Somehow, he managed exactly that, even if it was incredibly difficult. But he fought through it—Stay on your feet, goddammit! Stay on your feet, or you’re a fucking dead man!—and remained upright as his prey, now his attacker, stepped away from the door and raised his rifle to aim.
Smith flung the baton at the man just as he pulled the trigger—
Pop! as the rifle fired and Smith felt the heat trail of the bullet as it zipped! past his head, coming a few inches—maybe closer—from taking off a chunk of his right ear.
But it’d missed.
That was the important part.
It’d missed!
He thought he might have heard the pek! as the round hit something wooden behind him, way back on the other side of the barn, but Smith was too busy lunging forward again just as the man pulled the trigger a second time—
Pop! as the rifle bucked in the man’s hands and the round went wide, this time pekking into one of the stable doors nearby.
Before the man could fire a third time, Smith was inside his defenses and grabbing the rifle by the barrel with one hand, while his other struck the man in the chin. The head snapped back, and before it could come forward again, Smith hit it again—this time in the turned cheek.
Then again, in almost the same spot.
And again.
The man’s body slumped against the door as Smith wrestled the rifle out of his grip. Not that Smith let up. He had to be sure, even though he could see blood dripping down the right temple along the man’s head. Apparently, Smith’s baton had done more than just distract the shooter; it’d landed and broken skin.
Smith drove one knee into the man’s gut, even as the body slackened. Then, as his attacker, now prey again, was halfway to the floor, Smith smashed the buttstock of the man’s rifle into his face, because why the fuck not?
The man crumpled in a pile on the floor, his back against one of the doors.
Groaning from behind him.
Smith turned just as the man he’d shot with the TASER picked himself back up. The guy was already on his knees and was staring at Smith as he reached for his holstered pistol. But he was having difficulty getting a grip on the weapon, and after a while, gave up trying to perform the act with one hand and began using both.
Smith walked the short distance over and struck the man in the face with the buttstock of his newly-acquired rifle. The man’s nose shattered, and blood sprayed the cold air, not that Smith gave a damn. When the man collapsed to the floor, his drawn gun falling next to him, Smith stepped over him, legs on both sides of the man’s prone form, and looked down.
The man stared back up at Smith, his face a bloody mask. Smith couldn’t tell where the blood began or ended. “Don’t, please,” the man said, holding up both hands. If he even remembered about his fallen pistol—it lay dangerously close to him, easily within reach—he hadn’t reached for it.
“What’s happening outside?” Smith asked as he pointed the rifle down at the man and slipped his forefinger into the trigger. He was slightly out of breath and his stomach was hurting, but it was better than being dead.
“What?” the man said. Smith hadn’t just gotten him in the nose with the buttstock of the rifle, but part of his mouth, too. His lips were split, and he might have lost a tooth or two because his words were slightly slurred.
Smith didn’t feel very much sympathy for the man. He was pretty sure his own mouth was cut. Fortunately, he seemed to still have retained all of his teeth.
“Outside,” Smith said. “Who’s attacking the ranch?”
“I don’t—I don’t know,” the man said. He hadn’t lowered his hands.
“You don’t know, huh?”
The man shook his head. “Please. Don’t kill me. I didn’t do anything.”
“You didn’t?”
“No.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you,” Smith said.
Pop!
Then he walked back to the first man, still sitting against the door. Unlike his partner, this one didn’t get up or beg for his life. As far as Smith could tell, he wasn’t even moving.
Pop!
Luckily, two more gunshots inside the barn, in the midst of the ongoing chaos outside, didn’t draw any attention.
Smith took off one of the men’s gun belts and slid a Glock into the holster while a 1911 Colt went behind his back. He left the other rifle on the floor and hurried to the back of the barn to get the women.
It was time to make his exit.
Nineteen
He couldn’t see a damn thing from the first floor of the barn without opening at least one of the double doors, and he didn’t want to do that. It would expose him to not only gunfire (he still remembered that “stray” round that had nearly taken off the heads of one of the men he’d killed) but anyone who might be looking in his direction when he did.
Fortunately, Smith had other options.
While Mary and the other women waited on the first floor, he climbed up a ladder to the second and scooted his way along the darkness over to one of the windows. It was smaller than a door and less likely to be noticed when he eased it open and peered out.
It was a full-blown gun battle, all right, and it was still going on.
There were two factions that he could see: One was inside the main two-story house, the staccato flashes of their muzzles flickering in the darkness as rifles fired from windows on both floors. They were exchanging fire with people camped out among the hills, but the other side wasn’t constrained to that location. Some of the attackers had made it onto the ranch’s property, and he could see more muzzle flashes from within the fence, some firing on the house from a couple of the outlying supply shacks.
It was difficult to tell who was winning, if anyone was. The attackers were pushing in on the house, pelting the building with bullets. Whoever the attackers were, they had either shot out all the spotlights that had nearly blinded Smith earlier, or the ranchers had shut down the generator, because Smith couldn’t hear it humming anymore. The other possibility was that the attackers had taken the machine out, which was also possible. At the moment, the only lights Smith could see were coming from within the house, creating strange otherworldly glows along the corners of the windows the shooters were using to return fire.
Smith looked for but couldn’t find any casualties along the ground. Either the sides had retrieved their dead and wounded, or there hadn’t been any. He found that hard to believe, given how long the fighting had been going on.
Ten minutes? Twenty? An hour?
Who knew how long they’d been at it before he popped out of the barn basement and heard the shots for the first time. Hours, for all he knew, but that seemed unlikely since Gruff and Not-So-Gruff had come to fetch Mary as if it was just another day on the job for them.
The more obvious answer was that he’d heard the start of the fighting, or close enough. Not that that meant anything—
A strand of sunlight started to peek out from one of the hills in the distance.
Smith glanced reflexively down at his wrist, but there was nothing there. They’d taken his watch. Not that he needed a timepiece to be able to tell that morning was fast approaching. An orange glow was starting to wash across the landscape in front and all around him.
That prompted Smith to lower the window slightly so as not to be spotted by either faction. He left it propped open just enough to be able to see out and in both directions, but not enough to—
“Ron!” A voice, shouting. Then, again, “Is that you?”
Ron?
Smith leaned closer toward the crack in the window and turned toward the source of the voice: The house.
Then, the same unseen voice, just as loud as the first time, “Hey, Ron!”
It took Smith a couple of seconds to realize the voice was shouting in his direction.
Guess I wasn’t being as slick as I thought.
Whoever had spott
ed him sneaking a peek thought he was Ron. So who was Ron? It had to be one of the two men that had fled into the barn earlier, that Smith had shot, and were now lying dead below him.
Again, the same voice, “Ron! Answer me!”
Smith tried to pinpoint the speaker but couldn’t locate him. The man had to be in one of the house windows facing the barn, but from his vantage point all Smith could make out were the edges of naked window frames, the glass themselves having been shot out earlier in the gun battle. Although Smith couldn’t see the people inside the house, it was clear now that they could see him.
But not enough of him to make out that he wasn’t this Ron person, apparently.
Smith cleared his throat slightly, before shouting back, “Yeah! It’s me!”
“Ron?” the same voice asked. Smith couldn’t be sure if the man sounded suspicious or relieved to get a reply.
“Yeah!” Smith shouted. “It’s me!”
“Where’s Mack?” the voice asked.
Mack?
Then: Ah. Mack. The other guy.
“He’s here, too!” Smith shouted back.
He waited.
One second.
Two…
Three…
Smith was about to call back when—
Pek! as something struck and sliced through the wooden board that covered up the window in front of him, about half a foot over his head.
Shit!
Smith dropped to the floor, eating a handful of stray strips of old hay as he did so. The round hadn’t been close, but it’d felt like—
Move move move! he thought just before he did just that, about half a heartbeat before three more rounds pelted the piece of flimsy wood and a trio of hot lead entered the barn loft at almost the exact spot he’d been lying in.
Fortunately, he’d had the wherewithal to move just in the nick of time and was spared one or two or all three of those bullets going right through his stupid forehead.
Smith didn’t stop rolling until he was well clear of the window frame and the shooting had stopped. Just to be safe, he rolled a few more times, putting another few yards between him and the streaks of orange-ish sunlight pouring in through the newly-made holes.
He scrambled to his knees, then began scooting cautiously away from the front of the barn. Why the hell were they shooting at him? He thought he’d gotten away with it, impersonated this Ron guy, whoever he was. He’d even “confirmed” that Mack was still alive.
And yet, they’d still shot—
Pop-pop-pop! as a torrent of gunfire rang out nearby from the main house, and rounds began pouring through the flimsy barn wall all around him.
Smith spun and ran, then all but jumped through the hole in the floor. He bypassed the ladder entirely and went flying through the opening and—
Crashed into the first floor.
He landed, thankfully, in a big pile of hay.
Hallelujah! he thought as he listened to the continued volley of gunfire and the resulting pek-pek-pek! of rounds hitting, then coming through the second floor of the barn above him. Wood splintered and pelted the loft, and more than a few strips floated down through the opening above him.
“John, are you okay?” Mary, running over to him. “Are you okay? Are you shot? Are you shot?”
“No, I’m fine,” he said.
It was technically true, even though his back felt like someone had cracked a 2x4 piece of lumber across it, then did it again five more times. He supposed it was better than if he’d landed on the hard ground and not the stack of hay, which had cushioned his fall.
He stumbled up to his feet, slipping slightly on all the strands of hay. Mary helped him up and out of the pile, and Smith spent the next few seconds brushing hay off his clothes and out of his hair.
“What happened? I heard gunshots,” Mary said.
She had the other rifle slung over her shoulder, along with the other gun belt, a 1911 pistol in the holster. Smith had considered giving one of the other women either the rifle or the handgun, but he remembered how Mary had handled herself with Peoples. Besides that, she was probably the least traumatized of the five women, so the choice was pretty easy.
“They took a few shots at me,” Smith said.
“A few shots?” Mary said. “It sounded like everyone was taking a shot at you up there. What happened? I heard you shouting back at them. What did you say, exactly?”
Smith glanced toward the front doors, across the barn. The other women were scattered between him and Mary. Smith looked past them to make sure both double doors remained closed. They were, so the shooters hadn’t tried to storm in to finish him off. Not that he was surprised by that. To do so, they would have had to brave the property grounds, along with whoever was attacking the ranch.
The two dead bodies had been moved away from the doors and to the side. One of them was Ron and the other was Mack.
Or were they?
“Why were they shooting at you?” Mary was asking him.
“I think I was bamboozled,” Smith said.
“What? Bamboozled? What’s that mean?”
Smith couldn’t help himself and smiled. The voice from the house had asked for Ron, and when Smith had responded—impersonating Ron—had inquired about Mack. Smith had “confirmed” that Mack, too, was fine.
Then they’d shot at him.
With a vengeance.
Why? Because there was no Mack.
Smith stared at the two dead guys. One of them was definitely Ron, but the other guy wasn’t Mack. Whatever his name was, Smith had fallen for the trick. The shouter from the house had used a fake name to check if he really was Ron, and Smith had failed the test.
Slick bastard.
“Did you see who they were fighting?” Mary was asking him.
Smith shook his head. “Just shadows and muzzle flashes.”
“So we still don’t know if they’re friendlies or not.”
“No.”
The gunfire had resumed, this time going back and forth between the ones hunkered down in the house and the attackers on the outskirts of the property. Smith couldn’t tell if the unknown faction had made it closer while the ranchers were trying to kill him from the sporadic pop-pop-pop of their exchange. He’d need to get another look at what was happening to find out. That was going to be tricky now that the house people knew he was out here, and he wasn’t one of them.
Anne, with the other women in tow, walked over to where Smith and Mary stood. The young woman who had been down in the basement the longest was Jackie, while the oldest of the group was Carol. Anne’s little sister was Jessica. Smith wanted to say he got to know each and every woman in the last few minutes since they all escaped the underground room together, but all he really knew was their names. The truth was, he didn’t want to know more than that.
All four women looked even more haggard with the extra light that was filling up the barn from the coming morning. Their clothes were stained and torn in spots, and their hair was a mess. Jackie, in particular, looked almost like a feral animal as she stood in the back of the others, shyly peeking through the bodies in front of her at Smith.
“What are we going to do now?” Anne asked. “How are we going to get out of here?”
“Slowly and carefully,” Smith said.
“But how?”
“Slowly and carefully,” Smith said again. He turned to Mary. “I need you to keep an eye on them.”
“What are you going to do?” Mary asked.
Smith glanced around the barn. “Did you find another way in and out of this place?”
“A side door.”
She led him to a door near the back and just to the left of the room Smith and the women had emerged out of earlier. He hadn’t seen it before because it was still too dark; but now, with their brightening surroundings, it was hard to miss.
“What are you going to do with it?” Mary asked.
“Find out who else is out there,” Smith said. “Then figure out if they’re frie
nd or enemy.”
“Who do you think they are?”
“I don’t know. I’m hoping they might be Mandy’s people.”
“Who’s Mandy?”
It hadn’t occurred to Smith until now that Mary had never met Mandy or knew anything about her people or their fight against the Judge. She’d gone straight from the encounter with Peoples to Gaffney. Unlike him, she’d never had the pleasure of finding herself locked in a shack inside the junkyard.
He glanced over at Anne and the others, but the women hadn’t followed them over. The sisters stood huddled together while Carol and the young one had wandered over to the two dead bodies farther back. He wondered if any of them knew who Mandy was. He remembered what Blake had told him about how they had friends that had been brought here for “reeducation.” Was one of them a friend of Blake’s?
“John?” Mary was saying when he didn’t answer her. “Who’s Mandy?”
No one, now, he thought but said, “A group that didn’t like what the Judge was doing out here, so they were resisting him.”
“You think that’s them outside?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I have to go out there and find out.”
“And if they’re not this Mandy person’s people, but someone else?”
Smith drew the Glock. The holster wasn’t nearly as comfortable or well-designed as the one he was used to, but it would suffice. He tapped the extra magazine in his back pocket to make sure it was still there.
“What happens if they’re the enemy, too?” Mary was asking him.
“Then I shoot them,” Smith said.
“What if there’s a lot of them?”
“I have plenty of bullets.”
Twenty
“I have plenty of bullets,” he’d said to Mary, and he was pretty sure he did. He had ten rounds left in the 17-round magazine that was in the Glock he’d picked up off one of the dead men (either Ron or Mack, or whatever Mack’s real name was), plus the additional seventeen in the unused spare mag he’d located in the man’s pocket. That gave him twenty-seven rounds total.
More than enough, even if he did face an army outside, which Smith didn’t think he was going to have to.
After The Purge, AKA John Smith Box Set | Books 1-3 Page 42