She burst into a semidark room. In the span of a heartbeat she took in the entire room, matching it to the memory in her head. Iron posts held up a network of overhead trusses. The ceiling above naked girders was broken open in places, letting insulation and corrugated tin panels hang down. The windows ringing the room were covered with cardboard. Two big skylights let in light.
The place was a tangle of dusty, broken, water-stained desks and chairs. Junk lay scattered across the floor among the desks. Nails, screws, iron fittings, torn metal scraps, soggy cardboard boxes, and lengths of pipe of every size lay toppled over one another, some with one end resting on desks.
She made note of it all, but mostly she took note of the men. She knew she would have to be careful not to trip over things as she focused on the men.
It felt like she was watching herself move in slow motion.
Broken glass lay scattered everywhere, reflecting flashes of light as she charged into the room. A counter to her left with a tile front looked like a truck had fallen on it and splintered it apart. Boards leaned against filthy walls to the right. Metal doors of gutted utility boxes stood open with wires hanging out.
Angela spotted the spherical bomb sitting on a square stack of cement blocks. Wires attached to brass studs stuck out from the metal casing here and there around the bomb. A narrow metal cabinet of some sort stood close to the bomb. Clusters of wires, reminding her of umbilical cords, sagged between the metal gray cabinet and the bomb. Rows of amber lights on the front of the cabinet flickered on and off.
In this filthy, abandoned ruin of a building, the bomb and the cabinet with flickering lights looked like nothing so much as an alien spacecraft.
There were men scattered throughout the room—some bent in prayer, some sitting in groups talking, some with their arms crossed as they leaned back in chairs against walls or posts. Some were gathered around desks or stools playing card games, some were on the far side of the room peeking out a window past a curtain of cardboard, while others paced in nervous boredom, anticipating their imminent martyrdom.
At the crash of sound Angela made plunging in through the metal door, faces everywhere turned toward her and froze in surprise.
As her heart beat a second time, her gun came up, slowly, slowly, yet as fast as she could possibly raise it. Angela felt as if she were mired in the agonizing slow motion of a deep dream.
Her boots crunched on debris. She heard glass snap as it broke. A board behind the door she’d burst through toppled. It didn’t matter anymore. Nothing else mattered anymore. The rest of her life up to that moment didn’t matter anymore.
Her heart’s second beat ended.
The closest man turned as he heard the glass break under her boot. Without conscious thought, he made the fatal mistake of reflexively looking down at her legs.
With his face frozen in time beyond the front sight of her gun, Angela pulled the trigger.
With that pop and metallic clack of the slide cycling in another round, it started.
As he dropped straight down, others in the dim room saw the flash from her gun and the man falling to the ground. They realized the sounds they heard hadn’t been one of their brothers knocking something over.
She saw men everywhere in the room going for AKs leaning against desks, chairs, iron columns, and construction debris.
Suddenly the whole room was moving with men, like when she used to flip on the light switch in the kitchen of the trailer where she’d grown up and cockroaches scattered.
Angela was already firing at targets.
Speed and violence of action.
This was what she had practiced for her whole life.
Now, she had a roomful of living triangles before her. They all bobbed and swayed beyond her front sight.
In her head, her grandfather’s fingers snapped as fast as he could snap them, a human metronome setting the beat for her as she fired her gun.
Angela was in the slow-motion trance of the zone. Any man who went for a weapon was a primary target. Men who were close and pulled knives were next.
She fired without pause. Men collapsed, their guns dropped to bounce on the floor as bullets ricocheted around inside craniums. As dead men fell, they flipped over chairs and stools being used as game tables. Playing cards flew up as tables broke.
Angela planted her boot on a chair as a man fell and boosted herself up and over him, into the heart of the storm.
She counted rounds. The instant the slide locked back she was ready and pressed her thumb down on the lever, dropping the magazine. Another was immediately slammed home. She racked the slide to load a round and she was already shooting again at the closest men rushing toward her.
Automatic fire suddenly broke out, filling the room with deafening noise and the raging scream of the man firing the weapon. She saw flashes from the gun rattling off rounds to her right. She could hear the bullets zipping past her head, flicking her hair as they passed close but just missed killing her.
Jack rolled through the debris on the floor and between desks, using them for cover. With a well-placed shot he took out the man firing the automatic weapon before he could take aim for another burst at Angela.
She hardly noticed. It was irrelevant. She was in her own world of converging chaos, firing into faces as fast as she could lock her sights onto them. When a man turned to reach for a gun on a desk, she put a round in the back of his head, right at the base of his skull.
She spotted the man she needed beyond the gray cabinet with the flickering amber lights. His eyes were still wide in shock.
The air was filled with the smell of gunpowder and blood.
It was intoxicating.
Angela had always thought there was a rhythm to shooting—a kind of metallic music. Bang, bang, bang. Pause. Bang. Bullets splashed into the center of those triangles, and men spiraled down toward the floor, dancing with her to that beat. Bang, bang, bang. Pause. Bang. Every bullet found its target. Men tumbled. Reload. Pop, pop, pop. Pause. Pop.
It was the rhythm of life. It was the rhythm of death.
Angela was firing in every direction to that beat. Men fell all around her as the unforeseen specter of death itself swept through the room.
Dust billowed up as men crashed down among debris. To her left, when a dead man landed on one end, a board flipped into the air, throwing up a cloud of dust. To the right pipes stacked against an iron post clattered down as a dead man fell into them. The room was pandemonium. Men everywhere were yelling.
Lost in her own world, Angela hardly heard them.
She didn’t need to watch men fall to know she had killed them. She could sense the bullet hitting home. She was focused only on taking out targets as fast as possible to get where she was going.
She didn’t need to look into the eyes of any of these men. They were all cold-blooded killers who had worked their entire lives toward their goal of mass murder. They didn’t belong among the living. Her only purpose was to exterminate them.
It was an orgy of annihilation.
Angela had already emptied three magazines in a handful of heartbeats as she charged through the terrorists, cutting a bloody swath, the dead falling all around her.
With a gun in her hand, Angela felt like she imagined knights must have felt with a sword in their hands as they scythed down an onrushing enemy. It felt intimately familiar, brutally liberating. It was positively exhilarating.
With a gun in her hands, these men weren’t bigger than her, stronger than her. With a gun in her hands she became more than their equal.
Terrorists liked to tout themselves as superhuman, as welcoming death. Despite their claims, they responded to shock, surprise, fear of death, and pain virtually the same as anyone would. She used that to her advantage.