by Mike Mullin
Ed was on my right, another squaddie on my left. All three of us aimed our guns up the stairs. Ed had the shotgun he’d taken from one of the warehouse guards—the only gun that was loaded. “You brought knives to a gun-fight,” I called up the stairs.
I fought to keep my hands steady, to keep the tremors rattling my innards from leaking out. If my gun shook, surely he’d notice, realize I was bluffing. Then what?
The guy at the top stared at us over the tip of the larger knife. The smaller knife flashed in the lamplight, its motion unceasing. “Knives to a gunfight?” he said. “Really? That hoary old saw? It’s not such a bad strategy as you might think, bringing a knife to a gunfight. Within twenty-one feet, the guy with the knife can win every time.”
I didn’t believe him, but it didn’t seem like the time or place to argue the point. “Put your knives down. On the floor. Now!”
He continued in a conversational tone. “If there were only two of you, you’d be dead already. Julia, my throwing knife, would enter your body just above the suprasternal notch. It would puncture both the trachea and the jugular vein. You’d asphyxiate, drowning in your own blood. In the meantime, I’d charge the other guy. His hands would shake—like yours are. He might not even get a shot off, and if he did, it would miss. The first blow with Claudia, my gladius, would sever his arm at the elbow. It’s tough to pull a trigger when your hand isn’t connected to your arm. The second blow, the killing blow, would be an uppercut through the stomach, the liver, and into the descending thoracic aorta. He’d go into hypovolemic shock in seconds and be dead of blood loss within two minutes.”
The other two guys in my squad, Cliff in tow, clattered into the foyer.
“Shoot this guy, Ed,” I said. “I’m tired of listening to him.”
Ed raised the shotgun to his shoulder.
The guy dropped both his knives. They stuck, quivering in the hardwood floor, handles up, ready for fast retrieval.
I charged up the stairs, Ed and the rest behind me. The guy didn’t move, not even when I reached the top and grabbed his knives. When I stood, I was just inches from him, so close I could smell him—an alcohol scent like cheap cologne.
“Where’s Doctore?” I asked.
He smiled and said nothing.
“Ed, watch him. The rest of you, search this floor. Find Doctore. Make sure there’s nobody behind us.”
Ed took the lamp from the floor. I stepped around him to let the other guys past and tucked the gladius into my belt.
I was stowing Julia, the smaller knife, just as the front door near the base of the stairs burst open. A stream of guys dressed in black rushed in, guns raised. I stepped behind our captive and raised his own knife under his chin. He barely flinched.
A forest of rifles aimed up the stairs toward us. “Tell them to put their guns down,” I said, pressing the point of the knife into his chin.
The guy in the lead yelled up at us. “Orders, Doctore?” He very nearly growled his response. “Standish, you idiot. To start with, don’t give the enemy intel—the fact that I’m in charge, for example.”
“Tell them to put down their weapons,” I said. “S-s-sorry, Red,” Standish said.
“You know why they call me Red?” the guy asked. As he talked, the knife I held nicked his throat, a thick line of blood dripping downward.
“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” I said. “Tell them to put their guns down!”
“Red is the color of the knife, the color of blood, the way of iron, the way of the new world, the world of men. Our laws are the ancient laws, the Laws of Steel,” Red said. His voice crescendoed to a shout, “We are!”
“The Reds!” the men below us screamed in unison. “Johnson!” Red called.
“Sir!” a guy in the middle of the pack yelled back. “Standish failed me. You are hereby promoted.”
“Yes, sir!” he called back.
“Shoot Standish.” Everyone was still for a second. “Now!” Red hollered.
One of the guys in the front started to swivel, but Johnson was faster. He lowered his gun and shot, hitting Standish in the back with a three-round burst. Standish flew forward, crumpled.
“Jesus,” I yelled, “I almost stabbed you! If a firefight starts here you’re—”
“Cliff led them here,” he said. “Shoot him next.”
Cliff tried to move around behind me, but Johnson raised his gun and shot. Cliff was standing so close to me that I could hear the meaty thunks of the bullets hitting his torso.
“Tell them to put down their guns! Now!” I rammed the knife up into the soft underside of his throat, drawing more blood. “I’m this close to stabbing you.”
Red’s voice came out as a croak. “Do as he says.”
The men in the foyer below us—eleven of them now—laid down their guns. Drawn by the gunfire, the rest of my squad had returned. “Floor’s clear,” one of them said. “Just him up here.”
“Yeah, he’s Doctore,” I replied. “Tie ’em all up. We need to check on the other teams.”
Lynn’s patrol at the west gate had been spotted before they could take out the guards. Lynn was dead. The rest of the squad had overpowered and killed the two Stockton guards.
That firefight had put the guards at the east gate on alert. They pinned down Nylce’s patrol, and things were stalemated until Darla, hearing the gunfire, rammed the gate with her pickup truck, killing the guards who’d been using it for cover. Everyone on Nylce’s squad was okay, but we were down a pickup. Darla seemed to be fine.
“I thought you were going to guard the trucks?” I said when I finally caught up to her.
“I never left the truck,” she replied, giving me a shit-eating grin.
It took what little remained of the night to get organized. I sent Darla and Nylce back to the farm with our two remaining trucks to try to recruit reinforcements. Ed consolidated all our captives—including the guy I’d left at the warehouse—on the main floor of Doctore s mansion, tied and under guard. I split everyone else up into groups: three to guard the east gate, a pair to guard the west gate, a pair to guard the prisoners, two pairs to patrol the walls, and two pairs to patrol the streets of the town. I told the street patrols to enforce a curfew—keep everyone at home, indoors.
We were woefully undermanned. I hoped Darla and Nylce would return quickly and bring a couple of pickups full of help. The one bit of good news was that with all the rifles we’d taken from Red’s soldiers, all our people were armed now. Ammo, however, seemed to be in very short supply—nobody had more than thirty rounds. When I finished setting up all that, Ed and I grabbed a lantern and headed to the warehouse.
It was locked up tight. “Guess we’ll have to bust open the door.” I started hunting for a log to use as a battering ram—both the overhead door and pedestrian door were metal, and kicking them would only bruise my foot.
“Uh, boss?” Ed said. I paused to look his way. He held a ring of keys, jingling them so they glinted in the light of my lantern.
“Where’d you get those?”
“Took ’em off Cliff’s corpse.”
The third key opened the pedestrian door. Inside, we saw a huge stack of electric water heaters, their boxes forming a wall that blocked our view of the rest of the interior. We crept farther into the warehouse. Most of the racks were loaded with oddments—plumbing fixtures, pipes, electrical boxes, and the like. Along one wall, huge spools of wire rested on their sides.
Finally we found the food: a wall of nearly empty shelves with a few forlorn boxes scattered here and there. A case of sugar-free grape Kool-Aid. A dozen tiny glass bottles of saffron. Two cases of Sriracha hot sauce. A few hundred small paper packets of Sweet ‘N Low, Equal, and Splenda in a moldering cardboard box. I’d like to see the Iron Chefs do anything useful with those ingredients.
Farther along, we found the weapons—hundreds of them laid out in neat rows on floor-to-ceiling shelving. Old black powder rifles. Bolt-action rifles. Pump shotguns. Skeet shotguns. A hu
ge selection of revolvers. I didn’t see any semi-automatic rifles, and the few semi-auto handguns looked old and poorly maintained. I also didn’t see any ammo. A huge section of shelving near the guns might once have held bricks of ammo, but the shelves were empty except for a bottom shelf that held three large wooden crates. I pulled the first crate out onto the concrete floor.
It had no top. I lifted my lantern, letting light spill into the box. Inside were hundreds of cartridges—for rifles, handguns, and shotguns—in a bewildering assortment of calibers. Some of the cartridges were shiny yellow brass, others gray—steel, I figured, although I wasn’t sure. The other two crates held the same chaotic mix of loose ammo.
“We can work with this,” Ed said.
“It’s going to take too long. It’s almost dawn. Let’s carry a box to the east gate and sort it while we wait for Darla and Nylce to get back.”
“Yessir,” Ed replied.
“Don’t ‘yessir’ me,” I said.
“Nosir.” Ed grinned, a rare crack in his normally grim visage.
I laid six of the best-looking rifles on top of the wooden ammo crate. Ed grabbed one of its rope handles, and I grabbed the other. It was heavy—barely manageable between us. We trudged to the gate, reaching it just as the black sky began to fade to the yellow-gray of morning.
Steve McCormick was there with another guy. They were working on the gate, trying to complete a jury-rigged repair of the hinges Darla had shattered when she rammed it. “All quiet?” I asked.
“So far,” Steve replied.
Ed and I knelt in the packed snow behind the wall and started sorting ammo. I found five cartridges for one of the bolt-action rifles we’d brought with us. It looked like a twin of Uncle Paul’s hunting rifle, and I’d learned to fire that over the last year, although Darla was a much better shot than I was. “I’m going to go check on the patrols and the west gate. Get as many rifles ready as you can—we’ll need them when Darla gets back. If you see anyone coming, fire two quick shots. That’ll be the signal that you need reinforcements. I’ll tell everyone.”
“Got it,” Ed replied.
“If it’s Darla and the truck, fire once.”
“Yessir.”
I rolled my eyes at his yessir—a useless gesture, given how dim the early morning light was—and took off jogging alongside the car wall, looking for our patrols.
It took me almost two hours to find everyone. We were spread ridiculously thin—seventeen people to patrol a town that still held hundreds of terrified residents. I ended up back at Doctore s mansion. Our captives were sprawled across the living room, their arms and legs bound. The two guards I’d left there were sitting on folding chairs near the door, overseeing. The prisoners had been complaining about the lack of breakfast. I told our guards to gag anyone who got too annoying; I didn’t plan to hold anyone long enough for them to starve to death.
Just as I finished that unpleasant conversation, I heard a gunshot—not from the east gate, but closer. Did it mean Darla was back? If so, why wasn’t she at the east gate? I left the mansion, running down the street in the direction I thought the shot had come from.
I caught up with one of our patrols about two blocks off. “You guys fire?”
Kyle Henthorn, a burly, red-faced guy in his early thirties, replied, “Had to fire a warning shot. Guy came out of that house.” Kyle gestured with his rifle at a house across the street. “Didn’t want to go back in. Had to put a little scare—”
A rifle shot echoed across Stockton, and Kyle fell suddenly quiet. There was a short pause, and then two more shots rang out, coming from the direction of the east gate.
“The attack signal. Come on!” I dashed pell-mell toward a side street that would carry me in the direction of the east gate, with Kyle and the other patroller close behind me. We had to get there fast—if we were being attacked, there was no way Steve, Ed, and one other guard would be able to hold them off.
It seemed like it took forever to get back to the gate, even though it couldn’t have taken even five minutes. Stockton’s not that big of a town. I didn’t hear any more shots, which I took as a good sign.
As I approached the gate, I saw the pickups pulled up just inside the wall. Darla was back! I slowed to a trot—I was exhausted and starving. I’d had next to no sleep the night before and no food for nearly two days.
The people on the wall were silhouettes in the dim, morning light. I tried to pick out Darla; I hoped she was still in the truck, but I couldn’t see through its windows.
Knowing Darla, she’d be on the wall, even though she had to be at least as tired and hungry as I was. And I knew she was still weak from her injuries at the hands of the Dirty White Boys.
As I scrutinized the figures on the wall, one of them turned toward me. She—I thought, although I couldn’t tell who it was—raised her arms over her head, waving them back and forth frantically What was wrong? I broke into a sprint.
Chapter 10
The woman abruptly quit waving. Everyone on the wall fell flat all at once. I ran even faster.
Darla had obviously brought two full truckloads of reinforcements; there were about twenty people crouched behind the wall or the low log gate. Every one of them had a long gun—Ed must have gone back to the warehouse for more—and were aiming at the road beyond the gate.
Several hundred yards past the gate, I saw a panel van slewed diagonally across the road. Behind it, the top of a semi was visible. Dozens of figures were clustered around the van and spread out to either side, aiming rifles back down the road toward us.
“Get your idiot ass out of the middle of the road,” Darla shouted.
“Take cover, sir,” Ed yelled at the same time.
I veered—putting the edge of the car wall between me and the guns—and sprinted the rest of the way to the gate.
“What’s going on?” I gasped.
“Right after I turned onto Highway 78 about halfway between here and Warren, a line of trucks came over the hill north of me,” Darla said. “They chased us all the way back here.”
“How many?”
“Two panel vans and nine semi tractor-trailers.”
“Same ones that were loading the pork from the warehouse in Warren?” Ed asked.
“Must be,” Darla said.
“This doesn’t need to turn into a fight.” I pulled my coat, sweater, and shirt up from my belly. My undershirt rode up too, exposing my skin to the frigid air. I yanked the undershirt down and started trying to tear off a hunk of it.
“What’re you doing?” Darla asked.
“I need a white flag,” I said.
“Are you crazy?” Darla exclaimed. “You’re not going out there.”
“We’ve got their leader, they’ve got our food.” I struggled with the shirt. It wouldn’t tear. “Someone’s got to go explain things—work out a trade.”
“Someone,” Ed said. “Not you.”
“I’m not asking anyone else to take a risk like that! What if they start shooting?” The shirt was incredibly frustrating. No matter how hard I tugged, it wouldn’t rip. I took the knife off my belt.
“I’ll go,” Darla said.
“No!” I jerked the knife so hard that I nicked my belly.
“That’s no good either,” Ed said. “Say they take you hostage. He’ll do anything to get you back.”
Darla scowled and stepped away, moving along the inside of the car wall.
“He’s right,” I said as I finished cutting off a chunk of my T-shirt.
Darla had reached an old Chevy Silverado. She grabbed a piece of conduit, ripping it free of the brackets that held it to the underside of the car. The wires inside the conduit didn’t break, though. “They made these old trucks too dang well,” she muttered as she yanked on the conduit, trying unsuccessfully to break the wires.
I stepped over to her. “He’s right, you know. I’d do anything to get you back. Anything.”
“Let me see your knife.”
I handed i
t to her, hilt first. She took it and started sawing away at the wire. I stood and watched quietly.
The chunk of conduit came free, and Darla handed back the knife. Our gloved fingers touched as I took its hilt. “I know,” she whispered.
“I’ll go,” Ed said. I hadn’t even noticed him following us. He grabbed one end of the hunk of cloth I was holding, but I didn’t let go. “If they take me hostage, nobody’ll care.”
“No,” I said, “I’d care.”
“He’s right.” Darla handed the conduit to Ed. It drooped from his hand, a bit too floppy to make a really good flagpole.
“I can do it,” I said, pulling on the rag.
Ed held the rag tight. “But you shouldn’t.”
“Alex,” Darla said softly, “let go.”
I dropped the rag, and Ed tied it to the top of the conduit. He handed me his rifle and held the improvised flag high over his head. He walked slowly toward the gate, waving it over his head. Darla and I followed as far as the gate so we could peek above it.
Ed’s march from the gate to the panel van seemed interminable. He held both hands above his head, one waving the white flag, the other open and turned out toward the enemy. When he was about twenty yards from the panel van, two guys ran up and patted him down. Then all three of them walked slowly around the panel van, disappearing from view.
That made me uncomfortable. What would I do if Ed never came back? Send someone else? Go myself? It wasn’t that I distrusted Ed; the last couple of days had changed my view of him forever. The problem with the past is that you can never truly escape from it. Ed would always be a former member of a flenser gang. But despite his cannibalistic past, he’d saved my life—probably twice— and been there for me in every way that mattered yesterday during the fight and its aftermath.
Darla was leaning against the car wall beside me. I turned and muttered to her.
“What if he doesn’t come back?”
“He’ll come back.”
“They might not let him.”