Worth Dying For

balanced, ready, using the bright fragment of visual memory his eyes had retained, leaning down to where he knew the shotgun must be, grabbing it two-handed, tearing it away from the guy holding it, backhanding it hard into where he knew the guy’s face must be, achieving two results in one, making the guy disappear backward and recycling the shotgun’s pump action both at once, loudly,
CRUNCH-crunch
, and then shouldering the swinging door away and feeling it crash against the second guy, and bursting out of the stairwell and firing into the floor, not really seeking to hit anyone but needing the brief light from the muzzle flash, seeing one guy down on his left and the other still up on his right, launching himself at that new target, clubbing the gun at the guy, cycling the action again against his face,
CRUNCH-crunch
, bringing him down, kicking hard against his fallen form, head, ribs, arms, legs, whatever he could find, then dancing back and kicking and stamping on the first guy in the dark, head, stomach, hands, then back to the second guy, then the first again, all unaimed and wild, overwhelming force indiscriminately applied, not giving up on it until well after he was sure no more was required.
    Then he finally stopped and stepped back and stood still andlistened. Most of what he heard was panicked breathing from the room on his left. The dining room. He called, ‘Doctor? This is Reacher. I’m OK. No one got shot. Everything is under control now. But I need the power back on.’
    No response.
    Pitch dark.
    ‘Doctor? The sooner the better, OK?’
    He heard movement in the dining room. A chair scraping back, a hand touching a wall, a stray foot kicking a table leg. Then the door opened and the doctor came out, more sensed than seen, a presence in the dark. Reacher asked him, ‘Do you have another flashlight?’
    The doctor said, ‘No.’
    ‘OK, go switch on the circuit breakers for me. Take care on the stairs. They might be a little busted up.’
    The doctor said, ‘Now?’
    ‘In a minute,’ Reacher said. Then he called out, ‘You two on the floor? Can you hear me? You listening?’
    No response. Pitch dark. Reacher moved forward, carefully, sliding his feet flat on the floor, feeling his way with the toes of his boots. He came up against the first guy’s head, and worked out where his gut must be, and jammed the shotgun muzzle down into it, hard. Then he pivoted onward, like pole vaulting, and found the second guy a yard away. They were on their backs, roughly in a straight line, lying symmetrically, feet to feet. Reacher stood between them and kicked the side of his left boot against one guy’s sole and his right boot against the other’s. He got set and aimed the shotgun at the floor in front of him and rehearsed a short arc, left and then right and back again, like a batter in the box loosening up his swing ahead of a pitch. He said, ‘If you guys move at all, I’m going to shoot you both in the nuts, one after the other.’
    No response.
    Nothing at all.
    Reacher said, ‘OK, doctor, go ahead. Take care now.’ He heard the doctor feel his way along the wall, heard his feet on the stairs, slow cautious steps, fingertips trailing, the creak and crack ofsplintered boards underfoot, and then the confident click of a heel on the solid concrete below.
    Ten seconds later the lights came back on, and the television picture jumped back to life, and the excited announcers started up again, and the heating system clicked and caught and hummed and whirred. Reacher screwed his eyes shut against the sudden dazzle and then forced them open to narrow slits and looked down. The two guys on the floor were battered and bleeding. One was out cold, and the other was dazed. Reacher fixed that with another kick to the head, and then he looked around and saw the roll of duct tape on the sofa. Five minutes later both guys were trussed up like chickens and bound together back to back by their necks and their waists and their ankles. Together they were far too heavy to move, so Reacher left them right where they were, on the hallway floor, hiding the ruined patch of parquet where he had fired into the ground.
    Job done
, he thought.
    Job done
, Jacob Duncan thought. Seth’s Cadillac had been retrieved from the road, and both dead Iranians had been stripped to the skin and their clothes had been dumped in the kitchen woodstove. Their bodies had been hauled to the door and left in the yard for later disposal. Then