Dark of the Moon

bumping along under his arm, hung on a sling.
    The truck had fifty bullet holes in it, broken glass spraying all over, two tires gone. The agent was still alive, but his legs were torn to pieces, and he was fading. A brown-and-white dog, that might have been a pit bull, bleeding from its sides and head, scrambled around the truck, pulling with his front legs, back apparently broken, fixing on Virgil. Virgil loved dogs, but he didn’t even think about it and yanked his pistol and shot the dog twice.
     
    H EARD SOMEBODY SCREAMING. Another agent, behind the other entry truck, was shouting at him, and Virgil saw a bloody patch in the dust behind him, but the agent was still operating and he pointed out between the trucks and Virgil saw a third agent down and he shouted back, and the other agent screamed, “You get him, I’ll unload on the house, I can’t move, I’m hit…”
    Virgil shouted, “Do it,” and the agent rolled and opened up with his M-16, tearing across the windows, and Virgil kicked out from behind the truck’s wheel, grabbed the downed agent, and dragged him back, behind a tire. Another dog was coming for them, tongue out, bleeding, picked the agent with the gun, who was reloading, hit him just as he slapped the magazine in. But the dog got a piece of armor, not an arm, and tore at it and the agent found a pistol and put it at the dog’s head and fired. The dog lurched and turned and looked at Virgil, a doggy smile on its bloody face, and then it toppled over.
    Virgil was behind the truck with two wounded agents, or maybe, he thought, one dead. He looked at the man, caught a breath. No: still alive. He popped open the back door of the truck, lifted the wounded agent inside, and a hail of bullets knocked out the far windows and then went on.
    He picked up the second agent, the unconscious one, struggling against the weight, and threw him on top of the first. He threw the first man’s weapon on top of them, then crawled into the driver’s foot-well, gripped the steering wheel overhead, shifted the truck into reverse, and hit the gas pedal with his hand.
    Felt something scratching at him, ignored it, backed straight across the driveway on two and then three rims, heard the volume of fire picking up from the DEA agents to give him cover, never tried to turn, backed entirely across the yard into the field, across the field fifty yards, eighty yards, bumping over rocks and small trees and brush, the truck rocking violently, a hundred yards, and then he hooked into the roadside ditch and hit the brake.
     
    H E CALLED P IRELLI on his cell phone: Pirelli screamed, “How bad, how bad?”
    “Two pretty bad,” Virgil shouted. “If you got a truck that works, get it down here. You gotta make a run like right now. ”
    “I’m calling the north team in, they’re coming right by…If you got anything you can fire at the house, hose it down, hose it down…”
    Virgil got the M-16 in the back of the truck, with two magazines, began popping three-shot bursts at the house as he saw a dust funnel coming down the gravel road from the north, moving fast.
    One of the north group was trying to run right past the house. When he got close, Virgil emptied the last of the magazine at the upper windows of the house, where most of the fire seemed to be coming from, dumped the mag, slapped another one in, and as the north truck passed the driveway, hosed the house again.
    The north truck slid to a stop in the shelter of the ruined truck. An agent piled out, wild-eyed, and Virgil shouted, “You know where the hospital is?”
    “Yes, yes, we scouted it…”
    They carried the two downed agents to the working truck, and the north guy shouted, “How bad are you hit?”
    Virgil looked down at himself: blood, but not his. The agent touched his forehead, and Virgil reached up. More blood, and this time it was his. Didn’t feel like much. “You go on,” Virgil shouted. “Go on.”
    The agent took off, chased by a couple of slugs from the house when he broke from the cover of the wrecked truck.
    Virgil dug through the back of the wrecked truck, found a box with six mags in it, stuck one in the rifle, stuck the others in his jacket pockets, darted across the road and into the ditch on the west side. From there, he was able to crawl through the swampy water toward Stryker’s Ford.
     
    H E COULD HEAR Stryker still firing from behind the Explorer, and he cleared the truck and Stryker turned toward him and said, “Need