Page 9 of Red Rooster

She lifted her face and looked right at Rooster through a screen of tousled red hair, her green eyes huge and terrified.Help me.

“Be careful with her,” the leader said, turning to look over his shoulder at his men. “She burned Simmons back at the lab.”

Rooster felt Ashley step on his foot.

This wasn’t right.

He was going to do something about it.

He nodded his head, one slow, careful movement, and the girl’s brows lifted: she understood.

“Get down,” Rooster whispered to Ashley, and grabbed the baton that still wavered in front of his face. He snatched it loose, flipped it around, and the man who’d been holding it didn’t turn around fast enough.

Rooster caught him with it at the vulnerable place where the corner of his jaw met his throat, and the leader fell sideways into his own men, sending four of them down in a tangle.

The redheaded girl went up in a blaze of fire.

Fire.

Shouts. Flailing arms. Clap of riot gear crashing together.

If she was on fire, Rooster would get the extinguisher from under the kitchen counter. After he dealt with these idiots.

He slid into the old dance of hand-to-hand with the ease of long practice, and a freshly painless body. He cracked another in the shoulder with the baton, hard enough to send him staggering, and ripped the man’s gun from its holster in the process.

Another took a swing that he ducked, and he heard the crack of a gunshot that he prayed didn’t find a mark. He didn’t know where Ash was, but didn’t have time to check. He grabbed a man by the wrist, tugged him close, and pressed the muzzle of his stolen gun under his arm, fired off a shot that sent a jolt up his own arm. The man screamed and went down.

Rooster couldn’t risk a wild shot. He moved in close, and tight, baton in one hand, gun in the other. Muzzle to skin, to fabric, close shots that burned.

There were more screams than he could account for, and always fire, leaping and dancing at his periphery. Was the house burning? Why weren’t the smoke alarms going off?

Rooster dropped a body to the floor and suddenly, they were all bodies. No one was left standing but him…

And the girl, fire rippling around her like a shroud.

Slowly, she turned to face him, and the fire winked out. He expected her to be a blackened and ruined version of herself, but not even her clothes or hair were singed. Her skin glowed a faint pink, almost like a sunburn, but she appeared otherwise whole.

Rooster cast a glance around the room, the bodies slumped on the floor, and, in one case, across the breakfast bar. They all bore that particular limpness that comes with death. Some of them were burned, skin red, and black, and blistered.

“Holy shit,” Ashley said behind him, creeping back in on tiptoes.

Rooster shot a look to the girl that he couldn’t manage to make stern.

“Who are you?” he asked.

Her eyes rolled up in her head and she fainted for the second time that night.

~*~

They had to call someone. Mike Cartwright, Ashley suggested, an old service buddy long-since retired and now working as a vice detective.

“You can’t stay,” Ashley told him, voice heavy with sadness, and he knew she was right. The house was full of his fingerprints and DNA, and there would be no choice for her but to tell the cops what had happened. It was the only way to keep her and Desiree safe.

“I can’t leave you,” he protested, though, gesturing to the bodies.

“What about her?” They stood over the redheaded girl, again laid out on the couch. “I can look after myself, but what about her?”

Because turning her over to someone, after what had just happened, wasn’t an option, not for either of them. So Rooster stuffed his meager belongings in his duffle bag, crammed a hat down on top of his head, and told Ashley how sorry he was.