“Be a good sport,” he says. “Stay down.”
Flagg stops struggling. There is something wrong with his left eye. All he sees through it is black. His chest feels tight. Looking down he sees bandages wrapped around him, stained yellow from an antibacterial wash. Then he realizes what’s happened. He’s been shot. Probably more than once. In his mind he is fourteen again, trapped in a supply closet at school, hearing the shots, barely breathing. He thinks of his brother, out there somewhere. So many gunshots. So many screams. And then blood trickling under the door.
But he is not fourteen. He is a twenty-year-old man. And his brother is dead.
“Why’s the sky orange?” he asks, wondering if he’s in a dream.
A nurse enters. She is black, heavyset.
“Careful now,” she says. “Don’t move around too much. You’ll tear your stitches.”
Flagg lies back. He can feel it now, like a vise on his torso. His left eye burns.
“What did they hit me with?”
She comes over, checks his vitals. “You got shot,” she says.
“I know that. I’m saying large caliber, small caliber?”
“You lost half your liver. You were in surgery for nine hours. Does it matter?”
“What about the eye?”
“You had shards of rock in there. The surgeon cleaned them out, but you’ll never see outta that eye again.”
Flagg thinks about that. An eye patch, like a pirate.
“I’m hungry,” he says.
“We’re feeding you through your nose right now. Let your system get back on track.”
“How about a beer?”
“Very funny.”
She takes his temperature. Flagg turns his head, looks at the trooper.
“Hey, boss. Can I ask you something?”
“No.”
“It’s just—I gotta admit—I’m worried. I mean, when I make a run for it, how are you not having a heart attack chasing me down the hall?”
The trooper doesn’t look up. “Not gonna chase ya,” he says. “Just gonna shoot ya.”
The nurse glances at him. “No shooting in my hospital.”
Flagg stares at the ceiling. He remembers scaling the cliffside with Katniss. It was a beautiful night. So many stars. He was feeling good, because he’d pared his gear down to just twenty-five pounds, including the Remington. There were three clips for it Velcroed to his torso and five on his hip for the Glock. He knew from practice that he could reload both in less than ten seconds. Beside him Katniss looped the rope and pulled herself up, walking the wall like Batman. He’d known her for three years. She was running from something too, but she never said what. They’d both grown up on Marvel movies and Hollywood fables of self-empowerment, where rules and regulations never stopped you on your mission if your heart was pure. But what had they ever known in their lives except powerful people telling them they couldn’t do things? Can’t go there. Can’t fix that. Can’t punish your abuser. Can’t change the laws. Can’t better yourself.
A cool breeze rose from the east as they reached the plateau. This last bit was the tricky part. They’d have to free climb ten feet and pull themselves up and over. They unclipped silently. Katniss went first, dirt from the climb falling on Flagg, who had to duck his head to keep from swallowing it. When she was up, she flashed her Magnum over the edge. He reached up, grabbed a jut of shale. It broke cleanly, and for a second he thought he was dead, but then his other hand grabbed hold and he lunged into the cliff face, stopping himself from going down.
“Goddamn,” he said quietly, his heart pounding out of his chest. Then he was up and over. He knew from the walkie that the Prophet and the kid were inside the gate, moving toward the house. From his low position he couldn’t see any guards. He and Katniss were lying in the grass on the far side of the pool. Through his scope, Katniss scanned the dark windows of the house. There was a dim light on in the kitchen but no movement. Probably something they left on all night. It was getting on to be two thirty in the morning.
Flagg tapped Katniss’s shoulder. Together they rose and low walked toward the house, rifles up. The trick was to avoid the motion sensors. They had identified a rocky outcropping above the port side of the house that would give them high-ground superiority, and they climbed to it now, moving through a terraced garden past cacti and succulents.
Katniss took a knee, and Flagg settled in behind a rock. He saw Felix, Simon, and the Prophet sprint across the driveway and flatten themselves against the house. From his walkie he hears: “Here we go. We breach in three, two, one.”
Flagg and Katniss saw them enter the house, saw the lights flare. And then the night lit up, muzzle flashes popping from the roof, as bullets sprayed the rocks around them. Flagg felt fire in his left eye. He heard Katniss grunt and go down. He ducked, feeling shale rain down on him as what seemed like hundreds of shots raked the rocks above him.
He put a hand on Katniss to drag her to him, but the top of her head was missing and she was bleeding from the chest. Before he could retreat, a ricochet pinged off the wall behind him and punched him in the side, and he fell forward into a stone hammer that knocked him senseless. Only then did it hit him. It was an ambush, and they were fucked.
Margot