The Object: Book One (Object Series) (15 page)

Behind the car
, the lady cop crouched next to the back wheel, covering her head and crying out, "
Please!  Pleeease!
"

The other officer, a young light-skinned black man with corn-rolled hair, lay flat on his back, his chest spurting blood.  His right hand reached upw
ard and swatted repeatedly, as though a fly were pestering him.

Roger surveyed the scene, the houses and buildings in the area
.  The squad car sat diagonally in the intersection of 15th and
Hale Avenue
.  Roger
was hiding
behind the house at the corner, on the right side of Hale, facing 15th.
  Far down the street behind him, the old man stood out in his yard, probably smoking another cigarette, watching the events unfold.
  The gang members stood on
15th
Street
up ahead and to the
left.  On the other side of the street where they stood were two houses not ten feet apart. 
That was the spot. 
That's where he needed to be.  He had a plan.

In order to get there unnoticed, he ran across Hale Avenue, jumped the short, rusty cyclone fence, crossed the back yard of the house opposite the ones where he was headed, between which ten men with guns continued to pierce the squad car with .9mm rounds, and came around the side, staying low, until he reached the front.

He peeked around the corner.  Luckily no one had spotted him.  He was very close to the men now and realized some of them were just boys, the youngest of them not even in high school yet.  Most of them held their guns sideways with one hand.  Several
stabbed their guns at the air as they fired.  Terrible shooting.
  At least Roger had one advantage.

Now came the scary part.  He had to get across the street, and short of circumventing a block's worth of houses and running the risk of them deciding to advance on the car, his only choice was to stay low and cross the street directly behind them.
  This was nothing like the shooter games he spent so much time playing.  The gunfire was deafening, the
clank of
bullets on metal
so impactful the fear of being shot consumed him.
  If just one of
those boys so much as detected movement in his periphery . . .
game over.

Roger rose from his crouched position, readied his gun, and stepped out into the open.

Cockroaches

Danny crouched by the wall on
the Exit 125
overpass of I-65
, just south of Gene Snyder Freeway.  In the orange sunlight, he smoked a cigarette and watched
the object
, a thing so large and heavy that if it were to fall it might open a fissure in the ground deep enough to vomit up lava.

From here the view was breathtaking. 
Danny
was f
ar enough away as to not be directly under the
thing
and could see
its
upper hemisphere
. 
The
ring
encircling
the object
was completely detached and turning slowly
,
like the hour hand of a clock
, casting so dark a shadow diagonally along the middle of the object that it gave the illusion of a deep, metallic cavern where flying creatures beyond fathom slept hanging from the walls.
 
As a backdrop to the view,
a canopy of deep red and purple clouds streaked across the horizon.

Danny only noticed
the ring's
movement because he'd been sitting here so long.
  Getting
to this overpass
unseen had proved quite a task
, hiking up Exit 125's long ramp the least of his journey
, and for an hour he lay on his back in the g
ravelly emergency lane, smoking and decided how best to proceed.

But
the time for rest was over
.  As soon as he finished hi
s last
cigarette, he was going to break through the barricade and get the hell away from that thing
in the sky before some hatch opened up at the bottom and shot down a laser to
vaporize
the city.
  Danny at the right distance to hear the faraway screams and know, for a moment, what colossal agony raced towards him.

A quarter mile to the south, soldiers stood guard
in a line that stretched from emergency lane to emergency lane
across the interstate
, all of them posted behind a thick run of tangled razor wire. 
Parked at random behind the men were t
wo tanks, one for northbound, one for southbound, and enough military jeeps, hummers, and trucks to host a parade.

Danny peaked up over the concrete wall
, scanned the row of soldiers, and dropped.  He guessed thirty and maybe twenty more mingling in the back.

A few more, for certain, in the tanks.

He was ready.  He rose slowly, snuck his rifle onto the ledge.  Through the scope he studied the soldiers' faces.  Despite their stiff, unflinching posture, the men were talking to each other.  Some of them were laughing.

Kill a few to rile them up.  Kill a few more and force them to use heavy artillery.  Run back to the Exit 10 overpass.  Climb the embankment.  Get into the woods.  Any soldiers posted there would have headed down to the interstate to see the action.  Slip right past.

Danny pulled the trigger and a soldier's face exploded.

He watched the body drop, relished the stunned expressions on his comrades' faces.

Then he was being shot at, firs
t by M-16 rifle fire, then by
M-60s, what sounded like dozens of them
.  He could feel the bullets eating away at the other side of the wall
as the machine guns ate up bandoliers
.

He began to laugh.  It had only taken one shot.  Behind the thunder of gun
fire
, he could hear the whine of the tank's cannon turning.

~ ~ ~ ~

Roger sprinted across the street, figuring with the noise no one would hear him, and his chances of being seen increased the longer he stayed out in the open.  When he dove around the corner of the house, he was sure the gunfire would turn on him.

But it didn't.

He scrambled to his feet and crab-walked to the corner, where he peeked out at the firing squad.  Several of them had stopped shooting, but the youngest of them still grinned and fired away, as if today were Christmas and they'd just turned on the most anticipated video game of the year.

Roger knew the feeling, but this was nothing like a first-person shooter.  No surround sound system in the world could duplicate the real sound of gunshots, the thud of them, the terror that sound evoked right out of the air.

He took aim on the kid farthest from him and fired.  Blood burst from the kid's neck and he collapsed into the kid next to him, who had stopped shooting moments before.

Roger shot that one in the head and he fell o
n top
the
other
.

He took out two more before the rest noticed and started looking his way. 
H
e darted down the side of the house and around back.

The kids were shooting at the house now.  Roger peeked around the back corner, up the alley between the two houses.  He could see two of the remaining five kids from here, and their attention was focused on the corner he'd just fled.

He jumped across the opening and ran around the left side of the adjacent
house, up to the corner.  He had a good angle
on them here.  He could see their backs.

This time he didn't pause.  Three fell almost instantly
and the street fell silent
.  He missed the fourth, a short kid with bushy hair.  The kid spotted him and fired a shot that spli
ntered the trim next to
Roger's
face.  He felt the bullet graze the sleeve on his left shoulder, a few inches from tearing his throat open, like he'd done to that first kid.  Then to two more.

Another shot rang out, thudding into the wall around the corner.  About five seconds later, another.

Roger readied himself to pop around the corner
right after the kid's next shot, but right before it came he felt something hard press into his lower spine.

When the shot came, his body stiffened so tight it sent pain all through him.  It took him a moment to realize he hadn't been shot, that the kid out on the street was still plugging the house with rounds.

"Hey yo man, drop the gun."

A young voice, right behind him, sniffling.

Roger dropped his gun.  "Wait.  Kid.  Let me turn around."

He tried but the kid started screaming to his friend.  "Trey I got him, come here!  Don't move, man!  Come on, Trey!"

Trey came running wide open around the corner, gun out, and passed them.  He skidded to a stop and came back, pointing his gun at Roger's face.
  His
eyes looked like they'd been plucked out of a wild creature and inserted into his sockets.  Bloodshot and yellow.  He looked fifteen years old otherwise.

"Wait," Roger said, followed by nothing.

Trey stood there a moment, then shrugged and looked around the area.  "Well?  What're we waitin' for?"  He nodded and began to shuffle his feet.  "Oh yeah, that's right, to die."

The last thing Roger saw before he closed his eyes was Trey raising his left hand palm up to balance his grip.

Then came a deafening blast and he felt his body sling into the side of the house and collapse loose and numb to the ground.

The first thing to return to him was his vision.  He lay with his face in the thin dead grass, staring straight ahead at a spot of bare dirt
.

As he reached out for what lay there, the sound of Trey and the other kid crying on the ground nearby began to grow in his ears like a distant siren drawing closer.

He picked up the bullet and got to his knees, studying it closely and running his hand up and down his body, searching for blood.  In front of him, Trey writhed about on the ground, his gun several feet from him.

Roger crawled to the gun, picked it up, and pointed it at Trey's head.

Another loud blast knocked him off his knees.  When he gathered himself, he looked for its source and saw Sprinkles next to the tree, staggering on wobbly legs.

"There you are," he said in a long breath.  He climbed to his feet tucking Trey's gun into his back pocket.  He found his own gun in the grass and returned it to its holster, then picked up the other kid's gun, the one that had been digging into his back, and stowed it in a front pocket.

He remembered the bullet between his thumb and index finger.  In perfect condition.  It hadn't impacted something at any real velocity.  The only explanation was that Sprinkles had knocked it right out of the air
, and if Sprinkles had
been but a fraction of a second late, Roger would have hit the ground with his skull cored.

Roger approached Sprinkles, the boys still curled up in the grass, crying, but Sprinkles hobbled away quick enough that Roger had to chase him out onto the street and over to the intersection, where the squad car looked like it had been hollowed out by metal-eating termites.  As he approached the car, he could hear the female cop sobbing.  He came around the trunk, carefully, in case she decided to shoot.

Peeking over the
car, he noticed the woman's gun
on the ground.  The other cop was dead or unconscious, and blood still seeped out into the rough grain of the pavement in a four foot radius around him.

"Ma'am," he said.

The woman screamed and cowered against the car.

"
It's okay,
I'm not going to hurt you,"
he
said.  "I
got all--most of them
.  Is backup coming?"

She shook her head timidly.

"Can you radio for them?  I shot a lot of people.  Some could
still
be alive.  Two of them definitely are.  They're over there."  He pointed.

The woman wasn't listening.
 
Roger stepped around the dead cop and knelt in fr
ont of
her
. 
This was the first time he got a close look at her face. 
She couldn't be any older than twenty-
five, probably younger
.
 
Frail, s
haking like a poodle.

"Hey, you need to radio to dispatch, okay?  You need to call this in."

"No," she mumbled.

Roger nodded, unsure what to do.  He reached out slowly to take the radio mike from her shoulder.  Just when he unhooked it from the strap,
she lunged forward and hugged him, crying, "
I don't want to be a cop. 
I can't take
it.
"

"Okay," Roger said,
letting his arm settle over her back, then putting his other arm around her.  "It's o
kay
. 
Y
ou don't have to be a cop."

The girl buried her face in his neck and wept.
 
He pressed the button on the radio mike,
paused,
let go.
  A woman's voice came through, crackly and distant and unclear.  He turned the knob until it clicked, then returned the mike to her shoulder.

When he finally got her to stand up, he ushered her around the front end of the squad car to avoid another breakdown at the sight of her dead partner.
  Along the way he picked up her gun and returned it to its holster on her belt.

Behind him
Sprinkles meowed.  He turned to find the cat lying on the pavement, struggling to keep his head up.

"What's the matter with you?" Roger asked.

A weak hiss.

"Do you want me to carry you?"

Meow
.

Roger thought a moment.  "Are we doing the one meow, two meows thing again?"

Meow
.

The girl was staring at him now, her face a mess of confusion and fear.  He opened his mouth to say something but
stumbled
for words.  How would he explain Sprinkles?
  Should he bother?

He picked up Sprinkles
, held him against his chest, and came back to the driver's side of the mangled squad car, where the woman stood hugging herself and staring at her feet.

When he saw the boys coming, he reached for one of the guns stuffed into his pants.  Sprinkles made a breathy attempt at a hiss.  Roger paused, and when he saw the kids' faces, both soaked in tears and snot, he let go of the grip.

The boys stopped six feet shy of Roger and the woman and stood there, arms dangling by their sides, staring Roger directly in the eyes, as if waiting for permission to speak.

"What do you want?" Roger said.

Trey spoke first.  "I'm sorry.  Ray said we had to.  You gotta do what Ray says. 
We
didn't shoot nobody. 
We
just shot the car
, both of us
.  I promise.  I'm sorry."