The Bloomsday Dead by Adrian McKinty

Author:Adrian McKinty
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781451613230
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

A terrifying rip of noise and flame, the entire fiberglass rear of the boat exploding into pieces. This time I’m not quite so lucky. I’m thrown against the safety rail on the starboard side, the metal supports scouring into my back, the plastic rail gouging into my shoulder. I lie there stunned for a second and then I’m drenched in burning fiberglass.

I lose consciousness for a moment.

Blackness.

Pain.

Light.

Fingers. Arms. Pelvis. Stomach. Chest. Shoulder blades. Neck and head.

Motion? Yes.

A verb. Yes. A verb in my mouth.

Lips back. Tongue spit. Air migrating through my voice box. “Help.”

I try to sit up. I brush the burning embers off my body.

The peelers are hit too. Kevlar flak jackets kindling in the afternoon air. Hair and skin burning. Blood pouring out onto the swept street from unspecified multiple wounds. The blast echoing off the embankment like timpani fading diminuendo.

“Jesus Christ Almighty,” I mutter in disbelief. “What the—”

A crater where the rear hull of the boat had been and a rain of fragments.

I’m alive. Singed, but in one piece. The boat is sinking. The RPG man is preparing his third grenade.

Get overboard, Michael.

I try to move. Stuck. Pinned. Huge chunks of what looks like the cabin roof lying on my legs. I start pushing them off.

Look up.

The RPG man: still trying to load the grenade. The coppers: the first hit got them bad. It seems to me, though, that no one is actually dead. At least not yet. One of the boys has lost his shoe and by the looks of it a couple of toes. White-hot pieces of shrapnel embedded in the others—wound marks on their arms and legs. All of them yelling. Shouting into their radios. The young policewoman screaming about her shoulder. Something red sticking out of her uniform. Their words melded together in a patter of confusion. Crackled voices speaking back, telling them help is on the way.

The woman cop’s hat floats down among the smoldering flakes of metal confetti and lands burning on the deck, where other fragments have been dumped by the explosion.

In the split second between grenade launches and while I’m attempting to get the cabin roof off my legs I’m oddly fascinated by her. With her hat gone she looks like a person now. Her bob of yellow hair lying in a divot of rainwater, a scarlet trail oozing into the blond from a laceration on her scalp. She’s dazed and flailing, but now she’s doing the only sensible thing of the five of us.

She’s going for her gun.

What a damn fine idea.

I stop kicking the cabin roof and pull out the .38. I level it with a steady hand and take a shot at the grenade launcher.

He’s fifty yards off and it looks like I’m not even going to be close, but at least I won’t be alone. Blondie, with blood in her eyes and a hurt hand, somehow gets to a kneeling position and starts shooting her Glock 9mm semiautomatic.

“Die, you fuckers, die,” she screams.

She fires nine shots, I fire six, all of them missing.

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