He held on to the door handle of Jackman’s car and began to pull himself very carefully to his feet, inch by inch, molecule by molecule. He was in such pain he thought he was going to pass out, and the blood was coming out of the wound much faster now than it had been. He kept inching his way up, and then he was standing.
He made it upright just in time to see that Kathi Mittendorf had dropped the machine gun and put her hands on a body instead, and the body was coming through the door and down the steps at them.
It was Anne Ross Wyler, and she looked dead.
3
Later, when the shooting finally stopped, Gregor Demarkian would wonder exactly what had happened to him, and why. The sirens, the police strobes, the shouting—surely he remembered himself standing upright as Kathi Mittendorf staggered out the front door of her house, a gun in one hand and Annie Ross in the other, and bullets sprayed in an arc over her head, breaking windows, chipping brick. When you were dying, everything was supposed to happen in slow motion. Since everything had speeded up, Gregor concluded he was not dying, although he didn’t really conclude anything, because that assumed reasoned analysis. This was more like stream of consciousness, or stream of unconsciousness. Once he was standing up, he didn’t seem to be able to sit down. Everything hurt. He was dizzy. His eyes were watering. Kathi Mittendorf took Annie Ross’s body and dumped it on the ground. Then she backed into her house again and slammed the door shut. Gregor felt himself swaying in the wind. The wind was strong and cold and everything was getting darker. The door opened and Kathi Mittendorf came out again. She was carrying another body, and for a moment, all the police shooting stopped dead while everybody tried to get a look to determine if this body might still be alive. Gregor knew at once that it wasn’t. She wasn’t. It was the body of a woman. It had a hole the size of a McIntosh apple in its forehead.
“Get down,” John Jackman screamed into his ear, grabbing him by the lapel of his coat and pulling him.
Gregor had no idea why the pulling didn’t work. He was upright, and he seemed destined to remain upright. He could see the ambulance men, all three sets of them, crouched down behind their vehicles. They didn’t dare move from where they were. There were bullets everywhere. The sound of shooting was so constant, it had begun to feel like background noise. He wondered what Kathi Mittendorf was doing. She ought to be retreating into the house again. She wasn’t. She ought to be surrendering. She wasn’t. She had a gun in her hands, but she had stopped shooting it. Suddenly, everybody stopped shooting. The silence was so abrupt, it was like death. Kathi Mittendorf stayed were she was. The gun in her hand was a rifle, really. Gregor finally realized what it was she reminded him of: Sylvester Stallone in the Rambo movies, holding a machine gun in one hand and firing it. Did he do that? Gregor couldn’t remember. He hadn’t seen the movies. He’d only seen the commercials.
Jackman stood up himself, cautious. “Maybe,” he said.
Somewhere in the crowd of police, ambulance, civilians, SWAT teams, whatever was out there, somebody stood up and pointed a bullhorn at the door where Kathi Mittendorf was standing. Gregor had no idea why. They were close enough for a shout alone to have worked as well as it needed to.
“Put the gun down,” the man said through the bullhorn.
Gregor really wanted to sit down. He tried to bend his knees. They wouldn’t bend. He tried to bend his waist. It wouldn’t bend either. The pain in his shoulder was beyond belief. He didn’t even feel it as pain anymore.
Up at the door, Kathi Mittendorf dropped her rifle to the ground. She stuck her hands in the pockets of her jacket. She looked out at the crowd. Gregor couldn’t remember ever having seen anybody so calm. People in death were not this calm. Nobody was ever this calm. He searched her face for something in the way of emotion, but all he got was … amusement. Why would she be amused?
He thought of her sitting in her own living room only a day or so ago, telling him about the reptilian aliens who had taken over control of the planet, of the One World Government that was already more than half in place, ruling the world, destroying the lives and hopes and dreams of Good Americans. The words had rolled out of her like mercury rolling out of a broken thermometer, practiced and perfect. He remembered it like music. It made no logical sense and it made no practical sense but on some very basic level it made emotional sense. It was the truth of her. He stood there staring at her as the wind blew across his face and across hers, and finally it hit him. She was smiling.
If he’d been feeling better, his reaction time might have been better. On the other hand, it might not have been. She was smiling. The wind was blowing. She had something in her hand. Fruit, he thought, and then: oh, Jesus.