Dead and Alive

though multiple-word chants had become too exhausting to remember, Bucky and Janet each resorted to one word. She shouted, “Dog, dog, dog, dog….” He cried out, “Kill, kill, kill, kill….”
    “Shoot them,” Michael said. “Shoot ’em on the run.”
    “I can’t fire a .50 Magnum one-handed while driving a car,” Carson protested.
    Evidently, Bucky was at least peripherally aware of them, after all, and they were enough of a distraction from his pursuit of the dog to annoy him. He closed the gap between them, running alongside the Honda, grabbed the side mirror for balance, and reached through the window toward Carson.
    She stepped on the brake, and the mirror snapped off in Bucky’s hand. He stumbled, fell, tumbled away into the darkness.
    The Honda shrieked to a full stop, and about fifty feet ahead of them, Janet halted without a shriek. She turned toward them, jogging in place.
    Holstering his Desert Eagle, Michael said, “This is like some bizarre Playboy-channel special.” He handed one of the Urban Snipers to Carson and snatched up the other. “Not that I ever watch the Playboy channel.”
    Michael threw open his door, and Carson switched the headlights on high beam because darkness helped her quarry, hampered her. As her heart provided the thunder that the storm had not yet produced, she clambered out into the rain, surveying the night, looking for Bucky, not finding him.
    Glare of headlights reflected by the wet pavement, black and silver underfoot, and not far to the west, beyond trees, the lights of Walnut Street and Audubon and Broadway, which didn’t reach this far, and north-northeast, the university lights of Tulane and Loyola, which didn’t reach this far either, the park deep anddark to the east and to the south, the glow of maybe De Paul Hospital far out there.
    A lonely place to die, to be found in the morning, left like illegally dumped trash, left like her father and mother were left all those years ago, facedown under power lines, near a double-circuit tower, on a grassy bank of the levee in Riverbend, just off the bike path, each shot once in the back of the head, with carrion-eating blackbirds gathering overhead on the crossarms of the tower as day broke …
    Now this park, this lonely darkness, felt like Carson’s levee bank, her place to be left like a sack of trash, to be pecked at by bright-eyed birds. She had been out of the Honda ten seconds at most, edging away from the vehicle and defining the arc of the potential threat with the barrel of the shotgun, left to right, then right to left, but the ten seconds felt like ten minutes.
    Where was the freak?
    Suddenly a pale form rose from a drainage swale on the farther side of the road, the Bucky replicant, bloodied by his high-speed fall but back on his feet and shouting: “Something terrible has happened, terrible, terrible.” Looking no less powerful than a bull, he put his head down and charged her.
    Carson planted her feet wide, assumed the stance, the compact shotgun held low in both hands, right hand on the pistol grip in front of the forecomb, left hand cupping the slide, weapon held slightly to her right side, both elbows bent, the better to absorb recoil, which would be brutal if she locked her joints—atendon-tearing, shoulder-dislocating kind of brutal. As serious as a weapon gets, the Sniper fired only rhino-stopping slugs, not buckshot with a wide spread, but nevertheless she aimed by instinct, no time for anything else. The Bucky Guitreau impersonator, with blood in his wild eyes, lips snarled back from his teeth, barreled straight at her, fearless, ferocious.
    She squeezed off the round, the recoil jumped her backward a few inches, the barrel kicked up like she knew it would, pain knocked through her shoulders, a sensitive filling in a molar throbbed the way it did once in a while when she drank something ice-cold, and though she wasn’t in an enclosed space, the shot rang in her ears.
    The slug took the replicant dead-center in the chest, cracking his sternum, splintering bone inward, blood blooming, his left arm flailing up reflexively, right arm stroking down reflexively, as if he were launching into some novelty dance like the Chicken. Jolted but not staggered, slowed but not halted, he came on, not shouting anymore, but not screaming either, feeling no pain, and she fired again, but screwed up because she was shocked and scared by how he surged forward, didn’t get him in the gut or the chest,