Miguel glanced warily at the two figures to his left, Aronson and the boy, Orin. They were also carrying what looked like heavy clubs in the dark but had M16s slung across their backs. For all that he was wary of the damage his own firearms might do to the women, he was doubly concerned about those unruly cannons. An overlong squeeze of the trigger or poorly controlled aim and half a dozen people could be cut to ribbons regardless of whether they were friend or foe. At least the Mormons had changed from their normal outfit, a white shirt, black tie, and slacks, to dark jeans, shirts, and jackets. Some of them had black or navy blue hooded sweaters, which helped them to blend into the night. They were not camouflaged by any means, but it was adequate; it gave Miguel a spark of hope about them. He motioned them to take a break while he had one last peek at their target.
They all dropped to one knee. A few of them prayed in silence. Miguel could hear a bit of Aronson’s prayer.
“Oh, Lord, we pray of thee, give us your strength as we stride forward into battle. We ask that you give us your strong right arm and guide us in our quest for justice …”
Miguel adjusted the night vision goggles to control the bright glow of the burning oil barrels. He scanned the front deck of the club and the driveway to the left, where the agents had dragged couches and recliner rockers from nearby homes to fashion for themselves a handy outdoor party space. He counted eight men in all and two camp whores. As best he could tell, they were all sleeping. There were no signs of the Mormon women. The agents’ horses remained tethered in a well-fenced yard a few streets down.
They were not being guarded.
“All right,” Miguel said in a low voice. “It must be as we discussed back in Leona. Is there any one of you who doubts your ability to do this? It will not be like shooting a man, which in itself is a difficult enough thing to do. This will be much worse.”
He gave Orin a hard stare as he spoke, and the boy blanched but swallowed hard and nodded.
“I—I don’t know,” a voice piped up.
“Adam, be still now,” D’Age warned.
“No. It is good,” Miguel said, taking the measure of the young man to whom Sofia had taken a liking. “Any man who cannot carry this through to the end must speak up now. Once committed, we must not hesitate. To falter in striking is to die. Adam, are you certain you cannot?”
The boy shook his head. He could not have been more than sixteen years old. Miguel had come to know him a little the last two days because Sofia had taken to riding with the boys when she could. Teenagers, he thought. The end of the world and they still cannot bear to be embarrassed by being seen with their parents. Well, at least his daughter was safely hidden away with the women and the horses for now. Adam seemed to struggle to find his voice in the dark.
“It is just that … it’s …”
He petered out, sounding ashamed of himself.
Miguel reached over and gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “It is not a bad thing, Adam,” he said. “To know your own mind and conscience, and to listen to it, that is the mark of a real man. Here, give me that.”
He took the sledgehammer from the boy and laid it against the wall of the shed. He could not carry any more himself, his hands being full with his own massive hammer and the Winchester rifle.
“Give it to me,” a deep voice rumbled. It was Benjamin Randall. He stood a good foot higher than Miguel and was twice as wide across the shoulders. He took up young Adam’s abandoned hammer and hefted it to test the weight. Then he twirled both cudgels experimentally.
“Won’t be a problem,” he grunted.
Miguel glanced back at the Hy Top to make sure nothing had changed.
“Good,” he said softly.
“Adam, you will come with me to get the women. I am most certain they are being held in a room at the back of the club. I observe bars on the window and a padlocked steel door, but we can deal with that. Do you think you will be able to fire a gun? If you have to?”
Miguel was glad to see the young man question himself before nodding, even if he still seemed uncertain.
“I trust you, Adam. And I will need you to trust me.”
He turned back to the wider circle of men.
“The boy and I will cut around the block and approach the club from the rear. Give us fifteen minutes to do that. Then move in and take down the men outside as we discussed. There are two women with them. Not yours. If they try to raise the alarm …”
He left the sentence unfinished.
“We understand,” said Willem D’Age.
Miguel took the precaution of going an extra block when circling around behind the Hy Top, taking Adam up South Cedar Street, an unkerbed boggy stretch of dirt road where most of the small fibrocement cottages appeared to have survived intact. A red pickup had struck a power pole outside number 642, bringing it down on the front porch of the white clapboard house, and fat black power cables lay like giant snakes on the road top.
Maybe that had knocked the electrics out back in ’03 and saved the suburb from burning like some others in Crockett, Miguel thought. Two more cars had collided a little farther down the road, and they had burned out, but the flames had not spread at the time. Miguel and his teen shadow skirted them and cut through a scrap of open ground into West Bell Avenue. A few more crashed vehicles and a couple of children’s tricycles shrouded with stiff rags were all that remained of the original residents. Signaling to Adam to stay close and keep quiet, the vaquero ghosted another block back toward the center of town before swinging right and heading down a long straight road. South Sycamore, a bent and faded street sign declared it. The glow of the burning oil drums back at the Hy Top silhouetted the tree line between here and there, and he heard the snorting of a horse somewhere in between.
Miguel slowed down and pressed one finger to his lips.
The Mormon boy was wide-eyed but resolute.
The faintly glowing dial of Miguel’s watch told him he had three minutes to get into position.
“I need you to carry this for me. Just carry it, okay?” he said, passing his sledgehammer to Adam. It was a model sometimes called a Canadian ax, with a traditional flat hammer on one side of the iron head tapering to a wedge point on the other. As the two intruders picked their way carefully through the small forest that had colonized at least three blocks behind the Hy Top, Miguel held his Winchester, ready to snap it up and fire.
He fervently hoped that would not be necessary. They needed to remain hidden from their quarry until the very last moment. Taking up position behind the trunk of a dead white maple, he nodded encouragement to Adam and ruffled his hair to show the lad he was impressed with his fortitude so far. The boy visibly swelled with confidence. It would have been hard for him, losing his family at such an age. In Miguel’s judgment, he was very much a young man in need of a strong father.
They had to wait only another minute before the other members of the raiding party appeared without warning from the dark recesses of the woods that had crept up to the other side of South Cottoonwood. The first to materialize was Big Ben, carrying two hammers, one in each hand as though they were no heavier than children’s toys. And then came his brothers, as the Mormons referred to each other, all of them hauling a heavy cudgel of sorts. Sledgehammers, axes, and one crowbar. Miguel grimaced at what was about to take place.
The Mormons did not break into a sprint. They did not announce themselves with a war cry to summon up the spirits. They almost floated across the street until they were in among the loose collection of lounge room furniture over which the drunken, debauched road agents were draped, passed out in the warm glow of the barrel fires.
“Come now, quickly,” Miguel whispered to Adam, stepping out from behind the tree and taking long, brisk, but careful strides toward the padlocked steel door that led into a small room attached to the back of the club. The stench of urine and cigarette butts slashed through the otherwise clear air.
When they reached the door, their view of the street in fron
t of the building would be obscured, but Miguel was able to see the first moments of the attack as it unfolded. Big Ben swung his hammers like a gymnast twirling her ribbon at the Olympics and brought them down with a gruesome, sick-making crunch onto the heads of two road agents passed out under a blanket on an old brown couch. Miguel, who had seen many terrible things in his time, both before and after the Disappearance, was forced to blink away the sight, flinching involuntarily just before impact. There was no mistaking the wet organic cracking sound, however, as the men’s heads split apart like overripe melons. Not half a second later he saw D’Age and Aronson repeat the awful stroke, each man swinging his weapon, another sledgehammer and an ax, respectively, even as Big Ben recovered his momentum and whirled away from his first victims to bash the life out of another two.
Miguel heard a strangled, gurgling sound and spun around to see Adam vomiting into a clump of grass. The boy waved him away as if to say it was nothing. The vaquero tried to keep track of the number of agents as they went down, counting out each dull, chopping thud he heard, but it was impossible.
And then one of the camp whores woke up and screamed.
Her ululating cry was cut off by another muffled blow, and Miguel had his signal.
“Get up, boy. Our time has arrived.”
The whey-faced youngster, still dry heaving, nodded and took up position behind Miguel, covering him with an M16 as he went to work on the padlock securing the heavy security door. The first blow rang out like a discordant cathedral bell over the huge graveyard that was the town of Crockett. Miguel’s heart tried to leap out of his chest with the huge, jarring boom, but he ignored his galloping fears and swung again, striking the padlock squarely. It disintegrated with a shower of sparks and a metallic crash. He heard screams inside—women’s screams—as he wrenched open the door.
“Get out, get out now,” he ordered as the door flew back with a wrenching screech of stiff, tortured steel in an ill-fitting door frame.
Adam moved up just behind his shoulder.
“Come on, it’s us. Get out of there, you ladies; we have to go now.”
Other voices were shouting: deep male voices, angry and confused.
The first gunshot cracked open the night as a woman appeared from within the gloom of the prison at the back of the club. Miguel recognized her as the woman he had seen humiliated by the camp whores earlier in the evening. Her face was streaked with tears, her eyes dark sunken pits. She was shivering with fear and shock and seemed not to recognize Adam when she saw him.
“Come, Sister Jenny. This way, quickly.”
The boy took her by the arm and virtually dragged her from the room as the percussive trip-hammer of automatic weapons fire began around the front of the building. More screams followed and then the boom of a heavy single-shot weapon. Miguel almost stopped in midstride.
That couldn’t be the Remington, he thought. He had told her to stay behind.
There was no time for that. Sofia would do as she was told.
“Ladies,” he said urgently. “It really is time to go now. Quickly. With young Adam here. My name is Miguel, Miguel Pieraro, and I will be rescuing you tonight. But only if you step this way.”
Sofia almost lost her meager dinner when Ben brought the sledge down on his first victim’s skull. Choking it down, she brought out her Remington and waited for a target to present itself. In the excitement, she nearly opened fire on the first target that resolved in her scope, bracketed against the fires and torchlight of the camp. That would have meant shooting Orin and giving herself away. Sneakiness was the watchword of the evening, she reminded herself. Sneakiness and not shooting the wrong people. She forced herself to wait.
When the first camp whore screamed, Sofia pivoted toward her, but a sledge silenced the woman before she could fire. The woman’s boyfriend struggled to rise off the couch, a bearded, shaggy-haired, potbellied maggot with a red bandanna tied over his head. Ben and the other Mormons were distracted by gunfire from the front of the Hy Top.
Sofia brought the crosshairs of her Remington up to the bandanna boy’s unibrow, took a deep breath, and let it out.
As she exhaled, she kept the muzzle of the gun on target until her finger completed the pull of the trigger. Bucking in her arms, the rifle put a single round through the agent’s unibrow, disintegrating the top half of his skull in a spectacular shower of bloody gruel, dropping the corpse back onto the couch. She felt a surge of anger and … something else. It was a feeling she did not recognize, but it was powerful. No, it was … power itself. She felt her power over the man whom she had shot, whose life she had taken. It was a good feeling. Sofia forced herself to work the bolt mechanically, spitting out the spent .30-06 casing and sliding a fresh round into the chamber. The Mormon men, having discarded their sledgehammers for their M16s, took cover behind the couch and exchanged fire with those who tried to run back into the Hy Top.
Sofia tracked two more agents sprinting for the door, dispatching one with a clean torso shot that spun him off his feet and into a dry wall façade with a crash that shook the entire front of the club building. The other man she drilled in the ass, slowing him down long enough for the Mormons to pour a stream of tracer fire into his back. So intense was the fire that it disassembled him from the hip to shoulder height.
She had expected this to be hard, yet she felt nothing but a deep sense of satisfaction as she scanned the windows of the Hy Top for more targets.
In fact, Sofia was ashamed to admit as she dispatched another road agent firing from a second floor window, it was kind of fun.
Miguel kept up the banter as two more women emerged from the dark room. He had seen one of them earlier while scouting the building, but the other was unfamiliar, and he quickly noted that Adam did not recognize her, either. Another captive, then, most likely. She did not have the hardened aspect of the longtime camp whores, appearing every bit as traumatized as the Mormon ladies. Miguel moved into the locked bunkhouse and drew his sawed-off shotgun, keeping the internal door covered while Adam rousted the rest of the women out of there.
Sure enough, within a minute he heard somebody scrabbling at the lock on the other side, and within seconds the door flew inward and a road agent stood there, still groggy and half naked. He registered the presence of Miguel, and his bleary eyes had just enough time to go wide as they took in the huge, yawning muzzle of the Lupara, before the cowboy pulled the trigger and all but cut him in two. In the stark white flash of the muzzle blast Miguel caught a glimpse of a corridor behind the agent, stacked with boxes. The man’s body jackknifed around the molten comet of lead shot and flew backward, slamming into a tower of crates that toppled to the floor with the crashing tinkle of broken glass. Immediately Miguel smelled alcohol.
“Out now!” he roared, no longer concerned with stealth. He holstered the Lupara, with one chamber still loaded, and pointed his Winchester down the end of the hallway. “Is that all of them, Adam? Are all of your women out?”
The uproar of the gunfight was now so great, so overwhelming, that he wondered if he had missed the boy’s reply, but turning around, he saw he had not. Adam was frantically checking and rechecking his small frightened group of women, shaking his head ever more frantically.
“No! No!” he cried helplessly.
“Adam,” Pieraro yelled. “How many are missing?”
“It’s Sally, Mister Pieraro. Sally Gray.” And the raw anguish in his voice told Miguel that this Sally Gray was not just another captive. She was someone special to the boy.
Sofia would be disappointed.
“Take them out the way we came in,” he ordered. “Run and do not stop to look back or wait. We shall meet up again at the clearing. Go. Go! I will find your Sally.”
“Sir!” called out the woman he knew as Jenny. “I think she was in the storeroom. One of those men took her there not fifteen minutes ago.”
“Thank you, Jenny. Now go!”
He waved them off with a fierce gesture and took a m
oment to compose himself. Battle raged elsewhere in the building, a savage din of staccato weapons fire. Machine guns. Single shots. Men and women crying in fear and outrage. He checked the load on his Winchester. It was still good. He had not yet fired a shot with it. Crossing himself and imploring the help of the Blessed Virgin, he swallowed his fear, which was considerable, and swung into the hallway, covering its length with his rifle. He stepped over the ruptured body of the man he had slain and hastened down the corridor. It was poorly lit, with only a few shafts of lamplight poking in through gaps in the walls to illuminate his way. A door stood locked halfway up, and he considered how best to approach it for all of half a second before kicking it in and jumping out of the way of any return fire. None came, which was a small disappointment. He had been hoping not to have to push farther into the club. Another check of the room confirmed that it was little more than a closet filled with cleaning implements: brooms, mops, buckets, and so on.
Miguel ducked from the knees as a burst of gunfire suddenly tore through the wooden slats of the wall just ahead of him, allowing more light to spill through.
His legs quivering from the adrenaline rush, he cautiously edged up to the hole and took a peek. He seemed to be looking into what must have been the main bar area. It was chaos in there, with a small fire burning out of control in one corner where an oil lamp had been smashed or shot to pieces and had spilled its fuel onto the wooden floor, where spilled liquor and bedclothes had quickly caught alight. Bodies lay everywhere, some still, some twitching or trying to drag themselves away from the carnage, But he also counted at least five road agents still standing and able to give a good accounting for themselves. They were all hunkered down at the front of the building, firing out into the street. The shots that punched through the wall in front of him must have come from Aronson’s men out there.
Miguel furrowed his brow as he took in the scene.
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