Free Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno by Mike Barry

so that you had to control only yourself and if you did that then the landscape would take care of itself. Rolling and firing, Wulff had placed the assassin somewhere downrange and to the left of him, the only place he could have been at the moment of impact to stand clear of the gas tank. As he came up, rolling, the fire was returned. A bullet went somewhere to his left, then the next shot came in high and somehow he got under it, the bullet over him before he had really understood his gesture. That was what they said about fire, it was the same as lightning, if you heard the bullet and knew what had happened to you then they must have missed. That was the only way to look at it. He fired again, taking his third shot out of the.45 and there was a scream some yards down and to his right. Contact. He did not even check it, only pushed another shot down there and the scream arced higher, turned into a bubbling sound of rage. Wulff put one last shot down there and there was silence.
    Only then did he open his eyes fully, let the landscape come into him again. He had performed all of this in a high concentration so absolute and so sealed off from the desert that it might have happened in that private place that the instructor sergeant had always urged them to use and rely upon in the same way that they would use their weapons. The two vehicles had intersected, the Bonneville and the Fleetwood meshed at an odd angle like lovers who had started an entrance but had failed of completion in a hurried ejaculation, a tumble of limbs, emptiness and open space flooding their juxtaposition then. Owens body lay crumped high in the seat. He had taken an impact that had pushed him back, and then he had reared forward, tumbled against the windshield and fallen hunched near a pane. If he hadn’t been a dead man he might have been dead all over again. A ten-mile-per-hour impact could kill; Owens’s attitude was evidence of exactly what could happen if you did not know how to move with a crash. There was a light stink of gasoline in the air, in the point of juxtaposition—left rear bumper of the Fleetwood, right front quarter-panel of the Bonneville. There was a rainbow streak of marks torn from the uncompounded metal that dazzled in the sun, a scheme more beautiful than anything the designers might have conceived. Neither car, Wulff suspected, would ever run again.
    And crumpled to the right of the accident scene and about ten yards downrange behind the point of juxtaposition was the crumpled frame of a man now lying on his stomach, gun dangling from his fully extended fingers. As Wulff had calculated, he had used the Bonneville for cover. If Wulff had not gotten very lucky in the point of impact, if the collision had not displaced the Bonneville so that there was a wedge of light into which fire could be struck, Wulff would have been dead.
    Well then. It had not been the first time he had been lucky, Wulff thought. Then again it might not be the last, although there was a point at which you had to concede that your luck might be running out. But the trouble with that, the trouble with the easy, fatalistic calculations of this sort was that you never knew it until it had happened, until you had tumbled into the cave of disaster down that trapdoor, and then it was always in surprise. Death was always a surprise; the utter cancellation of those factors which kept you however perilously alive was to be greeted in shock. That was survival. It never got any easier to yield life. Owens had been right; calling himself a dead man had merely been a rationalization so that holding on would mean less to him than it did at the heart. Owens had been surprised, too. He had died stunned, his eyes rolling into his head in horrified contemplation of the unthinkable, which was that he, Owens, a professional hunter, was dead.
    Wulff spat on the ground and walked toward the dead man. His knees had cramped up slightly underneath his body so that in death the man