Then I heard distant gunfire, James’ Disciples taking on the other groups of Messengers that patrolled the netherlands of the mall, paring their numbers.
Sarah broke our embrace, stepped back and gazed with wonder upon her four fingered left hand. “Hurts like a bitch,” she said softly, looking up at me. Then, amazingly, she smiled. “But we’re alive aren’t we,” she laughed.
I did too; then tears filled my eyes as my emotions spiked, battled with one another for dominance, relief and fear, joy and anger bouncing off one another in my body like molecules of boiling water.
“Jesus,” Sarah said, almost as if in a prayer of thankfulness, “I was so afraid that we were going to lose each other, Mac.” She looked up to the lights, behind me to the chaos of the abandoned restaurant area. “I think we need to be out of here, Mac,” she said. “I feel like a target in a shooting gallery. Give me a fucking gun. We got some payback comin’.”
I nodded, so relieved by her presence that I couldn’t talk. I put a fresh clip in the Glock and handed it to her, then removed my shirt, used my clip knife to cut both sleeves off, and wrapped her hand to stem the bleeding, using the other half as a tourniquet between her wrist and elbow. The rest of the sleeveless shirt fit her snugly.
A wan smile. “He was laughing at me when he cut off my finger. Looked me right in the eyes while he was doing it. Thanks, Mac. They were gonna kill me.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Did we get him?”
“Don’t think so. But we sure as hell whittled them down. Figure maybe a hundred or so left.”
I picked up the HK belt fed that I had pushed out as bait for The Babe. I hated when they left guns and ammo laying around in the vids. Seemed like they always could have used it later on.
“I’ve been able to monitor,” she said. “I see you recruited help. How many on our side?”
I pretended like I was mentally counting.
“Twenty-three.”
She rolled her eyes. “Does that include me?” she asked.
“Twenty-four,” I said.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Everyone had checked in. Minor injuries. We were all back in our burrows, hiding, awaiting the next move by the Messengers. The two men that Roberto had sent to deal with the Messengers that were trying to work down to me on the lowest level had returned to Roberto, one with a gaping knife wound on his arm. They had dispatched two of the Messengers with knives. The other four enemy soldiers had not attempted to complete their mission when the firing started. Maybe their drugs were wearing off. Perhaps their hearts weren’t in it. In the far recesses of the mall, where Jose’ and Flint had taken on the other enemy soldiers, it was estimated that at least thirty more Messengers had gone down. We took no prisoners.
“I’m lookin’ at six dead Messengers,” Roberto said to all of us over the headsets. He was still two levels above Weasel, Stevie, Sarah, Duke and me. “None of ‘em are fat enough or ugly enough to be The Babe. There’s a trail of blood leading away from me, over to the other side of the circle up on this level. I figure ‘em to be hiding in the stores. I’m also looking at eight pairs of night vision goggles. They must have torn them off when the lights came on. Hell of an idea, McCall.”
“We’ve got six corpses down here,” Stevie replied. “That makes fourteen in this section if we count the scouts your men took out, Roberto. Add another thirty and we’re close to fifty down. Plus some of them have got to be wounded. Many of them without goggles. When we turn out the lights, there’s gonna be a bevy of blind Messengers.”
“Do it,” Weasel said.
The sound of the generator abruptly stopped, replaced by an eerie silence. We continued talking in the dark, seven individuals on the circuit of the comm sets, now eight because Sarah had retrieved her strategically placed derm from her butt crack and jumped back in. She also had her NVG’s back again, courtesy of Weasel, who had plucked them from the compound when she had been captured.
Each of us sat quietly with our respective teams, exhausted from the action, crouched in our dark caves, linked to the other groups only by the voices in our earpieces.
Sarah, Stevie, Weasel, Duke and I were all behind an ice cream vendor’s serving counter in the lower level. Stevie peeled his shirt and offered it to Sarah, as if proffering a gift to a queen. Now she had sleeves. Cinco homeless amigos. But alive, I reminded myself. Afraid she was too weak to continue, I tried to get Sarah out. It didn’t work.
“Not til we finish,” she told me, steel voiced. “He’s still in here.”
I tried another route, attempting to get her to help Merlin with his duties, knowing it would be out of the action. That fish didn’t swim either.
I then suggested to everyone that we pack it up and head home, the battle at the AON Building still strikingly clear in my mind. But no one was buying. If we let them go, we’d only have to deal with them at a later date. They would keep coming at us. They would continue stealing children. They would not stop waging war on Folks clans and indies. Even outnumbered nine or ten to one, we still had the advantage of superior equipment and better knowledge of the environment. Mostly we had too many people with us that wanted a piece of The Babe.
“McCall,” the now familiar bass voice echoed down from somewhere above me. “What you doin’ this for? I ain’t never done nothin’ to you.”
I thought about Stevie…and the slaughtered Gaylords in the college parking lot what seemed like a century ago…and the children he had brutalized… and Merlin…Roberto and the Cobras, and James and his Disciples at the AON building. Then there was the matter of the bounty he had placed upon my head. Stupid bastard was so used to terrorizing people, so enamored with the process of creating fear, he couldn’t conceive of the possibility someone would take it personally.
And now there was Sarah. Mutilated. Humiliated. Terrorized. The fact that all of his attempts to subjugate her had seemed only to galvanize her in no way lessened the enormity of the fat man’s attempts to break her will. He had trespassed on her humanity.
I gave up my attempts to get Sarah out, persuade everyone to pull back to regroup, heal our wounds. It was a bad idea. We knew where he was. Approximately how many men he had with him. The rest of his soldiers were scattered throughout the mall, disorganized, confused, probably cramming their noses with Bad Boy. It was time to end it.
“Hey, fat man,” I yelled. “This world is going to be a much better place without you. You’re gonna die today. Tell your soldiers they’re going down with you. I saw what you did to the Gaylords, you piece of shit. Your whole fucking war against the Folks is built upon a lie. There’s no room for you here anymore.”
A few seconds elapsed before he responded. There was a new timbre to his voice, a higher pitch, a reflection of the ambiguity he was beginning to feel at the prospect of being at risk. The clan bully had grown up and for the first time in his life faced an opponent willing to stand his ground.
“You know how many men I got here, McCall?” he barked. He was going to fall back on bravado. “I’m gonna snuff your ass. You been in my business too long.”
I asked Roberto if the Messengers were all in one spot. “Far as I can tell. Except for the stragglers. But if they’ve still got their long talkers, they’ll be able to find him.”
“If they’ve still got the balls for the fight,” Weasel commented.
“Can we set up a cross fire?” I asked.
“They’re in a shoe store for women. Other side of the railing from the three of us up here. About twenty meters. You three set up on their side and we can do it easily.”
“What about James’ team?” Roberto asked. “Why not bring them up?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to have all of us in one place,” Weasel said. “Let’s leave them out there. Have our exits covered just in case.”
Stevie, Weasel, Sarah and I, accompanied by a limping Duke, who hadn’t left Sarah’s side since she reappeared, made our way to the top through a seri
es of holes and tunnels and set up in a place called Victoria’s Secret. We now had a triangle with twenty meter sides, the Messenger’s at the apex.
“On my signal,” I said, “we start firing into the shoe store. Three clips. Full auto. Let’s see what we can shake out.”
We flipped off our glasses and started firing, pouring nearly 600 rounds of the 7.62mm ordnance into the shoe store between our two groups. When the fusillade had ended, we rolled three fragmentation grenades into the store. When the smoke cleared a bit, I flipped my goggles back on and surveyed the results of our barrage through the haze of powder smoke. We had given the store a whole new look, shredding the shelves and counter tops, obliterating the cashier’s station, reducing anything still standing into dust and wood splinters.
Nothing moved inside. “Next one’s up to them,” I said.
I wasn’t willing to risk a frontal assault. As it turned out, The Babe was.
Duke gave the warning about ten seconds before it happened. A whine. Ears straight up. “Something’s going down,” I told everyone. “Make sure you’ve got fresh clips.”
They came out from the rear of the store, en masse, at least forty, moving quickly through the store and out the front. I didn’t have time to count. A thundering throng of crazed Messengers, at the peak of a drug high, brave and invincible, firing away with M 16’s on full auto. They had a dozen men on their left flank firing at Roberto’s position, pinning the three Cobras down, thwarting their attempts to return fire and protect our group.
The Messengers, eschewing the use of their goggles because of the muzzle flashes, mostly outfitted in football or hockey gear, snarling their imagined invincibility, preceded by a wall of 5.56mm M 16 rounds, appeared to be a deranged sports franchise from an alternate universe.
And they were barreling right down our throats. As they ran past Roberto’s position, strafing his team mercilessly, none of the Messengers broke away from the main group. They stayed intact, roaring at us with the deafening sound and power of a tornado.
“Get the fuck out of here,” I screamed.
Sarah grabbed Duke around his middle and slipped through the back door. Stevie and I each took a different exit, one left, one right, through holes we had carved out of the walls separating the stores. Weasel slipped through a hole in the floor. I ran like hell, letting them have Victoria’s Secret. Maybe they’d find the answer to the puzzle while they were in there.
I hadn’t heard any of us return a shot during their charge. Roberto’s team had scattered at the same time we had. The Messengers’ full contingent was intact. Maybe a stubbed toe, couple of drug overdoses. I went down a level and several stores over, before I settled on a position near Lord and Taylor, put my back to a wall and checked on everyone else. No one had been injured, but we were now separate individuals, no longer two teams, and not fully aware of the enemy’s movements.
Thinking about our situation, no one injured, no one in imminent danger, I suggested we all scatter and wait them out for a couple of hours. See if any of them crossed our paths.
“Pick a spot with your back protected and two or three exits,” I advised. “Sarah,” I asked, “where are you?”
“As far as possible from where I was five minutes ago,” she answered. “Me and Duke are in the back room of some store.”
“Where? What kind?” I asked, planning to retrieve her.
“The store is nothing but empty boxes, garbage and empty shelves and clothes racks,” she said. “I have no idea where we are. But wherever it is, it’s quiet.”
“You got a back door?” Weasel interjected.
“Behind us. It leads to a hallway.”
“Are you all right?” I asked, concerned about her wounds.
“The bleeding has stopped. It’s wrapped tight. Throbs. Hurts like hell and I’m one handed for now. But it will hold until we finish here.”
Merlin came into the circuit then. From the deepest levels of the complex. Weakened from his leg wound, he nonetheless had an important function to perform. His job would be to orchestrate our final surprise for the Messenger troops.
“Why don’t we just jump to the end?” he suggested. “My little army is ready to go.”
“Too early,” I said. “Plus there’s too many Messengers left for it to be effective. Probably still close to a hundred out there.”
“Main reason,” Weasel said, “is we all of us have to be in a safe place first. We’re too exposed. Just hang tight, Merlin.”
“What are you talking about?” Sarah asked.
I told her.
“Son of a bitch,” she said. “Who’s idea was that?”
“You need to ask?” I replied.
We settled down to wait them out, open to the possibility that the Messengers would exit in the darkness and head home to lick their wounds. But The Babe was revitalized by his successful break out and temporary victory over our two teams. For the next two hours the Messengers searched the mall, looking for trouble, finding it three times as they encountered James’ Disciples, engaging them in fire fights, losing some men, then discovering their adversaries had slipped away through our system of escape hatches.
After the third battle, a particularly fierce encounter far from our positions, we lost touch with Flint’s team. It was then that we decided to get proactive—reform the teams and set ambushes while we still had the cover of darkness. The site of our original success, the food serving area, was to be our staging area.
“How am I going to get there,” Sarah asked, “when I don’t know where I am now?”
“When we get there,” I answered, “I’ll fire a shot from the Colt 10mm. Move toward the sound. When you see something you could call a landmark, let me know. I’ll come get you.”
• • • •
“I’ve got a big problem, Mac,” came her soft voice over the headset. The tone of her voice scared me. “I’m sorry. I got lost, Mac. I’m so sorry, honey.”
“What is it, Sarah?” I asked. “Just let me know.”
“I’m stuck in a hallway, me and Duke.” Hesitation. She didn’t want to say the rest. “We’ve got company…The Babe is in front of us, about twenty feet.”
“Does he know you’re there?”
“Oh yeah. He’s got us covered with an AUG. He wants me to bring you here. Duke warned me, Mac. He knew there was trouble. I just turned the wrong way.”
“Where are you?” I asked.
“I still don’t know,” she said.
“Ask him,” I said.
“Behind a place called Fannie Mae,” she told me.
About two minutes away from my position. A long hall with two entries from the outside and several interior doors leading to offices and bathrooms. He must have caught her in transit from one position to another. I had a choice to come in behind Sarah and Duke or behind The Babe.
“You got any weapons?” I asked.
“He disarmed me. Just a little .22 short in my boot and a couple of knives…and Duke.”
None of them would do any good against his bulk and body armor.
“Two minutes,” I said. “Listen up, everyone,” I said across the band, “keep all the Messengers away from this spot. I’m going to play this out. That means you too, Merlin. Best you can do for us is keep everything ready for when we need the final stake in their hearts.”
“You can’t keep me away,” Merlin said, his intensity burning my ears. “This is mine more than any of yours.”
Weasel came on, directing his comments at Merlin. “Stay out of it, Merlin. Let Mac read it first. You could screw the whole thing up sticking your nose in.”
Merlin didn’t respond.
“Mac,” Weasel continued, “I got about twenty Messengers outside my hole here. It’s gonna take me ten minutes using the back doors to get there. You’re on your own, son. Remember what I’ve taught you.”
“Merlin,” I said, “stay in the basement. Get those animals ready. We’ll come back to you if we can. This is going to be
over real soon—one way or the other. Stevie…How close are you?”
“Very,” he said.
“After I’m in, come in behind Sarah and Duke. But no shooting.”
• • • •
I stepped into the hall. He was talking to Sarah, snarling and condescending. “…that little party we talked about after its over. You’ll forget about him real quick once you had a taste of me.”
“You’re talking about me?” I asked.
His head whirled at the sound of my voice. He was positioned equidistant between Sarah and Duke’s position and mine. At his feet were her weapons, an assault rifle and two pistols. He faced sideways between us, his AUG on Sarah and Duke, an M 16 covering me. We all had the NVG’s on. Duke wore a perpetual snarl, his canines showing, throat throbbing with a low growl, Sarah holding him back by the collar. The splint was still on his leg, but I had no doubt that if she loosened her hold, he would charge, leaping to his death from the automatic weapon fire and possibly condemning Sarah to the same fate. We were balancing on a very fine wire.
“Got a problem, McCall,” he told me, a smile on his bloated face. “Can’t decide if I should kill you and then fuck this bitch or maybe just mess you up a little and make you watch. Think maybe I’ll kill you after I finish with the cunt. I’m thinking this bitch ain’t your whore, McCall. I think she’s your woman. Was your woman. She’s mine now.”
“What about the truck? The key?” I asked. Each of us still had our rifles leveled at the other. “Without her you won’t get them.”
He laughed. “I had you figured wrong, McCall. You’re just as big a fucking liar as I am. Stick the fucking key up your ass. If there is a key. This is just you and me now. The bitch replaces the truck. I’ll be riding her a long time after you’re dead, asshole.”
I saw Stevie step into the hall behind Sarah and Duke, fifty feet from my position, only thirty from The Babe.
“You’re gonna be doing your riding in hell, fat man,” Stevie said.
Blood of the Dogs_Book I_Annihilation Page 46