All Souls: A Gatehouse Thriller

by Karin Kaufman

  “Back here,” Nathan said in a raised voice. “Left of the office door.”

  I made for the office door, stopped, then moved to my left. “It’s me,” I whispered as I crept into what appeared to be a large, L-shaped sunroom. Claude was fifteen feet ahead and to my left, behind a cluster of large potted shrubs in the short part of the L, and Nathan was just a few feet in front of me, his eyes on a monitor.

  “Five men,” he said, just loud enough for Claude to hear. “Two veering left, three straight at us.”

  What was it with ex-Gatehouse men and their sunrooms? Then and there I promised myself I’d never buy a house with a sunroom or floor-to-ceiling windows. In fact, I’d bar every first-floor window and door and build a damn moat around my house.

  “The four in the front wore armor,” I said.

  “Get behind that planter,” Nathan said, tipping his head. “Take the one on the far right.”

  Moonlight glinted off a Sack’s weapon. They were feet away, slithering in the rabbitbrush and piñons. I adjusted my grip on my pistol and trained my eyes on the window farthest to the right. That was my focus, my end of the deal. That bastard would not pass.

  They rose and stormed the windows as one, firing as they came, shattering the glass before them. I emptied five shots into the Sack on the right. At least two hit above his armor. He dropped a handgun and staggered backward, blood gushing from a facial wound, and I pivoted left, ready to fire again, but the other Sacks had already been hit.

  Amid the chaos, and in my drive to take down my own Sack, I hadn’t heard Claude’s shotgun or Nathan’s 9mm, but they had dropped all four of their Sacks. Claude, his knees to the ground and his weight on his heels, was behind the planters, his right hand clamped over his left arm just above the elbow as blood seeped slowly through his fingers. Nathan saw him too, and rushed to his aid, telling me to keep an eye on the monitor.

  “It’s just a gash, I think,” I heard Claude say. The sound of fabric tearing was followed by Nathan’s concurrence. “Grazed the top. You’re going to need stitches, though.”

  “I’ve got thread, alcohol, and a needle. Want to help, Jane?”

  I shot a look at Claude, who was grinning ear to ear, waiting for my reaction to his question.

  “No.” I turned back to the security monitor. “Don’t find it especially funny, either.”

  “See anything?” Nathan asked.

  “I don’t see any movement.” I waved a hand at the broken windows while keeping my eyes on the screen. “They can just stroll in now, can’t they?”

  A single shot rang out from the direction of the kitchen. I gasped and wheeled toward the hallway. “We’re OK!” Zack shouted. “It’s OK!”

  “What are they shooting at?” Claude said.

  I heard a creaking sound from above and lifted my eyes to the ceiling. The noise stopped. Glancing toward Nathan and Claude, I saw they’d heard it too. Claude had grabbed hold of his shotgun and was ready to move. I’d counted down to one round left in my mag, so I dropped it, took a new mag from my pouch, and palmed it in. Another sound, rafters under the weight of feet, came from my right. I followed the sound, bending my neck as it traveled over and past me. There were at least two Sacks on the roof. So not all the bastards were on a suicide mission. Some had learned tactics.

  “Into the hall,” Nathan commanded. He shouted to Zack and Hall, telling them to watch the windows along with the front door.

  We hunched together in the center of the hallway, Claude facing the back of the house, Nathan facing the bedrooms to the right. I was focused on the hallway ahead and the only room to the left. Something rustled from behind the room’s closed door. “This door wasn’t closed before,” I whispered. “I’m sure.”

  Still crouching, Nathan angled toward the door, nudged me to the other side of it, and signaled for me to stay low. He stood. When he put his left hand on the doorknob, I steadied my weapon. He turned the knob and swiftly kicked the door wide, bringing his left hand to his pistol and firing twice before my eyes could register what the black blur before me was. I shifted my aim to another blur on the right, fired three times, and it fell.

  “Hold,” Nathan said. His gun still trained on the room, he called out for Hall and Zack to stay focused.

  We’d hit both Sacks in the room. They’d forced the window open, using the sunroom break-in and gunfire as cover, then cut the screen away. But creaking rafters meant Sacks were still on the roof. This was no random attack—striking this or that house on the chance a porter or Gatehouse member lived there. Not with eleven dead Sacks and counting. Who the hell was tracking us? And how? For the first time since becoming a hunter, I found myself fighting to keep my composure. Hyperventilating, grunting between breaths—I was doing the whole nine yards.

  Nathan put a hand on my shoulder. “I don’t think there are more than two on the roof, and they may be rethinking their plan.” He tossed his chin at the bedroom where the two black-clad Sacks lay. “They know those two didn’t make it.”

  For a full minute we listened for anything that would give away the remaining Sacks’ positions. They were paralyzed with fear on the roof, I imagined, in too deep to turn back but seeing with sickening clarity the certainty of their own deaths if they attacked us.

  Claude’s eyes narrowed as he looked to the ceiling. “They might try to burn us out.”

  Nathan hesitated, listening. “You’re right.”

  Nathan ordered me into the kitchen. He and Claude were on their way outside, he said, and they would return the same way—through the sunroom and down the hall.

  “Code word?” Claude said, looking from me to Nathan.

  “Penguins,” Nathan said.

  Claude frowned. “That’ll work.”

  “Shoot at anything else,” Nathan said to me before hurrying after Claude.

  Bending low, I inched down the hallway, pausing at the doorway to the kitchen and announcing my arrival to avoid spooking Zack and Hall. Zack’s eyes widened and locked onto the ceiling as I explained what the Sacks planned to do. “Eyes on the windows,” I said, jabbing him with an elbow. “They can’t drop in through the roof.”

  At the sound of gunfire I ducked, smacking the back of my head on a table leg but managing to keep both hands on my gun. In my peripheral vision I saw Hall flat against the wall under the gun rack.

  Something thudded on the roof, then something else. Then something rolled, soft and heavy, over the shingles and toward the gutters. For the next few minutes, footsteps, unguarded and businesslike, rumbled across the roof. “I think Claude and Nathan are checking the Sacks on the roof,” I said. I heard another rolling sound. “Then knocking them off it.”

  Soon after, I heard Nathan shout “Penguins” as he made for the kitchen. “It’s Nathan,” I said, relaxing the grip on my gun and feeling the tension leave my arms and shoulders.

  “What the hell’s penguins?” Zack asked.

  A strangled laugh escaped my lips. “Never mind.”

  I looked over at Hall, feeling generous in our victory, wanting to include her in the celebration. She’d lowered her hands, I noticed, but her eyes and her weapon were pointed toward the hallway and her finger was on the gun’s trigger. She’d heard me say the voice in the hallway was Nathan’s, so what in hell was she up to? A shudder of fear ran up my spine. I trusted my senses. “Drop it, Hall,” I said. With a turn of my wrist I aimed my gun at her chest.

  Without moving her gun, her eyes swiveled toward mine.

  Chapter 19

  Nathan entered the kitchen first, his gaze dropping immediately to my gun then over to Hall. He froze. “Don’t move,” he said. “Either of you.” Claude stepped around him and flicked the switch under the gun rack, turning on the house lights.

  Nathan stood over Hall and extended his hand. “Give it to me, now.” Hall protested and he cut her off, repeating his order. He held onto her gun as he turned to me and demanded my pistol. I handed it to him, grip first, then rose to my feet. “S
he has an ankle holster,” I said, feeling a little like a schoolgirl snitch but not caring one iota.

  Nathan twisted back to Hall and held out his hand.

  “No, that’s asking too damn much,” she said, rising, after a momentary struggle, from the floor. “What about her?”

  “What about me?”

  “What else have you got?”

  “Nothing on me,” I said. God, how we must have sounded.

  “Elizabeth.” Nathan made a give-it gesture with his fingers. “I’m not going to stand here and argue with you. We have things to do.”

  “This is nuts.” She bent down, lifted up her pant leg, and removed her Walther. Looking Nathan in the eye as she straightened, she put her left hand under his extended hand and slapped the pistol onto his palm, briefly holding that hand-and-weapon sandwich. I’m giving in, but I want you to know I’m pissed off and this isn’t over. She obviously thought Nathan could be intimidated—or she hoped to chip away at his leadership of our little group. She didn’t know you couldn’t bruise his confidence or erode his sense of right and wrong. It wasn’t possible.

  “What’s going to happen to hunter girl there?” Hall said, folding her arms across her chest, the fingers of her left hand clamping onto her upper right arm. “She pointed her weapon at me.”

  “You’re damn right I did!” I flung out my arm. “You were aiming down the hall—”

  “I was prepared—”

  “After you heard Nathan.”

  “I was listening for—”

  “After you heard me say it was Nathan.” I was jabbing my finger at her, wishing I could cross the room and jam a fist into her windpipe.

  “I heard Jane,” Zack said, at last speaking up. He tucked his Ruger into his holster and sunk into a dining chair.

  Hall, keeping a vise-like grip on her right arm, leaned sideways for a good bullying look at him. “Shut up. What do you know, cowering in the corner?”

  The whole time Nathan had been watching Hall and me, taking in what we said but remaining above the fray. Now he focused on Zack, briefly, then looked back to Hall. I couldn’t read him at all.

  “Enough,” he said. “Jane, check the kitchen monitor.”

  As I walked to the circuit box, passing the unlucky Sack who had taken the first of Claude’s shotgun blasts—to his face, removing most of it—I felt bile rise in my throat. Stepping over a corner of the front door, near where the Sack I shot in the neck lay dead, I saw spatters of bright red blood just inside the door and on the cabinets in typical arterial spurt patterns. Claude’s warm, comforting kitchen looked like a slaughterhouse. There were no movements in any of the cameras, I announced after a minute.

  “We need to get their names first,” Claude said, “then take the bodies outside.”

  Nathan crossed the blood-coated kitchen and retrieved a small notebook and pen from a drawer under the coffeemaker.

  “I was scared, OK?”

  I looked back at Hall, waiting for her to elaborate, to explain how being scared, like all the rest of us, caused her gun to rotate 180 degrees.

  “There were so many of them this time,” she said. “And I know they want me.”

  “It’s because that Sack wouldn’t stay dead,” Zack said. “He was saying something.”

  “What Sack?” I asked.

  Zack directed his eyes at the Sack I’d shot in the neck. “That one in the doorway.”

  “What did he say?” Nathan asked.

  “I didn’t hear him say anything,” Zack replied.

  I closed the false circuit-breaker door on the monitor and looked back at Zack, unsure of what I’d just heard. “What do you mean?”

  He pointed at Hall. “She heard him.”

  Nathan told Hall to take a seat. She complied readily this time, sneering at Zack as she did. “I’m not she. I have a name, and I saved your ass a few minutes ago.”

  “What did he say, Elizabeth?” Nathan crouched down, studied the Sack, then put two fingers to his carotid artery—a move I thought completely unnecessary, given the amount of blood that had left his body and the multiple bullet holes in his neck. The Sack’s eyes were open, his mouth hanging wide, and God, he looked no older than twenty.

  “He said someone’s name. Robert Roberts.”

  It came and went in the flutter of an insect’s wings, but I saw it. The expression that flashed across Nathan’s face told me that something was very wrong. More wrong than thirteen dead Sacks in and around his friend’s house. He told Hall he had never heard the name, but I knew different.

  After checking the Sacks for tattoos and writing down their names, we towed them out the front and back of the house, depositing their bodies so they couldn’t be seen from the road or driveway, and nailed plywood sheets over the broken sunroom windows. Most of the Sacks had been young Desires and Alarms, and two of them, including the one I shot in the sunroom, had been women.

  Hall, who had volunteered to sew up Claude’s wound, had done a surprisingly gentle job of it. I wouldn’t have let her near me with a needle. He had laid his 9mm on the dining table by his right hand before letting her cut away what remained of his shirtsleeve. Remembering his speed and precision in firing shotgun rounds at the Sacks, I was sure—so was Hall—that he could reach his handgun before a needle could inflict serious damage. Claude had put Hall’s and my backpacks temporarily out of reach, and Nathan had my pistol. They were waiting until we calmed down, but I resented the vulnerability Hall’s action had imposed on me.

  We were supposed to catch a few hours’ sleep before leaving at sunrise, with Nathan taking the first watch and Claude the second. They wouldn’t call for a clear-out until we were all on the road, Claude along with us. Hence towing the Sacks outside into the frigid night air so they wouldn’t turn green and swell with body fluids right there in the kitchen.

  Holding Claude’s shotgun in the crook of his arm, Nathan had slipped around the layers of plastic trash bags we’d hung where the front door used to be and headed outside. I saw him from the kitchen table as I sat with the others, all of us downing more coffee. He wasn’t walking the perimeter so much as wandering. He was as alert as ever, scanning the distance as well as nearby groves of trees, but he wasn’t cutting a discernible pattern.

  Pushing out of my chair, I stepped around the blood ponds and streaks in the kitchen and lifted Claude’s radio from the windowsill. A bloody mist dotted the mesh screen over the radio’s speakers. Wincing, I gingerly turned the knob until the voice on the radio was sufficiently loud, then drew back my fingers, wiping them on my jeans. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said over my shoulder.

  Nathan had planted himself on the driveway, halfway between the house and the highway. I trudged toward him, the sound of snow crunching underfoot, mentally auditioning my opening line. Respectful, tentative—that’s what it had to be. As he swung to face me, I dropped the whole tentative thing. “I have some questions I need answered.”

  “I’ll do my best,” he said, glancing at me then looking toward the highway. “Let’s walk toward the gate.”

  “No, I mean I really need answers,” I said as I followed him. “And I turned on the radio so they can’t hear us.”

  “I’ll tell you what I can,” he said over his shoulder.

  “There’s a lot you don’t tell me.”

  He stopped and turned back to me. “There’s a lot I can’t tell you. You know that.”

  “You know what, Nathan? As a porter you’re the best, but as a friend you suck.” It was a nasty, unfair punch, but I was angry. In Colorado he’d given Hall my full name without telling me, and here he’d casually dismissed the fact that he might be dead now if I hadn’t been alert to Hall’s shifty moves. Hell yes, I was angry.

  He punched back. “We’re not shopping at the mall, Jane.” He looked away again, searching the shadows and moonlit hills.

  So that was how he wanted to play it? Fine. “Then let’s not dance around this. What the fuck’s with Hall? You know damn
well she was aiming her gun at you. And that pig-assed Sack was dead before she shot him. You saw the fucking arterial spray five feet up on the fucking cabinets.”

  His head snapped around. “Don’t talk to me like that.”

  He was angry, as angry as he’d been when I told him I buzzed, and my stomach pitched. It was my turn to look away. Nathan had responsibilities and burdens I didn’t even want to know about, let alone carry. Even Kath had never gotten a mouthful like that from me, and there were times she had deserved it, well before she revealed herself as Mother of Crows.

  Before I could chicken out, I told him I was sorry, and he resumed his watch over the ranch and highway below. “We’re all tired,” he said.

  Not exactly words spoken in acceptance of an apology. At best they were a statement of tolerance. He assigned me human beings to kill and I killed them—so why did his approval matter so much? I stuffed my hands in my jacket pockets and hunched my shoulders against the cold. It was only the first of November, but winter had taken up residence in the New Mexico high country. Moonlight on the snow, pale on pale, chilled me to the bone. All the scene before me lacked was a lone coyote howling for his missing brethren.

  “And for the record,” Nathan said, with a backward glance, “I noticed the arterial spray. He was standing when he was shot, and that shot obviously killed him. I also noticed a second, almost blood-free bullet hole in his neck. Let’s get in the car.” He tipped his head and started out for our rental SUV.

  I pulled myself up to the seat, yanked the door shut, and faced him. “I didn’t realize you’d seen the second bullet hole too,” I said.

  Angling the shotgun toward the backseat, he peered through the driver’s window and windshield then shifted slightly in his seat to face me. “It wasn’t the best time to say something.”

  “I know.” I rubbed my hands over my eyes. The skin around them felt puffy and old. “I mouth off.”

  “You notice things other hunters don’t. It’s hard to keep quiet when something’s staring you in the face and it seems like no one else sees it.”