Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

the euphoria didn’t last. Up ahead was the end of the path. I could see into the clearing, the thick woods on both sides of me acting like blinders.
    The small-arms fire was to my left. I could hear that. When the end of the path was just feet away I looked to my right and saw a man crouched behind a fallen tree that lay atop the edge of a hole in the ground. There was another man laying motionless across the trunk of the tree. The crouched man was holding a shotgun between his legs and frantically searching the pockets of the motionless man while staying covered by the tree. The small arms-fire continued, bullets cutting pockmarks in the log. The man with the empty shotgun was Augie.
    He looked up just as I burst from the woods and into the clearing. I pointed my right hand to the left and just started firing. I kept my eye on Augie as I ran toward him. On his face was the look of bewildered surprise. My cover fire brought a brief end to the small-arms fire. It had to have been the surprise and the sound of the Colt firing that caused the cease-fire. I wasn’t aiming at a thing, so I knew it wasn’t the threat of being shot that stopped the men gathered somewhere off to my left.
    Then the shooting began again, and I knew this time it was directed at me. I was halfway to Augie and moving fast. My eyes were fixed on him and his on me. When I was maybe six yards from him I tossed the chrome-plated Colt I held in my left hand toward him. It was an underhand throw, and I didn’t bother to see whether it was good or not. I turned my head to the left and saw three points of white light flashing in the darkness. I thought, Three shooters, close together. I aimed and kept squeezing off rounds, but I was still running with everything I had and had no hope of hitting anything.
    I squeezed off three more rounds and then the Colt was empty. I looked toward Augie just as he caught the chrome-plated Colt. He gripped it with two hands and popped up from the ditch and peeked his head up from behind the fallen tree and lay down a covering fire for me.
    I wasn’t sure if I was close enough, but being upright and out in the open was getting tired fast. I dropped and slid like a runner pushing for home plate. The distance was greater than I had expected, but I had built myself a good momentum and slid as if on ice. I dropped into a small, freshly dug ditch Augie had adopted as his foxhole. I landed hard on my back against the wall of the ditch and came to an abrupt stop.
    I dropped the spent clip from the Colt, pulled out another one from my pocket, and slapped it in.
    The instant I had cover, Augie dropped back down into the ditch. He lay on his back beside me, the back of his head resting against the fallen tree. I reached into the cargo pocket of the field jacket and removed the remaining two clips. I tossed both to Augie.
    There was no time to waste, both Augie and I knew that. Everything was moving fast around us. It was almost as if we were suddenly aware of the Earth rotating at a thousand miles an hour upon its axis. The winds gusted often and caused the trees in the woods around us to twist and tap branches as if crossing swords. The trees hissed, offering covering noise, noise through which we could move.
    I pointed to the shotgun that lay beside Augie. He looked at me and nodded. I switched on the safety and stuffed the Colt into my waistband. Augie held his in two hands and readied himself. I looked at him and nodded again. Then we rose up together and turned. Augie lay down suppressing fire and I grabbed the belt of the man laying over the tree. The sound of the .45 firing pounded my eardrums. I yanked the man down into the ditch. The body dropped to the bottom of it, and I dropped down for cover with it. Augie followed right after. He had fired five shots, expending the clip. He kicked it out and slapped another in. We were both even now, one clip apiece.
    Very little fire had been returned. Maybe some of the shooters were on the move. The man at the bottom of the ditch was dead, I knew that by the way he fell when I dropped him, like he was just a sack of bones. I searched through his jacket pockets for shells and found only six. I pulled them out, then rolled the body away from us. All dead people looked the same, had the same stiff, surprised look, eyes half-closed. I looked away from the body and loaded as fast as I could five shells into the shotgun. It was a Mossberg with a shortened barrel. I pumped it once,