What explanation did that leave? Bad guys with respirator masks, who had been hidden away somewhere in the houses? In the attics? People who’d been in place, ready to spring their attack once the gas had taken effect?

Something like that might account for the shooting they were hearing now, but it still wouldn’t explain the screams. What the hell could explain those—

Danica grabbed his arm, cutting off the thought. She pointed to something outside and far to the right:

Out in the dead leaves, the female agent with the short black hair was moving. She had already rolled onto her back, and now her head was turning side to side, slowly. She brought up one hand and rubbed her face. The movements of somebody in a stupor, slowly coming around.

Somewhere off to the north, another long burst of autofire echoed through the woods. Dryden heard the stream of bullets cutting through foliage close by.

Now, as he listened, he could hear at least three different voices screaming, somewhere up near the shooting, still out of view.

The female agent drew her knees up, her feet pressed flat to the ground.

Dryden slung the M4 on his shoulder by its strap, and went back to the window. He paused and looked back at Danica. “I’m going to bring her in here. Keep watching for anything—”

A new scream ripped through the forest, from somewhere very close to the house. Dryden spun to face the sound—

And stopped dead. He stared.

It was the female agent screaming. She had her hands jammed against the sides of her head, and her mouth open, and her face contorted in rage. The scream, wild and raw like the others, went on for another five seconds, and then she sucked in a deep breath and did it again, still lying there.

Dryden withdrew from the empty window frame and went back to where he’d been standing, at the narrow, eye-level slot in the wall. One of Danica’s hands, holding on to an upright two-by-four of the wall, had gone bone white with the tension of her grip.

Outside, the black-haired woman finished screaming and rolled onto her front with a convulsive movement. She got her hands under her and shoved herself upward into a squat, her palms to the forest floor, like an animal on its haunches. Her breath went in and out in fast spurts.

Then she moved—she took half a dozen scrambling steps, caught her pant leg on the jagged corner of an old Volkswagen, and went sprawling on her hands in the dead leaves.