The John Milton Series Boxset 2

by Mark Dawson

  “The fuck are we waiting for?”

  Pops? He was Lundquist’s son?

  “Stand down, Private.”

  Milton prodded. “I warned you not to cross me, Callow. This isn’t going to end well for you. Any of you.”

  He heard the familiar sear of anger as he replied, “You forget where you are and where we are? You’re finished.”

  “Don’t let him rile you up. All he’s got left are words.”

  Milton looked down the darkened corridor to the bedroom door. She must keep them in there, he thought. A lockbox beneath the bed or hidden at the back of the wardrobe. Somewhere Arty wouldn’t find them. There was no way he could get down there to look. He would have to pass the open door, and he was prepared to bet everything he had on the fact that they had at least a couple of their guns trained on the dark space. As soon as they saw any sort of movement, they’d empty their magazines at it. He was trapped in this half of the RV.

  “Come out, friend. We’ll do you quick and easy if you play nice.”

  “I don’t think so. First person who puts his head in that door gets it shot off.”

  He looked up. There were cupboards attached to the walls, but they were above the wide, open window and there was no way he could get to them without presenting them with an open invitation to pump a dozen rounds into his chest.

  “Get your ass out here right now,” Lundquist said, his voice hardening.

  “We’ve got a stalemate, Lundquist.”

  “We ain’t got shit. Show him, Private Chandler.”

  There came the deeper, more powerful boom of a shotgun, the echo of the blast, the sound of it being pumped, and then a second boom. The spread was fired at reasonably close range, and the buckshot peppered the thin metal walls, dozens of tiny piercings that appeared just a few inches above his head. The openings admitted tiny splinters of light from the flashlights outside.

  If the next shot was aimed lower, he’d catch the buckshot in his head and shoulders.

  LUNDQUIST LOOKED at the coil of smoke that was unwinding from the muzzle of the rifle. He had been in a situation like this, years ago, in Vietnam. Another world. Another war about nothing, the government sending poor boys to die. Boys without an earthly idea what they were doing. They were doing it again, now, just the same. Gooks then, ragheads now. He remembered all the way back, damned near forty years, and how it had been raining then, too, the monsoon, raining for a week on end with no let up.

  He remembered.

  The foxhole, the VC outside.

  He couldn’t forget.

  That was where it had started. His hatred of the government, it had fomented there.

  Damned if he was going to let this godforsaken Limey throw a wrench into what God had told him to do.

  “The girl,” Lundquist called. “Bring her over here.”

  Morris Finch and Leland Mulligan dragged her across until she was in front of him.

  “On the ground.”

  Lundquist watched as the two men dumped Flowers in the mud before him. She pushed herself out of the muck and onto her knees. He looked down at her. She couldn’t have been more than thirty, and maybe she was even younger than that. Scrawny. She had put up a fight, and there had been no choice but to knock her around pretty good. Her right eye was puffed up, and blood was crusting beneath her nose. It had been a bad day for her already.

  About to get worse.

  “Milton!”

  Lundquist looked back at the RV, its flanks peppered with bullet holes and studded with buckshot.

  No reply.

  “You got until I count to five, and then Agent Flowers is going to get badly hurt.”

  Nothing.

  “One.”

  Just the sound of the rain.

  “Two.”

  The rain, beating on the roof of the Winnebago, drumming on the brim of his hat.

  “Three.”

  Morris Finch looked over at him with sudden concern.

  “Four.”

  He reversed the rifle, holding it by the muzzle and the receiver.

  “Five.”

  He swung the rifle like a bat, the stock catching her on the side of the temple and knocking her out cold. She was unconscious before she fell sideways, landing with a wet slap.

  “You did that, Milton,” he called out. “I didn’t want to hurt her. That was your doing. It’s on you.”

  Nothing.

  “You don’t come out of there with your hands up, Milton, the next thing I do, I promise you, someone’s not waking up.”

  When Milton called back, his voice was cool and even. “I’m going to kill you, Lundquist. I’m going to kill you and every one of you out there. No one escapes. That’s a promise. You can take it to the bank.”

  Lundquist felt a shiver pass up his spine, but he knew the others were watching him, taking their lead from his example. He was their commanding officer, and he dare not show any weakness. Instead, he set his jaw and looked over at Leland. “Bring him over here,” he said, pointing at Arthur Stanton.

  Mallory screamed out.

  Leland hauled him across, kicking him in the back of the legs so that he fell to his knees.

  Lundquist held the muzzle against the boy’s head.

  “Your call, Milton. You want this on your conscience? It’s up to you.”

  MILTON CLOSED his eyes and tried to think around the pain. He had heard Lundquist strike Ellie, and he knew that he wasn’t bluffing about what he was going to do next.

  No doubt about it: Lundquist was in it up to his neck now. He had started to kill, and the only way to see himself clear was to keep on killing. He had nothing to lose. Milton didn’t doubt that he had hit her. He didn’t doubt that he would kill her, too, if he thought that was what needed to be done. He didn’t doubt that he would kill all of them.

  Milton opened his eyes, looked down at the bloody fabric knotted around his bicep, and knew that he had to get out.

  There was nothing he could do for Ellie, Mallory, or Arty.

  He was trapped.

  He had no weapon, and he was surrounded by men who did. The second they saw him, they would put a dozen rounds into him.

  He couldn’t help anyone if he was dead.

  Maybe there would be nothing he could do for them.

  Maybe they had just struck a rich seam of bad luck.

  But if he could get away himself, maybe they would take them somewhere.

  Maybe he could come back and help them.

  A lot of maybes.

  One certainty.

  One thing for definite.

  He would keep to his word.

  He would murder every last one of them.

  He grimaced from the effort of propping himself back against the seat. He looked around with fresh eyes, not searching for a weapon, but for a means to escape.

  And then he saw it and knew what he had to do.

  “Ellie,” he yelled out. “Mallory! Keep it together. I won’t forget about you.”

  “Milton!” the girl called out.

  “Get out of the RV,” Lundquist ordered, his voice tight with tension.

  Milton crawled on his belly to the front of the RV as another fusillade stitched across the panel to his right, the bullets passing through it easily, leaving jagged blooms of metal in their wake. Rounds ricocheted, pots and pans were struck, ringing out as they toppled from their shelves and thudded against the carpeted floor. A digital clock on the wall was blown off its hook, spinning to the floor and smashing into pieces. A framed picture of Mallory and Arty fell onto him.

  He kept slithering, arm over arm, until he reached the driver’s seat. A flight of four steps led down to the door at the front of the cabin, but only half of it was panelled with glass. He wouldn’t be seen.

  The keys had been left in the ignition. Milton had no idea whether the engine would still work. He thought of the bindweed wrapped around the wheels. When had it last been fired up? Had it been cared for? Was there any gas in the tank?
If it hadn’t, or there wasn’t, he was dead. He slithered another half foot, reached his left hand to the gas pedal and then snaked his right up above his head, finding the key and twisting it as he pumped down on the gas.

  The engine croaked and spluttered.

  Come on.

  Now Lundquist knew what he was trying to do.

  “Fire!”

  A parabola of glass fell onto him as the windshield was blown inwards.

  Milton twisted the key a second time.

  Come on.

  The engine coughed and barked and then fired, a thin rumble that he could feel through the floor. The RV had been left in gear, and it jerked forwards. He reached down with his right hand and yanked up on the handbrake, then punched down on the gas. The RV bumped as the wheels rolled over the chocks and then picked up speed. The firing continued from all sides, rounds lancing in through the denuded window and punching out again through the roof, another shotgun spread blowing out the windows at the rear.

  He remembered which way the Winnebago had been left, its nose pointing back up the rough track to the entrance to the hollow. Milton hauled himself to his haunches, bracing himself against the seat to mitigate the lurching roll as the RV struggled out of the hollow. He reached up to sweep the fragments of glass from his scalp and dared to raise his head above the lip of the window. The road into the trailer park ahead was blocked by the Explorer and, behind that, a van and a police cruiser that hadn’t been there when he arrived. He swung himself up onto the seat, jagged flakes of glass scratching at his legs, the wind from the open window rushing around him. The engine was screeching in first, and he took the stick and crunched down into second, wrenching the stiff steering wheel just in time to avoid slamming the RV into the gatepost.

  He looked in the big side mirrors: the one to his left had been destroyed, but the other one was intact, the men left in the Winnebago’s wake following after it on foot. He saw muzzle flashes as two guns fired, the bullets winging into the RV and ricocheting off with metallic pings. Milton crashed into the rear of the Explorer, bouncing it out of the way. He would have preferred to have been in something like that, something with a little more power than this old heap, but there was no time to change vehicles.

  He gave himself a thirty-second head start.

  He had to make it count.

  PART THREE

  Chapter 23

  MILTON SPED through the trailer park and out onto West McMillan Avenue. He swung the wheel and hauled the RV around to the right, passing the junctions with East Court and West Court Streets before reaching the crossroads that bisected Falls Road. He ignored the stop sign, skidding around in a wide loop and bouncing off the row of parked cars outside the offices of North Coast Realty. Metal crunched loudly and alarms sounded, a pedestrian shrieking abuse at him, as he stamped on the gas again and changed up to third.

  Behind him, he heard the sound of a police siren.

  He looked down at the speedometer. He was doing fifty, and the engine was already protesting. He might be able to squeeze sixty out of it, if he was lucky, but no more. The RV wasn’t built for speed, and what was more, this one had been idle for a long time. It had been a small miracle that it had started at all, and he didn’t want to push his luck.

  Wind was lashing his face and stinging his eyes. He swerved around two cars waiting for a red light, slaloming between oncoming traffic from the left and the right, a cacophony of angry horns sounding in his wake. He pulled out to overtake a logging truck, trunks lashed down to its bed, and swung in ahead of it just in time to avoid another truck coming in the opposite direction. Two more angry horns sounded as he pulled away.

  The northern outskirts of town were marked by the railroad, a single track that led to Marquette to the east and Duluth in the west. The railroad signal ahead was flashing red, and the bells were clanging, and with no other cards to play, Milton counterclockwised the wheel hard and screeched around to the left, teetering on two wheels briefly until the RV straightened out and all four wheels touched down again. Railroad Street ran alongside the tracks for a mile, and Milton followed it, the road dipping down and then climbing again, racing by the cheap prefabricated housing that abutted the line. The siren grew louder and, as he looked back in the mirror, he saw the blue and red lights of a cruiser as it turned off the main road and sped along in pursuit. It was directly behind him. It was coming fast. He would never be able to outrun it and, if he stopped, they would shoot him. He had to go someplace they couldn’t follow.

  The engine began to splutter. Milton looked down at the dash again and saw that the fuel gauge was showing empty.

  Come on.

  The asphalt ran out, and the road continued as a bare, unadopted track littered with fist-sized rocks and pocked with cavities that crushed the RV’s ancient suspension as it bounced over and through them. He lost speed, but the cruiser did not.

  It drew nearer and nearer.

  He heard the big train before he saw it, a low, throaty rumble that grew louder until he saw the orange locomotive heading right at him. A triangle of headlamps glowed brightly down the tracks, and clouds of black fumes spewed out into the night. The diesel’s horn shrieked as the driver saw the RV barrelling towards him.

  Milton gripped the wheel tight and kept his foot down hard, pressing the gas pedal to the floor.

  The cruiser was close, twenty feet behind and narrowing the gap, but Milton didn’t mind that now. He wanted it to be close. It suited what he had in mind.

  He swung across to the right of the road, leaving enough space for the car to accelerate on his left. He turned and looked and saw Lundquist at the wheel, the flashing lights pouring into the cab. Michael Callow was in the passenger seat, the window open, a shotgun pointed right at him.

  Too close to miss.

  Milton waited until the last possible second, so near to the massive diesel that he could see its registration stencilled across its flank and then the angry face of the driver in the lit cab. He heaved the wheel to the right, the RV bouncing up the small embankment until it reached the track, the front wheels buckling as they crashed over the leading rail and skimmed across the second. Its forward momentum, although rapidly retarded, was still more than enough to send it down the embankment, steeper on this side, and the front of the RV buried itself into the ditch that separated the railroad from the field beyond. The sudden impact propelled Milton from the seat, bouncing him off the wheel. His head crashed against the dashboard and his vision dimmed. His ears filled with the indignant roar of the train’s horn.

  Milton’s head swam and, as he opened his eyes, he saw two of everything. He wanted to rest, to let the screeching noise in his head subside, to assess the bellow of pain from his left arm. His hearing corrected itself, and the screeching became deeper, an angry ululation as the train thundered by.

  The train… the train…

  He came around.

  He had only bought himself a little time. The cruiser would be on the other side of the train, Callow with his shotgun, and now Milton had no transport to use to get away from them. He had to get clear and spend the advantage he had won to put some distance between them.

  He reached his left hand for the handle next to the door and started to pull himself out of the seat. The pain in his arm intensified. He let go and probed with his right hand. His arm was tender and sore, and the harder he pressed, the worse the pain became.

  But there was no time to worry about that.

  The Winnebago was tilted forwards at fifty or sixty degrees. The angle pressed his chest against the wheel. Milton turned so he could reach his right hand over the back of the seat and pulled himself back into the salon, grabbing the back of a chair, an open cupboard door, the table’s single leg, anything within reach. He didn’t have the time to make a proper search, but he knew he couldn’t just run. He had already decided that he was going to hide in the woods until he had the chance to assess the situation, but his bag, his rifle and all his gear were still bac
k in the Sheriff’s Office in Truth.

  He had to find the essentials.

  He looked for Mallory’s pack, but she must have left it in the Pontiac. No way to get that now. He would have to improvise.

  He found a bag in the cupboard. There was a first-aid kit above his head, and he yanked it off the wall and stuffed it into the bag. He grabbed a saucepan from where it had fallen to the floor and shoved that in, too. He found a flashlight in a cupboard beneath the sink, a nylon line that was used to dry clothes, another kitchen knife with a serrated edge, cable ties, a roll of dental floss from the bathroom and a small bottle of alcohol-based sanitising gel.

  He yanked the drawstring tight, tossed the bag to the front of the RV, and scrambled after it, pulling himself through the empty window of the driver’s side door and dropping out into long grass between the trunks of the trees. He reached in and hauled the bag out after him.

  The train was still coming: freight cars loaded with logs and then a line of black tankers, warning notices proclaiming that they were filled with ethanol. The noise was immense, a deafening clatter as the brakes slowly brought the mile-long convoy to rest. That was fortunate. The railroad would have been clear much more quickly if the train had just continued onwards.

  Lundquist, Callow, and the others had two choices. If they wanted to keep their vehicles, they would have to drive to either end of the train and cross the track there. Or they could wait for it to come to a complete stop before climbing through the boxcars and coming after him on foot. Either way, it had probably bought him an extra five minutes.

  Milton slung the bag over his right shoulder and then forced himself between the small trees and bushes, struggling through the vegetation until coming out the other side. He recognised the wide field of corn although he was a long way from where they had entered when they had started their trek the day before yesterday.

  Milton ran into the field, each stride sending a flash of pain up from his arm. He stumbled on a deep rut, righted himself, and kept going. Lightning flashed overhead, and he could briefly make out the line of trees, underbrush, rocks, and, beyond that, the darkest of the deep forest and the slow climb up the flanks of the mountains. The lightning flickered away, and darkness fell once more.