Hannibal left Will in the car, waiting until he was out of visual range to pull out his pocketed gun. While guns were abhorrent to him, Hannibal was more than adequately trained in their use, and the sidearm’s weight was familiar and easy in his hands.
He could have worked the lock open, but instead used a rock to break the back door’s window and reached in to unlock the door manually, all to further diffuse any possible suspicion down the line. Hannibal was never anything but meticulous. He did a sweep of the house, top to bottom, before pocketing the gun once more. It took little time to find the inside passage to the garage, and he opened the garage door to stow the Bentley inside, Will still cocooned in the back seat.
“You will have to lean on me, Will. I want to get you to the kitchen. Do you think you can walk, or shall I carry you?”
An abandoned kitchen in an abandoned house, hidden in the (hopefully) abandoned woods. It sounded like the start to every suburban horror story Graham did himself the favor of avoiding. There were enough urban atrocities in his life.
Will grimaced, blinking sweat out of his eyes, and fumbled the hand not stuck to his wound along the back of the driver’s seat. Hannibal was in the doorway, a concerned corduroy blur, but the car windows were fogged-up on the in and out of his breathing. Beyond the doctor’s elbow he could make out what looked like a child’s bicycle, propped up against concrete and hosed down for the winter.
Vacation home.
“To my own tub of ice?” he mumbled, shifting into a rush of static and nausea. “I can walk.”
After a fashion.
They cleared the garage like an unwieldy, staggering creature. Will did his best not to bleed over more than his fair share of the staircase, and accepted the coat Hannibal managed to push between his hand and the wall when he staggered for a third time. They stopped there so he could lean against it and catch his breath (pulling in the smell of cordite and cologne) without leaving bloody hand-prints and drag marks up the wall to terrify the kids.
The lights were out when they reached the kitchen, but the low bulbs under the extractor hood and along the cabinets had been turned on, up-lighting an immaculate oak and white kitchen in shadows.
Will caught the edge of the table under his elbow, hooking onto it to ease the weight on Hannibal’s arm, still locked tight under his armpits. The doctor didn’t relinquish his grip when Will sunk, stone-like, onto one of the kitchen stools. Superior anatomical understanding. The compression sent a jagged cut of pain through his ribs, and Hannibal had him jacked back up a few inches almost before his yell, flooding air back into his lungs when he would have passed out.
Hannibal kept the speed up until he was sure that there was no glint in the rear view mirror, and nearly passed the broad driveway. The car came to a halt in the middle of the wooded path and Hannibal got out, the engine off, listening.
The woods were black and unwelcoming. They were also silent, the natural silence of trees and wildlife and things settling rather than the unnatural stillness before resounding gunfire or the revving of an engine. Hannibal exhaled and got back into the car, turned the engine over, followed the long driveway down, down, down.
“It does not appear that we are being followed, no, but I believe we have little choice but to tend to your wounds before we attempt to leave. I presume, at times like this, breaking and entering is a lesser violation than allowing a federal agent to succumb to his injuries?”
It wasn’t a serious question; Hannibal wanted to keep Will talking as he pulled around the side of the large vacation lodge, flicking on the headlights only long enough to ascertain that nobody’s tire tracks had disturbed the leaf litter in a very long time.
Will’s elbow jutted out, anticipating the squeal of tires and a painful shunt from the sound of Hannibal’s foot hitting the pedal. But the Bentley braked like a hammock, swinging his weight ponderously in the well of the leather without shifting his torso more than—
—his ability to clench his jaw closed.
Small miracles(and luxury engineering).
Will’s laugh was guttural and wet, a sarcastic suck and pull that reminded him of Dr Lecter’s wrist, slipping through the ragged gape in a man’s side. Out-of-practice fingers groping through blood and incompetence to save a man’s life (and his kidney).
“Semantics, technicalities— lazy paperwork.”
There was a rush of cold air as Hannibal opened one door, then the other, chilling the sweat on his skin.
Hannibal would not have wished a gunshot wound on Will. It was a messy, unpleasant way to make a statement; Hannibal found guns in general to be terribly crude weapons and preferred to avoid them. But an opportunity had presented itself, and Hannibal knew better than to bemoan the circumstances. He would make the best of an imperfect situation, as was his wont.
In an ideal world, Will would not have gotten shot—especially somewhere well out of cell phone reception range. Even if Hannibal did get a call through, how long would it take for Will to get onto a Medevac helicopter? How long before he was being worked on by a proper trauma surgeon?
The Bentley’s shocks absorbed much of the abuse as Hannibal drove, lights off, speed too high for the conditions, deeper into the woods. A quick glance, one he had to risk, told him Will was bleeding, but not bleeding out—something to be thankful for, at least.
Will’s face was a closed-off grimace as he wedged both feet into the Bentley’s door; braced against the expensive inlay and stopped to suck in air raggedly through his teeth. It wasn’t fortitude, or grit, or anything more than the dizzy edges of survival that made him tense his knees and start pushing, shoulder over shoulder until he could collapse full-length along the backseat.
The grope of Will’s fingers found the collar of his jacket, jerking it open with sloppy yanks. The trees were streaming along outside the window, darker each time he forced his eyes to focus, telling him— (the air was growing stifling, the first heavy wave of shock) –west.They were going deeper into the woods, heading away from the road and any chance of backup. Will struggled to roll his jacket one-handed over the pressure of his fingers, obscenities sticking hard to the roof of his mouth. (At least he could still feel the shake in his hands; the spasm of blood-flow in his legs.) Turned to cough his lungs clear, since he hadn’t asphyxiated by now (any exit wound would be turning the upholstery into a waterbed).
“—followed?"
This suit was new, before its first dry-cleaning. Hannibal looked down at the crimson smear and was nearly irritated. Then, Will’s blood was soaking into the wool, digging deep, and Hannibal knew that it would remain below the surface long after the visible staining was removed. That thought alone almost brought a smile to his lips.
“I cannot seem to find a signal,” Hannibal murmured, pocketing the gun with what he hoped was a non-professional’s absentminded touch. He ignored the manner in which Will was focusing his unstable sight past him in the direction of the boathouse, fiddling with the phone before finally giving up. “Perhaps if we drive out to the main road—"
A set of headlights appeared at the very end of the long drive. Serendipity.
“We need to get you into the Bentley, Will. Now.”
Not pique.
Will heard the faint grind of an engine, unwelcome déjà vu that dry-chambered a second shot of adrenaline to his nerves. Hannibal was already urging him up, hands under his shoulders, and Will exhaled hard through his nose so he wouldn’t yell as he shoved his heels into the dirt, getting some weak traction.
The need to say something, hours of training and lecturing the training, facts that might somehow make a difference to their survival (he had the badge, even a temporary one) was drowned out by the taste of blood in his mouth.
Will focused on moving: one foot in front of the other, trusting Dr Lecter’s hands to shove his forward motion in the right direction as they stumbled across the driveway. Behind them the car was accelerating into the turn, probably no more than half a minute away from their vantage point, and Will fell against the doctor twice on their slippery short-cut down the bank, pumping a fresh glut of blood over his fingers.
The Bentley opened automatically when they reached it, no flash of lights or telltale beep, and Will had just enough time to see a gray SUV top the curve before he was being pressed into the back. His chest burned, and the tense seconds between the sound of his door closing and Dr Lecter sliding into the front crawled, timed with the ragged beat of his breathing.
It was a straight shot down the bank. An easy, pedestrian kill.
This entire venture felt ill-planned from the moment they stepped into the boathouse. Hannibal felt it like a palpable frisson in the air, like static. This is not a complete picture.
Will walked outside to investigate the sound of an approaching vehicle. Hannibal took the liberty of snapping a neck (less crunch, more pop, despite popular belief) and smoothing the lines of his jacket.
The gunshot outside was completion: static charge bursting into a spark. That was not the sound of Will’s sidearm.
They met half-way across the walkway, Will unsteady, bleeding, stumbling, Hannibal taking longer strides to get there at just the moment the agent’s legs gave out. Will’s blood was fever-hot and thick as gel between his fingers. Hannibal found himself acutely disappointed that someone else had drawn it first. It was not theirs to bring to the surface.
“Do not permit yourself to go into shock, Will. I need to phone for an ambulance.”
Permit.
From his knees in the gravel, Will exhaled twice before he nodded tightly. Even under the circumstances, Dr Lecter’s concern sounded more like pique to the dizzy ringing in his ears. Will was inclined to forgive him, on the simple merit of still being alive. The agent’s world had fluxed sharply, in and out, as he saw the doctor coming down the bank. Once the driving fear for his safety let go, there’d been nothing to hold him up.
Hannibal was supporting him with one hand, the other reduced to movement above his head – he had a cellphone? – and Will made himself look past his coat to the open door of the house. Lecter had his back to it, too caught up in his injuries, and the gun cut a red streak across his suit as Will caged his hand around the trigger guard and shoved it grip-first into his chest.
He wasn’t in any condition to be shooting straight.
The gulf between agent and special agent tasted metallic, the same shock and reel that had turned homicide into used-to-work homocide. It bubbled up hot beneath his fingers, and Will pressed harder against the entry wound, slipping against the side of the vehicle as he fought upright.
The gun was still in his hand. The night guard was slumped over the tow-bar, aspirating his last few pints of blood face-down into the truck bed. Will swayed, swallowed iron, and felt his grip around the trigger turn slippery and numb. Up ahead, the lights in the boat-house were glowing brightly and already beginning to blur, creating sunspots against the dark driveway.
Will braced his elbow against the shattered window, and listed his weight forward until he was stumbling, one foot after the other, towards the last place he’d seen anyone alive.
