Excerpt: Claus Jensen's Boys

I stare at Keagan; he's in his element here, and I'm having a hard time of thinking of ways this could be a bad plan. Others seem to agree, or at least, like me, can't think of reasons to disagree. Jacob, predictably, looks the most upset, and I can't help but wonder what he had planned that would depend so much on us being armed.

Before I know it everyone is spread out again, moving crates and boxes around, unrolling bed kits to cover as much of the ground with inflammable items as possible. Keagan is walking around, anointing everything with splashes of gas—I wonder what the military uses gas for these days, anyway—and finally he deems everything is perfect and orders everyone but Alek, Jacob, and me out of the building.

The four of us are tasked with starting eight flames around the building, and getting them moving towards the center. Keagan tosses each two flares from the supplies; we walk to our places and start them burning, then put them down on the blankets, fanning the air until the blankets catch and the gas does its job. I scurry away and watch in awe for a moment as the fire seems to come alive.

“Malcolm! Move your ass, get the other one going!” I look up, startled, and wave to Alek as I do as he says and go to start the next one.

The eight fires are growing, and the air is growing thick with smoke. I can hear all of us coughing as we carefully make our way back to the door, and it's this coughing, I think, that masks the sound that should get us moving faster just long enough for a bullet scream past us and clatter against the wall. Ultimately harmless, but now we can hear others going off, and that is not good.

Like an idiot, I turn around, and I can see one box that was supposed to be filled with something other than ammo is light up like fireworks, and now we can hear more bullets whizzing around.

“FUCK!” Keagan yells, grabbing my arm and pulling me towards the door, but not before I can hear the crash of glass breaking and then there's a shriek from up ahead and a thud as Alek hits the ground. “FUCK!” Keagan yells again, leaving me to get Alek, and I just run as fast as I can, my heart pounding and my lungs burning from the smoke and the gas fumes and I need to get out of here—

The night air is cool and clean and I keep running towards the line of flashlights ahead, where the guys are screaming for us. Will catches me and holds me still.

“Malcolm, we heard gunshot! What the hell happened? Are you okay?”

I'm gasping, gulping down air, coughing smoke out of my body, but I manage to nod. “M'fine. Shit. SHIT.” I turn around, looking for the others. Jacob is out, panting to the side of the group, and I can see Dustin trotting over to make sure he's okay. I look back towards the building, which is now bright orange through the windows, and I can see the silhouette of Keagan carrying Alek over his shoulder.

“Keagan!” I shout, running back towards him. “Is he...?”

Keagan, now far enough away from the building to safely stop, drops to his knees and carefully puts Alek down. “He's fine. Got hit in the leg, though. Not too bad, just a flesh wound.” He laughs a bit. “We didn't happen to take any medical supplies out of there before we lit it up, did we?”

I shake my head. We should have, but we didn't. “Can we get him back to your place, you have stuff there, right?”

“Yeah. Just, just give me a sec here.” Keagan looks back over his shoulder at the burning building. “That was fucked. Wasn't supposed to be like that.”

“Oh, good,” I say, a lame attempt at being funny. “I was worried that you'd meant for that to happen.”