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Then he heard it, the sound that Shaw must have noticed a moment before. It was rumbling, metallic, uneven. It took a moment for his mind to fill in the blanks: wheels, something heavy on an uneven surface.
“North,” Shaw said.
He followed Shaw’s gaze through the doorway. The dirty windows at the front of the store made it impossible to make out details, but it looked like a fireball was rolling down the hill, headed straight toward them. Fast.
Lurching away from the cooler, North moved toward the front of the store. The fireball was racing toward him now, and a small, sickened part of him knew what he was looking at, what it had to be, even though the rest of his brain was still trying to process that knowledge into words. He was aware of movement at his shoulder, and then Shaw saying, “What—”
Then Shaw made a weird, breathy noise and lurched into North. North stumbled. Ezell hammered at his neck, his fist connecting with the base of North’s skull, and the world went Technicolor. Distantly, North was aware of the weight of the CZ leaving his waistband, of Ezell shoving Shaw into him again. No longer in control of his own body, North was still moving forward, under the combined force of Ezell’s blows and Shaw’s weight.
The fireball hurtled toward them. It bucked over the concrete island where the gas pumps had once been, and then it hopped the curb again when it reached the store itself. For a moment, even through the filthy glass, the flames illuminated a familiar outline. North tried to turn his movement into a controlled fall, and he and Shaw went down together as the GTO crashed through the front of the store.
Metal screeched. Glass shattered. Wood snapped. The GTO kept coming, all that mass pressing forward with the power generated as it had rolled down the hill. Gondola shelves flew into the air. The car hit a drink cooler like a pool ball, and it slammed into the back wall of the store hard enough to punch halfway through it. North rolled toward the counter, thought of Shaw, stopped.
And by then, it was over.
Dust hung in the air. A stink enveloped North: gasoline, melting synthetics, particleboard on fire. He scrambled to his feet, looked for Shaw, and found him. The GTO had tipped over one of the gondola shelves, pinning Shaw beneath it. All North could see was where Shaw’s legs stuck out, the black jeans, the black sneakers.
A fuse blew in North’s brain, and the world went dark.
He didn’t remember crossing the space to Shaw. He was only distantly aware of the heat of the fire, of the blaze spreading from the car to the cheap shelving and broken plywood. The fact that it was the GTO registered only at the edge of consciousness, in the same way that a part of him knew Ezell was escaping. None of it mattered.
North crouched, grabbed Shaw’s calf, and called, “Shaw! Shaw!”
Shaw’s leg moved, and he shouted something back. But over the roar of the flames and his pulse rushing in his ears, he couldn’t make out Shaw’s words.
Get him out, North thought. Got to get him out. He got his fingers under the shelving and lifted. Muscles in his arms corded. His biceps strained. Nothing. The fucker didn’t shift. North swallowed a scream, adjusted his position and tried again. The flames beat against the side of his face, and he thought maybe something was wrong with his vision, maybe he’d hit his head, because the world rippled under waves of light and shadow. This time, he felt the strain through his arms, down his back, gathering at his spine like something spiked. He knew he was being stupid; he knew this was a bad lift, and if he kept it up, he was more likely to hurt himself than anything else. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was getting Shaw free.
Somewhere far off, Shaw was shouting.
Finally, North released the shelves. He slumped over them for a minute, and the hammer strokes of his heartbeat blacked out everything else for a moment. He tried again, and fuzz moved into his vision. “Move,” he grunted. “Move! Move, you bitch! You fucking piece of shit, move!” The last was a scream, and then he couldn’t anymore, and he dropped onto his ass, kicking wildly at the shelving, lost in a frenzy fueled by terror. The flames were growing hotter. When they flared up, it felt like a slap on the cheek.
Maybe it was the fact that his body couldn’t help him, and so he had to try something else. Maybe it was the fact that, sooner or later, no matter how much of a dumbass you are, your brain comes online again. Whatever the reason, enough of his vision cleared for North to make out the problem: the GTO had collapsed part of the gondola shelves beneath it. North wasn’t just trying to lift the shelving unit; he was trying to lift the whole car. He scrambled over to the burning wreckage, set his shoulder to the front, ignoring the hot-brand steel that seared through his shirt, and pushed. For a moment, nothing. Then the GTO rocked backward.
That was when the first gunshot rang out.
Shaw shouted something, and the tone wasn’t panic or pleading—it was an order, and it sounded like, “Go! Go!”
Another shot rang out. Closer.
North gave the GTO another shove, and then he got to his feet. His gun. His gun—then memory returned, Ezell shoving Shaw into him, taking North’s gun. Shaw had been in possession of Ezell’s gun and his own, but he was trapped under the debris of the shelves. North checked himself, but he’d lost his pepper gel in the fall. He grabbed his flashlight from where it had rolled up against the counter and scanned the room for another weapon.
The back door flew open, and Ezell staggered inside. He’d fallen in mud, and the left leg of his jeans was soaked. Not mud, North realized an instant later. Blood. His already pale face was colorless now, and his eyes were wide and unseeing, settling on North the way he might have looked at anything else—the old reels, the bait cooler, the tackle box. “Help me,” Ezell said. “You’ve got to help—”
Then the man in black stepped through the doorway. He was the same man North had seen outside Ezell’s house, he was sure of it. And he thought odds were good this was the same man Theo and Jem had fought. On his hips, still sheathed, he carried a sickle and a big fucker of a knife. In one hand, he held a pistol, and he raised it and shot Ezell: once in the back, once in the head. Ezell’s body gave a little dance-step twist, and his momentum carried him another pace before he fell.
North was already moving. He grabbed the first can of spaghetti rings and hurled it. All those summers of Chouteau-boy softball came back to him, and the can pegged the man in black in the face. The mask muffled the sound, but the man cried out. North hurled the lantern next. This time, it was a body blow, and the man in black let out a sharp noise and staggered back. Another shot went off, and chips of wood sprayed from the wall. The man was off balance now, one hand moving toward his ribs. Jem had stabbed him in the side the first time they’d met, North remembered. That explained the way the man held himself, the slight stiffness of his movements. Another shot rang out, and the tackle box flipped over. How many was that? More importantly, how many did he have in the magazine? Before the man could recover his balance, North hooked the half-empty water jug and sprinted forward. He timed it so that the jug left his hand at the same time the man began to steady himself. It was a bad throw, but then, North didn’t have much practice throwing jugs. It hit the man in the midsection. Not hard enough to hurt anybody else, but this guy grunted and staggered back—if only for a moment.
A moment was all North needed. By then, he’d closed the distance, and he brought the flashlight—with its steel body and the weight of its batteries—down in a savage swing. He aimed for the head, and it was the kind of blow that should have incapacitated the man, maybe even killed him. But this guy was fast, and he was coordinated, and he rotated in place, taking the blow on his shoulder instead of the head. The crunch of metal on bone transmitted itself up through the steel and into North’s hand, and the man screamed. The gun fell from his nerveless hand and hit the floor. North went for it.
And almost got killed. The sickle came at him in a black blur, and only luck and a lifetime of jackassing with Shaw let him dodge in time. The blade moved through the air, missing North by a fraction of an inch, and a clinical part of his brain noted that it didn’t sound like a whistle, the way sometimes people said. This thing, at least, hissed—barely a noise at all, but low and furious. He threw himself sideways, and the sickle missed him again. It had come close enough, this time, to tug at his shirt.
North hit the floor, flipped over, and kicked the bait cooler into the man’s path. The man kicked it back, and North kicked it again, hard, sending it straight into the man’s legs. The man grunted. He hip-checked the cooler out of his path this time, away from North, and took another step. One hand hung empty at this side—his injured arm. In the other, he held the sickle. But not by the handle, North saw. He’d adjusted his grip to a strap at the end of the weapon. North scrambled to get upright. His back hit the shelves. Run, his brain said. When it’s you against a guy with a knife—hell, when it’s you against a guy with a fucking sickle—run.
But Shaw.
The man in black moved his good hand, swinging the sickle by its strap, and the blade blurred. North hadn’t ever seen anything like it—it was some martial arts shit, the kind of thing that would have looked badass and hokey all at the same time in a movie. In real life, it made North’s bowels loosen, made his legs feel like water. The sound. It sounded like a machine, something moving with tremendous power and speed, but barely making more than a hiss as it came toward him. North shifted his grip on the flashlight. He tried to think. Stay out of his range. Block with the flashlight if you have to. Wait for your opening, because he’s going to fuck up sooner or later.
Would he, though? This guy, whoever he was, was good. He’d taken on Jem and Theo at the same time, and for all intents and purposes, he’d won. He’d dodged a blow that ought to have broken his skull, and even without the use of one arm, he’d still gotten North on the defensive. And, unless North missed his guess, he stood pretty good odds of killing North in the next fifteen seconds.
