Broken(10)

    “Don’t give me that,” he snarled, sounding much like the animal I knew he was. “You know better than to do it like this. You tried to breach my back door. Mine. If I hadn’t unhooked the claymore before you got in here, it woulda turned you into stew meat!” I turned my head slightly right to look; sure enough, just above the frame rested a claymore mine, the small straps unplugged from ties where they attached to the door, the ultimate in home security. Anyone coming in through that door would die horribly, a spray of pellets propelled by an explosive charge turning their body to a mush like the ultimate shotgun blast.

    “And I care why exactly?” I turned, slow, rising from my knees to face him.

    He couldn’t take a step back as he was already against the wall, but I saw a subtle change in his posture, as though he wanted to recoil but was hiding it. “Because you don’t want to get killed.”

    “I don’t care if I die,” I said, staring him down. His eyes had always been somewhat warm before, at least to me; now they barely met mine and were coldly assessing. His pupils were beginning to dilate; I could see them even at this distance. “All I care about is making sure I settle accounts before I go.”

    I saw him start to reply to that, then stop. He kept the shotgun aimed at me, level with my head. A simple pull of the trigger would end it, I knew. The chorus in my head was silent, though I could feel their nervous emotion within. Strangely, I felt none of my own.

    “Go on,” I said. “You’ve got the gun, you’ve got me dead to rights. I’m in your house, I came to kill you—”

    “You can’t kill me—” He shook his head.

    “You don’t think so?” I asked, staring him down. I could feel it: he wanted to turn his gaze sideways, look away from me, but he couldn’t. He wanted to avert his eyes, as though to give the little broken girl in front of him some privacy from the weight of the emotions I knew were oozing off me, but his training wouldn’t let him look away from a potential threat. So he kept staring at me and I kept staring right back at him. I had nothing but accusation in my glare; his, in return, was fading.

    “You shoulda approached faster,” he said, and the slurring was getting worse. “Shoulda burst through the front of the house with a truck—”

    “I didn’t have a truck.”

    “Shoulda stolen one,” he went on, swallowing heavily. “Break through the front of the house, odds are good you’d have taken me out before I could get clear. If not, the element of surprise would have been worth it. Or a sniper rifle from a distance—you always were a hell of a marksman—”

    “I didn’t want to do it like that,” I said.

    “Because you couldn’t be bothered to plan it out like you should,” he said, and I could see him starting to sweat, “you’re sitting here staring down the barrel of a shotgun when you oughta be looking at my corpse from a half-mile away.”

    “It was never gonna be like that,” I said calmly and took a step to my right, leaning against the kitchen counter. He swept the shotgun barrel to keep me covered. I had taken a step in the direction of my gun, and with the waggle of the barrel, I knew if I took another he was going to pull the trigger. I watched his eyes, and it was hard to know if that was an empty threat or if he was serious. I wasn’t going to test it. “You know I have trouble killing people. Always have, ever since Gavrikov—”

    “It’s a weakness I would have trained out of you, sooner or later,” he said, taking a hand off the barrel to wipe the perspiration off his forehead.

    “It’s funny,” I said. “Because I killed Wolfe to save my own life, and I killed Gavrikov to save the city because I owed them for what Wolfe did. Do you know how many people he killed to get to me?” I watched as Parks shook his head, slowly. “Two hundred and fifty-four. Men, women, children. From those first two guys outside the supermarket to the last family he slaughtered before he came to get me in my own basement, he killed two hundred and fifty-four people. I remember the number. It echoes in my head.” I felt something in my mind from Wolfe, a vague sense of glee, and ignored it.

    “You didn’t cause that,” Parks said, and brushed the gray hair out of his eyes where it was starting to mat on his forehead. He blinked his eyes, twice, but the shotgun stayed level.