No shortage of ammunition in this operation. No reconsideration of the recklessness or the immorality of cold-blooded murder. Just the relentless, savage execution of the plan.
In the thin wash of daylight from the screened vent in the eave, Jilly saw that Shepherd’s face was animated by a succession of tics, squints, and flinches, but that behind his closed lids, his eyes were not twitching as they so often did. The thunder of gunfire disturbed him, but he seemed less scared to distraction than focused intently on some enthralling thought.
The gunfire stopped.
The house popped and creaked with settling ruination.
In this certain to be brief cease-fire, Dylan dared to motivate Shepherd with the threat of what was coming: ‘Gooey-bloody, Shep. Coming fast, gooey-bloody.’
Having moved out of the upstairs hall, into rooms on both sides of the house, the gunmen opened fire again.
The killers were not yet in the room immediately below the attic corner in which Jilly, Dylan, and Shep huddled. But they would visit it in a minute. Maybe sooner.
Although the brutally pounding fusillades were concentrated in two widely separate areas, the entire attic floor vibrated from the impact of scores of heavy rounds.
Wood cracked, wood groaned, bullet-struck nails and in-wall pipes twanged and clanked and pinged.
A mist of dust shook down from rafters.
On the floor the bird bones trembled as if an animating spirit had returned to them.
Freed, one of the few remaining feathers spiraled up through the descending dust.
Jilly wanted to scream, dared not, could not: throat clenched as tight as a fist, breath imprisoned.
Rapid-fire weaponry rattled directly below them, and in front of their eyes, swarms of bullets ripped through stacked storage boxes. Cardboard puckered, buckled, shredded.
As his eyes popped wide open, Shepherd thrust off the floor, stood upright, pressing back against the wall.
With an explosive exhalation, Jilly bolted to her feet, Dylan too, and it seemed the house would come apart around them, would be blown to pieces by the cyclone of noise if not first blasted and shaken into rubble by the shattering passage of this storm of lead, of steel-jacketed rounds.
Two feet in front of them, the plywood floor ruptured, ruptured, ruptured, bullets punching through from below.
Something stung Jilly’s forehead, and as she raised her right hand, something bit her palm, too, before she could press it to the higher wound, causing her to cry out in pain, in shock.
Even in this dusty dimness, she saw the first drops of blood flung from her fingertips when she convulsively shook them. Droplets spattered darkly against the cardboard boxes in a pattern that no doubt foretold her future.
From her stung brow, curling down her right temple, a fat bead of blood found the corner of that eye.
One, three, five, and more rounds smashed up through the floor, closer than the first cluster.
Shepherd grabbed Jilly’s uninjured hand.
She didn’t see him pinch or tweak, but the attic folded away from them, and brightness folded in.
Low rafters flared into high bright sky. Knee-caressing golden grass slid firmly underfoot as attic flooring slipped away.
Sounding as brittle and juiceless as things long dead, clicking flitters of startled grasshoppers shot every which way through the grass.
Jilly stood with Shep and Dylan on a hilltop in the sun. Far to the west, the sea seemed to wear a skin of dragon scales, green spangled with gold.
She could still hear steady gunfire, but muffled by distance and by the walls of the O’Conner house, which she saw now for the first time from the outside. At this distance, the structure appeared less damaged than she knew it must be.
‘Shep, this isn’t good enough, not far enough,’ Dylan worried.
Shepherd let go of Jilly and stood transfixed by the sight of blood dripping from the thumb and first two fingers of her right hand.
Two inches long, roughly a quarter of an inch wide, a splinter had pierced the meaty part of her palm.
Ordinarily the sight of blood wouldn’t have weakened her knees, so perhaps her legs trembled less because of the blood than because she realized this wound could have been – should have been – far worse.