Defiance: Judgment Day (The Defending Home Series Book 3)

by William H. Weber

  As the last of his men sprinted into the library, two were cut down by Brigade bullets right as they made it past the threshold. The enemy would be on them at any moment. This was where Zach and the half-dozen fighters who remained would make their last stand against men with infinitely more firepower and training. The odds against them were overwhelming.

  Just the way Zach liked it.

  •••

  Sandy

  The cartel was inside the college. Sandy and everyone else around her had heard the explosion near the main entrance. And it hadn’t been long after that Tyrell and Roy had shouted that someone was coming. The corridor linking the two parts of the old school was dark, making it hard to identify the half-dozen figures heading toward them. What gave them away was the sound of their heavy, military boots and the orderly way in which they ran. These weren’t members of the resistance. Hell, they weren’t even cartel men. These guys were military. Could they be the same ones at Dale’s house before he’d gone missing?

  Nobel stood, the flames from the burn barrel distorting the air around her. She moved purposefully toward what Sandy thought was a broom closet. After flinging open the door, she began tossing out empty mop buckets and boxes of cleaning products.

  What on earth is she doing?

  Before Sandy could find out, Roy and Tyrell yelled for the figures in the corridor to halt. Instead of complying, they opened fire. Roy and Tyrell followed suit, the ear-shattering noise from the gun battle echoing inside the spacious room.

  Sandy joined them. Gripping her pistol with both hands, she sank to one knee and leaned into the open. Under the circumstances, she knew better than to follow standard law enforcement procedure by aiming for center mass. This was the quickest and most reliable way to neutralize an armed threat, true. But if they really were some sort of military, then their torsos would likely be protected by body armor. In that case, the nine-millimeter bullets in her pistol wouldn’t do much more than annoy them. Legs, on the other hand, had no such protection.

  Aiming low, Sandy fired every bullet in her magazine. A dark figure in the lead dropped to the ground, clutching his knee and shouting in agony.

  Before she could rejoice, a volley of rounds struck the walls and floor around them, ricocheting into the open chamber. There wasn’t much to hide behind except for ducking out of the hallway. The enemy was thirty yards away and closing fast. Roy moved in to slow them down with a bit of return fire and was immediately struck in the head. His body slumped to the ground, blood pooling around the wound. It was a horrible sight and for a moment Sandy’s eyes were locked on Roy’s unblinking eyes. Were it not for the hole in his forehead, she might have sworn he had decided to take a nap in the middle of a gunfight. Snapping out of her shock, Sandy snatched the AR he’d been holding and stuck the weapon into the open, firing wildly.

  Behind her, two more resistance fighters fell. Nobel and most of the others were gathered around the utility closet. Was this somehow the location of Nobel’s famous weapons stash? If it was, it certainly seemed a lot smaller than Sandy had imagined.

  Nobel waved them over. One after another, resistance members began disappearing into the small space. The plan Nobel had been alluding to was a secret escape hatch.

  But wherever they were going, these heavily armed cartel men would surely follow. That was unless Sandy could find some way of slowing them down. Peering over her shoulder, she caught sight of the burn barrel and suddenly she knew what to do.

  Through the continuous hail of gunfire, she grabbed hold of Roy’s body and pulled him clear. When she was done, she quickly undid the laces of his left boot and removed his sock. A handsome Navajo resistance member, Tahoma, looked at her as though she were mad.

  “I don’t even wanna ask,” he said, pulling the charging handle on his AR and engaging the enemy.

  With Roy’s sock in hand, Sandy raced over to the burn barrel and the one-gallon plastic gas container, spinning off the lid and shoving in the sock halfway. She then used the lighter on the table to ignite the end of the sock. The smell was awful, no doubt about it, but if this worked, she knew it would well be worth the vile odor. The difficulty was in making sure the sock wasn’t blocking the entire opening.

  With her flaming time bomb in hand, Sandy ran over to the mouth of the corridor. In the few moments since she’d been gone, another resistance member had been shot and killed. Peering down, she saw that the sock was burning closer to the gas can’s opening. At the back of the hall, Betty and a fellow nurse were still waiting to enter the closet.

  “You gonna throw that thing or what?” Tahoma asked, more nervous of Sandy’s plan than he was of the soldiers bearing down on them.

  She watched the flame creep closer, her hands shaking. If she waited too long, it might go off in her face.

  “Covering fire,” she yelled, curling her arm back and lobbing the improvised explosive into the corridor. It sailed through the air, the flame from the sock flickering behind it. After colliding with the wall, the gas can fell to the ground and exploded, engulfing the hallway in a yellow burst of flame. Three of Fernando’s men caught on fire, waving their arms as they tried to put out the blaze consuming them. The resistance members fired, dropping all three.

  Now the corridor was clogged with flame and smoke.

  “Move out,” Sandy ordered and even though she didn’t have a lick of authority over them, everyone obeyed. As they ran through the former resistance headquarters toward Nobel’s secret passage, Sandy was left to wonder if the corridor wasn’t the only thing going up in flames.

  •••

  Zach

  Zach fed another magazine into his AR right about the time a stun grenade rolled into the library and detonated. The thunderous noise and blinding light was disorienting. Flashbulbs bloomed in Zach’s vision as he came up to acquire a target. His men had fanned out in all directions. Several were inside the stacks which lined the walls. Others were in the center of the room, crouched behind overturned study tables. Tracers flickered by in both directions, tearing books off of shelves, thudding into walls and tearing chunks of wood from seats and tables. It was a miracle any of the men on either side could live through such a barrage.

  At the library’s entrance, several soldiers in desert fatigues rushed in and were cut down. The fire from the hallway intensified. To his right, Zach saw three more of his men go down. Another flashbang rolled in and he yelled a warning. This time they were ready and when the next wave emerged, Zach zeroed in with the iron sights of his AR and unloaded half his magazine in rapid succession. If he’d been using an M-4 instead of a semi-automatic AR-15, his impulse might have been to switch to full automatic and hold down the trigger as he tried to fill the air with as much lead as possible. Except all the target practice they’d done in the field behind Dale’s house had confirmed that would only have dotted the ceiling above the enemy’s heads with lots of bullet holes. The muzzle of any rifle rose dramatically when fired at full auto. Zach’s favorite Hollywood action star from the 80’s was the legendary Chuck Norris, but even his twin micro-Uzis probably wouldn’t have hit the broad side of a bus ten yards out.

  More enemies fell, many of them moaning in agony. They were wearing armor, which in some cases had helped to protect them from lower-caliber rounds, but that only covered their vital organs. Each of their extremities were still vulnerable to attack. Even a .223 round to the femur bone in your leg would snap it like a twig and leave you writhing on the ground like a wounded deer.

  But for all the hits they’d made, the enemy wasn’t giving up and Zach’s men kept on going down. Another object rolled in, except this wasn’t another flashbang. It was a military-style fragmentation grenade and it went off with a tremendous blast, throwing bits of shrapnel as well as a concussion wave in all directions. Although Zach, Dannyboy and Travis were several yards away, all three of them were thrown back. The detonation went off in the center of the study area, killing three of his men who had taken cover behind an ov
erturned table.

  Down to barely a handful of men, Zach was facing an enemy who never wavered. They just kept coming and coming. This wasn’t going well. Dannyboy and Travis returned fire as Zach prayed that Caesar and his bikers would come from behind and squeeze Fernando’s men in a pincer. But as precious seconds drained away, the miracle was looking less and less likely. It was starting to look like Zach was going to need to forgo prayer and make his own miracle.

  Gesturing toward his three remaining Rangers, he rolled his left hand into a fist, pointing his index finger toward the rear of the library. He was calling for an orderly retreat, just as they had done while working their way into the library. Zach and his two companions provided the first stage of the leapfrog, while the three Rangers across the room turned and scooted for a row of shelves set behind the study area. Once there, they returned the favor, keeping Fernando’s men pinned down while Zach and the others did the same.

  Soon, both groups were poised behind opposite ends of the bookshelf, firing through the stacks as the enemy entered the library. The resistance continued leapfrogging, trading space for enemy lives. Eventually, Zach realized they would run out of room long before Fernando ran out of men. He scanned frantically for an emergency exit without finding one. Ammo was also becoming a serious problem. Dannyboy and another resistance fighter were down to using their pistols. Throughout the heat of battle near the entrance, there hadn’t been time to loot their dead comrades for extra magazines.

  “I guess this is where we go down fighting,” Travis said, seemingly resigned to his fate. He caught Zach staring behind them at a stained-glass portrait of a settler, standing proudly by his homestead, musket in hand.

  “This ain’t no time to get sentimental,” Dannyboy told him, reloading his pistol. “If you ain’t gonna use that rifle of yours, I hope you don’t mind if I do.”

  “We’re not done just yet,” Zach said to Travis. Staying low, he ran toward the stained-glass window, firing his weapon at the settler’s image as he went. Tiny holes appeared before the settler crumbled in a heap of glass shards. Zach turned to shield himself from the spray. When he reached the opening, he leaned over the edge and peered down.

  “It’s a ten-foot drop,” he said, using the butt of his rifle to clear the glass around the edges. He swung a leg over just as the others peeled away from their positions. One by one, they leapt through the air, landing with a soft thud on a patch of yellow grass. Ten feet didn’t sound like a long drop until you were the one falling through empty space. Travis and Dannyboy went next before the desperate escape was stopped by a hail of bullets. For a moment, Zach stood waiting for his three Rangers to appear.

  Dannyboy yanked on his arm. “They’re gone, Zach. There’s nothing you can do.”

  Still torn, Zach reluctantly pulled himself away, running backward as they followed the curve of the building to avoid getting shot as they fled. But it wasn’t only the prospect of losing so many good Rangers that disturbed him. It was knowing that somewhere in the sports complex was the body of his son Colton. Dead or not, it felt as though he was abandoning his boy all over again.

  Chapter 9

  Brooke

  The sun was already starting to go down by the time Keith agreed it was safe enough to meet Nobel and the others at the community college. Oblivious to the battle that had been raging there, they drove south, through the empty streets of Encendido, creases of tension on all of their faces. Perhaps the most unnerving part was the eerie quiet and lack of people. In their own way, each of them wondered what they would find once they reached their destination.

  After their daring rescue, Keith had decided it was best they head for his place and keep their heads down for a few hours. It wasn’t clear just yet whether Fernando knew or not. Just as it wasn’t clear what had become of Brooke’s father.

  When they arrived, Keith had pulled the cruiser right into his garage and quickly shut the door. Brooke had gone into the bathroom and gasped when she saw her face. Her lower lip and her right eye were both cut and swollen. The sight, however, was only one of a series of recent shocks. The appearance of the Brigade had been unexpected, but being freed by Keith and above all Randy? That took the cake.

  “I don’t think it’s nearly as bad as you think,” Caleb said, wiggling a bottom tooth knocked loose by one of his torturers. He lifted up his shirt, revealing a random pattern of cigarette burns.

  Brooke wanted to reach out and touch one of them, but didn’t.

  “I heard you screaming,” she said, turning back to the mirror, the shock of seeing her face subsiding with every passing minute.

  “Nobel had only started to roll out some SERE training program.”

  She threw him a look. “Sometimes you fire off acronyms as though everyone in the world knows what you’re talking about.”

  He grinned sheepishly, his dirty blond hair hanging loosely about his face. “Yeah, sometimes I forget. SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. It’s a program taught to military personnel to help them survive if pursued or captured by the enemy.” His eyes dropped to the floor.

  “What’s wrong?” Brooke asked. “It was getting interesting.”

  “Talking about the military lately, I can’t help feeling discouraged.”

  “I’m sure they’re still out there somewhere,” Brooke said, not really believing it, but eager to keep Caleb’s spirits up.

  He shrugged. “Somewhere, maybe, but look who showed up when we needed them the most.”

  He was talking about the Brigade. They’d been dressed like American soldiers, which had made the deception all the more painful. The truth she carefully stepped over was the likelihood that more and more groups like the Brigade would begin filling the vacuum left by the disappearance of law and order.

  “Tell me more about SERE,” she said, forcing the corners of her lips into a smile.

  He could see what she was trying to do and appreciated it. “Well, the details might vary from branch to branch depending on their needs, but mostly the instructions are the same. One area covers interrogations.”

  “So you’re saying those girly screams were all part of your training? Is that it?” She grinned, nudging him with her elbow.

  Caleb laughed. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that we never got that far and most of what we did cover didn’t seem to stick.”

  “That’s because of how people learn,” she told him. “I’m guessing they only brought you through a few theory lessons.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, we went over old air force manuals.”

  “There’s no way that approach has any chance of sinking in without muscle memory.”

  Caleb regarded her, impressed.

  “Think of marksmanship,” she went on. “There was a very good reason my dad had us shooting behind the house every chance we got.” A lump lodged in her throat as soon as she mentioned her father. Brooke swallowed it down, trying to keep her anxiety at bay. There wasn’t anything she could do to help him, apart from pray that he was being held somewhere close and that they might free him just as Keith and Randy had freed her.

  “Please don’t stop, it’s just getting interesting.”

  Brooke beamed, appreciating his wit at turning her own words against her. “What I’m trying to say is that having someone show you a picture of a gun doesn’t make you a good shot. The theory might be important, but it’s nothing without the kind of muscle memory that goes with long hours of practice.”

  “You’re starting to sound like your old man,” Caleb said. He’d spent a good number of hours over the last few days helping Dale, digging that escape tunnel in the basement of Dale’s home, so it was fair to say he knew what he was talking about.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said.

  They used a water bucket in the bathroom to wash up a bit. Afterward, Brooke found a vacant room where she could rest her head. Keith had suggested they lie low for a couple of hours and Brooke’s body couldn’t have agr
eed more. Right now she wanted nothing more than to lie down and recharge. When Caleb walked past, intending to find his own spot, Brooke called him back.

  “Everything okay?” he asked, his blond hair now wet and combed back out of his face. He looked kind and safe, exactly what she needed right now.

  “Will you stay?” she asked, patting the empty space beside her. “At least until I drift off.”

  He glanced around, uneasy.

  “Don’t worry, nothing funny will happen,” she assured him. “I like you too much to let my dad dismantle you.”

  Two hours later they were awoken by a nudge from Keith, who told them they were leaving in five minutes. The slow, careful drive to the college took longer than expected, mainly because Keith was doing his best to avoid any cartel checkpoints set up throughout the city. But the streets of Encendido were not only devoid of the local townsfolk, the checkpoints common along main arteries were also missing.

  “Where’d everyone go?” Caleb asked. He and Brooke were both in the back seat, their faces pushed up against the windows.

  Keith didn’t answer them, but the way he nibbled at the inside of his cheek made it clear he was wondering the same thing.

  As they turned onto Winrow Avenue, Keith shouted at them to duck down. Brooke and Caleb obeyed, scrunching down into the space between both seats.

  A second later, a pickup rolled by. As it passed, Brooke rose to peek out the back window. Standing in the bed of the truck was a cartel enforcer. At his feet were five or six dead bodies.

  Brooke gasped, covering her mouth with her hand. She told them what she’d seen and Keith ordered her to stay down.

  Houses surrounded by dead grass lined the street as they proceeded. This had once been where professors, administrators and even some students lived, opting to remain close to the college. Now, the occupants were either dead, gone or keeping a low profile. The end result was that the neighborhood had fallen into disrepair. Perhaps yet another reason why Nobel had hoped her secret headquarters might slide under the radar.