He still didn’t understand.
“Baby, what’s wrong?”
“It hurts, Jack.”
She looked down, and he did, too.
Her seat was full of bright red arterial blood and she was squeezing her right leg.
“Oh, Jesus,” Jack said.
Naomi said, “What’s wrong.”
Jack yelled, “You and your brother run to the other side of the car.”
“Why? What—”
“Just do what I f**king tell you.”
Something struck the rear passenger door a foot away from Jack. He slid his right arm under Dee’s legs and lifted her out of the seat.
The report broke out as he carried her around the smoking grille, Dee moaning when he set her down in the grass on the other side of the Jeep.
“What happened?” Naomi said.
“She’s shot.”
“Oh God.” She covered her mouth with her hand.
Cole started to cry.
Jack’s hand was slicked with warm blood that was beading and dripping off the ends of his fingers.
A round zipped through one of the back windows.
“Na, Cole, get behind the tires and lay flat against the grass.” He looked at his wife. “You have to tell me what to do.”
“I don’t know if it nicked the femoral artery or what, but you’ve got to stop the bleeding right now or I’m going to go into hypovolemic shock and die.”
“How do I do that?”
“Wrap something around my leg.”
“Like a shirt?”
“Yes. Please hurry.”
Jack ripped open his button-up shirt and tore his arms out of the sleeves as another bullet hit the Jeep.
Dee cried out when he lifted her leg and ran one of the sleeves underneath it.
“How tight?” he asked, tying the first knot.
“Cut my circulation off.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
He slid the loop to the top of her thigh and bore down on the knot, then put his foot on it while he cinched it down again. He kept watching Dee’s right hand which she’d been pressing into the wound, trying to stop the blood that pulsed between her fingers with every heartbeat.
“Is it working?” he asked.
“I can’t tell.” She blinked several times, staring into the fading sky. He thought her eyes looked glassy. “Yeah,” she said finally. “It’s stopping.”
“Can I leave you for a minute?”
“Why?”
“I need to see if anyone’s coming.”
He opened the rear passenger door—no safe way to do this.
Moved quickly into the backseat and reached into the cargo area, grabbing two AR-15s and a pair of binoculars, then diving back outside as another gunshot resounded across the prairie.
Jack crawled around to the back of the Jeep, lay with his chest heaving against the ground and brought the binoculars to his eyes.
Pulled the prairie into focus.
Distant grass, waving in the wind. A backdrop of clouds going dark as night fell. A jackrabbit standing on its hind legs.
He made a slow scan of the horizon.
A pickup truck scrolled into view—old, beat-to-hell Chevy with equal parts paint and rust. He lowered the binoculars to gauge the true distance—a mile, possibly more—then glassed the truck again.
A woman stood in the bed staring through the scope of a high-powered rifle that she’d braced against the roof. The rifle bucked, soundless. A bullet hit the other side of the Cherokee with a hard ping, like it had struck one of the wheels.
The report was slow in reaching him.
While the woman loaded another long, brass-tipped cartridge, he panned down the prairie, starting when he saw them. The men already so close they took up the entire sphere of magnification—three of them in hunting camouflage, a man perhaps five years his senior and two teenagers who shared a strong resemblance.
The teen boys carried semiautomatic pistols and the man a double-barreled shotgun, their faces flushed from running.
Jack lowered the binoculars. They were less than a hundred yards away. No idea how he’d missed them.
He took up one of the machineguns, wondering how much ammo remained.
Looked over at Dee, the children huddled around her.
“They’re coming, Dee.”
“How many?” she asked.
“Three of them.”
“I can help shoot,” Cole said.
“I need you to stay with Mama.”
Jack crouched behind the rear, right wheel, fingering the trigger.
“Is this it, Jack?”
“No, this is not it.”
He eased up until he could just see through the panels of spiderwebbed glass. The footsteps had become audible, swishing through the grass. The men would be upon them in seconds.
He crouched back down behind the tire.
Shut his eyes, took three deep breaths.
Came suddenly to his feet and swung out around the corner of the Jeep with the AR-15 shouldered. The three men already scrambling to raise their weapons vanished behind the burst of fire, the steady recoil driving into his shoulder, and then the magazine was evacuated, the barrel smoking, the men cut down fifteen feet from the Jeep.
A bullet struck the taillight by Jack’s leg, and he was back around the other side of the Jeep by the time the gunshot reached them.
“Are they dead, Daddy?”
“Yes.”
He lifted the other machinegun out of the grass.
“That one’s empty,” Dee said. “We’re out.”
He couldn’t stand the pain in her voice.
Knelt down behind the tire again and raised the binoculars. The light was going fast. Took him a moment to find the pickup truck again, and when he had, it wasn’t alone. Two other trucks had pulled up alongside it, their doors thrown open, and now he counted eight people, heavily-armed, in heated discussion.
“What?” Dee said. “What do you see? Jack.”
“There’s eight of them now. Three trucks.”
“We have to go.”
“Where, Dee? We’d get a mile, maybe two, before we broke down again.”
“Then what, Jack?”
“We fight.”
The people were climbing back into the trucks now.
“They’re coming,” he said.
Dee was struggling to sit up.
“You shouldn’t be moving,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter. Give me a hand.”
“Dee, you shouldn’t—”
“Give me your f**king hand.” He pulled her onto her feet, her right pant leg dark with blood. She used him for support, groaning as she limped over to the Jeep and opened the driver side door.