by Scott Blade
“It’s on silent.”
“Not silent. Vibrate. You kill one, text me.”
She nodded.
“Remember, there were ten. Now, nine.”
“Okay.”
“You happen to find her, text me. You get into trouble, text me. Got it?”
“You do the same.”
Widow nodded and headed up the center row of vehicles. He took out his phone and made sure it was set to vibrate. Sometimes it was necessary to split up in order to achieve an objective. Widow had no reservations about that, but the problem with splitting up was communication. They didn’t have radios and headsets to stay in contact, and he didn’t want his phone ringing. Texting was the best way for them to relay information. He needed her to tell him if she killed one so he could keep up with the numbers.
He simultaneously kept his eyes on the sky for the drone and watched his twelve o’clock view. He stayed low, using the heavy equipment as cover. He heard the drone’s buzzing blades echoing behind him. They faded and faded. He kept the KA-BAR out for now.
He walked on for what seemed like a hundred yards but was realistically more like sixty. Up ahead, he heard voices. He crouched down and stayed as close to a pair of bulldozers as he could.
He peered through a crack in the metal skirt around the midsection of one of the bulldozers. He saw two guys. They were standing by a white F150 that must’ve been from the 1980s. The hood was up, and one guy had his head stuck in it, checking out the engine, Widow figured. Just two guys talking over an engine, which was good. It meant the drone hadn’t discovered the dead guy yet. The bad news was that there was about twenty yards of open clearing between his position and theirs. No way was he going to sneak up on them, but he could try. He put the KA-BAR away and levered the action, walked slowly toward them. The ground was worn and compacted from the traffic of the heavy equipment around them.
Widow pulled the rifle up, stock in his shoulder. He paced to about fifteen feet behind them and aimed down the stock. Then he paused. He noticed a half-empty bottle of tequila resting on the front tire. That made him smile because tequila was Mexican. For militia racists who hated Mexicans, that was rich.
The half-empty bottle also made him smile because he realized that chances were they had been drinking it.
He didn’t fire. Instead, he crept closer, keeping the rifle ready. No movement.
He moved in closer. Nothing. Now he was less than ten feet behind them.
Widow took two giant steps. Fast. He reversed the rifle and plunged the stock into the back of the first guy’s neck. He toppled forward, nailing his face on the grill of the truck. Widow heard a loud crack. The chrome finish was smeared in red blood.
The guy’s nose had broken.
The other guy pulled his head out from under the hood and jumped back.
Widow saw an AR15 resting against the bumper. The stock was on the ground, and the muzzle was within inches of the guy’s hand.
Widow reversed the Winchester and shoved it in the guy’s face. He said, “Don’t even think about it! I’ll blow your head off!”
Widow didn’t recognize the guy’s face, but he knew instantly that the guy recognized his. He knew because he’d seen that look of terror in people before. Many times it was right before he killed them.
The guy said, “You?”
“Me, asshole.”
“You’re supposed to be locked up.”
“I guess you were there then?”
The guy said nothing, but he trembled violently like most people would if they knew they were going to get shot in the face.
Widow looked down at the other guy. He was starting to get up, cupping his nose, trying to stop the bleeding.
Widow said, “The girl.”
The guy didn’t even let him finish the question. He said, “She’s alive. We didn’t touch her. I swear.”
“Where?” he asked.
“She’s out back.”
Widow wondered why Cameron hadn’t seen her from the drone. Maybe it had been too high up.
“What about Glock?”
“Who?”
Widow shoved the rifle deeper into his face and said, “The guy with the voice.”
“He’s here too. He’s out back. Near the girl.”
The other guy stood up. His face was a mess. He held it with both hands, but that didn’t seem to be helping. Blood was everywhere. The guy leaned back against the truck. His hair was so disheveled that Widow figured he must’ve had a comb-over because he now had one long section on the side.
Both men were over forty, maybe over fifty.
Widow said, “Get over. Next to your friend.”
They both came in closer to each other.
The second guy asked, “What ya gonna do?”
Widow wasn’t quite sure. He wanted to kill them, but he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t in the habit of killing unarmed guys. On the other hand, he was sure they deserved it. He couldn’t use the knife—it was hard to kill two guys who saw it coming with a single knife.
Suddenly, he heard Jake barking in the distance. Only a couple of barks, but it was certainly enough to announce that there was a situation on their property. At the very least, the militia guys would know there was a dog loose.
He didn’t hear Leon discharge her weapon, and this worried him for about a half a second, but then his phone vibrated. He took it out and smiled at the screen. It read, “One down.” But Widow thought, Two down.
He slipped the phone back into his pocket, one-handed. He looked at the two guys and said, “Bad news, guys.”
“What?” they both asked, only the voice of the one with the broken nose sounded jumbled and nasal.
“Looks like you don’t get to live to fight another day after all,” Widow said, and he shot them both through the chest. Quick. Pop! Lever the action. And Pop! It was fast.
The muzzle flashed, and a red mist sprayed against the front of the F150. Neither guy screamed because both were dead before they hit the dirt. Widow had aimed at the heart. He watched them fall over and stared at the holes in both men. The close proximity of the shots had burned through the front of their shirts. Blood pooled underneath them.
He levered the action again and reloaded two more rounds into the rifle. He didn’t want to be caught having to reload it.
He moved away from the dead bodies, then jogged around the set of bulldozers and dipped down beside a large dump truck. He peered around the corner and saw mountains of heavy pipes of all different sizes. Some were big enough to be tunnels, and others were around two feet in diameter. They were stacked and piled in neat rows but in no particular order.
He looked past them and saw the house. It was faint, and still about fifty yards away. He stopped and pulled the phone out again. He texted Leon, “Two down” and “Go live.” Then he wondered if she’d understand. She probably would, but civilian law enforcement was different than military. He texted, “Shoot to kill.”
She responded with “Got it.”
Then he heard the buzzing sound again. The little drone was coming behind him, flying over the dead bodies. Widow knew that now they would know someone was coming for them. It would be all hands on deck. And he heard them. Loud, angry voices. He looked back at the house and saw bodies coming out of it, armed with their AR15s and whatever else.
He peered back at the drone, which was moving in his direction.
He texted Leon again and said, “I see the house. They’re coming out. Wait until I shoot. Then fire two times. Into the air. Draw them away. Then head back to the Tahoe.”
Widow turned and aimed at the drone and fired, levering the action after.
The drone didn’t explode like in the movies. But the bullet ripped through the center of it, and tiny little flashes of electricity surged through it. It plummeted to the ground.
Widow turned back and aimed in the direction of the house. Then he heard Leon’s shots way off in the distance. She was a good two hundred yards away, at least. He dr
opped to a crouch and ran to the right, keeping his head low. He scrambled to cover behind a row of huge pipes. He ran around them, gripping the rifle with one hand. He pulled the KA-BAR back out and lowered himself so he was out of sight as best he could be. He peeked around the pipes and saw the house. It was less than twenty yards now. He saw five confused faces standing in front of it.
Widow tallied five men, plus the four dead, which meant that there was one more in the house. But then he saw Glock and another man come out from the house. There were eleven, not ten.
The guy behind Glock was big, with a long gray beard like the leader of a motorcycle gang. He must’ve been the head of the Jericho Men. He had an open laptop in his hand. He must’ve been controlling the drone, which made Widow suspect he was the one who had tracked him using the iPhone from the dead woman. Therefore, he was the reason Hood was dead.
The guy started barking orders at the men. Three of them ran off in Leon’s direction, two others toward the fallen drone. All of them were armed with AR15s, which made Widow wonder if they had a corporate sponsor, except that the AR15 was manufactured by various gun makers, not just one. Then again, they did have a corporate sponsor—Auckland Enterprises.
Widow moved parallel to, but in the opposite direction of, the two guys headed for the fallen drone. He stayed close to the pipes and then crossed over to stand near a giant spool.
Between the spool and the house were nothing but beaten-up tracks of dirt. Heavy, thick tracks traced around the house to the back. He stayed there and texted Leon to be on the lookout for three guys, headed in her direction. She responded with “Get the girl” and nothing else.
Widow raised the Winchester and aimed at Glock, who was about thirty-five to forty yards away. He was looking straight ahead and missing Widow to his left. Widow was tempted to take the shot, but he didn’t want the rest of them coming down on him, not yet. He lowered the rifle and ran to the back of the house. He made it to the edge and hugged the wall.
The walls of the house were wood siding—cheap and thin. He put his ear to the wall and listened, hoping to hear Jemma crying or even breathing heavily. He just wanted a sign that she was alive.
He heard nothing but music. Sounded like some remade Hank Williams, not as good as the original.
He kept the rifle ready for a shot from the hip and slid down the wall to the back corner. He leaned over and looked.
The backyard was a rectangle, wide and short. There were several personal vehicles. Over to the south was a long stretch of animal cages, like a dog kennel. They were dark, and the bottom half was blocked off by a long baseboard, which he guessed was simply plywood they had nailed on. He saw no dogs and heard no barking. But there was a stench unlike anything he’d ever smelled before. It was horrible. It smelled like there were dogs in there, only none of them were alive.
Troughs lined the back of the kennel, and there were holes where dogs could stick their heads out and eat. The smell was so bad that he wouldn’t have been surprised if there was old, rancid dog food still in the trough.
Widow jumped around the corner and stood in the backyard. He scanned the area. No sign of life. He moved to the back door, which he expected to be unlocked. Why lock it way out in the middle of nowhere?
The bad thing was that the back door had a screen door on it, and screen doors were noisy. They squeaked when they were opened. The best way to deal with them was quick, like a Band-Aid. But Widow did one step better. He skipped it and checked out the windows. He figured he could find an open one. On a nice, windy day like this, why not?
He skipped the first two and found one near the other corner. It was open. The room was an empty bedroom. There was a double bed, pushed to the wall. On the big wall in the room, he saw computers—not one, but several. There were monitors and all kinds of computer equipment.
The monitors were all on, and he could see empty fields and portions of the Rio Grande. They were showing feeds from cameras that must’ve been placed miles away on the borders. Looked like hard-to-reach areas, like those might’ve been areas the Border Patrol wasn’t monitoring because to cross them was a death wish. Widow imagined that if the stories of illegal immigration were true, these were the types of places where aliens crossed—the unexpected areas and, therefore, the least guarded by US Border Agents.
Leon had said that these guys never turned anyone over. Not ever. Which made Widow think they did something else with them. Something worse. And he thought about the kennel. They had no dogs. He looked back at the kennel. And then he heard a noise. It came from off in the distance. It was gunfire. He heard AR15s. Unmistakable. He heard Jake barking and the undeniable sound of a Magnum blast from the shotgun—return fire from Leon. He smiled, but he couldn’t leave her out there alone for long.
He pulled out the phone and called her. It rang and rang, and she answered.
“NOT A GOOD TIME!”
“Where are you?”
“I’M AT THE TAHOE.”
“Get in and drive away. Keep going. I’ll call you when I have her.”
He expected Leon to argue back, to give him some crap that she couldn’t leave him behind, but she didn’t. She just said, “I’M STARTING IT NOW! CALL ME BACK!”
He heard the engine start, and the line went dead.
He put the phone away and jerked out the KA-BAR, cut through the screen in the window, and jumped in. Widow kept the rifle down at his hip. He searched the room, checked under the covers, under the bed, opened the closet, but there was no sign of Jemma.
He didn’t want to call out to her because he wasn’t sure if there were any other guys in the house or not. Cameron had only counted ten, but that didn’t mean there were only ten. So far he had seen eleven. Modern drones weren’t perfect and neither were drone operators.
Widow clasped his hand tight around the knob to the door and jerked it open. He panned down the hall. No one was there. There was one other door to his right and a living room at the end of the hall. He opened the other door and found a bathroom with a stand-up shower, a cracked white sink, and a steamed-up mirror. There was still steam in the air. Someone had just gotten out of the shower.
Widow looked at the carpet in the hallway. Wet footprints peppered the floor down the hall. Someone might’ve been just getting out when he heard the gunshots.
Widow stepped into the bathroom and flushed the toilet. It was loud. He stepped back into the bedroom, leaned the rifle down by the door, pulled out the KA-BAR again, and waited.
Two seconds later, a barefoot man wrapped in a towel came running down the hall with an M9 in his hand and nothing else. There were twelve guys, not ten.
The guy faced the bathroom, gun out.
Widow reached out, grabbed a tuft of the guy’s hair, and jerked his head back. He spun him around and swatted the gun out of his hand. It clattered off the doorjamb.
Widow shoved the guy into the wall and pressed the KA-BAR against his neck, forcing him to look at the ceiling unless he wanted his throat cut.
“Where’s the girl?”
“What? I…I don’t know, man.”
Widow looked at the guy’s eyes, which were looking down at him because his face pointed to the ceiling. Widow recognized him. It was the guy who had shot him with the rubber bullet.
“Last chance. Where?”
“I told ya. I don’t know.”
“She here?”
“She was. She was with that guy. With the voice. I swear I don’t know where she is now. I was asleep, and then I took a shower.”
Widow pulled the knife back away from his throat, let the guy lower his head. He locked eyes with him. Widow said, “Look at the knife.”
The guy looked confused for a long, long moment and then moved his eyes slowly down to the knife and the blade. It was still wet with blood. The guy started to squirm.
Widow clamped his hand over the guy’s mouth and said, “You lie.”
He stabbed the blade into the side of the guy’s neck, jerked it ar
ound. Blood sprayed out and across the wall, but the guy didn’t die, not as fast as he should’ve. He tried to push away from Widow but couldn’t. Widow stared into his eyes and watched his life slip away. He let go of the guy. His body went limp and inert, slid down the wall, and he was dead by the time he hit the carpet.
Widow stepped out into the hall and approached the living room. Then he stopped, realizing the shooting had stopped. He heard the leader yelling outside.
Widow slipped into the living room. A small kitchen was off to his left. He saw appliances, a cheap dining room table, and four chairs. On the table was another laptop, open. The screen showed a muted news report about one of the presidential candidates, the one pushing for the wall, Widow guessed. He really wasn’t sure which was which, because he didn’t even know who was running. The guy on the screen looked familiar. Could’ve been the other guy. He wasn’t sure. And didn’t care.
He turned and looked around the room. There was no sign of Jemma.
Two more AR15s rested on a coffee table near a long leather sofa. Which might’ve meant that Glock and the leader had run out the door without them. Which might’ve meant that they were either unarmed or only armed with sidearms.
The front door was ajar, and Widow heard Glock’s inhuman voice. And then the door flung open.
Widow raised the rifle. Fast. He planted his feet, pressed the stock into his right shoulder, took aim.
Glock and the leader of the Jericho Men walked in, and the looks on their faces were the best part of Jack Widow’s day.
JOHN GLOCK held a Sig Sauer in his hand, like the one the dead woman had had. The leader of the Jericho Men held a cell phone up to his ear and the laptop that controlled the drone in his other hand.
Widow said, “Hang up.”
The leader of the Jericho Men didn’t say another word into the phone. He just hung it up and dropped his hand down by his side.
Widow backed up and said, “Come in.”
The two men stepped in through the door. First Glock, and then the leader of the Jericho Men. They stopped three feet from the doorway.
Glock started to speak, but Widow said, “Shut up!” And he levered the action, which spit out a live round, but he did it more for effect than anything else. The only thing better than the sound of a rifle’s lever action was the cocking of a shotgun. That CRUNCH! CRUNCH! sound would’ve been something special, but he was satisfied with the Model 94.