American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,220

right side windows have both melted, leaving viscous, drooping holes in the frames.

But Mallory… Mallory seems completely fine. There’s not a mark on her.

She looks at Bolan as if just slightly surprised. Then she glances around the smoke-filled car.

She opens her mouth and says, in a curiously nasal voice, “Ah. I’ve been here before. Haven’t I?”

“What?” says Bolan. His voice is a little hoarse from the smoke. “Mal, are you all right?”

Mallory looks down. There’s something at her feet: the huge rifle the girl had with her.

Mallory picks it up and turns it over in her hands, as if she’s a little unsure of it. “This is big,” she says.

Dord continues groaning and coughing in the passenger seat. “Fuck,” he says. “Fuck, man. It burned the hair off the back of my head.”

Mal looks at Dord, who is turned away. Then she points the rifle at the back of the seat and turns off the safety.

“Mal?” says Bolan. “Mal, what the—”

She pulls the trigger.

The shot punches through the seat, as well as most of Dord and what’s left of the windshield. The top of his belly bursts open, and the smoke whips around the bullet’s now-vacant trajectory.

Dord chokes and struggles against his seat belt. The gaping hole in his chest brims with blood, then overflows, dribbling down his white-shirted belly. Bolan is trying to shout, “Mallory, what the fuck!” when she cocks the rifle with a harsh click-clack, raises it a little higher, and fires again.

This time the bullet goes through Dord’s upper chest, and part of his neck. He slumps forward, blood running down the gray, slick seat belt, and goes still.

Mallory looks at Bolan. There’s something wrong with her eyes: something fluttering or flickering, as if her eyes were lamps filled with moths.

“Mal?” says Bolan.

She cocks the rife, then raises it toward him.

And that’s the last thing he sees: just the dark eye of the rifle, and her hand, and the curl of the smoke.

Mona wakes up when she hears the blast. She thinks it might be part of whatever the hell it is that First did to her when she hears people screaming and coughing. Whatever just happened to her, or whatever First meant to happen to her, something’s gone wrong.

She wonders where the hell she is. It’s dark, wherever it is. She feels around, finds something hard and circular hidden under a blanket below her. She knows what it is almost immediately.

All right, she thinks. I’m in the trunk of a car. This is… not good.

Everything gets spectacularly less good when she hears the gun start going off. And there’s no mistaking that sound: it’s a .30-06 rifle, probably hers, she’s guessing, since it’s nowhere in the trunk. Someone starts screaming at a much higher register, which means he got tagged. Then the gun goes off again, and the screaming stops, which is really, really quite bad.

Someone asks a question. And the gun goes off one final time.

Silence. Mona waits for a good noise. Maybe—praise God—a siren.

But this is Wink. She can’t remember the last time she heard a siren, or even saw a cruiser.

The car’s shocks creak very slightly as someone shifts from one end of the car to the other. Seat springs cluck like chickens; the nasal thunk of a car handle; then feet on asphalt, coming her way.

Mona has no idea how it could help, but she feigns unconsciousness.

A vein of light erupts above her. She cracks an eye, just barely, and sees a rather pretty but questionably dressed woman looking down on her. Mona’s never seen her before, but she knows that fluttering in the woman’s eye, the suggestion of movement where there should be none.

“Hm,” says the woman, and she slams the trunk shut.

Mona hears footsteps, definitely going away. They keep going until she can’t hear them anymore.

Then silence.

Silence for a very, very long time.

Mona says, “Well, fuck.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Mrs. Benjamin does not precisely understand first aid, but she thinks she gets the general principles: things that are within the body must stay within at all times. If they do not stay in, they must be forced in, and kept there via things like gauze and sticky tape.

It seems simple, but it proves both complicated and painful. She would have preferred more help from Morty Kaufman, who runs the neighborhood drugstore, but when he arrived at seven thirty a.m. and found that not only had his shop been broken into but Mrs. Benjamin was sitting on the floor bleeding from over a