“Dannyboy,” he shouted.
A head full of disheveled hair poked around the corner.
He slid his fingers through the opening. “Find something we can use to keep these doors shut.”
Dannyboy nodded and ran off, rifle in hand. On the other side of the hallway was student services, where more bikers and Rangers were firing back at the approaching enemy. One of them turned, a kid who reminded Zach of Colton, the unmistakable look of fear splashed all over his face. Must be the kid’s first gunfight. His chest heaved and his tongue struggled to moisten a mouth that had gone desert-dry. Zach could hear it when the young Ranger spoke. “A bunch of ’em are heading for the sports center,” the kid shouted.
They were trying to flank them.
Zach put a hand on his shoulder. “Take a deep breath, kid.”
The young man was doing just that as Zach spotted Travis entering the room, keeping low.
“Not looking good, is it?” his second-in-command asked, decked out in the cargo shorts and green t-shirt he seemed to love so much.
“Do you ever change?”
Travis scanned his outfit, befuddled. “Sometimes.”
“It would just be nice if you weren’t always in the same get-up.” Zach drew in a sharp breath. “At this point, holding them off is irrelevant since most of our safehouses are under attack.”
Both men ducked into the hallway in time to see Caesar with at least ten of his bikers heading toward the sports complex.
“Where you going?” Zach asked him. Nobel’s headquarters was in the basement of the Forum, a building which had its own entrance and its own vulnerability. He assumed Caesar planned on setting up an ambush for the cartel men moving in that direction, but it made far more sense to keep everyone close together instead of spreading them all over campus.
Betty and three other nurses ran past them, heading in the other direction.
Caesar ignored Zach’s question and kept heading for the sports clinic and the wounded who were trapped there. The men marching behind him were armed with a mishmash of assault rifles and sawed-off shotguns, looking like a group of modern-day Visigoths.
“Should I try to hold them back?” Travis asked.
Zach shook his head, still stinging from Caesar’s slight. “Forget those guys. At least if they can hold the Agora, we won’t have to worry about getting flanked from the west.”
The rattle of gunfire continued in both directions. Just then, Dannyboy came charging around the corner with three broomsticks he’d duct-taped together, eagerly shoving them through the metal door handles.
He beamed. “This should hold.”
A shout of, “Grenade!” erupted from the registrar’s office as men came charging out. Half a second later, a deafening explosion shook the ground, sending a cloud of dust and debris into the hallway. Three men were sent flying into the opposing wall. Zach ran over to see if they were all right. When he spun to peer into the smoke-filled room, he couldn’t see a thing. Mixed in with the scent of high-powered explosive was the unmistakable smell of burning flesh. As the haze cleared, two of Nobel’s resistance fighters lay dead, their smoking bodies riddled with shrapnel.
If these guys had grenades, there was no telling what else they might have. The initial pessimism Zach had felt about their present situation was starting to seem like a serious understatement. As if on cue, the unmistakable sound of a .50 caliber machine gun barked into action, shredding student services.
“Oh, great, they have a machine gun.” Zach found Travis. “Is Nobel still in her headquarters?”
His second-in-command nodded just as Dannyboy and a handful of others ducked back into the registrar’s office to clear out the dead and return fire.
“Well, tell her she better have a damn good escape plan, ’cause I’m not sure how much longer we can hold out.”
Chapter 7
Sandy
Nobel’s headquarters in the basement of the Forum building was a beehive of frantic activity. Men and women rushed around, many of them stuffing sensitive intelligence into burlap bags. Others tore pieces of the town map marked with safehouse locations off the wall and fed them into a metal burn barrel. Next to it was a small gas can and a lighter.
Betty ran in, panting, followed by three nurses. The Agora was under attack and they feared for the safety of the wounded they had been caring for. Nobel assured them everything would be all right. She had already sent Caesar and his biker friends to bring them to safety.
Sandy looked on with alarm, clutching her service revolver, listening to the sound of gunfire as it crept ever closer.
Nearby were Roy and Tyrell, the two young men who had been helping Dale dig the tunnel from the basement of his house to his barn out back. The moment she’d heard they were under attack, her stomach had roiled. Dale was out there somewhere and they still hadn’t heard from him. Was it possible he had been captured by Fernando’s men? The reports had been clear that several safehouses had also come under fire, news that could be interpreted in several ways. Either Fernando’s men were making a general sweep through Encendido and got lucky, or someone had spilled the beans. She remembered Nobel asking to use Dale’s property as a possible safehouse should any of her agents need a place to lie low. He had accepted, of course, which was one more reason the cartel men might have him.
The last she remembered hearing, the military was in town and yet here they were receiving bullets instead of greetings from an officer informing them the cartel had been dealt with. All of this did not bode well for Dale nor for the cause for which they were fighting.
A few feet away, Walter struggled to hold onto the maps which outlined his battle plan, a junior resistance member promising they would not be destroyed. Ann was by his side, her arms around her husband’s shoulders. It seemed to Sandy as though everything was coming apart at the seams.
She walked briskly over to where Nobel and a few others were burning documents, wisps of black smoke flickering up toward the high ceiling. “If your people spent less time destroying things and more time shooting back at the people attacking us, we might not have to worry about erasing evidence.”
Nobel paused in the act of flipping through a large white binder filled with profiles on Sheriff Randy Gaines and probably every Encendido deputy who had ever served on the force. Other pages featured data on members of the resistance. Her features tensed, although her kindness never wavered. “It doesn’t matter whether or not they storm in here. None of that will change the fact that they know we are here. If they get their hands on this information, they’ll be able to round up every resistance fighter in town.” She paused on a page with Sandy’s name and picture, ripped it out of the three-ringed binder and held it up as though to prove her point. She then tossed it into the barrel, where it was turned into blackened snowflakes.
“Oh, there’s no secret there. They already know all about my defection,” Sandy countered.
“Yes, but what about Keith’s and any others he’s convinced to join him?”
Sandy didn’t have an answer for that. She grew quiet, becoming more aware of the fighting going on outside. From the Acropolis Zach and his men were busy trying to buy them time. If that position fell, the attackers would only need to head down the stairwell and along the narrow corridor connecting both buildings. There was another way into this room from the ground floor above them. For that reason, all of the stairwells had been purposely blocked with a veritable mishmash of tables and chairs taken from many of the classrooms. As far as she knew, the only viable way in and out was through the Acropolis.
Listening to the fighting raging in the building next door, Sandy was becoming seriously concerned over what might happen if Fernando’s men managed to breach the Acropolis’ defenses. With one way in and one way out, they might be trapped.
As though to underline her point, the booming sound of an explosion echoed from over in the Acropolis. This was followed a minute later by heavy machine-gun fire. If she didn’t know a
ny better, she would swear Nobel’s headquarters was being assaulted by a battalion from the 82nd Airborne, backed up by firepower far heavier than anything Fernando seemed to have at his disposal. Everyone in the room grew still, listening pensively, traces of fear crumpling every brow.
“Get back to work,” Nobel scolded them, like a classroom full of students waiting impatiently for recess.
“It doesn’t sound like things are going very well,” Sandy said. “Why don’t I help you destroy these documents while Tyrell and Roy keep guard over the hallway? The last thing we need is to have anyone showing up unannounced.”
Nobel nodded and suggested the two men do exactly that. “A good general should know his enemy better than he knows himself,” she said, dropping a handful of pages into the burn barrel. “I’ve studied the cartel’s playbook, both here and back home. If push comes to shove, I’ve got a plan.”
•••
Dale
Before setting out, Dale had taken some time to go through the adobe structure for anything that might be useful. He’d cut the back out of the dead driver’s desert fatigues to wrap around his head as a shield from the sun’s powerful rays. He’d carved strips, soaking them in rubbing alcohol he found in the bathroom, to serve as improvised bandages for his wound. The blood from his slashed cheeks had already clotted, even though they still stung like hell.
While gearing up, he’d also grabbed the soldier’s utility belt, which contained a pistol holster and a canteen three-quarters full. Dale had then poured in the water from the canteen Captain Lee had left behind. Apart from the driver’s pistol and two magazines, he’d also grabbed a FX-05 Xiuhcoatl Mexican assault rifle. Similar to the HK G36, the FX-05 was nicknamed the ‘fire snake’. It had been leaning against a chair in one of the side rooms, next to three mags filled with 5.56.
In his condition, the weight of the rifle and the ammo would work against him, but the thought of heading out into the unknown with little or no protection had seemed somehow almost sinful.
Before leaving, he had gone to the kitchenette and worked the taps, but no water came out. He’d even opened the coffee machine and searched for a water heater, but to no avail. Weapon-rich, but poor on supplies, he had set out, staggering and wincing from the pain in his abdomen where the spike had pierced his flesh.
Two hours of lumbering along a gravel road in the hot desert sun brought him to Highway 2, where he stopped to assess the situation. Although in Spanish, the signs seemed clear enough. To his left was a town called Cananea, population thirty thousand. The swine flu had surely cut that down by at least eighty or ninety percent, but a Mexican town was precisely the kind of place Dale wanted to avoid. To his right was Naco, a small town nestled along the Mexican-US border. That was the good news. The bad news was that Naco was at least fifty miles away. A wounded man trudging along in the blistering sun with few supplies would be lucky to make it ten to twenty miles. That was assuming he wasn’t intercepted by the Brigade, cartel members or anyone else lurking in the area. Not to mention the wolves, coyotes and venomous insects he might encounter along the way.
Already he had broken his own rule by moving along the main roads, but the flat, arid landscape meant there were few places to hide. Patches of parched ankle-high grass stretched toward distant mountains, punctuated only by the odd Alamos tree or Saguaro cactus. Stomping off road was also a great way to get bitten by a snake. For all of the above reasons, he figured it was best to stick to the asphalt and seek cover should he spot anyone approaching.
Nevertheless, sweat poured down his back and soaked his pant legs. The belly was crying out too, sending a searing bolt of pain through his torso with every step. It was amazing, and not in a funny way, how easily we took simple things like walking for granted until you threw in a dollop of intermittent agony.
One foot in front of the other, Dale told himself, and it was quickly becoming a mantra.
With pain and a long journey as his constant companion, Dale’s mind kept returning to his loved ones back home―not that he had a home anymore. The knowledge that at this very moment, his daughter was at the mercy of the Brigade’s sadistic soldiers was worse than any physical suffering they could have inflicted on him. The concern over her wellbeing and the bubbling rage at her tormentors was the only real power propelling his weakened body forward.
Right now, there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. Just knowing he had let his daughter down was the greatest torture of all.
But that feeling of concern was not only limited to his own flesh and blood. The Brigade’s arrival meant Sandy, Zach, Walter, Ann and even Duke were all in terrible danger. By now they would know something bad had befallen Dale. Perhaps they had sent a scout to check on him and found the Hardy compound occupied by Fernando’s men. There were a million possible scenarios for how events might have played out in his absence and few if any of them were good. The resistance had been on the verge of launching an assault to sweep the cartel from Encendido once and for all. Now all of that was up in the air. Had it already gone through? If not, then everything they had worked so hard for might be slipping between their fingers. Dale was determined to not let that happen.
By his fourth hour on the road, the sun had tracked clear across a cloudless sky. He brought the canteen up to his lips with arms that weighed about a hundred pounds each. Every step required a herculean effort. Even his vision was wavering, much like the waves of heat shimmering off the distant asphalt. He had the sensation that something was nudging his leg. He glanced down and saw his dog.
“Duke?” he remarked, utterly surprised and thrilled to see his loyal friend.
The German Shepherd trotted beside him, peering up at his master with unfiltered admiration.
“I thought you were stuck at home.” Even in his exhaustion, Dale recalled that Brooke had muzzled Duke when the men in fatigues showed up and put him inside. But now there was no muzzle and as if to show his approval, Duke let out a quick succession of excited barks. Dale came to an unsteady stop, reaching out to run his hand through the dog’s fur, swaying back and forth like a drunken sailor on shore leave. Palm down, Dale worked his hand through thin air, a distant smile on his deluded face. He managed another ten steps before he collapsed on the side of the road, his dried lips uttering unintelligible whispers.
Chapter 8
Zach
Back in the Acropolis, the Brigade’s .50 caliber machine gun was thwarting the resistance’s chances of mounting any kind of effective defense. Even with sandbags and prepared positions, there wasn’t much that could stop such a large, powerful round. It was hardly a surprise that the Ma Deuce, as the platform was nicknamed, had been around since the First World War. The weapon packed a serious punch, making it even more useful in this new lawless world dominated by drug gangs and paramilitary warlords. In Africa and the Middle East, large-caliber machine guns were often mounted on the beds of small- to medium-sized foreign pickups. Known as Technicals, they had come to represent lawlessness and unrest. Their ease of manufacture and relative low cost meant they would likely begin popping up in greater numbers as the world continued to fall apart.
Dannyboy and several bikers as well as Nobel’s resistance fighters scrambled out of both frontal positions. For a moment, the firing from outside quieted down. Zach and the others backed into the hallway. To their left was the corridor which led to Nobel’s headquarters, to their right the path to the sports complex where Caesar had gone with ten of his men. Thirty yards to Zach’s rear was the school library.
“Why’d they stop?” Zach wondered out loud.
“Whatever the reason,” Dannyboy said, clutching his rifle while ducking behind a row of lockers, “can’t be nothing good.”
“I suggest we retreat to the Forum,” Travis suggested. “With only one way in and one way out it’ll be far easier to defend.”
“You wanna run away?” Zach said with disgust. “For all we know, those boys outside have had a change of heart.”
Seconds later, the building shook with a terrible noise as the doors disappeared in a haze of fire and smoke. Zach and his men hit the floor, coughing from the roiling cloud filling their lungs and blocking their vision. From out of the mist came the burst of enemy fire and the illumination of muzzle flashes. Far from retreating, the Brigade had blown the doors right off their hinges. Which meant they were inside the compound, cutting Zach and his men off from the Forum and Nobel’s headquarters.
“Fall back,” Zach yelled. Altogether, there were fifteen of them: a mix of bikers, Rangers and resistance fighters all running for the library while Zach, Dannyboy and Travis laid down covering fire.
“I’m running low on ammo,” Travis said, changing magazines and pushing the empty into the slot in his vest.
Zach sneered. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
Soon it came time for the three of them to pull back while the other group held the line. Zach was hoping to draw them into the library and away from the staircase beyond the registrar’s office, which led to Nobel’s headquarters.
They kept low, bullets whizzing over their heads, some slamming into the metal lockers along both walls with a hollow boom. A few cut into the linoleum floor tiles, kicking up ricocheting rounds and puffs of powdered stone.
The library was just ahead now, its double doors already hanging off their hinges. In a final dash, they charged through the open entry and into a large, high-ceilinged room. In the middle were long rectangular study tables surrounded by rows of shelves filled with thick scholarly volumes, many coated with fine layers of dust. More shelving receded toward the back of the library where a series of stained-glass windows cast an almost eerie glow. Zach was beginning to understand, big as it was, this room was a dead end.
Defiance: Judgment Day (The Defending Home Series Book 3) Page 4