by ML Banner
More importantly, American Freedom Network was down, perhaps for good.
The constant high-pitched ringing in his head now included popping sounds.
He stuck his forefingers into his ears and rapidly wiggled them. He knew it was a futile attempt to clear up what would only take time to unblock. When he removed them, the pops were now more pronounced, and there were many of them. After what seemed like a minute, he realized what they were.
Automatic gunfire.
A hand grabbed his shoulder, startling him. It spun him around so that he was looking at its owner. Aimes’s face was a network of concerned lines; his mouth twisted into shapes and muffled words came out. “Are you all right?” He was yelling, but it sounded like he was in the next room.
“Grimes, can you move?”
He nodded through his daze.
Aimes pulled him up and led him toward the front door.
Grimes put his hand out to block their progression. “Wait, I’m not going out there unarmed.”
Grimes stumbled to a hall closet, reached in, and grabbed his suppressed .300 Win Mag. “Okay, point me at the jihadis,” he said as he slung his rifle over his shoulder.
“It’s not jihadis. It’s some other group of nut-jobs.”
~~~
Corporal Ben Sparks
After the explosion, he dropped the RPG launcher and ran, looking back to inspect his work only after he was a couple of blocks away. The radio building was destroyed, and the antenna appeared to be down.
Several of the town’s residents running to the explosion slowed, asking him if he was okay and did he see the explosion? He ignored them and continued his run. It was easier than killing them. He finally stopped when he reached his truck parked a mile away in the lot of a dollar store. He never understood the American fascination with the dollar store.
He opened his backpack and fished out a bottle of water, sucking it down in nearly one gulp.
He pulled out his RF detector once more and turned it on. Already having the known AFN frequencies preset, he checked all of them. There was nothing registering. He was successful.
Ali Atef smiled at the good fortune Allah had brought to his mission and tried to consider what if anything else he needed to do as he slid into his truck. His handlers had provided him the truck and the radio equipment necessary to track down the infidels’ radio station and stop them from further hurting their efforts.
He was able to track the signal to Texas, but to get any more specific was difficult because they changed their frequencies often. So he’d pretended once again to be a Corporal Ben Sparks. It was his favorite American name. When he arrived in this country from Iran, to use his skills for the war to come, he’d taken it and the life from the American. As Corporal Sparks, he called out to G, who ran the American Freedom Network, pretending to be needing help. When this G transmitted long enough over two frequencies, he was able to pinpoint the exact location of the broadcast.
After finding the antenna and the shack it was connected to by wires, he assumed it was the radio shack that transmitted the signal. The RPG worked perfectly, and now he was ready to go.
He’d first check in with his handlers, and then he’d hopefully be given the ability to fight the infidels at a place of his choice in two days. He had one in mind.
He pulled the microphone to his mouth and pressed the transmit button. “This is 1F8. Come in.”
Ali started up the truck and pulled into the empty road. He’d go north on the main thoroughfare before heading west. He hoped to fight with Mahdi Abdul in Florida. He accelerated.
“1F8, were you successful?”
Ali stopped his truck abruptly.
A convoy of vehicles lined the road in front of him, blocking his way. There were men and women, most half-naked, sitting on top and outside the vehicles, screeching. The lead vehicle was a semi-tractor trailer with spikes sticking out of its front grill. On the top of each spike was a decapitated head.
Ali stared, dumbstruck. He had never seen such a display in America except in their films.
“Repeat, 1F8. Were you successful?”
Ali jumped at the broadcast, more surprised that it had startled him. He reached down and grabbed the microphone again and raised it to his face while glancing up. “This is 1F8. Mission was a succe—”
A 5.56 bullet, shot from the roof of the second vehicle in the caravan, crashed through Ali’s truck windshield, burst through his nasal cavity and exploded out the back of his head, interrupting him midsentence. Ali’s foot slipped off the brake as his head flopped onto his chest. His truck idled forward and slid through the caravan unmolested.
The caravan growled its way down the road, the vehicles’ occupants announcing their entrance to Stowell with shrieking brays and automatic gunfire.
Chapter 21
Sunbay Cove, Florida
Lexi
The man who had whacked Lexi in the head and arms stood over her. His two bloodshot eyes glared at her through a full-bearded face. His searing stare bristled over every inch of her, causing her to shudder.
She wanted to scream, but her mouth was taped, so it would be no use. She tempered her anger, even though she certainly wanted to kill them, but the bastards had taken her gun and her knife from her. She was getting mighty tired of people taking her gun from her. She didn’t even try to rustle away from one of the other two men who held her tightly.
She was just trying to understand what they were doing with her.
The red-eyed man held out a picture to the other two men behind her for their examination. She couldn’t see their faces, only this one. He withdrew it, pulling it back to his own gaze. She caught only the briefest glimpse of the image, and with it came a rifle shot of recognition. It was a picture of her, with Travis and their Aunt Sarah and Uncle David in Tucson, taken over a year ago. How could they possibly have this?
Lexi immediately had a flashback of her time of captivity at Uncle Abdul’s compound.
Never mind what they intended for her. She was in a full panic over what this meant. Can this really be happening again? And how? Uncle Abdul is dead. She watched him die.
She told herself to breathe, to be calm and focus on first getting out of this; then she’d figure out what was going on. She listened to each of her senses now, concentrating on only those things she couldn’t control. Her panic started to subside.
She’d learned this technique of boxing up your emotions firsthand years ago and even much more recently over the last few days. It seemed to be the only way to cope in this crazy world: put your emotions aside and deal with them later, but survive now. With the added skills she was picking up every moment between her reading and Frank’s training, she had many more tools than before all this happened.
Now she needed to use her abilities, both old and new, to get out of this one. Not only would her life depend on it, but maybe Travis’s and Frank’s too, as they still didn’t know these men were here.
She had to get free and warn them.
So Lexi focused on all her senses, like a computer taking in data and processing it, churning through to a solution.
One subtle thing she noticed, within the wet gentle breeze of the Gulf’s salt air, was their smells, or rather lack of them. All people, but most especially men, stank now that showering wasn’t practical. And although these men smelled sweaty and the red-eyed man was malodorous, even so she could pick up hints of soap as if they had just come out of a shower. She stored this piece of data for later use.
A small shudder hit her when she heard them unpack something, and then they roughly zip-tied her hands together. This brought another mental image. It was exactly what she needed. This was the thing that would provide her an opportunity for escape or disruption, and certainly to warn Frank, Travis, and Jasper. She knew how to undo her zip-tie. She waited for the opportunity to start.
The two other men rose from behind her and withdrew their weapons—semiautomatic pistols by the look of them—and
started toward the back door of their house. They walked carefully and quietly, obviously wanting to surprise whomever they found in the house. She had to work quickly.
She pulled a paperclip from the waistband of her shorts. She was glad she kept it against her back so as not to interfere with her survival knife, which she had carried—before they took it—up front. Frank had told her to always carry a paperclip on her, in addition to her gun and knife. He told her there were many uses for it as a tool and a weapon. It would make a perfect tool in this instance.
Both now crept below the window line, hugging the rear of the house, only a few feet away from the door.
From one of her books she remembered a hack for undoing zip-ties using a bobby pin. She didn’t have enough hair for a bobby pin, but a paperclip should do just fine. Apparently, if one used the end of the pin or clip to wedge it under the interlocking ratchet and force it from the teeth of the zip tie, one could pull themselves out of it.
She worked quickly, bending one end out and then sticking it into the zip tie while watching all the men.
One of the two stealthy men already had the screen door open.
~~~
Frank
“Keep trying, Travis.” He glanced at Jasper. “Maybe it wasn’t what we thought it was.” Frank was sure that this guess was wrong, but he wanted to think the best. He didn’t want to accept that Grimes was hurt or killed and what that might mean for the rest of his hometown, Stowell, Texas.
“I’m going to use the head, if it’s all right?” Jasper asked, sounding almost uninterested.
He was right, Frank thought, what-ifs never solved anything. “Sure, it’s off the hallway, and it’s a normal flushing one, not one of those chemical things.”
Jasper nodded and stomped across the creaky floor to the hallway. Frank stepped partially out the door to watch their neighbor. Before he entered the bathroom, at the end of the hall, he seemed to examine each inch of his path, like he was looking at it for the first time. Frank stepped back into the radio room and storage area of the house and then took his place behind Travis. “Do you have frequencies on the other bands or just these?”
Travis lifted his head up from the desk with all the papers, including their notes about the frequencies, and stared forward. “Sorry, Uncle Frank, but this was as far as I got with Ga-Ga-Ga—” Like a broken record, Travis seemed to be stuck on G. His body became rigid and started to shake.
Frank peered down over his head and put his hands on his shoulders. “Travis, are you all—” Frank lifted his head, now pointed, like Travis, toward the back door. “Hey buddy, don’t shoot. You can take whatever you want. We won’t stop you.”
Frank lowered his hands further behind Travis’s back and clutched his rolling desk chair, getting ready to pull him out of the way.
Two Middle Eastern-looking men stalked into their living room, guns drawn. Their eyes kept shifting from Frank to Travis.
“Step away from the boy,” commanded the closest.
“Hey Mohammad,” Frank said, intending to be disrespectful. He remained where he was. “That’s not going to happen.” Frank glanced past the men to the kitchen counter, where he’d left his Glock and shotgun. When he had realized Jasper was their intruder, he’d let his guard down and deposited his only weapons there. They were much too far away, and the men were closing the distance, slowly approaching.
“I will not warn you again,” the man said smoothly. “Step away from the boy or both of you will die.”
~~~
Lexi
Got it, she thought to herself. She felt instant slack and gently pulled until she was able to remove first her left hand and then her right. While the red-eyed man was staring at the house, away from her, she ripped the tape from her mouth and yelled, “Watch out. They have guns!”
Red-eyes spun around wildly, ready to strike her once again for causing so much trouble. But she was already lunging for him. Holding the paperclip firmly between the knuckles of her right fist, she punched him directly in one of his anger-filled red eyes.
He attempted to swing the gun at her, intending to make her pay for her disobedience, when multiple shots erupted from inside the house. He hesitated just enough for Lexi.
She grabbed his gun hand with both of hers, pulling and twisting up, bending his hand back painfully. At the same time, she pivoted and swung herself around him, pulling him to the ground. This time, it was the man who dropped the gun when he hit the ground hard. But she landed on her face, already sore from where he’d punched her, and on her chest, taking her breath away.
Before she could react, she heard the man’s footfalls, but they were scurrying away from her, toward the dock. Twisting her head up but still lying prone, she could see the man was making a break for the boat. She turned away from the dock and caught sight of her gun and knife still lying on the ground where they had thrown them.
Then she turned toward the house, fearful of what had just happened.
~~~
Frank
Frank was a bit taken aback by how things unfolded for them.
After the second command to move away from the boy, Travis swung his left hand around the chair, out of the view of the men. In his hand he was holding a .22 Ruger.
That brilliant boy must have pulled it from the scabbard underneath the desk. Frank accepted the gift, flicked the safety off, hoping there was a bullet in the chamber, and readied himself to push Travis farther into the room, out of the path of bullets. He would have to shoot quick and steady, using his weak hand.
He was about to make his move when two helpful diversions occurred. The first outside involved Lexi screaming; the next, the hallway toilet flushed and the door noisily opened with a clunk—Frank had just about forgotten about Jasper, who said from out of his field of view, “Howdy, fellas.” That was all Frank needed.
He raised the gun and aimed for the first man’s head, who like the other had swung his head toward Jasper, away from them, when he fired the first shot—then another—and another. Joining the music of the little soprano-like pop-pop-pops from his pistol was the beefy tenor of ratta-tatta-tatta-tatta of the Thompson—thank God Jasper hadn’t laid his machine gun down too.
The two men danced as if being electrocuted by multiple jolts before dropping to the floor.
“Lexi!” Frank yelled, bounding to the back door.
Frank heard the sound of an outboard motor as he raced out the door and down the stairs. He instantly saw Lexi standing by the dock, arms down, one holding her gun. She was watching the mouth of the inlet, out of his view. She turned and saw him and gave him a thumbs-up. She was okay.
The motorboat quickly powered through the inlet, hugging the coastline. Using the heavy growth along the shore, Lexi’s red-eyed abductor made sure they couldn’t see him. After a few seconds, the sounds of his boat faded into the Gulf.
Chapter 22
Stowell, Texas
Grimes
Once outside his home, he glanced back. His shed had definitely been blown up, taking the tower with it. He could see that easily from here. And other than some minor damage, his house was in good shape.
Either his ears were starting to clear out or it was their being outside, but he could hear the gunfire loud—and it was everywhere.
They scampered across the street toward Stowell Grocery, ducking behind a curved block wall on the street corner. Posted on each end of the wall was one of their town’s militia acting as spotters. Each was responsible for covering two directions of empty streets with an AK rifle—from the stash he, Aimes, and Cartwright had taken from the local terrorist cell responsible for torching Cartwright’s home. One aimed his weapon to the north and then pointed it west. The other pointed to the south and then the east. Each looked for their newest enemy in one direction, scanning for a few seconds before moving and searching in the other.
Grimes peeked over the edge of the wall. He could hear the gunfire, but couldn’t see the shooters. In the distance, he a
lso heard animal-like screeches, almost like primeval yells, as if they were being invaded by an Indian war party. He spun around and sat hard against the wall, examining his rifle and going through the mental checklist he did before shooting. “Tell me what the hell is going on,” he huffed.
“There’s a crazed group of Mad Max wannabes that just drove into town, shooting up the place. They had Paul’s head and others on sticks.”
Grimes wondered if he’d sustained a concussion during the blast, because what he heard made no sense.
Then the sounds changed direction: they were now coming from the east. Their inhuman cries and pops of gunfire now mixed with echoing car and truck engine groans.
“They’re coming,” hollered the southeasterly spotter in a frazzled voice.
“We’ve got bogies coming from the east on Main,” Aimes howled into his radio. “Pete, you and your men get your asses down Campbell. Maybe we can box them in once they come upon us. Grimes …” Aimes spun to look behind him, sensing Grimes had already left. He caught a glimpse of his friend moments later, hobbling up a ladder to the top of the grocery store’s roof. At the northeastern corner, Grimes signaled thumbs-up and erected his bipod.
“I need you,” Aimes bellowed to his northwest spotter, “up against the horse facility across the street.”
The young man dashed away and diagonally across the intersection, then over a fence and through a field of grass as he made his way to the facility before he was seen. Aimes had just called in two groups from the south, and they were set up and waiting, their position protected by trees and bushes, making them invisible to the approaching hordes from the east.
They were ready.
The Mad Max convoy—Grimes could see what his friend meant—rumbled toward them slowly, halting only a hundred feet from the intersection. The semi-truck in front was the one with spikes festooning its grill, a moving horror show of severed heads on every spike. One of the heads looked familiar. That was obviously the intent. Their goal must have been to scare their victims into submission. It wouldn’t work with Stowell.