“This isn’t good,” Cali said as the last of the cameras showing the Shed went blank.
Sam pulled out a drawer in the workbench and tossed a submachine gun and some magazines to Juan. He dug around in another drawer and pulled out a combat shotgun and hefted it to Cali along with some black padded straps looped with shotgun shells.
He looked at CG. “You want a gun?”
“No. I don’t think so,” he said with a wave of a trembling hand.
Sam dug in another drawer and tossed a cylindrical object to CG. “High-power flashlight,” Sam said. “Doesn’t shoot bullets. Doesn’t go bang. Puts out a light bright enough to blind a man.”
Bullets smacked into the wall from outside. They could hear metal squealing as the rounds penetrated and embedded in the layered walls. It seemed to come from all four sides of the Shed all at once.
“Goddamned hit squad,” Sam said as he searched the interior for anything else that might aid them. The gunfire was now so steady and continuous that it sounded like rainfall. Dust fell from the reinforced rafters above them, and they started to cough.
Juan raised his shirt over his mouth. “I’m going to check for weak points.”
“I’ll come with you,” Cali said.
CG played the flashlight’s beam around the Shed’s interior plywood walls, shielding his eyes with his other hand. He jumped as the light reflected off the black-orbed eyes of a stuffed mountain lion perched above the door. Closing his eyes for a moment, he took a deep breath and resumed searching the walls. Across the open floor of the Shed was a lofted storage area, and the light reflected back at him from a dust-covered mirror. Had he not shut his eyes at the last moment, he’d have been blinded. CG looked over and saw Sam shaking his head as he resumed searching along the wall, kicking at buckets to see if there was anything of use in them.
“I’ve seen this horror movie before,” CG said to himself. “And we’re all going to die.”
With tactical flashlights mounted underneath the barrels of their guns, Juan and Cali moved through a doorway into a small bathroom off to the side. Juan flicked on the light.
Toilet. Sink. Mirror. Single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.
Beyond the toilet was a step-in shower with a drawn curtain. It was faded yellow with gaudy blue figures on it that might have been clowns. They exchanged a look, and with Cali covering him with her shotgun, Juan threw back the curtain. It was a cramped, empty space with standing room for maybe two people. They sighed.
As they turned, the lightbulb on the ceiling flickered off and back on.
In the mirror Juan thought he saw a flash of movement behind him. He scissored his feet to face the open doorway.
It was only CG playing his flashlight beam over the nooks and crannies of the main room.
Before Juan turned back to the bathroom, he realized how quiet it was now.
The gunfire outside had stopped.
“Think that’s a good sign?” Cali said.
“Probably not.”
They shouldered up and moved to the door on the other side of the sink.
This time Cali opened it.
Their twin flashlight beams crossed over a bare mattress lying on the floor against the wall. Juan couldn’t find a light switch.
Cali stepped into the room behind him and gasped.
In the shadows immediately to their right loomed a stocky figure, an upraised massive fist about to strike her.
32
Siege
Juan’s submachine gun sprayed two three-burst shots into the figure’s chest. Hair and plaster exploded into the air.
Cali spat out a tuft of fur as she looked up at the grizzly bear mount reared up on its hind legs with one paw extended toward them. The six rounds had chewed through the hide in a close cluster within the bear’s heart circle.
“Jesus,” Juan said, and wiped the back of his hand over his face.
Cali punched Juan in the shoulder. There was a closet in the corner, and she cleared it, prodding its interior with the barrel of her shotgun. By the light of her shotgun flashlight, she could see an old Soviet-era rifle leaning against one corner with a couple boxes of cartridges next to it.
“Hell’s going on in there?” Sam called out from the main room.
“Paul shot a bear,” Cali said as she and Juan came back into the main room.
“Scared the hell out of me,” CG said.
There came an audible click from the Shed’s breaker box, and the fluorescent overhead lights hummed out of existence, leaving only thick, oozy darkness, three gun-mounted tactical lights, and CG’s high-power flashlight.
“That ain’t good,” Sam said. “They found the generator.”
The gunfire outside resumed, a steady shelling coming from at least three directions. Dust again trickled from the rafters.
CG played his light toward the far wall, where Sam was digging about in the dark near some bunk beds under the partial loft. Sam crouched behind a bunk bed he had moved out from the wall so he could rest the machine gun against the frame. When CG’s flashlight beam got too close and illuminated Sam’s serious face, Sam raised a threatening hand.
CG lifted the light beam along the wall and over the projection of the loft’s floor and across the boxes and crates and barrels up there and the figure of another bear—a smaller black bear—and an old refrigerator and a man in black who was pointing a rifle down at him.
Several things happened all at once then.
CG yelled, “Shit!”
Sam tensed behind the machine gun.
Cali fired off a round at the intruder.
The man’s rifle erupted in a downward trajectory that chipped the concrete floor. Bullets ricocheted around the room, and CG gasped and fell to the side.
Juan’s tactical light revealed another man in black military fatigues and snake-eyed facemask on top of the loft, and he sprayed the man with controlled bursts of submachine rounds, aiming a little low to account for the subtle muzzle hike as he held the collapsible stock against his shoulder.
Wood splintered through the darkness amid the confused, scattered beams of flashlights. The man fell backward without making a sound, his body pelted after getting a single shot off at Juan that had grazed his arm.
“Get the fuck down,” Sam roared, and fired his .44 magnum at the bedroom doorway where a black fatigued man slithered out. The man was too quick, though, and ducked back inside the room.
Juan ran over to CG and dragged him along the concrete floor to the wall.
CG tried to scrabble to his feet, and raised the high-power flashlight at the bathroom doorway as another assailant sighted on him. The man screamed and fired blindly, missing CG by a few feet.
Cali turned and unloaded buckshot into his chest.
CG turned his head in time to see a hole open up in the wall behind him and a fluorescent, snake-eyed facemask peering in. With teeth clenched tight, CG thrust out with the ribbed front end of the flashlight, shoving the head out into the night with a groan.
Sam kept his gun and flashlight trained on the loft as Juan quickly cleared the bathroom and bedroom.
Suddenly all was quiet again.
“I don’t like this,” CG said as he backed away from the hole in the wall.
“Makes two of us,” Cali said. “It’s too quiet.”
Juan cocked his head. “Do you hear that?”
A soft hissing sound was starting to permeate the blackness.
Sam flashed his light around. “Probably some kind of knockout gas or teargas.” His flashlight beam stopped on the newly-made hole in the wall, where a cloudy gas was coughing into the room.
The hissing sound grew louder as Juan covered his ears. He played his flashlight over his teammates and saw that they weren’t covering their ears.
It’s so loud. Can’t they still hear it? he thought.
He blinked, fighting the sensation to scream as the hissing reached a sort of crescendo as if amplified by speakers outside the bui
lding. He felt the blackness of the room spinning before him as if he was trapped in a madhouse filled with squeals and squeaks and screams.
His vision started to blur, and he slammed his fist against a workbench.
He was vaguely aware of Sam rushing over to the hole in the wall and bracing a bucket filled with motor parts against a scrap of plywood.
For a few moments longer, the hissing continued in Juan’s ears, and then the hissing died away to a whisper.
CG’s eyes jumped from teammate to teammate. “Did we make it?”
A sudden pounding on the door punctuated the silence.
Everyone looked at each other as if unsure of what to do. Juan mentally gauged his spent ammo and the remaining rounds still on him.
“Let me in,” a voice said. “Quickly, before they come back.”
Sam ran to the back of the room and got behind the machine gun. After spitting to the side, he brought his shoulder to the pad.
The knocking came again now, more insistent.
Juan sprinted up to the door. There was more gunfire and then a grunt from the other side. Juan glanced back at Sam and then threw back the bolts, walking the heavy door backward. A man in jeans and a polyester shirt fell into the room. As soon as the man was inside, Juan pressed himself up against the door and closed it.
The man on the floor dropped his gun and held his hands out to the sides with his fingers splayed.
Juan stepped away from the door and looked down at him.
“Agostino?”
“What the hell are you doing here?” Sam said.
Agostino sucked in a breath as he applied a rag to his bleeding arm. “Short story is that Aguilar asked me to follow you guys. Thought you might be up to something connected with Rockwell’s disappearance. He really doesn’t like you,” he said, looking at Juan.
Cali frowned.
“I followed you in my car at a distance until you started slowing down. Then I parked in the ditch and ran along the tree line to keep up. When I reached the lane, I saw men creeping in out of the fog. It wasn’t long before the gun show started, and I took cover until it died down.” He wiped his sweaty face before continuing.
“The way they moved . . . They seemed to glide over the ground like ghosts. I shot one of them in the back four times. He just gave me a look and sauntered off into the trees. I don’t think they can die.”
“If they breathe, they can die,” Sam said as he picked up the machine gun and trained it on the loft, which had partially collapsed. He ordered CG to keep shining the high-power light around the walls in case they mounted a second wave. For the moment, the gunfire had come to a stop.
Juan and Cali inspected the bathroom again, with Agostino tagging behind. Half the sink was on the floor, and the toilet had a pronounced crack in it.
And the shower curtain was closed.
Juan’s eyes bulged. He looked at Cali, and she nodded.
She raised her shotgun and fired twice. The curtain sprang and clawed at the air, and Juan ripped it clear from the hooks at the top on the shower rod.
There was a hole in the wall just big enough for a man to shimmy through.
Cali cursed, and Agostino made the sign of the cross.
“I’ll watch this hole with my gun,” he said. “You two finish checking the building.”
Breathing hard, Juan and Cali moved to the bedroom. In the light of their flashlights, they saw the soles of black boots slither through a hole in the wall that had not been there previously.
Juan rushed to the hole, and looked out and saw a man in black slipping away into the darkness.
“This is creepy as hell,” Cali said.
Juan bumped up against her shoulder as they checked the closet again. “I thought you like scary movies.”
“Not when I’m in one.”
Juan knew what she meant. He was having a difficult time holding his gun steady as evidenced by the jerky movements of his flashlight beam. Usually a gun pressed tight against his palm calmed and soothed him.
If that hissing starts up again . . . he thought. He had never before experienced an episode like that. The closest way he could think to describe it was his mind having an allergic reaction.
He and Cali backed out of the bedroom with Cali keeping her shotgun trained on the hole in the wall.
“These look like thick walls,” Agostino said. “Must have cut the holes with some kind of laser during the gunfight.”
Out in the main room, Sam rooted around in what was left of the loft. “I can’t believe none of those men are here. As many rounds as we pumped into them, at least one of them should be dead. It ain’t natural.”
He shivered and climbed back down after glancing through a hole in the wall above the loft just wide enough for a man to fit through. “I don’t even see any blood,” he said as he reached the ground.
“I think they must be human, you know, but I don’t know,” Agostino said from the bathroom. “Maybe they’re . . . I dunno.”
“They’re human alright,” Cali said. “I cut one of their throats earlier.”
Agostino wiped more sweat from his brow. “Either way, we need to get out of here. We’re sitting ducks. They’ll slaughter us on their next attempt.”
Juan cleared his throat. “I saw one of them running toward the tree line out back by the ruins of the greenhouse and the pot fields. With any luck, they’ll set off one of Rockwell’s booby traps.”
“Did you get a look at my truck outside?” Sam asked Agostino.
“They slashed the tires. It’s not going anywhere.”
“What are we going to do then?” CG said.
“We can take my car,” Agostino said. “That’s assuming they didn’t slash its tires, too. It’s about a half mile, maybe a mile away. They might try to follow us, so we’d have to be fast.”
“But it’s dark outside,” CG said. “How are we going to see?”
Agostino pointed at the moonlight streaming in through the hole in the loft wall. “Looks like the moon came out from behind the clouds.”
CG put his palm to his forehead. “That means they’ll be able to see us, too.”
“Not if they can’t see us in the fog,” Agostino said with a weak grin.
“You think they’re still watching the door?” Juan said.
Agostino nodded. “They’d have blown my shoulder off if I hadn’t thrown myself into the doorway earlier.”
“We could go out the hole in the bathroom,” Cali said. “It’s the biggest, I think.”
“No,” Sam said, perhaps a bit too quickly.
“Afraid you won’t fit?” Juan said as he ejected a nearly empty magazine from his gun and snapped in a fresh one. “I think you’re the only one of us not bleeding.”
Sam grunted. “I’m not scared.” He scratched the back of his head. “Fine, let’s do it. But we wait until they trigger a trap.”
Not a second after he had spoken the words, a blasting roar shot up from the earth and shook the foundation of the Shed.
CG swallowed. “I guess we’re going now.”
They ran blindly through the fog and trees and tall grass, and Agostino led them to his car right where he said it would be. It was a subcompact, and Agostino had the car in Drive before all the doors were shut.
“I’m sure glad you guys trusted me,” Agostino said.
Juan tensed, half-expecting Agostino to pull a gun on them from the driver’s seat, but the man did no such thing.
“You didn’t have to open that door to let me in. You could have let them come for me and stab me and drag me off into the trees. You didn’t know it was me out there. I . . . owe my life to you guys. Shit. I’m still shaking from it all. I’ve never been in a firefight like that before.”
“You did good,” Sam said, his wide shoulders twisted so he could lean his head back between the headrest and the rear passenger blind spot. He took up so much space in the small car’s back seat that Cali, who was sitting in the middle, was bunched up against
Juan.
“Give me some space, will ya?” Juan said to Cali. The sound of the rough road passing under the car kept everyone but Cali from hearing him.
“Gee, I’m sorry,” Cali said, unclipping her belt buckle and squirming backward, nestling herself against his chest. Her hair was frizzed up and dusty, and it was in his face, but Juan didn’t mind.
He slid an arm around her and let it rest on the inside of her thigh, amazed that she was okay with this. Even though he was bushed from the night’s activities, things felt right with her pressed up close to him. He could hear her soft breathing as if she were about to doze off to sleep. He couldn’t believe this.
He looked around the car; everyone seemed to be sleeping. No one was paying them any attention.
Juan lifted his hand and let his knuckles glide over her warm cheek.
“Stop it,” she laughed. “That tickles.” She jabbed her thumb and finger together and dug into his side.
He jerked upright and pinched her back on the arm.
“Ouch,” she said.
“Serves you right,” he said with a laugh. He looked over at Sam. Out like a light. He looked at CG. He was in the front passenger seat, and the seat was as far forward as it could go so that Sam’s knees weren’t crushed against the back of the seat. CG’s own knees were jammed up against the glove department. He was snoring.
“It’s all so funny,” Juan said.
“What’s so funny?” Cali said, and turned to face him. The moon provided just enough light inside the cab for him to see her face, the curve of her smooth cheeks and her perfect nose and white, straight teeth. And her lips. Those lips he just wanted to kiss. “Well. Go on,” she said.
“Go on what?” he said.
“Kiss me.”
“Kiss you?”
“Juan, sometimes you are just so stupid.”
He craned his head closer to hers as she looked up at him, so beautiful in the light of the crescent moon—a killing moon—and he placed his mouth against hers . . .
And it felt all wrong.
It felt cold.
The Colombian Rogue Page 22