Chapter 434 — Three Shots II

Chapter 434: Chapter 434 — Three Shots II

Finn looked at her.

He did not seem to know what the words meant. He looked at her the way you look at somebody speaking a language you don’t have.

James knelt where he was.

Ten minutes ago Eamon had been complaining about the queue for the kettle. Then he had turned round and started a question.

*When they send us back up, where do you think they’ll—*

Now his jacket was lying open on the ground in front of James, and what was inside it was never going to move again.

Ruth reached toward Eamon’s face. She stopped with her hand an inch from it and did not touch him. She took her hand back very slowly and put it in her lap with the other one, and stayed on her knees.

---

"Was that a Challenger?" said Finn. His voice was not right. "Was that one of theirs? A skill?"

James did not answer.

He was looking at the jacket.

It did not look like a skill. Every skill he knew left something behind, a scorch or a frost. This had nothing but the hole. It did not look like a bullet either. He had been shot two days ago in a ditch, and it had felt like being punched. This had gone through A-rank armour, and through Eamon, and whatever fired it was not on the forecourt.

It could fire again.

He was on his feet.

"*Cover!*" He did not know his voice could go that loud. "Everybody, get *off* the road! Get behind something! *Now!*"

People moved.

Farrell was already moving. James heard her before he saw her. She came round the end of the barn at a run, shouting.

"*Off the road! Into the buildings! Medics, anyone you can move, get them inside. Anyone you can’t, get them behind the barn wall.*" She had her radio up. "*What was that? Who saw it? Where did it come from?*"

Nobody had seen anything.

"Ma’am—is it them? Are they coming back?" A young soldier by the sandbags. "Are they attacking?"

"We don’t know. Get the wounded out of the open and stop asking."

The soldiers were looking every way at once, north, east, one of them straight up at the sky. There was no British line and no infantry in the fields. The battle had been over for five hours. Whoever had killed Eamon had done it from somewhere none of them could see.

---

Farrell was on the radio behind the jeep by the barn wall.

"*All call signs, Farrell. We’ve had a Challenger killed at the junction. Kelleher. A-rank. One shot, unknown weapon, unknown direction. Has anybody got eyes on anything? Anything at all? Over.*"

Owen was behind a wrecked car at the edge of the forecourt, with three soldiers. James saw him hear the name on the radio. His head came up. He looked across the forecourt at the medical station, at the ambulance, at Finn on his knees beside the boxes.

He started to get up.

"*Walsh!*" Farrell did not even look round. "*Stay where you are! Stay in cover!*"

Owen stopped half up.

He went back down behind the car. But he did not look away from the ambulance.

---

James went to Farrell.

On the way he called his skeletons in. He had three standing: the broken-necked one from the morning, and two he had raised from cattle behind the farm three hours ago to help drag wrecked vehicles off the connector, when nobody was shooting at anyone.

`[MANA: 2,060 / 3,100]`

Farrell was crouched behind the jeep with the radio and the folder. She had pulled herself in against the engine block, where it was thickest.

"Anything?" said James.

"Nothing." She did not look up from the radio. "Nobody sees anything. The houses on the east say nothing came past them. The checkpoint on the north road says the road’s empty. Nobody’s moved forward." She lowered the handset. "Whatever it was, it’s further out than anyone’s watching."

"How far?"

"I don’t know. Further than I’ve ever heard of." She pointed past him, at a group of soldiers crouched by the petrol station pumps. "Those lads need to get into the building, they’re—"

The second shot came.

It went through the jeep.

James saw it. He did not see the round, only what it did. The engine block, the thickest thing on the forecourt, the thing she had chosen to put herself behind, opened. Metal went outward in a burst, and the jeep rocked on its wheels.

Farrell went over sideways.

The radio went out of her hand and skidded across the concrete.

The sound came after, the same deep crack and thump.

For half a second nobody did anything.

Then Owen shouted: "*Ma’am!*"

---

James was there.

She was on her side by the front wheel, half against it. The shot had come through the engine and into her left side, below the arm. Her uniform was torn open there.

He knew by looking at it. He had just knelt beside Eamon.

He got an arm under her shoulders.

She was conscious. Her eyes were open. She was trying to breathe and it was not working properly. Every breath came in short and shallow, with a sound in it.

Her hand came up and caught his sleeve.

She did not look at him. She was not looking at the wound. She was looking past him, across the forecourt, at the soldiers still crouched at the pumps, out in the open.

She pulled at his sleeve, toward them.

James understood.

"Finn!" He did not take his eyes off her. "*The pumps! Get them back! Get everyone into the building!*"

He heard Finn’s voice behind him, shouting at the soldiers. He heard boots.

Farrell’s lips moved.

"—tell Cronin to—"

That was all.

Her hand loosened on his sleeve and slid off.

"Captain." He held her. "Captain. Farrell. *Nessa.*"

Nothing.

Ruth was beside him. Owen had shouted, and she had come.

She looked at Farrell, put two fingers on her throat, and looked at the wound.

She took her hand away.

She did not say anything this time. She did not need to.

Captain Nessa Farrell died beside the jeep she had been using to keep the radio and her soldiers out of the open. Her folder lay on the ground beside her.

---

Owen stood three steps away.

He was looking at her.

The folder had fallen open when she went over. The casualty lists and her notes had come out across the concrete, with *Walsh* in the margin of one in her handwriting.

Owen knelt and began to pick them up, one page at a time, turning each the right way round and putting it on the last with the edges straight. His hands were shaking so badly the edges would not go straight. He kept straightening them anyway.

On the ground by the jeep’s wheel, the radio was still going.

"*—Farrell, Farrell, this is Castlebellingham. Confirm your status. Over.*"

Nobody moved to answer it.

"*Farrell, this is Castlebellingham. We heard a report of a casualty. Confirm. Over.*"

Finn came over. He bent down and picked up the radio, and James watched him look at it for a moment.

Then Finn keyed it.

"Castlebellingham, this is Hale. Attached Challenger, Farrell’s unit." His voice was flat. "Captain Farrell has been killed."

There was a pause on the line.

"*Hale. Say again. Over.*"

Finn shut his eyes.

"Captain Nessa Farrell," he said, "has been killed. Same weapon as Kelleher. Over."

The line was silent for a long time.

---

James looked across the forecourt at the ambulance.

Eamon was still there among the boxes. Ruth had put her own jacket over his face before she came running.

Two people he had been talking to less than an hour ago, and nobody had even seen the thing that did it. There had been two sounds, a long way off, and then two people on the ground.

Something hot came up in him. He wanted to go wherever those shots had come from, now, with Durendal.

But he did not know if it was two kilometres off or five, north or east, one man or ten. There were forty soldiers here in reach of something that had just gone through an engine block. If he ran into the fields after a sound, whoever it was would keep shooting the people he had left behind.

He made himself stay.

---

He sent one skeleton into the open stretch between the barn and the petrol station, where the soldiers had to cross. It would not stop whatever that was. The thing had gone through a diesel engine. It would go through cow bone without noticing. But it was something standing in the open that was not a person.

He sent another to the corner of the barn, behind the wall where the wounded were, thirty metres from him. Close enough for Grave Step.

---

Behind the ambulance, Ruth had not moved.

Another medic was kneeling beside her, a man James did not know, trying to get her up.

"Ruth. Come on. We need to get inside. Ruth."

"We can’t leave him."

"Ruth—"

"We are *not* leaving him in the road."

James went over.

He crouched beside her, the ambulance between them and the north.

"It might fire again," he said. "Whatever it is. It can go through that." He nodded at the ambulance. "We’ll get him. When we know where it is. When we can do it without anyone else getting killed doing it. I promise we’ll get him."

He did not say anything else. He did not tell her he could fix it. He could not fix it. He could raise what was under that jacket, and it would walk and fight and never be Eamon.

Ruth looked at him for a long time.

Then she let the other medic take her arm, and stood up, and went with him into the building without looking back.

---

Finn found James at the corner of the barn.

He saw where the skeletons were. He looked at the one standing out in the middle of the forecourt, and then at James.

"You think it’s after us," he said. "Challengers. That’s what you think."

James looked at the ambulance, and at the jeep.

"It’s killed two people," he said. "With two shots. Eamon. And the officer running this whole unit." He looked out at the fields. "It’s not shooting at whoever’s standing nearest. It’s choosing."

Finn did not say anything.

He did not have to. James could see him working it out.

If whoever was out there knew who was worth shooting on this forecourt, they knew what James Ganner looked like.

---

A lieutenant came across from the building at a crouch with a radio. He was Cronin, the one Farrell had been trying to say something to at the end.

"Castlebellingham’s been listening to British traffic," he said. "Since the first shot. There’s a callsign they’ve not heard before. It keeps coming up, right round the time of both shots. From the same area, roughly north-east of here."

"What callsign?" said James.

"Longbow."

"What is it?"

"They don’t know. Not yet." Cronin looked at the jeep. "They don’t think it’s an infantry unit. The way it’s talked about, it sounds like a weapon. A system. Something specific." He shook his head. "They’re working on it. That’s all they’ve got."

*Longbow.*

James looked back at Eamon’s jacket, lying open on the ground by the ambulance.

He had a name for it now. He did not have anything else.

---

Cronin took the unit without saying he was taking it. He started telling people what to do, and they did it, because somebody had to.

James stood at the corner of the jeep and looked at the hole. The round had come in through the radiator grille and the engine, out the other side, and through her. Farrell had not been behind a ward. She had been behind a diesel engine, and the engine had not mattered.

His own plate was good, but not as good as Eamon’s had been. Durendal could kill anything he could reach. He could not reach this. His undead could stand in front of things he saw coming, and nobody had heard either shot until its target was down.

He had been standing still at the corner of a jeep for two minutes.

---

The first skeleton was in the middle of the forecourt.

He sent it to where he was standing now, at the corner of the jeep, and brought it right up to him until it was in the same spot.

The second was at the corner of the barn, thirty metres away, behind the wall, with nothing round it.

"James," said Finn, from the barn. "What are you doing?"

"Moving."

"Why?"

"Because Eamon was the best-known Challenger on this forecourt after me," said James, "and Farrell was the one in charge. And I’ve been stood here for two minutes."

Finn’s face changed.

"Get in here," he said. "Now."

He went for the barn wall himself.

James let go.

`[GRAVE STEP — MANA COST: 120]`

`[MANA: 1,940 / 3,100]`

The world folded and he was at the corner of the barn, by the second skeleton, behind the wall. The bad second came. His balance went sideways and the ground tilted under him, and he put a hand on the stone.

The third shot came.

He did not hear it first. He felt it, through the link. The skeleton he had left standing at the corner of the jeep, in the exact place he had been, went out like a candle.

Then the sound came. It was the same deep crack and the same long thump.

James turned his head.

Where the skeleton had been there was nothing. There was bone in pieces across twenty metres of forecourt. The skull had gone to splinters, and the ribcage was gone. The round had gone straight through it as if it were not there. Behind it, in the wall of the petrol station kiosk, there was a hole the size of a fist at the height of a man’s chest.

Soldiers had gone flat all over the forecourt. Somebody was swearing, high and fast.

Finn had turned at the sound and was staring at the place by the jeep.

James got up off the wall and went to the corner, carefully, staying behind the stone, and looked.

The hole in the kiosk wall was at the height of his chest, his upper body, where he had been standing ninety seconds ago.

It had not been a shot at a skeleton. Nobody would waste a round like that on a cow skeleton.

Somebody had aimed at James Ganner.

---

Finn came round the barn wall to him.

"Are you—"

"I’m fine." It came out wrong. "I’m not hit. I felt it go. The skeleton. I’m fine."

Finn looked at the bone across the forecourt, at the hole in the kiosk, and north-east at the empty fields. He did not say anything.

Behind them, Ruth was shouting for more dressings. Owen and another soldier were half-carrying a wounded man toward the door. By the jeep’s front wheel, the radio was still asking for Farrell.

James looked north-east. There was a field, a hedge, a line of trees and the grey sky over Louth, and nobody standing in any of it. He had a name for the weapon now, and he knew what it could do.

The British had brought something to this war that could kill a Challenger without ever having to fight him.

James stood behind the barn wall with his hand on the cold stone and looked at the pieces of bone scattered across the forecourt where he had been standing.

That round had been meant for him.