for me, haven’t you?”

“The girl first,” Constance said. “Then we talk.”

Cassie said, “That’s fine. Talking’s one of my favorite things. But first maybe you could let my little brother go . . . take me instead?” Cassie’s hands were up and she was putting on her fake smile. It wasn’t a good fake smile. You could always tell when she was faking, because she didn’t look friendly; she looked like she was going to throw up.

The lady’s arm like an iron bar pressing against his windpipe, hard to breathe now, and something else pressing against the small of his back, his special secret, nobody knew, not Zombie or even Cassie, and not this lady, either.

Sam slipped his hand behind his back, into the space between him and Constance.

He was a soldier. He had forgotten his ABCs but he remembered the lessons of combat. Your squad before God, that’s what they taught him. He could remember only the vaguest outline of his mother’s face, but he knew their faces, Dumbo’s and Teacup’s, Poundcake’s and Oompa’s and Flintstone’s. His squad. His brothers and sisters. He couldn’t recall the name of his school or what the street he lived on looked like. Those things and the hundred other forever-gone things didn’t matter anymore. Only one thing mattered now, the cry of the firing range and the obstacle course rising from the throats of his squad: No mercy ever!

“You now have fifteen seconds,” the lady holding him said. “Don’t make me count them down; it’s so melodramatic.”

Then the gun was in his hand and he did not hesitate. He knew what to do. He was a soldier.

The gun kicked in his hand when he fired; he almost dropped it. The bullet ripped through the lady’s abdomen and exited her lower back, the slug burying itself in the dusty sofa cushions. The noise was very loud in the small space, and Cassie cried out: For an awful second, she must have thought it was the lady’s gun that went off.

The shot failed to drop the Constance lady or break her hold on his neck. Her grip loosened, though, at the shock of impact, and Sam heard the tiniest of gasps, a startled huh, and before he could blink, Ringer was flying over the coffee table, arm drawn back, hand curled into a fist. Her knuckles grazed his cheek before landing against the side of Constance’s head, and then a hand he didn’t see flung off the arm around his neck and he stumbled free. His sister reached for him, but he spun away, holding the gun with both hands, and Ringer yanked Constance completely off her feet and swung her body high into the air like an axman cutting firewood, smashing her down onto the coffee table. The table exploded, wood and glass and pieces of jigsaw puzzle spewing in every direction.

Constance sat up; Ringer rammed the heel of her hand into Constance’s nose. Pop! You could hear it break. Blood burst from her open mouth.

Fingers clawing at his shirt: Cassie’s. He pulled away. Cassie wasn’t part of a squad. She didn’t know what it meant to be a soldier. He did. He knew exactly what it meant.

No mercy ever.

He stepped over the broken pieces of the table and pointed the gun at the middle of the lady’s face. Her bloody mouth pulled into a soulless snarl of a smile, bloody lips and bloody teeth, and then he was back in his mother’s room, and she was dying of the plague, the Red Death, Cassie called it, and he was standing by her bed and she was smiling at him with bloody teeth, face stained with bloody tears; he saw it so clearly, the face he’d forgotten in the face he saw now.

In the instant before he pulled the trigger, Sammy Sullivan remembered his mother’s face, the face they had given her, and the bullet that tore down the barrel held his rage, bore his grief, contained the sum of all he had lost. It connected them as if by a silver cord. When her face blew apart, they became one, victim and perpetrator, predator and prey.

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