One Day in a Small-Town Desert, chapter 4, page 2

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Pí‘oro Kılímo pushed himself to his feet, rifle in hand. Bhanar had saved his life. Maybe the kid wasn’t as crazy as he seemed. Or just insane in a different way.

Pí‘oro looked around, searching for Bhanar. The world flashed with red and green. There the kid lay, across the driveway. Had he been hit? Through the scream of the cruiser siren, Pí‘oro heard an auto engine crescendo. He had barely turned to see the cruiser when it hurtled past him in reverse, snapping his nightwear and jacket around like a flag in a demon-wind.

The punk--the blonde had called him Zhíno--stopped the cruiser in a spray of gravel. Zhíno’s squinting eyes burrowed into Pí‘oro from twenty meters away. The punk was trying to scare him. He could have hit him with the cruiser just then, if he had wanted to.

“So now it’s my turn to try scaring you.” Enforcer windscreens are bulletproof, right? Pí‘oro leveled his rifle at the punk’s face and fired.

The windscreen blossomed into a web of cracks, centered just about at the middle of the glass. The cruiser accelerated in reverse, away from Pí‘oro.

The big man laughed. “You don’t like that, do you? You Névo-brained punk.”

Pí‘oro crossed the driveway to Bhanar. The kid was moaning, so at least he wasn’t dead. But he obviously had been hit by the auto. He lay on one shoulder, with his head tucked down and one arm behind his back. His legs bent opposite directions with more than the correct number of joints. Blood soaked through his denim trousers at one of the joints. So, two broken legs at the minimum.

With a glance down the driveway--the cruiser backed out into the road--Pí‘oro knelt down beside the foreign kid.

“Thank you, son. You saved my life.” Pí‘oro reached to pat Bhanar’s shoulder, but stopped himself from fear of hurting the kid. “Or at least saved me from grievous injury.”

Bhanar moaned something resembling, “Welcome.”

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