Page 141 of The Ashes of Summer

I flinch. Around me a few women gasp. One starts crying.

Brenda lies twisted beside one of the stained mattresses, and just like that she's gone.

And I wait to feel something about it.

Nothing comes. Not horror, not satisfaction. Just a kind of flat, level quiet, the same one that arrived when I pulled the trigger on Jackson.

I'll think about what that means later. Not now.

The silence lasts three seconds.

Then it all erupts again.

A man bursts out from behind a curtain near the back wall, still hauling his jeans up with one hand while fumbling for a handgun with the other. One of Black's men drops him before he gets it level, and the gun skitters away across the concrete while blood sprays the divider behind him.

Another comes charging out of a side room swinging a crowbar. One of the military guys steps around it like it's nothing and drives the butt of his rifle into the side of the man's skull, and the crack of it goes right through the building before he folds.

Everything becomes movement. Women crying, men shouting, bodies hitting the floor. The whole warehouse feels alive—like the place itself is fighting being taken apart.

"It's okay!" I shout. “We’re here to get you out of this hell you’ve been living in.”

A few heads turn toward me. Others don't. Some of them are too frightened to move at all.

One woman keeps asking the same question over and over, and her voice breaks every single time.

"Is this real?"

The gun in my hand suddenly feels heavier than it did a minute ago.

Jacob showed me how to hold it before we came in—where to put my hands, what to do with my feet, how not to let the recoil take my wrist. For your safety, he said, and neither of us pretended it was anything else.

After Jackson. After Vince. After all of it.

I don't think I'll ever feel safe unarmed again. I'm not sure how I feel about knowing that.

Across the warehouse, Jacob is still moving. Still fighting. Still bleeding.

Every step of it clearly costs him. I can see it in the way he carries that shoulder, in the tension strung across his face, in the half-second pauses before he makes himself go forward again.

But he keeps going. Because that's who he is. A man who'll take himself apart before he'll let somebody else suffer.

One of the guards lunges at him with a knife, and Jacob catches his wrist mid-swing and puts his face into a steel support beam hard enough that blood sprays the metal. Another comes out from behind a curtain and one of Black's men gets there first.

Within seconds, it's finished.

The fighting dies in stages. The gunshots stop first. Then the shouting. Then the desperate sounds of men trying to find a way out of a building that no longer has one.

Until all that's left is frightened women, overturned mattresses, and everything that happened here.

My eyes drift across the room. Counting. Checking. Looking for whatever we've missed.

And that's when I see it.

One curtain, near the back wall, still closed.

Every other section has been cleared. Every other curtain pulled back and left hanging.

Not that one.