“What?” she demanded, a confused frown on her face. “You need to leave my house—“ she began, a split second before she saw the knife in his hand coming toward her throat.
The knife cut into the woman whether Cisco could shout her name or not. She bled out and died at his feet just the same, too. He stared down at her and watched her arms twitch as she gave up her grip on life and stared at him with pained, wide eyes. Her makeup was ruined, he noticed absently. It took longer for her to die than he’d expected.
He turned and faced an outraged, angry group of men, who had suddenly remembered they carried a lot more weapons than a mere knife. But so did Cisco. He nodded.
The three loyal soldiers he’d brought from his camp stepped around the corner, weapons up, and cut down every man in the room. It was over in seconds.
Cisco found himself watching the black specks that floated on the edge of his vision, teasing him and flitting away if he tried to focus on them too much. He blinked, growling at the momentary distraction. His men were already picking through the remains of the little group and pocketing ammo and prizes.
“Come on,” Cisco growled, forcing himself to speak slow so they could understand his mangled speech. He limped from the house and his three-man vengeance squad followed. As he staggered down the steps into the backyard, a new idea formed in his tortured mind.
Across the street sat the house that had stymied him for so long. Attack after attack had failed. He turned and looked up at the second floor of the ghost house. The window he’d used to watch his storm raiders hadn’t been repaired. The gauzy curtains billowed out and moved in the breeze like the sides of a living creature.
During the storm, Jenkins had stopped him from personally crossing the street and attacking Cami Lavelle’s house. Cisco tried to grin. Jenkins wasn’t around to stop him anymore.
He turned and squinted at the Lavelle house. “Follow me.”
He limped his way down the driveway, his squad behind him, and made it to the road before the first person at Lavelle’s house noticed them. A shout went up and the kid ran back around the house. Cisco heard someone hammering away at something, like they were working on repairs. People straggled in from all corners of the neighborhood, the results of the feinted attack on the east side that he and Jenkins had worked out.
Cisco grunted. The house had taken a beating, between his attack and the hurricane, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t give two rats for the house. He wanted Cami Lavelle. He wanted to see her face as she died under his hand. He wanted her to know that she didn’t have any power over him. That she couldn’t stop him.
“What do we do, boss?” asked one of the men behind him as they approached the house. Several voices rang out in alarm from the back, and he could hear doors slamming and people moving inside as well. There were a lot more people than he’d expected but it didn’t matter. He only had to kill one.
His men, though…they could have plenty of fun. He swept his good arm toward the house and the bloody knife glinted in the sunlight. “Kill them all.”
His mad dogs laughed and darted ahead, two to the left, one to the right. In seconds, the gunfire started. It gave Cisco all the time he needed to complete his mission. He just needed the black spots in his vision to stay away long enough for him to bury his knife one more time.
He followed his men toward the right side of the house and smiled as he watched the big bruiser race around to the back. He paused at the corner, fired several shots and laughed at the collective screams that erupted from behind the house.
The front door swung open and a man ran out, glanced at Cisco and lowered his weapon. “Holy—you okay, buddy? What’d they do to you?”
“That way!” Cisco yelled and tried to point with his ruined arm. The man got the message, if not the words.
“They went that way?” he asked, looking around the other side of the house. He nodded. “Get some cover, man—the medic’s inside.” He disappeared around the corner and yelled. After a spurt of gunfire, he reappeared, bloody and crying, then collapsed at the ground near Cisco and died.
Cisco looked away and stared at the front door as he made his way, painfully slow, up the steps and across the porch. His breath came in ragged heaves and his body felt heavy, but every step brought him closer to his goal.
Someone upstairs was crying as he entered the stuffy, darkened house. Several voices called out from what he guessed was the kitchen, so he moved that way. Outside, the gunfire continued unabated. He saw glimpses of people running past windows through slits in plywood attached at every opening.
So that was how they’d held off his attacks so well…clever.
As the fighting crackled all around him, his vision began to shrink and walls of black rose up on either side of him. He scanned the kitchen—the girl he’d first kidnapped worked on someone on the floor, and two people helped. None of them paid him any attention. Blood coated the floor and the table, and open boxes of medical supplies and bandage wrappers had been scattered all over the place. The kitchen was a mess, but the view out the back door brought a smile to his face. Well, if he could smile, he would have.
Several men with construction tools ran for cover as one of Cisco’s soldiers staggered into view, bleeding from multiple wounds, but still yelling defiance and spewing death and fire from his AR-15s, held akimbo and raking the crowd. People in the distance appeared from behind trees and a shed that leaned at a drunken angle out in the yard. Muzzle flashes lit up the shadows, but they were all too scared—adrenaline forced their shots wide or high. His soldiers continued to drop people left and right.
Cisco turned when he heard a voice he recognized come from down a long hallway leading out of the kitchen.
"I swear this is like some kind of dream," a man said.
“It is, now that you’re back,” a woman replied.
It was her. Cami Lavelle—and she was right there. He limped as fast as his shredded body could take him down the hall toward a darkened room at the far end of the house. On the floor, he found an old man, covered in bandages and blankets. But Lavelle wasn’t there. He turned—it had been a trick of acoustics. There she was—just coming into the kitchen from outside.
The door burst open and the man—Cisco recognized him as the assassin Jenkins had sent, who turned out to be a double-agent. He fired most of a magazine from the AR-15 in his hands into someone on the other side of the door. A second later, Darien Flynt appeared in the doorway.
Cisco couldn’t believe his luck.
“Reese!” the corpse on the floor behind him shrieked in a paper-thin voice.
Cisco’s good eye focused just in time to see the man from his camp—the one who’d warned him about Jenkins—spin around in surprise.
“Gah!” he gasped and stepped back, right into the Lavelle woman. “Cisco!” They stumbled back into the wall and he dropped the empty rifle he’d been carrying as he struggled to place himself in front of…his wife.
“She’s your wife?” Cisco called out, ignoring the fact that his voice was horribly mangled and unrecognizable. He looked at Cami. He’d had her husband the whole time and didn’t know it…
The man and woman most responsible for all his pain and frustration stood before Cisco, horrified at his presence, and unnerved enough to freeze. Cisco couldn’t imagine the way he appeared might strike much fear in anyone—he only had one good arm, and the only weapon he carried was a bloody Bowie knife.
“Hey, ugly! I got somethin’ for you…” a reedy voice called out from the floor.
Cisco turned and stared down the barrel of a chromed shotgun, held in trembling, palsied hands by the wheezing, sweating, frail old man on the floor. The remains of Cisco’s lips pulled back as he snarled and raised the knife.
Chapter 31
Lavelle Homestead
Bee’s Landing Subdivision
Northwest of Charleston, South Carolina
Darien was in what remained of the screened in porch when he heard the shotgun go off behind him.
He spun and saw Cisco in the den, looming over Marty. The ex-con staggered back under the blast from the chromed 12 gauge he’d used in the storm, then fell forward, right on top of the old man. Cisco brought a wicked looking knife down with him, too, aimed right at Marty’s chest.
“No!” Darien yelled as he vaulted over a makeshift blueprint table that held the designs for the wall. He crossed the porch in two strides and burst through the open patio door. The acrid smell of a spent shotgun shell made his nose itch as he grabbed Cisco and pulled him off Marty with a furious shove.
The handle of a big Bowie knife stuck up at a gruesome angle out of Marty’s abdomen. The old man’s hands quivered above his stomach and his eyes, wide and bloodshot, looked from the knife to Darien. He wheezed, and a trickle of blood leaked out of the corner of his mouth. His legs thumped in spasms of pain under the blankets they’d wrapped him in, his heels drumming softly on the floor. A red stain rapidly spread from the knife and soaked his blankets.
“Marty!” Cami and Amber yelled in unison. The girl with her first aid satchel was the first to reach his side, sliding to a stop on her knees.
Then everyone was there—Reese, the long-lost husband, Cami, Mia, and Mitch, the radio operator. Even Rufus limped in from the front room where he’d been recovering from his neck wound.
Darien looked down at the bloody mess that used to be Cisco. He frowned. The man’s torso had been shredded in the shotgun blast, but that didn’t explain why the lower half of his face was so disfigured. Darien counted at least three gunshot wounds spread from his hip to his right shoulder. Someone had done a number on the mad man of the forest, and it hadn’t been Marty.
Cisco’s one functioning eye flicked with recognition as he focused on Darien. “Aaarrrlll guulll…guuullll ruuuhhh…” he groaned. The eye narrowed, swimming in a pool of blood and sweat.
Darien shook his head as the others crowded around Marty and cried or shouted orders. Cami broke down in tears while Amber threw herself into saving the old soldier. She cut away his shirt and the blankets, and grabbed gauze from her first aid satchel that never left her side, then prepared to pull the knife free.
“Someone hold him down—help me!”
Rufus and Mitch got down on their knees and prepared to help.
“Dont!” Cami cried.
“He’ll die if we don’t pull it out!” Amber retorted.
“He’ll die if you do!” Cami yelled.
“Ain’t nothing stopping that, now,” the old man wheezed. Everyone fell silent. He looked at Amber. “Do it…”
Darien looked at Cisco again, writhing on the floor in impotent rage. His one good arm flopped about, the grasping fingers still searching for a weapon. Blood welled up from his open chest and soaked the carpet. Darien had never seen such hatred, even in his long career outside the law. Cisco’s wrath had reached out and taken more than a dozen lives, ruined families, and brought untold grief on the whole neighborhood.
Guilt flooded Darien’s soul—he was responsible for all of it. Cisco had been with his original crew when they’d walked off the highway in search of water and shelter so long ago. He’d unleashed Cisco on Bee’s Landing.
All of this…it’s all my fault.
There was no way for him to snap his fingers and make everything right, but there was one thing he could do. He looked down at the gleaming Desert Eagle in his hand. He didn’t even remember drawing it from the holster, but there it was, a solution, waiting to be implemented.
Darien leaned over Cisco, put the Desert Eagle to his forehead and looked down. The psycho grunted something and lifted his head up off the floor, pressing his flesh into the barrel. That baleful eye glared at Darien, daring him to do it.
The boom from the hand canon surprised everyone in the room, most of all Darien. He felt the mighty kick of the .50 caliber pistol travel up his arm, a ripple of energy that made the weapon come alive in his hand. He watched as a single cartridge winked in the sunlight as it flew from the weapon and disappeared out of sight.
What was left of Cisco’s head dropped back to the carpet and a ghastly sigh escaped his ruined body. The grasping hand lay still and the blood that welled up out of his chest slackened to a trickle.
Darien lowered the smoking pistol and looked at the others. “It’s done.”
“Why’d you do that?” Amber shrieked, her bloody hands hovering over her newest patient. The others just stared at him. Only Reese met his gaze with a nod of approval.
“I swore I’d put a bullet in his head and finish his reign of terror. And I did.”
Darien dropped the gun to the blood-soaked carpet with a solid thunk, then turned and walked out of the room. Behind him, the shouting and crying began again in earnest as Amber started to operate.
Spanner, covered in blood and looking like he’d just come from a slaughterhouse floor rushed up around the corner of the house. “Darien! Come quick!” he panted.
The blood drained from Darien’s face. “Is it Jon Boy?”
Spanner shook his head and swallowed. “No—he’s fine, he’s hiding with the kids, I think—it’s Harriet.”
Darien stumbled as he walked across the porch. “What?”
“She’s—“ Spanner’s eyes saw the scene behind Darien. “What the—what happened?”
“Cisco’s dead,” Darien said quickly.
“So’s Harriet,” Spanner replied, looking at the mess on the floor inside. “He killed her…and everyone over there at her meeting.”
Reese stepped into the porch. “Harriet’s dead? Harriet Spalding?”
“Yeah, bunch of others, too—hey, who are you?” Spanner asked, looking at Darien.
“Who are you?” asked Reese. He looked back into the house. “How many new guys are there?”
“He’s Cami’s husband—” Darien began.
Spanner’s eyes opened wide. “He made it back? No way!”
“Yes, way,” Reese grumbled as he came closer. “What can I do to help?” he asked Darien. “I’m sorry…Cami said you two were…close…”
Darien shook his head. All the feeling had left his body. He was totally numb between executing Cisco and losing Harriet in the same five minutes…he couldn’t think. “I’ll handle it.”
“You sure?” asked Reese.
“I’m sure,” Darien replied in a flat voice. “See to the kid. She’s gonna need you now.”
Reese turned back to the house, as if hearing the wailing from inside for the first time. “I…”
Darien didn’t hear him finish his statement. He’d already climbed through the open screen wall and started toward Harriet’s house. Spanner was by his side—that was enough.
“How?” he asked as they jogged across the front yard toward the street.
“I…” Spanner said, at a loss for words.
“How?” Darien repeated as they pounded their way up the long driveway with its collection of once manicured trees.
Spanner stopped and put a hand on Darien’s shoulder. “Dude…he…he cut her throat. I’m sorry…it’s a mess.”
Darien looked down at the ground and listened to himself pant as he tried to catch his breath and wrap his mind around what Spanner had just told him. He spotted a trail of fresh blood on the ground. He turned, and the trail led straight across the street to Cami’s front door.
“You’re sure?”
Spanner gulped air and nodded. “Oh yeah. There’s no doubt. Sorry.”
Darien blinked as he stared at the gravel under his feet. “He came here first. He was looking for me.”
“Mr. Darien!” Jon Boy called from across the street. “I been lookin’ for you!”
“Go—keep him away from here,” Darien said quickly as he waved at Jon Boy.
“But,” Spanner began.
“Just go! I’ll take care of her. He doesn’t need to see—he always liked her.” Darien looked at Spanner. “Please.”
Spanner nodded, swallowed again, then put on a cheerful smile as he turned to intercept
the gentle giant. “Jon Boy! Guess what?”
“What?”
“I found some frogs!”
“Oh boy! Can we go giggin’?”
Darien turned away as Spanner led Jon Boy around the house toward the pond. Spanner had just bought him several hours of peace.
As his vision blurred, Darien started for the front door. He might just need every minute.
Chapter 32
Lavelle Homestead
Bee’s Landing Subdivision
Northwest of Charleston, South Carolina
Cami woke sometime in the middle of the night. She blinked in the darkness of her bedroom, and the stifling heat of the boarded-up house descended upon her and made her injuries itch. She took a deep breath and sighed. Footsteps padded across the room, and Cami became more alert.
Next to her, Reese snored softly. The weight of him, his presence in her bed had allowed her to achieve the deepest, most peaceful sleep she’d experienced since the tsunami. But something woke her…what was it?
Her hand snaked out quietly to the nightstand where she kept a pistol. Before her fingers touched the grip, though, she heard a stifled sob.
"Amber?" she whispered.
"I…I'm sorry…I didn't mean to wake you," Amber replied, just as quiet.
Cami shifted under the blankets and tried to sit up, but winced in pain. "What is it, honey?"
"Sssh…don't worry about it, you should get your rest," Amber said, her voice wavering.
"Wait—what is it?" Cami demanded. "What…"
And then she knew. Without a doubt, without being told, Cami knew that Marty had died. "He's gone, isn't he?"
"Yeah…" Amber replied softly.
"Was the…I mean, did he…" Cami began.
"He was sleeping, I don't think he felt a thing…" Amber said quickly. She stifled a sobbed, then caught herself. “We did everything we could…”
"Oh, honey, come here," Cami said as she reached out her arms in the darkness.
"Mom…" Amber said through sniffles. "I think I'm a little old…"
Broken Tide | Book 6 | Breakwater Page 22