Patriot Acts Read Online Free PDF Page B

as I came up I fired two shots at Grant and his bald head, less concerned with hitting him than with keeping him preoccupied. Both rounds smashed the Ford’s windshield, beside where he stood, and he started to duck back behind his open door.
    Then the Civic hit the Ford, and the Ford hit Grant, in the form of the door he was trying to use for cover. It wasn’t a fast impact, and it wasn’t—relatively—a hard impact, but it was still the impact of one car hitting another, and that was enough; that had been what I was after all along.
    Grant grunted and went down and out of sight as if someone had dropped a bag of bricks on his head, and I went after him immediately, trying to capitalize on the moment and the brief advantage it gave me. Mark was screaming a warning to him, and there was another rapid string of barks from his AR-15, but I was vaulting the Ford’s hood then, the Glock in my right, and I didn’t dare look back and I wasn’t about to stop. I cleared the gap between the Ford and the passenger door, saw Grant on the ground, and somehow he’d managed to keep hold of his MP5, and somehow he managed to raise the muzzle in time, and somehow he managed to pull the trigger.
    He’d set his MP5 to three-round burst, so that was what he fired, and that was what hit me. Rounds slammed into my chest, the sensation like being struck with a club very hard and very fast. I landed on my feet, but for some reason ended up on my right side, practically parallel to where Grant lay on his back, the MP5 still in his hands. Each of us moved to kill the other.
    I was faster, and put two rounds from the Glock into his head.
    Then I dropped my pistol, took his MP5, popped the magazine, and gave it a read. Eighteen rounds remaining. I slapped it back into place, ran the bolt, and then rolled onto my back, and when I did that, it felt like something tore open in my middle, low in the belly, ripping me apart with a line of acid and fire. I threw a hand out towards the Ford, reaching into the open compartment. Using the seat, I pulled myself upright with one hand, clutching the MP5 with the other, and the pain flipped, exploded, and everything from my right hip on down told me that I should, under no account, ever try moving like that ever again.
    There was a tremendous amount of blood all over the ground beneath me, or so it seemed to me. Already, it had soaked my jeans. Some of it was certainly Grant’s.
    Just not much of it.
    There were two marks in my vest, where rounds had hit and died against the Kevlar. The highest was in the upper right quadrant of my abdomen, the other roughly middle, about where my navel was. The blood I was spilling was coming from further below. With my free hand, I reached around to the small of my back, beneath the vest, and discovered a hole in my body that couldn’t have been much larger than an apple. Maybe a Fuji. Maybe a Braeburn. When I brought my hand back around, it shone black in the night, covered with more of my blood.
    I wasn’t hearing Mark or his AR-15. There was a good chance he didn’t know I’d been hit, that all he knew was that there’d been a quick exchange of shots, and now there was silence. But he wasn’t calling out, either, wasn’t asking Grant for his status, which meant that he figured either I’d killed Grant and was still alive and kicking, or that Grant and I had killed each other. Certainly, if Grant had killed me, Grant would have announced the fact the same way he’d announced everything else that he’d witnessed.
    I was getting cold, and it wasn’t just the night.
    When Alena had begun teaching me, she’d done so, first and foremost, by showing me her training regimen. “Showing,” in this instance, had meant making me do it with her, and the first month of the process had been a living hell, had very well nearly killed me. It wasn’t just the diet and the exercise, it had been the
choice
of exercises. Between the swimming and the running and the combat