The Peripheral

89

Griff had made her put on armor for the ride, a black-magic cotton candy jacket. Burton wore one too, and in a way that was what nearly killed him, how the lining flash-hardened with the energy of the bullet. Fired into the concrete between Burton’s feet, by a man who was probably already dead when his finger pulled the trigger, the bullet had ricocheted up, hit the jacket’s sleeve around Burton’s left wrist. The bullet had disintegrated then, something about the physics of the cotton candy tending to cause that, and one fragment headed back down, into Burton’s right thigh, nicking the femoral artery.

It all seemed to happen at once, making no more sense than Tommy said any gunfight ever did, when you were in it. She’d been walking a little behind Burton, to his left, Clovis on her right, and afterward she remembered having sensed Clovis go up a notch, when they’d stepped out into the alley. They were going to get into Tommy’s car, to go and see her mother and try to talk her into letting them move her. Griff hadn’t mentioned the party time yet, whatever it might be, but if he didn’t, she was going to bring it up on the ride out. Mainly he’d talked about her mother, who refused to hear of moving. He wanted to move her to northern Virginia, where he said he had a safe house. Lithonia had agreed to go with her. Sweet as her mother was on Lithonia, she still wasn’t having any. Then Tommy had arrived to drive them, so she’d been looking forward to seeing her mother, even though she didn’t have much hope for her buying the idea of any safe house, and to sitting beside Tommy, if the way things were didn’t mean Carlos had to be sitting there instead, with his bullpup between his knees.

It had been so quiet outside, in spite of the forty-seven protesters the drones had been able to count, over on the far side of the building, across the street in front of the parking lot. But Burton must’ve had his tomahawk head in his right hand, arm down at his side, the handle straight up, against the inside of his arm, and when he’d seen whatever gave the man in the squidsuit away, he’d popped the Kydex sheath off and dropped the tomahawk’s head, because she’d distinctly heard the sheath hit the concrete, just by where she’d locked her bike so many times. He’d caught the handle by its very end, how he did, before the head could hit the concrete, and wrist-snapped it, somehow, smack up into the man’s still-invisible head, making a sound like whacking an unripe pumpkin, and that had been the last thing she heard for a while, because then the guns were too loud to understand as sound at all.

It seemed like separate gifs to her now. The front of Clovis’s paramedic crotch pack open like a clamshell. The fat plastic pistol clipped in it, same color as the pack. Clovis, who’d shoved her to the side so hard that it really hurt, the pistol in both her hands, arms out shoulder-high, leaning into recoil, the muzzle flash continual, until the magazine was empty, and no more expression on her face than if she’d just been driving, paying serious attention to the road. Another was ejected brass, from Carlos’s rifle, weightless cartridges, floating, like they were frozen by a strobe, but one bounced off the back of her hand, burning her. Another was the thing the squidsuits did as bullets hit them, how whatever stolen color and texture flared, whited out, died, as whoever wore it fell. And Burton on the ground, eyes open, blank, nothing moving but the blood pumping from his thigh with every heartbeat.

Her ears ringing, so bad she never expected them to stop. Tommy holding her back, as Clovis, the reloaded pistol in its open clamshell now, pulled things from pockets behind it. Homes blue latex gloves. A flat white ceramic hook. Crouched beside Burton, she used the hook to slit his cammies back in blood-soaked flaps, exposing his right thigh. Pushed the full length of her bright blue index finger straight into the spurting hole, frowned, moved it a little. The spurting stopped. She looked up. “Walter fucking Reed,” she demanded, “stat.”