Acts of Nature

began again.
    I was inside the cocoon of the closed room but there was no mistaking the sound of gunfire outside. I heard Marcus’s screams and already knew I was responsible. The image of those severed fingers on the floor will be in my dreams. But then came some indecipherable yelling and two quick reports. A medium-caliber handgun, I thought. Not Buck’s big .45. And then I felt more than heard something or someone tumble onto the deck just on the other side of the wall and the sound of something metal skittering across the boards. I was standing, the generator inside was humming, the air conditioning clacked on, the computer indicator lights started popping on, glowing red and green. I took a step toward the window that showed damage from Buck and his crew’s attempts last night to get in but then flinched at the sound of another shot. This time it was the .45 and it repeated itself twice more and there was another thud that vibrated the floorboards. I crouched down in exasperation. There was carnage of some form going on ten feet away from me that I couldn’t see, could only hear, but I knew instinctively that its outcome was going to determine my fate and Sherry’s.
    Again there was silence and I was afraid to move but then I remembered the open hatch in the corner and sneaked to it, my ear to its edge, hoping to hear, to get some clue what the hell was happening outside. Taking a chance, I moved my head into the opening, but the sunlight outside was still so new that very little penetrated under the raised decking and I could see little more than a black shimmer on the top of the water. When I strained, I heard nothing but a high-pitched keening like an animal in deep pain.
    “Max?”
    Sherry was trying to get up. She had somehow risen to a sitting position on the bed but her leg was locked straight and I needed to move to her, but hesitated. She tried to swing her damaged leg over the side and was just about to fall so I made a decision. I flipped the metal port closed with a clang and rushed to her side, catching her before she tumbled to the floor.
    “Was that music that I heard, Max?” she said in a delirious whisper. “Are we home, Max?”
    While the skinny peckerwood with the missing leg writhed around on the deck, Harmon let go of the boy and stepped over to kick the big .45 over the edge and into the swamp. He then looked down at the man who now had his stump of a knee in both hands and was kind of spinning on one hip like one of those break dancers on TV, though they didn’t leave a smear of blood behind when they did it. He stepped over to his partner, who appeared to have lost part of the side of his head. Harmon had seen dead men before and you didn’t have to take a goddamn pulse to tell. He did not mean to be callous. He and Squires had been through a lot together. But after what had been nearly a lifetime of war and violence, Harmon’s nature was to care only about family. Squires was not family. He picked up the big man’s Mk23, checked the load, and then realized, hell, he hadn’t even taken his own Colt out of his pocket yet. He took two more steps and looked down at the kid who had come sliding around the corner yelling, “Marrcussss!” until Squires shot him. The kid’s skin was already going pale. Chest wounds will do that. Harmon shook his head. Neither of these boys was older than his kids, sitting in their dorm rooms at Notre Dame, probably having a party while the campus got it together to enjoy the weekend.
    He avoided the blood pool and went back to the older hick, who was now emitting a high keening sound of serious pain. Harmon thought for a minute about what the guy had said about unarmed police officers being locked inside the shack. Why the hell would he make something like that up? Then he thought about the idiot claim that there were drugs inside. The company didn’t deal in drugs. They dealt in oil, which was much more lucrative, though sometimes the way they obtained it and bargained for it and set prices for it wasn’t any more legal than the way drug suppliers did the same thing. In fact, Harmon had been working the company angle on this trip since the minute he’d gotten off the phone with Crandall. No doubt this place was clandestine as hell. Harmon knew enough about the business to understand the company was always looking for supply. They had ways of studying deep rock formations, ways of setting off subterranean explosions and then measuring and