Which didn’t tell him much, because right now the woods were littered with M4 rifles, a hundred or more for the taking. There was still no way to know who was shooting, or what they were shooting at.

Dryden considered the position he and Danica were in—fully exposed, like targets on a firing range. Then he looked around at the FBI agents he could see from this spot: a dozen at least, lying as they had fallen, alive but defenseless.

“We can’t just leave them like this,” Danica whispered.

Dryden nodded; it simply wasn’t an option.

He turned toward the house that went with the picket fence, fifty feet behind them. It had wooden siding and sheathing, much of which had rotted away, leaving empty horizontal slats between boards. Through those gaps, the dim interior of the house was visible; the drywall and insulation behind the exterior had long since fallen away.

“Come on,” Dryden whispered.

He nodded toward the house and ran for it. They crossed the yard in a few seconds and clambered over the sill of an empty window frame. Inside, it took only a moment to find a wall section that was mostly intact, with open slats close to eye level. They stood there, staring north through the trees. They could still see Grace and the others; they would be able to defend them, if it came to it.

Another scream from the woods—it had the same ragged intensity as before, but the voice was different, lower-pitched. There were now at least two people making those sounds.

Danica turned to Dryden, her eyes asking the question again: What the hell is this?

Dryden felt for the collar microphone and keyed it.

“Dryden to air, are you seeing anything happening in the northern part of the subdivision? Any activity in the woods up there?”

Three seconds passed, and then the pilot’s voice came through the speaker: “Negative, but we’ve got no visual at all through the trees. We can’t see the ground. What are we looking for?”

“Shooters,” Dryden said. “And—” He cut himself off, unsure of how to even describe the rest of it. He keyed the switch again. “I need to know if anyone else could have entered the woods after the gas attack. Do you have a good enough look at the surrounding area to rule that out?”

“Yeah, spotters couldn’t have missed that. We’ve got clear sightlines and five hundred yards of open land around the woods. Nobody else went in.”

Dryden considered that, his mind already trying to fit the pieces together. The FBI agents were all down, and there was no one else in the forest who hadn’t already been there before the gas clouds came through.