by Jason Brant
“What’s wrong with him?” Allison asked. “Why is he so dirty?”
“Cause he’s a douche.” Nami moved the mouse on the desk, and the screen flickered to life.
“That’s not fair,” Sammy said. “You know why he’s like that.” She slowly walked around the office, looking behind the desks and in cabinet drawers. “And I’m not seeing any extra guns in here.”
Nami didn’t look up from the screen. “Shit. The internet is down too.”
Allison turned back to the two women. “What’s happening here?”
“How should we know?” Nami asked.
“I’m not an idiot. It can’t be a coincidence that all of you are in town on the day that men wreck my car, shoot at the sheriff, kill a man, and all the phone lines go down.” Allison crossed her arms over her chest, hoping it would make her appear tougher than she felt. It helped to hide the dance her hands were doing. “So, what’s happening here?”
Nami hopped out of the seat and walked past her. “Someone is trying to kill Ashley.”
“What? Why?”
“Because he can read—” Nami paused, tilting her head slightly. “You hear that?”
“What?” Sammy stood behind the sheriff’s desk, knelt down, sifting through the bottom drawer. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Sounds like an engine.”
Allison stayed quiet for a moment, listening. She was about to say that she didn’t hear anything either, when the faint whine of a small engine came from the woods behind the station. “Sounds like a quad.”
“What the hell is a quad?” Nami asked.
“A four-wheeler. There are trails all through the mountains.”
“Oh.” Nami listened for a moment before shaking her head. “Sounds like it’s coming at us fast.”
A handful of gunshots from the same direction as the quad made Allison jump.
Her arms broke out in goose bumps when screams filled the forest a second later.
12 – The Hits Keep on Coming
The area had remained silent as I stood at the end of the parking lot. I kept expecting the men down the road to come looking for us, but there hadn’t been any sign of them since we’d left the driveway leading to my cabin.
I’d leeched her most recent memories as we were pulling into the police station. Smith’s men had openly attacked the sheriff and killed the professor. They’d placed a spike strip on the road, which had taken out Allison’s car.
Clearly, they didn’t want anyone coming into, or going out of, the town.
But what I couldn’t figure out is why they let Allison and the sheriff escape. The car was heavily damaged, the sheriff bleeding out, and the men had an arsenal in the back of their van. They could have taken Allison out with ease, but they’d let them get away. Sure, they’d shot the car all up, yet they didn’t give chase.
That didn’t make any sense.
I couldn’t get a grasp on what their endgame could possibly be.
A handful of the agents outside the cabin had tried to take us out. After they’d failed, no one else had come up to finish the job, despite the fact that two men were less than half a mile away, watching one of the roads leading out of town.
There was something else going on that I hadn’t worked out yet.
The tower of black smoke rising from the direction of town didn’t give me any warm and fuzzy thoughts. If I had to guess, that was probably coming from the place where the giant explosion had happened.
I know, I was a regular Hardy Boy.
My conscience got the best of me as I stood there and watched the black mass rise higher. Someone could be hurt. The smart thing to do would be to go in the other direction. Smith was after me and the safest play was getting out of Dodge.
But no one ever accused me of being smart.
As soon as we developed a plan for getting the sheriff some medical care and extracting the women from harm’s way, I planned to go see what trouble I could scrounge up in town.
My fingers thrummed on the handle of the pistol in my waistband as I paced up and down the edge of the parking lot. Sammy, Allison, and Nami were talking about me inside. I puffed my chest out a bit, showing off the body that Budweiser built.
I deflated a moment later when I heard a four-wheeler zipping through the forest.
A gunshot followed it.
Then a scream.
Drew popped up from the other side of the police cruiser, his gaze locking on mine. “Now what?”
“I’m on it.” I sprinted across the parking lot, rocks and gravel grating under my shoes. The pistol was in my hand, the safety off. “Stay with them in case Smith’s peons come by.”
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“That doesn’t leave much out.” I ran by the side of the converted house and plunged into the tree line behind it.
The whine of the ATV died. It was hard to tell how far away it was because of the way noise travels in the forest. I’d grown up in the suburbs, so I wasn’t much of a woodsman.
My pace slowed, and I slid behind a group of trees. The burn in my legs from the early morning run had already returned. Had I known that I’d be fighting for my life later in the day, I might have taken it a bit easier during the workout.
Another scream came from ahead.
This one had the throat-searing quality of someone suffering incomprehensible pain.
I’d heard something like it before.
Some intel had come in about a possible weapons cache outside of Fallujah. The tip came from a villager who had been given a handsome payout for the information, which meant it was about as reliable as a rain forecast in Shitsville, Iraq.
Instead of an underground bunker filled with rusted-out Soviet bombs and RPGs, we found a torture chamber. Al Qaeda had moved into the area a few months earlier and started kidnapping and mutilating any locals who cooperated with us.
The place looked like Ed Gein had been hired as the interior designer.
It smelled like Satan’s asshole.
The walls and ceiling were made of stone and packed dirt. Naked light bulbs hung from a series of exposed wires that wouldn’t have passed code in a sewer. The dim lighting concealed most of the gory details.
Caked blood dried on the floor. Rusted drills and saws and tin snips covered benches. It looked like we’d just walked onto the set of the latest Saw flick.
We were a dozen feet inside when I heard a shriek that chilled me to the core. I’d never heard a human being make a sound like that, and I’d been around men who’d just had their legs blown off.
It took everything I had not to tuck my tail and haul ass out of there.
We pressed on, clearing the small space in less than thirty seconds. It was only four rooms branching off a connecting hall with a closed door at the end. The scream had come from in there.
If I’d faltered then, even for a millisecond, the courage of the men behind me would have evaporated. Bravery was a funny thing. Everyone expected the hero to have a John Wayne stoicism, when it was more than likely that they were just trying not to piss themselves.
Courage was the first thing to abandon men in the face of unrelenting horror. It was that instant just before shit was about to go down when your bravery skipped town.
We were smack dab in the middle of that moment when the man behind that door screamed again. He babbled something in Farsi, a language in which I knew exactly zero words, but the meaning was plain—he wished for death.
Whatever they were doing to him in there had broken him long ago.
When I kicked the door in and saw the pieces of him they’d sliced off, I went into a rage that I still only partially remember. We shot the four men in the room with him, giving them a swift death they didn’t deserve.
The victim died as we were transporting him to the Green Zone.
But the screams I’d heard as I stood outside the door were just like what was coming from the forest ahead of me.
My courage threatene
d to flee like a thief in the night.
The memories of that day flooded back, the same chill I had so many years ago running up my spine. I hid behind a tree and peeked around the corner, scanning the woods for movement. The forest floor dropped away twenty yards ahead, sloping out of view. From the sound of it, the screamer was down there.
The frantic emotion baking off the wounded man filled the air around me. The hair on my arms prickled as dread coursed through my body. Afraid of what I would see, I carefully let my guard down and allowed the man’s thoughts through.
Incalculable misery rushed in.
His mind was a pulsating beacon in my brain.
And it was nothing compared to the madness emanating from the person with him. It was the same fractured thoughts coming from the agents who had gone insane outside of my cabin. Whatever had infected them was more widespread than we’d hoped.
The combined effect of having both of them in my head made my knees buckle. I slid down the tree, free hand going to my forehead. The bark dug into my shoulder, causing deep scratches that I barely felt.
The screams became a muted, tinny annoyance in the background. The trees around me swirled.
I focused all of my willpower and blotted them out, reasserting my mental shields. Even with my mind walled off, I could still feel their thoughts out there, pounding against my defenses. In a normal day, surrounded by regular people, my ability to keep people sealed off wore down as the evening approached.
Having to deal with so much already that morning would break me down to little more than a blubbering pile of goo in no time.
As my senses returned, I got back to my feet. A stabbing pain settled behind my eyes like a hangover after a weeklong bender. Or a half-decade bender, in my case.
If I was going to make it through the day, I couldn’t afford to open my mind to those around me anymore. I was afraid of being worn down but, beyond that, I feared that whatever madness had infected the federal agents and the man ahead of me was contagious.
What would happen if I lost it as they had? With my ability, very bad things could go down. The thought that I could catch their illness by being in their minds made me double my efforts to wall myself off.
I staggered around the tree, still feeling woozy. The foliage on the forest floor opened up a few yards ahead, exposing a four-wheeler trail. The residents of Arthur’s Creek loved their dirt bikes and four-wheelers, zipping through the woods at all hours of the day and night. A few of them had even come upon the cabin once or twice, only to be run off by the agents protecting me.
The screaming continued.
I faltered on the trail and had to force myself to continue. I’d hoped that the period of my life where I witnessed horrible things was finally over, not wanting to accept the realization that it might never end for me.
My fate, it seemed, was to have life shit on me over and over until the day I died.
I squeezed the handle of the pistol, grinding my fear into it. My finger caressed the trigger.
“Please! Please, kill me!” The man repeated his pleas three more times before my feet got moving again.
At the crest of the hill, I stopped and raised the pistol in front of me.
Took a deep breath.
I finally looked down the slope and saw two men at the bottom of the hill. A four-wheeler idled, the front end pressed against a fallen log.
One man was lying on his back. Both of his legs had compound breaks in multiple places, the limbs rending at odd angles. It looked as if he had four joints in each leg.
Blood poured from open wounds surrounding the pinkish bones.
He wore a white t-shirt that had turned maroon. He’d been shot at least twice in the torso, though it was hard to judge exactly how many rounds he’d taken from the top of the hill.
His assailant stood by the man’s legs, prodding at the protruded bones with the toe of his boot. He held a pistol in one hand, letting it dangle by his hip. As I watched, the shooter kicked at a shard of femur.
The wounded man howled again, the cords of his neck standing out.
I couldn’t believe a man so close to death could scream with such vigor.
The torturer shifted his weight as he stared down at his victim.
That was when I took him in for the first time, finally peeling my horrified gaze from the man lying in the trail.
He was just a kid.
Maybe fourteen or fifteen.
Pimples covered his cheeks and forehead.
Tousled hair hung in his eyes.
He still had braces for fuck’s sake.
What the hell was going on?
The kid kicked the man again, and I actually heard another bone break.
That snapped me out of the fog I’d descended into. I drew a bead on the kid’s chest with the pistol. I had no intent to use it. “Stop!”
The kid jumped at my shout and looked up the hill at me. With a squeaky voice, he said, “Why would I do that?”
“Because I’m pointing a gun at you.”
“Oh, you mean one of these?” He raised his own. “Big deal.”
“Drop it and step away from that man.” I looked at the victim again and saw that his breathing had grown shallow. His eyes had closed. I hoped that he’d just passed out and wasn’t actually circling the drain.
Judging from the grievous wounds he’d suffered, that hope dwindled the more I looked at him.
“Nah.” The kid gave me a grin that made me want to shudder. It was the kind of smile that you saw on pictures of Charles Manson or Ted Bundy—a soulless expression. A predator watching his prey. “I’m not done playing yet.”
“Listen to me very carefully.” I kept my voice even, doing my best to keep the disgust and terror out of it. “What you’re doing right now isn’t you. Someone is making you do these awful things. Just put the gun down and we’ll figure it out together, all right?”
The corners of his mouth rose even higher. “Why would I do that when this is so much fun?”
With a calm, nonchalant motion, the kid aimed his pistol at the man on the ground and shot him in the eye.
“No!” I took an instinctive step forward and then stopped. I couldn’t give up the high ground. “You little shit!”
Death throes sent the man’s body into a spasmodic dance. His ruined face stared back at me, the lone eye unseeing.
“I think you’ll be my next plaything,” the teen said. He cocked his head to the side and looked me up and down. “We’re going to have so much fun.”
I gaped back at him, struggling to wrap my head around the situation. “Don’t do it.”
“I’m just a kid.” He turned the pistol toward me. “You wouldn’t shoot a kid, would you, mister?”
I hesitated. I never hesitated when the shit hit the fan. “Don’t.”
The kid’s finger tightened around the trigger as he continued to raise the weapon.
I double-tapped him in the chest.
After that, I puked my guts out.
13 – Some Wounds Never Heal
My aim was true. One round in the right lung, one in the heart. The kid died quickly. The poor bastard in the dirt stared at me with his sightless eye as I descended the hill.
I’d tried to stop the kid’s bleeding, but nothing short of a biblical miracle could have saved him. I put pressure on the wounds with my hands, but I wasn’t able to slow much of it down. He sneered up at me for a few seconds, defiant until the end.
How long I sat in the dirt trail, staring at my blood-caked hands, I couldn’t say. I closed both of their eyes before climbing back up the short hill and heading for the station. Drew stood in the back door, aiming his pistol in my general direction.
“You all right?” He saw the blood on my hands and lowered the gun. “What happened?”
I chewed on the memories for several seconds as I walked closer. “I shot a kid.”
“What?” Drew stepped aside and let me into the old house. We walked down a hallway and ende
d up in a living room that had been converted to the main office of the police station.
I plopped down in a chair behind a desk. My hands left bloody prints on the armrests. “There was a kid torturing a man in the woods.”
Sammy stood by the front door, watching me with the soft, concerned gaze I’d come to know so well when we were together. “Oh, God. We heard the screams.”
“It looked like he’d shot the man off a four-wheeler, and then broke his legs. He was just toying with him when I got there.” I stared at my crimson fingers again. “He shot the man when I got there, and then tried to shoot me. I had to put him down.”
“Fuckity fuck.” Nami sat behind another desk in front of a computer monitor. “We’ve descended into the seventh circle of Hell.”
Allison’s throat worked. “What did he look like?”
Her face contorted as I described the braces, pimples, and longish hair.
“You killed Jimmy Walsh?”
I couldn’t raise my eyes to meet hers. “I don’t know what his name was. I couldn’t tell.”
“He was a good kid. His mom came into the station for coffee every morning.”
If she was trying to make me feel even worse about the shooting than I already did, then she accomplished her mission. Had I not already emptied my stomach in the woods, I would have puked right there on the desk. My gut felt like it had twisted in a knot.
Drew had been standing behind me, listening to the story, allowing me to work through it. He used the same procedure when questioning suspects while playing detective during the day. He’d give people just enough information to let them try to weave a bullshit story. They usually talked themselves into an extended stay in a cement hotel room.
He placed a white towel on my shoulder. “Found this in the bathroom. Get yourself cleaned up.”
I swiveled around and looked up at him. “I didn’t have a choice. If you’d seen the look in his eyes—”
“I know.” Drew shook his head. “We’ve both done things we wish we hadn’t today.”
“He had the same craziness going on in his head as the agents. When I tried to hear what he was thinking, it kicked the hell out of me.” I took the towel and wiped red smears across it. The blood in the lines of my hands and folds of skin around my knuckles didn’t want to come off.