by Gregory Kay
Midge’s scream, “You leave him alone!” was drowned out by the roar of the 12-gauge Remington 870 ‘house gun’ she had snatched up before going out the front door and firing it from the front yard.
Staggering as six of the nine 00 buckshot contained in the cartridge hit him, Smith felt the .33 lead balls hammering his neck and chest, ripping patches of cloth and flesh away and sending them sailing into the yard. He staggered again when Benny shifted his aim and put a round in the center of his forehead this time, and, when a third voice entered the scene, demanding to know what the hell was going on, Smith knew he was in trouble. There was no question in his mind he could kill them all, even with the amount of damage he had sustained, but his masters knew there was no way he could keep it a secret, and, at the moment, that took priority.
Harry turned onto Shore Street, still trying to get his head around what Luke had told him, and wondering who it was that had actually committed suicide in his friend’s place, and was more than a little surprised to see Midge Pickens in the front yard blasting away toward the back of the house with a shotgun.
“Shit!” he yelled as he stomped the brake, sliding the cruiser to a stop and slamming the shift into park before throwing open the door and almost vaulting out. “Midge! What are you doing?”
She gestured toward the back yard with the weapon’s muzzle.
“He was trying to break into Luke’s house, and he attacked Benny!”
As if in answer to his name, someone – he rightly assumed it was Benny – fired his last three shots in quick succession, the reports of the small game rifle sounding like a rapid trio of hand claps.
Drawing his own weapon, Harry shouted, “Everybody, hold your fire! State Police! Put your weapons down!”
“He went that way!” Harry heard Benny shout before he stepped off the back porch and into view, his Ruger dangling empty and forgotten in one hand while he pointed at the alley with the other, “He took off toward the railroad tracks!”
“Stay here!” the trooper ordered and took off on the run after him. Over the quiet thud of his feet in the grass, he could plainly hear the approach of a locomotive coming his way from the south, and realized it would be there in considerably less than a minute. The track was only two blocks away; if he could make it before the train separated the two...
Darting through a pair of unfenced yards, Harry was crossing North Main Street when he saw the black-suited figure running before him and recognized him immediately from his description, as well as from the security camera footage.
He’s the one who got taken down in that alley; he’s supposed to be dead! Then again, so is Luke! What the hell is going on here?
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” he yelled, even though he wasn’t sure about his right to shoot him; he didn’t know the situation and didn’t see any weapons, but...
The man didn’t stop, didn’t even slow down when the train rolled down the tracks directly in front of him, blocking his way. For a startled moment, the trooper thought he was going to throw himself underneath the iron wheels, but instead he leaped what looked like an impossible distance from Harry’s angle, landing gracefully on the coupling joining two tanker cars and arresting his forward momentum by grabbing the metal ladder. Harry took aim and then backed the pressure off the trigger and turned the muzzle to the sky in a panic when some part of him recognized the warnings stenciled on the massive metal cylinders; both were full of chlorine, and a puncture from a missed shot could mean a neighborhood full of injured, and quite possibly dead, people.
There was nothing he could do but run back to his car to radio in while the train rolled out of sight.
Pete Morris was standing in full rain gear on the landing at the Riverfront Park, looking as grim and morose as the dark gray sky while the water dripped off his hat brim just in front of his nose. An ambulance and a Fire Department rescue truck were parked beside his cruiser only a few feet from the water’s edge, and, other than the pair of divers in the water, everyone else stood around just like he was, wanting to do something while, at the same time, knowing they couldn’t do a damned thing.
No chance now; it’s a recovery, not a rescue.
As if to confirm his thoughts, he heard the outboard motor when the drag-boat finally arrived: a big yellow john boat with a long steel bar full of large treble hooks in the back, ready to lower into the water and start ‘fishing’ for the body, hopefully hooking into clothing or flesh and bringing it up.
Damned miserable day all the way around!
Seeing Harry at the wheel of the state police car pulling in behind his own cruiser and motioning him over, Pete was a sure it was about to get worse. He’d already heard about the attempted break-in and shooting at Luke’s house – the City had dispatched a pair of patrolmen up there at Harry’s request – and he knew that whatever pulled the trooper away from something like that had to be major.
He was right, but not in the way he had imagined.
Harry waited until the Sheriff got into the passenger seat and closed the door behind him to give them some privacy; then he didn’t beat around the bush.
“Luke is alive.”
Pete gaped.
“What?! But Mike McDonald swears he saw him jump in the river!”
“Then he must have jumped out again, because I just stopped and talked to him about thirty minutes ago.”
“Whew!” Pete blew out his breath, “That’s a relief! At least it wasn’t him.” Gazing out the windshield at the old fisherman still standing there in the pouring rain, wringing his hands helplessly in between calling out and pointing at the exact spot to one of the surfaced divers, the Sheriff said, “Maybe the old man drank a few too many while he was sitting here, to make a mistake like that. I wonder who it was?”
“I don’t know, and right now I really don’t care. Whoever it was, they’re not as important as what’s happening right now, even as we speak.
“The guy Benny and Midge Pickens shot the hell out of when he was trying to break in Luke’s house answers to the same general description as the one supposedly killed in the alley behind the post office, the same one who’s been killing cats and dogs. Somehow the son of a bitch absorbed ten rounds of .22 long rifle and one of 00 buck, and still managed to outrun me. He’s got to be connected with those Federal spooks.” He paused and took a breath. “They’ve kidnapped that reporter and Joe Parks’ daughter.”
“Shit!” Pete exclaimed, knowing his deputy too well to doubt his actions as a result, and Harry nodded.
“Luke, Whitey Walker and that Robinson boy caught one of them taking her things out of the hotel under a national security letter. Luke tried to arrest him, he pulled a weapon, then the other two jumped in and, as far as I can tell, they all three beat the living shit out of him until he told them what was happening. Both those girls know too much, and they intend to kill them.”
The Sheriff’s face turned dark enough to rival the lowering sky.
“I don’t give a damn who they are, I’m not going to allow that!”
“Luke’s not either; he's rounded himself up a posse; Whitey, Johnny, and the Parks girl’s parents, and he was on his way to meet some more. They’re all armed to the teeth, killing mad, and they’re going in there to take her back.”
“Well they’re not going to do it alone!” Pete declared, coming to a decision. “I’ve had enough of this Federal sneak-and-peek horse shit! I’m calling out every man on the Department, as well as the Point Pleasant, Mason, and New Haven City Departments; if that stubborn-ass deputy of mine is going to do this, he’s going to have backup! They can’t arrest us all.”
“Lets do it, and do it quick, but I expect it’ll be over already, one way or another before we get there; Luke had a half-hour head-start, and my guess is he’s stuck into ‘em already.”
Pete cursed and slapped the dash in frustration.
“I hope not, but...well, I can only hope Joe Parks and that crazy son of a bitch Whitey can even the odds a little.�
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“At least Luke has one more advantage; if they’ve been monitoring our radios, they won’t be expecting him because they think he’s dead; my guess is that’s why they sent that weirdo to his house, to remove any evidence.” He gestured at the laptops lying in the backseat. “They’re too late now. Luke told me to bring this to you and sit down with you and evaluate it, but I think we’d better do that on the way.”
CHAPTER 29
The entry proved easier than any of them had expected. They knew there had to be surveillance cameras, so they had dressed Johnny in their captive’s clothes as he was the best fit, prayed the driving rain would obscure things enough to conceal his identity the rest of the way, and had him drive the Suburban down Potter’s Creek, where he got out and used Barnes’ keys to unlock the tubular metal bar that acted as a gate to one of the closed-off areas while the others crouched down in the seats and floorboard. Once through, he pushed the bar closed and snapped the lock, but only hooking it in the part of the latch attached to the post, allowing the gate to appear locked, but to swing open at a push; they all suspected that, once they got the girls, they might have to get out much faster than they came in.
The igloo indicated by their prisoner was their next stop, and Johnny’s flesh goose-pimpled when he got out and repeated the process on the big double steel doors. The effect was not only from the cold rain soaking through his clothes or the tension that seemed determined to pull his shoulder blades together and instill an almost irresistible desire to empty his bladder on the spot, but from a sense of complete wrongness that seemed to permeate the area, giving him an aura of fear beyond anything he would have believed possible. The feeling was exactly like being caught in your worst nightmare, and it took every fiber of his being not to fumble the lock and drop it or the keys in the mud before running away screaming in terror.
“What is it?” Kathy hissed from her hunched position in the back, and Rhonda Gordon looked sharply at her, her lip quivering and her teeth almost chattering.
“You feel it too, then? I thought it was just me.”
Shifting his eyes to the other men, Luke told her, “We all feel it. Fiona and I noticed it before, in that igloo the Satanists had used, only it wasn’t this strong.”
“What the hell is it, scumbag?” Whitey demanded of their prisoner, and Barnes promptly moaned an answer, stammering and wheezing. Luke noticed he didn’t sound too healthy at all, but he didn’t really care.
In another minute or two, it won’t matter anyway, one way or the other.
“Th-they’ve...opened the gate. It’s...like that, wh-wh-whenever the gate is...active. Y-you...get used to it.”
Before anyone could say anything else, Johnny was getting back in the car and nodding toward the open portal to the igloo even while he took the wheel.
“Here we go.” His voice was wire-tight.
“Remember the plan,” Sam warned, “We go in hot. You see anyone other than the two girls, kill them! Don’t hesitate, or we all die, and they’ll die along with us! Got it?”
There was a chorus of whispered assents, and Kathy threw up a mouthful of bile in Joe’s lap as the Suburban rolled forward, and then the front dipped down as they started down the shallow ramp.
They didn’t go far; Luke estimated they were no more than ten or fifteen feet underground when they leveled off and Johnny swore.
“Shit! There’s my Camaro!”
Following the plan and not raising into ready view, the deputy asked, “Is Fiona’s Jaguar there?”
Looking up from the back seat, he saw Johnny’s head nod.
“Yeah, there’s a black Jag. There’s also an old white Chevy van parked beside it – “
“The ‘devil’s disciples’” Luke remarked to no one in particular, and Johnny continued, “Also that game warden Cherokee is here, along with a black Grand Caravan, a wrecker, and...hell, there’s a State Police car!”
“It’s no more real than the DNR vehicle; don’t worry about it.”
“We’ve got a whole lot more to worry about than that,” Whitey assured them, and Sam nodded.
“You see a door anywhere?”
“There’s only one; a sliding steel door on the left, just wide enough to back that minivan into, if you’re careful.”
“How far?
“Maybe ten feet...”
“Stop.” Johnny promptly pressed the brake, and Sam ordered, “Okay people; remember the plan and buy the numbers! Hit it!”
It was a hastily-assembled, amateur operation, and it showed as they scrambled out of the car with all possible speed; Joe swore as he banged his cast against the door frame, and, cramped from crouching, Kathy nearly fell. Even Sam straightened up with an audible crunch of shifting vertebrae.
“Go!” he yelled sharply as they clearly heard the sound of yells and gunfire from the other side of the door, “Gogogogo!”
They went, Luke in the lead, the upper right arm of his stumbling, limping prisoner in one hand and his Ithaca Marine in the other. The soldier was naked and covered in blood – Johnny was still wearing his clothes and Whitey had worked him over more than a little severely. His eyes were black and puffed almost shut, his lips were split, his body covered with gashes and tears, and his testicles were already swollen to the size of tennis balls.
If it hadn’t been for what had happened to Fiona and Alison, they might have felt sorry for him.
“Open it!”
Barnes, with some degree of encouragement from Whitey, had given up the entry code, and he hit the numbers on the keypad in rapid succession even while Sam grabbed the door handle in preparation. As soon as the latch clicked, he yanked it open and Luke drove his prisoner through by the expedient of a stiff shove between his shoulder blades, forcing him inside first, as a shield...until something big and dark slammed into Barnes, driving him aside and striking the deputy’s arm so hard in passing it half-turned him to the right and drove him into the door frame with stunning force.
Jerking his shotgun up as he recovered, he noticed a couple of unusual things. One was that the entire room was spattered with gore, and the other was that the soldiers still on their feet – three of them – were firing off to his right, in the direction the prisoner had gone. One, however, noticed him, and, with a look of both surprise and terror on his face, swiveled his aim toward the deputy.
With no time to aim, Luke quickly triggered the shotgun instinctively, and from a distance of twenty feet, all nine lead balls hammered into his enemy’s torso between his nipples and his navel. The man staggered, lost his balance, his grip on his weapon, and his life at the same time, and fell on his face in the floor.
As he racked the slide, some distant part of the deputy nagged that he had just effectively ended his life by killing a Federal agent, but the louder voice inside didn’t give a shit; it was too busy looking for Fiona and trying to stay alive.
He couldn’t see her, though, and as his boot came down in a puddle of blood and started sliding from beneath him, a split-second later something impacted with his back and completed the motion, sending him sprawling, sliding across the gore-slick floor.
“Get the hell out of the way!” he heard Sam shouting and belatedly realized he had been blocking the door and the former Green Beret had shouldered him aside in order to get a clear field of fire, and, from the roar of perfectly-controlled three-round bursts from the vintage submachine gun over his head, Luke realized he must be taking full advantage of it. Then more boots and tennis shoes went pounding past him, there were more yells, screams and shots, and, from his position on the floor, he discovered he was opposite a desk. On the other side, through the six inch space beneath, was a pair of combat boots. He triggered a shotgun round through the narrow opening, one of the boots exploded in a brief and brilliant red flower at the ankle, and the footwear’s owner yelled and collapsed.
Immediately jumping to his feet, he vaulted onto the desk, slid across the surface and crashed down on his wounded opponent, dropping
his knee into the man’s gut like a falling bomb and crushing his nose with the shotgun before his adversary could bring his own weapon into play. Despite the iron hard muscles of Colonel Davis’ conditioned midsection, flesh was still flesh and the breath whooshed out of him, delaying his reaction just long enough for Luke to slam him under the chin with the shotgun’s receiver, bouncing his head off the floor and knocking him cold.
Hearing Kathy scream, “Oh, my God! What is that thing?” followed by a squealing roar of rage behind him, Luke turned his head and saw something big coming his way, snarling and spraying blood from an impossibly-wide open mouth full of fangs and tusks.
“Shit!” he yelled, even as the tiny, far-off part of him still running on logic nagged that his exclamation was going to be a very poor and unoriginal excuse for his last words.
Bullets from the others were hammering into the creature – from the noise, the rippling skin and flying blood, Luke guessed everyone still alive on either side must be shooting into it – but it had set its beady red eyes on him, and it wasn’t stopping. Twisting desperately, he was trying to bring the shotgun not only into line with the monster, but between it and him, and the impact hit him like a speeding car even as he squeezed the trigger.
“Luke! Luke! Are you okay?”
“What the hell is that thing?”
“I don’t know, but get it off him!”
“Alright, just watch that son on a bitch!”
“I’ll watch it, but you watch that son of a bitch under him!”
“I got him covered; he ain’t going nowhere! Move it!”
Luke heard the shouts and felt the jostling, and an enormous weight suddenly left his chest and he rolled off whatever was underneath him to the left, coming to again after dropping a few inches and bouncing his nose against the floor.
“Ouch.”
“He’s awake!” Blinking his eyes, the deputy saw Johnny bending over him. “Are you okay?”