Armageddon's Children - Terry Brooks [106]
“Michael, don’t do this,” he begs. “Put down the weapon and talk to me.
Think it through. There has to be another way.”
“There is no other way!” Michael screams.
Logan doesn’t stop to think after that. He simply acts. He shifts his gaze past Michael’s left shoulder, as if catching sight of something, and says in a hushed voice, “Demon.”
Acting instinctively, Michael wheels and fires, the Ronin spraying bullets everywhere. Logan does not hesitate. He brings up the Scattershot and levels it.
Michael is already turning back, realizing he has been tricked, when the Scattershot discharges its load into his chest. The force of the blow throws him back half a dozen feet and leaves him sprawled on the concrete floor.
For a moment, Logan cannot move. He cannot believe what he has done. The echoes of gunfire and the moaning of the prisoners waft through the building.
“Michael,” he whispers.
Maybe there is still time to help him. Maybe he can still be saved.
But by the time Logan reaches him, Michael is already dead.
* * *
IN THE AFTERMATH, it feels to him as if he has lost everything. Unable to make himself leave, he kneels next to Michael’s body for much longer than is safe. Finally, hearing shots in the distance, he regains sufficient presence of mind to realize that he needs to flee. Then he remembers the prisoners still locked in the cages, still trapped and helpless. Using the iron bar, he snaps the chains, flings open the doors, and watches them flee. When the last of them disappears, he slings Michael’s body over his shoulder, picks up the Scattershot and the Ronin, and walks through the drifting smoke and the bodies of the dead into the night.
He finds Grayling outside, another man hanging on to him for support, the two of them working their way toward the only truck still intact. Grayling looks at him, sees whom he is carrying, and stops. When Logan gets close enough, the big man asks him where he is going. Away, he answers. It’s over. And keeps walking as the other calls after him, Good luck.
He finds the Lightning parked back in the trees where Michael has left it.
Michael always drives it on these raids, to the attacks and then back, his own personal transport. Sometimes he lets Logan ride with him—more often than not since losing Fresh. Once or twice, he has even told Logan that one day the Lightning will be his. One day, it seems, has arrived. Logan knows the codes that release the locks and disarm the security system, and he uses that knowledge now. Then he puts Michael in the back and drives away.
When he is far enough out in the middle of nowhere—so far out that he doesn’t know for sure where he is—he parks, takes out a shovel, digs a grave that is both deep and wide, and lays Michael within. After he has covered up the body, he sits by the grave site and tries to think things through.
Had it really been necessary to kill Michael? He asks himself this question over and over. He agonizes over the possibility that there might have been another way, a way he should have found, a way that would have kept the one person he cared about alive. But it happened so fast, and at the time he had been so sure. If he didn’t kill Michael, Michael was going to kill him. Michael had gone native; he had gone over the wall and into the wilderness, and he wasn’t coming out. His mind had snapped for reasons that Logan could only guess at, and nothing he did on that night—and perhaps for many nights before then—had been rational.
Logan would have done anything to save Michael. Anything. But he failed to act quickly enough, and so Michael is gone. He cries, thinking of it. It seems unfair, wrong. Michael did so much for others, for all those men, women,