bow. Who was old, she saw. Suddenly a second teammate was at her other shoulder, saying sure, you’re going to notice more now, much more detail, because now you’re operating at a higher level, or maybe a more primitive level, where senses are more acute, so that although the guy is dressed head to toe in shiny black, and has a machine on his face, you can tell from his posture and his movements he’s about our grandfather’s age, and he’s stooped, and he’s sparrow-chested, and if we think back to all the older guys we’ve known, uncles and great-uncles and so on, and the lousy shape they were in, and we adjust for height and weight, then maybe we don’t have too much to worry about with this guy.
He was slow with his reload. His right elbow was slow to bend. Kind of awkward. Arthritis, maybe. He tried to compensate by scrabbling for the arrow early. He fumbled it. Patty breathed in. She felt she was at the head of a tight V-shaped formation, somehow now in motion, loud music playing, her loyal teammates marching at her shoulder, willing her on, bearing her forward, buoying her up, making her weightless.
The first teammate whispered, I think the thing to remember, when all is said and done, apart from anything else, is that this guy shot Shorty with an arrow. Which by any standards is completely out of order.
The second teammate said, the night vision device will protect his face. Better to aim for his throat.
Keep mine for a weapon, Shorty had said.
She did it beautifully. Despite very little prior experience. She felt it all happen, at a molecular level. She sensed every compound flooding her brain. Some were complex emotions. Mostly about Shorty. Primeval feelings. Much stronger than she expected. Some were simple software downloads. Dusty old how-to manuals, left behind from savage eras deep in prehistory. She absorbed them all, and they gave her animal grace, and strength, and speed, and cunning, and ferocity, plus some kind of serene human abandon over the top of it all, that made her surrender to instinct completely. She danced across the space, trailing the flashlight behind her, shuffling her stride to perfection, swinging the flashlight ahead of her, accelerating it hard, keeping it low, the Cyclops eye coming down to track it, then whipping it up in a savage U-shaped curve, into the narrowing angle between the dropping chin and the arching neck.
It hit with a crunch she felt all the way to her elbow. The guy went down like he ran into a clothes rope. He landed on his back. She grabbed his bow and threw it away. His night vision was bound to his head with thick rubber straps. She tore it off. He was a thin, pale, sour man, about seventy years old.
His mouth was opening and closing like a goldfish.
Panic in his eyes.
He couldn’t breathe.
He pointed to his throat, both hands, desperate urgent gestures.
Can’t breathe, he mouthed.
Tough shit, she thought.
Then she heard Shorty whimper.
Later she knew she would have no defense, if a lawyer accused her of flying into a murderous rage. Damn right she did. Or if he asked her, sternly, did you in fact beat the victim to death with the flashlight? Damn right she did. With blows to the head, exclusively. A lot to his face. With every ounce of her strength. Until his skull looked like a bag of nails.
Then she crawled back to Shorty.
Who was quiet.
He had seen.
First things first. She got her hands under his arms and dragged him deeper into the woods. She got him sitting upright against a tree. She got his legs straight out in front. Then she ran back to the guy she had killed. She took his night vision device. She strapped it on. She hated it. It smelled of his breath and his hair, and dirty metal, and perished military rubber.
But now she could see. Luminous green, in fantastic detail. Every vein in every leaf on every tree was sharp as a pin. As if lit from inside. Glowing softly. At her feet she saw every twig and every fallen flake of bark, with exquisite precision. In the far distance she saw trees just as bright as the trees close by. It was better than daylight. It was unnatural. It was amplified, and smoothed, and gated, and displayed. She felt like Superman.
She ran back to Shorty, and got to work.
* * *
—
Reacher took the