Tessa held the gun so tightly that the edges of the steel cut into her hands, careful to keep her finger off the trigger, her feet aching in her heels, her throat aching from the breaths she was taking, her heart aching for more reasons than she wanted to list. She began descending into the valley between two small hills, one sloping and gradual, but taller, her car still burning at the very top, the other, where Johnny and Ada were meant to be positioned, was shadowed by poplar trees and marked the edge of the farmhouse's property with a low stone wall. She circled around, approaching from the flank instead of head-on, but the night was quiet, not even a breeze blowing through the leaves to rustle the branches. She realized she could see the dirt road leading up to the property once she had ascended the slight upward slope, and then she could see a gun.
Tommy heard the telltale series of noises that was a machine gun being loaded and repositioned, and that was not how he was going to go out, by friendly fire once he had finally reached some semblance of safety.
"Johnny! Don't fucking shoot! It's me!" He shouted, dropping to the ground on instinct, Reilly's large frame smothering him, waiting to be torn apart by a trigger happy Gypsy's bullets, waiting for the rest that would come after. Tessa ducked as well, but didn't have a soldier's instincts or reflexes.
"Tom?" A voice called out. Tommy sighed, relieved, disappointed, exhausted. He stood again, which was getting harder and harder for him to do, his backpack made out of comatose CMO and probable bloodloss due to the bulletwound taking their toll.
"It's me," he said, and Tessa stood from her defensive position, looking wary. They climbed the remaining portion of the hill, and at the top, stationed by his machine gun like God on his throne, was Johnny, and by his side was Ada, who ran to Tessa and gripped her tight the moment she saw her, a rather rare display of affection for Tommy's usually reserved sister. Tommy let Ada hug him as well, in turn, wincing from the pressure she inadvertently put on his arm.
"Where are the other Germans?" He asked Dogs, having had enough of the emotional reunions, especially considering they could all be for nothing. We're not free yet. We're not done yet. The words beat like a mantra in his mind.
Johnny was chewing on a long blade of grass. "Well, some of them are on this here hill," he said, gesturing to the slope beyond the mossy stones that formed the wall. "Wasn't too good uphill against me and my friend here, turns out." He knocked on the side of the gun, which resonated with a dull, metallic thud. Tessa and Ada were speaking softly in the background. The sky, off in some distant horizon, was just barely beginning to lighten. Johnny continued, his tone neutral like they were discussing the outcome of the latest betting crops. "Rest of 'em I 'spose got left at the house or ran off when they saw all the carnage." He took the grass out of his mouth, contemplatively. "I hope to God you've got a way to get us out of here other than that car you made me blow up." His accent lilted across the words like the cheerful notes of a fiddle.
Tommy shook his head, once. "Only one. You have any cigarettes?"
Tessa sat by her father's side with Ada, silent, watching the sun creep slowly up. She was trying to stifle some of the bleeding, but his eyes were twitching under their lids, his face pale and clammy, and she dared not remove the bullet lest she cause more damage, so she kept pressure on his back and watched him bleed out onto the fragrant green grass. Ada didn't speak, didn't look like she wanted to. Tommy and Johnny Dogs shared a few, clipped words, but Tommy came back over to where the two women and unconscious old man were soon after, a borrowed cigarette between his lips.
"Ada, may I have a moment with Tessa?" He asked, lighting up. His eyes were cold in the creeping, bare morning light when he raised them again, and Ada nodded and stood, still silent, and Tessa worried for her as she watched her walk back to Johnny and the gun. Tessa looked out at the sky over the hill instead of her father, instead of Tommy, and wondered if there was any way she could be able to convince herself that she had just woken up early in her bedroom and decided to go outside and enjoy the sunrise. A fantasy, but an appealing one. She had been having a lot of those, recently, it would seem. Tommy stood beside her, smoking, and then, to her surprise, he sat down, mud and grass and all, but she supposed at this point, it hardly mattered anyway. He pulled his knees up and locked his fingers together in a cage around them, like a boy might, but his eyes were hollow and his cheeks were sharp and the gun was lying on the grass next to him, and the interlaced fingers were smeared and splattered with bright and dark and blood blood blood red.
She reached out for the cigarette, and he passed it to her, and she took three long drags holding it in her hand with the broken bones, which was throbbing and sore, keeping the other pressed to her father's back where the bullet was, pressing the fabric that she had ripped off of her dress against the wound. She passed the smoke back to Tommy and he took it without speaking, finished it, then moved so that he was closer to her, legs stretched out in front of him, still not saying a word, sitting next to her beside her father's immobile body. Why he had wanted to do this, she had no idea. What he meant by it, she had no idea. She could feel his shoulder brushing hers, and the logical part of her brain was fighting the reins, screaming at her not to, but she turned and lifted her good hand to the back of his head against his buzzed hair and kissed him, hoping that Ada and Johnny were too far away or too preoccupied to notice, poured everything into it, all her fear, like she was a glass and he was the ocean, sweeping it away in the current, swallowing it whole, and his mouth was warm and slick and open and it felt like something she shouldn't be doing and that was why she did it, one of his hands in her hair and his lips sliding, pressing against hers, like he had come and sat by her just to taunt her, just to wait for her to crack and had gotten what he wanted when she did, and she pulled back because otherwise she was going to fuck him in front of his sister and an Irish Gypsy and her father was going to bleed out because she wasn't keeping pressure on his wound. Her body rebelled against her despite her best intentions to put distance between them, and she only managed to get about three inches away from his lips, had to focus on holding herself back, the taste and smell and feeling of him dizzying her and calling to her like a siren to some poor, lost sailor who knew the danger but couldn't stop himself from jumping overboard anyway.
"So what now?" She said, almost against his mouth, her tongue tasting slightly of mint and smoke.
"Hmm?" He said, his thumb brushing slowly against her cheek.
"Do we just sit here and wait to die?"
"What's the rest of life but sitting and waiting to die?" He asked, his deep voice an audible form of apathy, and she was jealous of him for it, for not feeling and suffering and existing so close to the surface like she did.
"And after? If we get away somehow?" She questioned, because she wanted to know, or she thought she did. He leaned back on his hands, away from her, putting the space between them that she couldn't manage to, and lit another cigarette.
"There is no 'after'", He told her, and she raised her eyebrows.
"There is no after." She repeated, to affirm it, her tone cold. He looked at her, and his expression was patronizing, and she hated it, like she was a child who was simply too young to understand the complicated ways of the world. "I thought you meant it," she said, trying not to sound accusatory, and failing, and realizing she was only solidifying his nonverbal argument regarding his opinion of her, which, in turn, only made her angrier. "You told me you meant it."
"I did mean it." He blew the smoke out, his jawline sharp enough to cut, his constant twists and turns like his smoke in the air and undecipherable moods even more so.
"And?" She prompted.
"And what?" He said, his words and accent rough.
"So there's no 'and' and there's no 'after' and there's nothing at all, is that it?" He rolled his head back. The sun was starting to peak out over the hills, bathing the horrors of the night in a pristine golden haze, lighting up his skin and his angles like he was God's favorite angel. His smoke wisped out between his lips.
"What did you expect, Tessa?" He said, and she shook her head, pressed her lips into a line, appalled. She shrugged, trying to repress everything that was welling up inside of her, trying not to let any of it leak out onto the surface.
"More than this," She told him, and he looked at her with his eyes like lightning strikes, full of pity or full of nothing, she couldn't tell, she could hardly ever tell what they held inside.
"You and everyone else," He replied, and she was silent because she couldn't even fucking speak, couldn't even look at him. They were silent for a few tense seconds, and then,
"If your father survives, remind him that he owes me a lot of money," Thomas said, and she whipped her head back around and locked eyes with him for a moment and he looked like he was making to stand up again but she slapped him, full across the face with her good hand, the other still pressing the ripped piece of her dress to her father's slowly rising and falling chest.
"Get the fuck away from me," she told him, and he stared back at her, and her hand stung like it had been plunged into a hornet's nest, and her heart felt like the same hornet's nest only tramped underfoot, only worse, and he looked like maybe he was going to say something, but in the distance there was the sound of an engine and a large, black van was flying down the dirt road to the farmhouse, and then he stood and walked away and didn't look back.