by Daniel James
Roach’s smile was exhausted. “And you?”
She didn’t answer.
“If we make it out of here, I’m done with this life. I’m going to grab hold of a second chance and not let go. We can start—”
There came the shriek of bolts sliding out of their rusting locks. Roach pushed away from the wall, his tired kids cuddling him for warmth. He gently moved them aside and looked at Diane, his eyes so full of love hardening into hate. Wincing at the shallow slice in his flank, he stood protectively over his family and readied himself to die fighting.
Isaac stepped inside, Colquitt and Jensen hanging back beyond the threshold, listening to the rattle and roar of the few remaining machine guns. Roach was speechless at this bizarre union.
“Some assholes are trying to spring Wyndorf. We stop them, then”—Isaac threw a doubtful look at his other enemies at his back—“we see where we go from there.”
Roach couldn’t believe his ears. “Sounds like a full-scale NRA invasion out there, and you have a knife. What do I get to take to this gunfight, a shovel?” Roach glanced down at his palm, tacky with blood, turned to his family in the corner, and shook his head, baffled. He brought his harsh stare up to Jensen and Colquitt. “And what’s stopping you from killing us?”
“There’s no olive branch being extended here,” Jensen answered. “No trust to be gained. I realised the bark of my demons exceeds their bite. I don’t care what happens to the rest of you after this, so long as Wyndorf doesn’t slip the noose.”
Roach pondered it for a whole two seconds. “My family, they stay hidden in here.”
“Fine,” Jensen answered quickly, keen to get back to the barn and ensure Wyndorf was still in place.
Roach kissed Peter and Vicky, squeezing them tight. “Daddy needs to go help take care of something, but I’ll be right back.”
The twins clung tightly to his coat, begging him to stay with them, their weeping, defenceless eyes wrenching his heart from his chest. He struggled to keep his own tears back and soothed the pair of them with words he hoped carried some weight.
What must it feel like, Isaac wondered, to have loved ones to come back to.
Colquitt paid no mind to the touching scene, while Jensen watched with the glazed expression of a PTSD sufferer.
Roach held Diane’s hand and pulled her close, whispering into her ear, “When everything goes quiet, you all sneak out of here. Find the road and don’t stop until you get to safety.” He paused, a word stuck to his tongue. “I love you.” He almost didn’t say it, didn’t think he still had the right to. “I’m sorry.”
Diane looked brave for her children, for herself too, afraid that if she lost it now she might not regain it. “I love you. Promise me you’ll be careful out there.” They embraced tightly, keeping it quick.
Roach hurried over to Isaac, noticing how his attention was on Peter and Vicky, and realising how surprised he must be. “I didn’t know how to bring it up, man. We don’t exactly have BBQs on the weekend.”
Isaac wasn’t offended. “Cute kids, must get it from Diane.” He exchanged a quick look with her, glad she was safe but not exactly in the moment to play catch-up. He let his pitch drop, wanting to speak discreetly without giving Jensen or Colquitt cause for concern. “This was my idea, I told them we could both help stop this breakout, but seeing you here with them …” He shook his head. “You’re leaving with Di and the kids, now. The three of us will stop Wyndorf.”
“No, we all need this closure,” Roach countered.
“Let’s go,” Colquitt thundered.
Isaac knew Roach had made up his mind and gave him a friendly punch on the shoulder. He barged past Jensen and his unleashed wolf, racing for the hellish night above.
Roach sidled up to the frail, scarred man, noticing Colquitt tense, probably sweating over his purse. “Ludlow was like my pops.” Jensen possessed no fear, holding Roach’s glare like he was ready to die. “But we’ve all done enough damage to each other.” He pointed at his family. “This was some unforgivable shit, but you spared them. My not killing you here and now is me being generous.” Roach turned, holding a hand up to his family. “I’ll see you soon. I love you.” Without another word he ran up to where Isaac crouched at the top of the stone stairs, knife locked tightly in his fist.
Jensen spared a brief look at Diane and her babies, surprising her with a tenderness that was utterly incongruous with his violent features and terrifying actions. “God forgive me.” He closed them in but left the door unlocked.
“Stay behind me at all times. Hear me?” Colquitt secured his walking bank balance. They both joined Isaac and Roach, ready to brave what sounded like the death rattle of the apocalypse.
Slaughterhouse
Garland could feel eyes on the back of his head, a sensation which prickled his spine like sheet ice. He, Schecter and Kershaw were fifty yards from the livestock enclosures, and were expecting to be scalped by a rifle bullet at any moment. They passed an upturned graveyard of Thurman’s cannon fodder, who had been attentive and enthusiastic in their fighting but too erratic, their skills dulled by a crippling ratio of narcotics to training. Identification was difficult for several of them: one missing half his head from a heavy-calibre shot, another cocooned in fire besides a blasted tractor on its side. Garland could almost feel himself being transported to another time and place. The moon dust of Afghanistan, an M1 Abrams tank smouldering in the cold desert night with a company of corpses. The heavy losses of these unsuitable men did hurt Garland, yet he couldn’t help but view this as a pragmatic act, a necessary cull. And at the end of this bloody night, he knew the souls of the perished would take the matter up with Major Thurman.
They hadn’t crossed any other fallen hostiles. Either there were some up ahead or it was a clear case of quality over quantity. They paused besides a low wall, the sound of crackling bonfires making Schecter think of his melted skin.
Garland tried to raise Thurman on his comm channel, checking to see if the old warhorse was still galloping about somewhere on his demented rescue. “Major, I’m approaching the collection point. What’s your SITREP?” All he got back was silence. He shared a look with Schecter and Kershaw, part sympathy, part relief that they might have been spared the act of shooting their once-revered leader like a rabid mongrel. The three of them removed the looped wire earbuds from their ears. “Okay, let’s finish this.”
Garland took point, leading them the last dozen yards in a careful jog. He split up Schecter and Kershaw so they could surround the livestock enclosure, anticipating some final push back from the enemy. Garland climbed over the metal gate, finger poised to put down any combatants, but the only sounds in the night were the fiery snapping of the charring bodies and trees engulfed by grenade flame.
Inside the pen, he found the bodies of two more of the suited men in pig masks, and three more of Thurman’s meth-addled mercs, face down in old hay and dirt. Crouching low, he cautiously swept down the central avenue, paranoid of shooters hiding behind the wooden roof supports or bent low in the long parallel rows of pens. The quiet rush of his pumping blood eased when he spotted Schecter and Kershaw enter from the opposite end of the brick enclosure, moving down to meet him midway.
Mixed voices stopped the three of them dead in their tracks. Tones of elation merging with aggression. Garland rounded a mesh-covered fencepost and found Thurman in one of the central pens on his right, panting and smeared in greasy soot and beaded with sweat, his eyepatch looking like the empty hollow of his skull beneath the fading strip light. He was standing victoriously over a grinning Wyndorf, about to cut his cuffs.
Isaac and Roach followed Colquitt around the side of the farmhouse, with a skittish Jensen at their tail. The mad schemer was untroubled by the death in the stilled air. His main worries were that Wyndorf might get away with the help of well-armed assailants, and, of course, even if they caught him in time, that Isaac or Roach might steal the kill for their own gratification.
Roun
ding the house’s charred and devastated south corner, the four of them got their first glimpse of the Valkyrie buffet laid before them in the smoky, flaming farmyard. The soil rich with spilled blood. Across the infernal meadow they spied a trio of killers hurriedly marching into the hostage pens. Colquitt’s knife wound seemed to scream out in righteous retribution when he laid eyes on the great hulking soldier leading the rescue.
Roach stooped down beside the corpse of some whack job in camouflage fatigues and a skull jawbone neck scarf. He dragged the sub-machine gun from the man’s dead hands, an HK UMP, another German number. He checked the magazine, about twelve rounds, half-full, then slapped it home again. A short, strangled cry escaped him as a hand seized his ankle. The downed soldier still had a little fight in him. His other hand swung his pistol up at Roach. Roach roughly kicked the hand away, the handgun flailing off into the grass, then smoothly placed a single round into the combatant’s chest. Taking a calming breath, he looked up and saw Colquitt had stopped moving, gun trained on him, fire reflected in his eyes and burning him with a warning. Threat shimmered like heat between the pair of them until Colquitt was forced to keep up with the undeterred surgeon, but he was keeping one eye firmly on Roach.
Isaac could sense the anxiety coming off Roach in waves. Clearly he was wanting to get back to his family in one piece, and praying for their safe passage from this nightmare. Isaac, in contrast, had never felt so calm. Unshackled, knife in hand, his only true purpose minutes away from him, ready for his blade. He imagined Maggie, discouraging his blood lust, begging him to turn the other cheek and get out of there whilst he still could. At the moment, though, he turned a deaf ear to his ghosts.
Garland couldn’t believe the major was still alive. He was well beyond his prime for the physical rigors of combat. These were his twilight years as a tactician and surely the hard effects of methamphetamine had clouded the stars of his painfully accrued wisdom. And yet here he was, a broken-down trained killer forged in the steaming jungle, a frosty, carnivorous grin on his seamed face. Garland paid only scant attention to the other two people cinched tight in the pen, a big husky guy and a young woman, both with bound ankles and wrists. They looked like the ones who’d been caught in the shootout on the street earlier.
“Major.” Garland hid his disappointment. “Did you lose your earbud? We thought you were dead.”
Thurman’s expression was one of pure need, and he looked almost reverentially at his cackling speed-king savior. “Some close moments,” he admitted. He sawed through both sets of plastic cuffs on Wyndorf. “Come on, soldier. Let’s get you back to the DMZ.”
Wyndorf was almost grooving on the spot, a drunk office-party employee revelling in the violence in the air, and gave Garland a sneer. “Hey, meathead, I didn’t know you cared enough to go through all this trouble for li’l ole me.” Schecter and Kershaw were stock still, bow and rifle just waiting for the command to follow through and settle this. Wyndorf got to his feet. “First things first, I need to find a few fellas who I’m kinda hopin’ are still very much alive. I’ll skin them quick as you please, then we can put this shitshow behind us and get back to business.”
Garland cocked his pistol. It sounded like the world’s largest rat trap getting sprung, the big silver barrel gleaming in the electric light.
Thurman’s one dark piercing eye, white phosphorus burning in a copper-stained swamp, settled on Garland. “What in Christ’s name are you doing, son?” the major snapped incredulously, his vile mouth like a sewer manhole spewing forth undesirable materials.
“Sticking to our mission, sir. It’s been an honor.” He squeezed the trigger. The bullet sped through Thurman’s eyeball, splashing gray matter and bone splinters out the back of his gray crew-cut, some of it splashing on Fitzy and Grace. The disgraced and rusty cog of the government collapsed as if his wires had been snipped.
“Is this about our disagreement on business models?” Wyndorf’s gaze was a black hole, its immense gravity drawing in all warmth and life, nullifying it, corroding it into nothingness. He faced his death without care.
Garland trained the gun on Wyndorf, trying to absorb as much joy out of this as quickly as possible. He started to squeeze. For one bizarre second he thought he had somehow squeezed too tightly, as he heard the single whip-crack of a handgun. It took a second or two to realise it came from the killing field outside.
That second or two was all it took to rob Garland of his chance. He turned back, ready to finish the objective. He didn’t feel the bullet crash through his left cheekbone with a wet snap, altering the structure of his eye socket like a cracked and concave eggshell before continuing out the back of his head, didn’t get to process the sight of Wyndorf on one knee with a feral snarl and Thurman’s smoking service 9mm in his hand.
Isaac raced the last of the distance, through the gate of the perimeter fence and straight for the livestock pen with his soul collapsing into deepest, blackest despair. Each pounding footstep hammered an image of Wyndorf with a gunshot to his cranium, maybe caught in the crossfire of his backup and Colquitt’s final guards, departing this rotten world without staring up into the satisfaction of Isaac’s face as his final act. Although Isaac paid him little thought, Jensen, now stumbling and wheezing to keep up with the other three, was brimming with an almost identical distress.
They entered at the exact moment it turned into a shooting gallery. Isaac hopped behind a thick wooden support column, the knife in his hand feeling more ludicrous than ever before. Roach slid behind an old wheelbarrow opposite him, the HK’s stock wedged into his shoulder. Colquitt charged in and had to leap over the body of Rossbach, or maybe it was Olivetti, their bodies and those of their killers littered about the doorway in splashes of blood.
To Isaac’s surprise, the bullets were not being aimed at them. From his split-second appraisal of the scene, it looked as though the two soldiers—who shot the third behemoth?—were targeting Wyndorf as he dived for cover behind a flaky concrete wall, several shots puffing up powdered stone. Isaac poked his head around the splintery column, seeing Wyndorf pop up and fire a few shots at a burned guy who snatched a steel-tipped arrow from the quiver on his back, smoothly drawing it back and locking on to his target with machine-like precision. As Wyndorf’s bullets bored past him through the pen’s wall, the archer composed himself and loosed the arrow, his keen eye watching the thin, razor-pointed shaft whistle through the air. Isaac’s heart froze, time slowing down. Wyndorf flinched, twisting his body to one side, the arrow skimming past his center mass and embedding itself deep into the post behind him. Isaac had a wild notion to throw caution to the wind and just sprint down the center aisle, past the soldiers and straight at Wyndorf. He would most likely take a bullet or two, but as long as they didn’t prevent him from sticking his knife in Wyndorf’s heart, he could live with that. Or not, as the case may be.
Schecter traded a couple of arrows with Wyndorf’s taunts and bullets, as Kershaw raised his rifle to drill a couple of bursts toward Colquitt and Roach, the triplet bursts chiselling the concrete wall and pinging off the metal wheelbarrow. Roach returned fire, his bullets sparking off the filthy concrete floor and kicking up damp, rotten hay. Isaac was getting antsy: he needed to find a way to get out of this pointless three-way holding pattern of spent brass and stainless steel arrow tips. He crawled away from the barn’s aisle, shimmying under the metal bars of the nearest pen, and quickly and quietly moved on his elbows across the thick, damp carpet of yellowish-brown hay, the noise of heavy calibres tearing up the scenery and Wyndorf’s sick taunts mocking the archer about his burns. Isaac got the impression the two of them had history. In between exchanges, he heard Grace and Fitzy talking in urgent, hushed tones. They were a few more pens further in, and scrabbling about, probably trapped by plastic restraints. Isaac figured the knife could actually come in handy.
Kershaw was slowly backing away from his cautiously advancing opponents, moving and firing, moving and firing. He paused behind a wooden pi
llar, knowing his ammo was running perilously low. Good job he picked up that pipe bomb from Buckley’s corpse. Kershaw observed Schecter’s position, the archer nocking another arrow and moving from cover to cover, carefully pursuing Wyndorf as he vaulted over another of the enclosure’s partition gates, getting steadily closer to the building’s exit. Kershaw pulled out a box of waterproof matches from his belt, striking the head against the rough wooden support and kissing it to the short fuse in a sizzling display of hissing sparks. Pipe bomb in hand, he had only just pulled his arm back to launch the homemade explosive when Roach’s last bullet burned through his midsection, right through his large intestine. Kershaw gasped in shock, numbness temporarily shielding him from the white-hot agony, his wide eyes spotting Roach nestled in the shadowy cover of the former hostage pen. With a last-ditch attempt, Kershaw tried to summon the strength to toss the bomb toward him. As his pain-wracked body awoke with a start from its cottony warmth of adrenalised oblivion, he fumbled the throw and dropped it only a few feet in front of him.
It was a mercy killing compared to the gut shot. The building almost left its foundations with the devilish eruption, the sound, fury, light and heat rattling the timber rafters and making every swinging strip light shudder like a weather vane in a hurricane, shattering many of them like sugar glass and setting the surrounding blast-weakened wooden columns alight. The staunch support post Kershaw had been using in his final moments was split in half with a hungry groan like that of a giant awakening from a deep slumber. The nearby supports voiced their own displeasure.
Isaac was in the act of cutting through Grace’s ankle cuffs when the whole world unexpectedly exploded. With the slippery sensation that his goal was becoming more and more unattainable, he went at the cuffs, Fitzy’s too, like he was expecting the roof to buckle and drop on them at any second, another obstacle to interfere with his atonement. Roach was suddenly right there at his side, pulling Fitzy to his feet as Grace quickly swept her eyes about the barn, getting her bearings on what she had missed whilst lamely writhing like a worm across the floor on her knees, struggling to stand up.