Clitheroe was a walrus of a man with a mustache and lamb chops that had fallen through a time warp from the 19th century. His fingers were pudgy as sausages, and his tactical vest was held in place by armored extender-straps. He was studying a schematic. The rest of the people in the room were a motley collection of shapes and sizes, men and women, all in black and armed to the teeth they had left in their head––some of them didn’t have very many. All were hanging on Clitheroe’s word like their lives depended on it. Perhaps they did. The one thing that screamed from the room, as far as Maxine was concerned, was that these guys were part-timers and preppers who’d taken it upon themselves to do something crazy. Take on an army unit holed up in a hospital.
Clitheroe looked up. “What are you doing here, Captain? You’re supposed to be down on barricade four.”
Karel held up her gun. “A group of Carron’s men came out of the medical center. Tried to break through. We got them all, but I saw this one.” She pointed at Maxine. “She looked like she was lost, and it turns out she was. I sent the men back to the barricade while I get her to safety.”
“All very noble, Captain, but safety is the park. Not command and control. Are you sure she’s not a spy?”
“Well, I’m sure I’m not a spy, Mr. Clitheroe, if that helps.”
Clitheroe looked hard at Maxine, and after three or four seconds he broke out into a wide smile. “Give this woman a bigger gun. I like the cut of her J-I-B.”
When Clitheroe had finished briefing his militia, Maxine asked to take him aside for just a moment, promising not to keep him long.
“The main assault is about to begin, Mrs. Standing, I really don’t have the…”
“Please. I have to get inside the hospital first…”
“No.”
“Please, listen. From what you said in your briefing, your guys are going to go in mob-handed and kill everything that moves… Carron, Jonstone, the lot of them.”
“Yes, that would be about the size of it. Strength through superior firepower. We think there’s only about thirty or so of the deserters and mutineers in there. Carron is no general in the accepted sense; any army man who would use his own forces to feather his own nest, subjugating the people of Cumberland and stealing the food and medication from their mouths, doesn’t deserve to live in my book. We’re going to take him and his men out in a way that goes beyond extreme prejudice.”
“Don’t you want to give them a chance to surrender?”
“You think I haven’t? You think I want to risk my people like this? Of course, I offered them the opportunity to surrender. I could give you a pair of field glasses now and point you to the trees where he hung the bodies of the people I sent in there to broker the deal with him! Every man in there knows that if they come out here, they’re going to face the justice of the people of Cumberland, and that justice is going to be swift and final. And I don’t blame them for that. I didn’t set up and train this militia to sit on our backsides while Carron and his like are left to do what they want. No, ma’am.”
Maxine smiled. “I get all that, really I do, but I think there’s at least one person in that hospital who would be glad of a rescue.”
Clitheroe listened impatiently while Maxine explained the reason for her journey, what had happened to Cynthia Banks, and her knowledge of where Doctor Lawrence Banks might be now.
When she’d finished, Clitheroe sighed and smoothed both sides of his tobacco-stained mustache with his thumbs.
He turned to the room. “Okay. Listen up, boys. We got a problem.”
“I really don’t like the idea of you coming in there with us,” Karel said as they hunkered down fifty yards from the rear service entrance to the medical center.
“You got any idea what Banks looks like?” Maxine replied.
“Nope.”
“Well, I had plenty of time to study a picture of him on the mantle of his cabin while his wife died at my side.”
“You want to be careful around here, honey. Death is a communicable disease.”
Karel, fifteen of her men, and Maxine were shielded from the windows at the back of the hospital by a five-foot-high concrete wall which, as the sun went down over Cumberland, provided cover as they approached from between the houses behind it.
Gunfire could be heard from the front of the hospital as Clitheroe’s forces, instead of mounting a full assault, offered a distraction raid to draw what fire there was from the building. The thinking was that, as darkness fell, if they could make things very interesting at the front of the building, that would give Karel’s team a relatively clear run at the back.
“I still don’t see why we couldn’t have gone with the original plan.”
Maxine shook her head. “I’ve seen Carron in action. He’s not a logical actor. If he thinks he’s going to be overrun, surrender isn’t an option–– like your guys found out––he’ll kill Banks and anyone else he can. He won’t want a surgeon as useful as him to fall into your hands. He’ll kill him out of spite. He sentenced me to death for breathing in the wrong direction.”
Karel shrugged. “Let’s hope we’re all still breathing at the end of this.” She looked at her watch. “Three. Two. One.”
Four explosions in unison signaled the start of the decoy operation.
Karel made her MP5 ready and her team did the same, pulling their goggles down over their eyes.
Each member of the ten-person team, Maxine had been told proudly by Clitheroe, had bought and paid for their own equipment, and had spent their weekends training and getting into shape––some shapelier than others, Clitheroe had laughed, patting his stomach. Every woman and every man in the group were ready for this, and they were ready to help Maxine get her man out of the medical center. The Third Maryland Defenders were ready to do their duty.
“Go! Go! Go!” Karel hissed, and as one they began swarming over the wall.
Inside, the medical center was dark and smelled bad. It had been under siege by Clitheroe and his Defenders for nearly three days, Maxine had been told. There was no sanitation, and no one had been able to leave the building to get water or get rid of waste. The smoke from the fires outside insinuated itself throughout the building as they moved down the corridor beyond the service entrance and into the main bulk of the building.
Only two of Carron’s men had been in the vicinity of the service door as the Defenders had approached it. They’d been shot where they stood. The crack from Karel and the others’ weapons had been almost totally covered by Clitheroe’s actions out front. Once inside, they secured the space, easily finding the access way into the building. Leaving two Defenders to keep the service area clean of Carron’s men, Maxine and the rest followed Karel.
A shadow in the shape of a uniformed soldier appeared up ahead. Karel took him cleanly in the flak jacket, knocking him over backwards. The soldier—a black-haired, musclebound specimen with bad teeth—tried to return fire with his sidearm, but two more bullets from Karel, sent into his legs, put his aim awry. By the time Karel got to the bleeding soldier, her team had taken up defensive positions covering all points of access to the corridor, and covering the angles up an exposed stairwell.
Crashes and flashes from outside flickered along the halls. The hefty stutter of heavy machine gun fire from the roof echoed through the building. Karel knelt by the soldier who was writhing in pain, trying to stop the flow of blood from his shattered knees. His nametape read JACKSON.
“We have medics waiting to come in, Jackson. When we have finished here, all I have to do is tell them where you are and you’ll get treatment. Now, you don’t want me to forget where you are and what’s wrong with you, do you?”
Jackson’s face was white with shock, his mouth trembling and his eyes wet with tears. “Carron’s not going to surrender… I was coming out to give myself up.”
“Don’t lie to me, Jackson; it does nothing to help my memory. If you were going to give yourself up, you would have by now.”
Jackson cla
mmed his mouth shut.
“Where is Doctor Banks?” Maxine hissed, joining Karel by Jackson. She began taping a wound pad from her pack over one of his wounds and Karel flashed her a look. Maxine ignored her; Karel rolled her eyes.
“We need to move out of here, Karel,” Zimmerman, one of Karel’s men, said. “Anyone comes down the corridor, we’ll be caught like rats under a bucket.”
Karel nodded and turned back to Jackson. “Answer the lady’s question, soldier. And answer it now.”
“I don’t know. Upstairs, I guess. They brought him in two days ago. They don’t tell us squat. Just expect us to die like dogs.”
Neither Karel nor Maxine were convinced by Jackson’s sudden conversion to the good side, but right now he was all they had. “Floor?”
“Top. The fifth.”
“Why does it always have to be at the top when there are no elevators?” Maxine muttered.
Karel smiled grimly. “One day, doing this will be easy.” Then Karel shook her head and shot Jackson through the forehead.
“You can’t…” Maxine began, but Karel put a hand over her mouth. “Did you believe him when he said he was ready to switch sides?”
Maxine shook her head.
Karel gestured at him and explained, “He was just telling us what we wanted to hear. Any of us would do the same in a similar situation. If we left him here while we went up, you can guarantee he’d have tried to raise the alarm. Anyone who had stayed in here this long while we were pounding them was ready to stay and die. Let’s go. Move out.”
Maxine took one last look at Jackson’s twisted body and wide-open eyes, picked up her pack, and followed the Defenders to the stairs. She knew in her mind that what Karel said was true, but it didn’t stop it hurting her nursing sensibilities. She knew she had to focus on Doctor Banks, though, and through him, Storm.
They moved quickly up through the floors. What was left of Carron’s men—perhaps thirty or so by Clitheroe’s estimate—were up on the roof, firing from their positions over towards Lincoln Elementary. They passed windows where Maxine saw the Morse code of white-hot tracer fire helping Carron’s men find their targets in the dark, smoke-filled air.
They came under fire two floors below their destination, as three of Carron’s men shot from behind overturned tables on a landing between flights. They opened fire with their M164As, chewing up the stairs and sending bursts of plaster over Karel’s team. Zimmerman took a round in the shoulder as he pushed Maxine facedown onto the concrete and shot upwards. Karel threw up a stun grenade which blasted the stairwell magnesium white and drove nails of intense sound into Maxine’s ears. The soldiers behind the tables were disorientated—one ran back up the stairs and was cut down by Karel leading from the front, and another tried to climb over the railing and drop down the middle of the stairwell, but misjudged his grip in his panic. He fell, smashing into the concrete below like a combat-uniformed pinball.
The last soldier raised his weapon and began to fire. His eyes had been so blinded by the flash that he couldn’t have hit an eighteen-wheeler from ten yards. Zimmerman, dropping his MP5 and pulling out his Glock G45, took the soldier out of the brief exchange with a bullet to the chin that sent him down in a spray of blood and bone.
They climbed over the tables and continued up.
On the fifth floor, there were still sharp sounds of battle echoing around the medical center. Karel told her team to search the wards and the offices while Maxine helped Zimmerman with his wound. He was in a little pain, but still buzzing on the adrenaline of battle, his eyes bright and showing he wanted to be with his team. The bullet had drilled deep into Zimmerman but hadn’t smashed his collarbone. “There’s no exit wound, so someone will have to dig the bullet out.”
Zimmerman smiled. “When we find your doc, I can be his first house call.”
Maxine put kaolin-infused WoundStat Combat Gauze into the wound and thumbed it in to pack the hole. The kaolin would staunch the bleeding, and the gauze would cover it until they could get him to the doctor or a medic.
“Pressure,” she said, hauling Zimmerman’s other arm across his body and putting it in place over the gauze. Zimmerman looked unhappy that he wasn’t immediately able to return to the fray, but complied with Maxine’s order.
“Maxine?”
It was Karel, calling from the other end of the room. She was standing next to a pair of double doors that had been pulled open by two of her team. All three were pointing their weapons through the doors. “I guess we’ve found your doctor.”
Maxine ran to Karel, but skidded to a halt.
Looking through the door was like coming upon a secret magical door which looked right into the past. Through the doors, illuminated by yellow oil lamps, was a room that may have once been a modern operating theater. But the lights were dead, and the faces of the electronic equipment were blank and black. There were five people in the room.
Two were soldiers. Hands high, weapons at their feet. On an operating table, General Carron lay back with a stick between his teeth and a half-drunk bottle of whiskey in his hand. He was covered in theater sheets all the way down his body to his knees. His left leg below that was black and swollen with infection. The skin was broken and discharging pus. The stench from the wound was wafting from the room and clogging Maxine’s throat with its rich, bitter-sweet debasement. Holding Carron’s hand was the pinch-faced Major Johnstone, the officer Maxine had managed to escape from when she’d been on her way to be executed. Johnstone’s face was a mask of shock. Next to Johnstone, poised with a bone saw to begin a traumatic amputation of Carron’s leg, was Doctor Banks.
The distance collapsing between this tableaux of barbaric, two-hundred-year-old battlefield medical practices and what might have been humane and safe now banged like a thunderclap in Maxine’s skull.
This horror was exactly what was going to happen to Storm…
“So,” Doctor Banks said, adjusting his grip on the bone saw, “shall I continue… or not?”
28
Josh, Tally, Poppet, Henry, and Greene left the ranch at three a.m., through the cellar door that led out from under the building on the aspect directly in opposition to the tree line. Tally had had to argue with her father hard to get him to allow her to come along, but in the end, he’d relented; she was fit, she was fast, and she would be an asset to the attack if things went to plan.
They skirted the pasture without lights, their clothing dark and their faces blackened with combat face paint from Henry’s bag. They were armed with sidearms, shotguns, MP5s, and from the pack on the horse Josh had brought, an RPG and three rockets gifted to him by Jayce. Henry carried them in his pack. They were to be used, Josh said, as a last resort. This was not a kill-mission, and he’d made that very clear, which Tally herself had been glad of. Running these guys off the land was more than fine, and threatening and roughing them up a bit would hopefully suffice to get their meaning across.
Her dad’s plan was to capture the guys––however many there were––up on the ridge, making it clear to them that the Jefferson and Standing families were not willing to compromise on their position, and that they would defend the farm to the last if that’s what Creggan and his men wanted.
Josh had explained that this, of course, wasn’t what they really were going to do—if worse came to worst, they would have to acquiesce until the group was fit to travel. But giving Creggan’s men a good show of force, and maybe even exploding one of the RPGs nearby… well, maybe that might give Creggan pause and allow a dialogue between the two sides which would explain the deception over Maria and form the basis of a negotiated settlement. There was no way, Josh had argued with Donald, that those at the M-Bar could stand up to Creggan’s forces if they came en masse. So, this show of force and giving the watchers sight of the ‘RPG deterrent’ might just bring them to the table. Donald had argued that he’d rather die than give up the M-Bar. Meanwhile, Josh had said that it was his children in the firing line, and so it wasn’t Dona
ld’s decision to make anymore. That had hit home for Donald, and he had nodded, but Tally had been able to see how unhappy her grandfather was. He wasn’t ready to negotiate a settlement––he was ready to shoot and kill, whatever the consequences.
She admired his grit, but her dad had been right. They needed to buy time. Storm couldn’t be moved yet. It would probably kill him if they tried. Storm’s condition was stable, yes, but he was still in a lot of pain and would need the surgery Maxine had gone to organize. Until that facet of the conundrum was dealt with, they had to try to prolong the time before fighting at the ranch, or avoid a full-scale battle entirely.
Tally had been incredibly relieved to see her dad again, though; it had been such a difficult decision to leave the coast and travel north, but the fact that it had worked out so well––more by luck than judgement, it had to be said––made the wrench of making it worthwhile. Her dad had told her a little of what he’d encountered in Savannah, and she had told him the twists and turns of her own journey. Both of them had been through the wringer, but perhaps felt stronger because of it. This was another reason she wanted to go with her dad and the others to confront Creggan’s men on the ridge. She wasn’t letting her dad out of her sight again. That Henry had supported her pitch to her father—that she should come along, that she could handle herself, and that she would be an asset rather than any hindrance—had helped, too, and made her admiration of him even greater. There was something resilient and sound about Henry that, in safer times, might have made her feel slightly stronger things for him. She still might, she’d told herself a few times. She hadn’t decided yet.
The party, single file, with Henry leading and Josh bringing up the rear, made its way across the blackened plain swiftly in the cool night. Only the rustle of the grass and the lowing of the cattle in the pasture in the distance complemented their soft footfalls. Grandpa, who’d struggled with the role he’d been given to stay back and keep watch on Laurent, Storm, and Maria, had given them the best idea he could about where the shot had come from on the ridge, and the cover there. Tally knew her father had insisted that her grandpa stay back because he couldn’t trust him not to shoot first and ask questions later, thus wrecking his plan. He’d been smart not to say anything like that to him directly, just couching it in the terms that his father-in-law would be more accepting of—that he’d be better at defending the property with all the others gone.
Supernova EMP Series (Book 2): Deep End Page 24