Lionhearts (Denver Burning Book 5)

by Algor X. Dennison

  “This isn’t happening,” Liam said, shaking his head. “No way are we going to lose our guns and gear to this crowd.” He happened to have stopped with his gun pointed roughly in the direction of the pickup truck, and he held one hand up in the air to draw attention while he slipped the trigger finger of his other hand into place on the gun. “Now, hold on, ladies,” he shouted. “Just hold on a minute. I think there’s been a misunderstanding here. You see, we’re just—”

  “No misunderstanding,” the woman in the truck interrupted. “You just drop your weapons or we’re going to open fire. This is your last chance. We don’t want to hurt a couple of nice young fellows like yourselves, but I swear if you move so much as a muscle, we are going to open up on you.”

  “Well, here’s the thing,” Liam replied, loud enough for all to hear. Mike, astonished at his brother’s audacity, stayed quiet and ready. “I’d love to submit to whatever plans you fine women have for my brother and I,” Liam continued, “but you see, we’re on a mission to save our sister, and we can’t tarry for long. We’re certainly not going to put down our weapons.”

  “Then you’re going to get it!” shouted the woman in the truck, and she steadied her gun hand with her other arm.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Liam shouted back. “You see, this rifle I’m holding here, I loaded it up this morning with the last of my incendiary ammo. Just in case any of you ladies know less about guns than it looks like you do, that means whatever I shoot today is going to catch fire. And as you can probably see, I’ve already got it pointed at the gas tank of that truck you’re standing in, ma’am. Maybe you can imagine what would happen if I were to fire right now.”

  Liam paused so all those assembled could visualize a massive orange fireball engulfing their leader. In spite of himself, Mike had to fight back a sly grin. He knew the incendiary ammunition was a fantasy—he and Liam had bought a brick of the expensive stuff several years back and had some fun with it at the ranch, but they hadn’t seen any since then. The women that had the Leonhardts in their sights didn’t know that, though.

  “Just in case anyone’s thinking of shooting me down before I can get off a shot into the gas tank, please consider that I’ve got a notoriously itchy trigger finger and I’m quite certain I’d light up that truck before I hit the ground.”

  Mike spoke up. “I can vouch for that. His trigger finger is indeed itchy. In fact, ma’am, if I were you, I’d definitely give your shooters the signal to stand down while we mosey on out of here the way we came.”

  The woman in the truck, who was bristling with anger but also staring very fixedly at the barrel of Liam’s gun, yelled back through gritted teeth. “Nobody’s standing down. You shoot, and you’ll both die with a pound of lead in you.”

  “That would be really unfortunate,” Liam said, staring not at the woman but at the truck’s underbelly, and keeping his rifle aimed right at it. “Because all we came here to do was find our sister. She used to live in an apartment on the other side of this block. If I had to die while searching for her, that would absolutely ruin my day. But I swear to you, I’d ruin yours as well. You’d better think carefully about whether that’s worth it.”

  Mike took a slow step backward. “Come on, brother, let’s go.”

  Liam and Mike started taking small steps back the way they had come, with Liam carefully aiming his rifle at the truck the whole way. Some of the women shifted their positions to retain a good line of fire on the two men, and one advanced on them, but Mike waved her away. Liam gripped his rifle with both hands, and the woman backed off.

  “Should we shoot?” one of the women asked.

  “Shut up, Kathy,” the woman in the truck shouted. “I’ll do the talking.” She slowly began to move to the edge of the truck and made ready to leave it.

  “Time to move, Mike,” Liam said. They were almost out of the ambush zone now, with a majority of the women shooters unable to see them past the walls of the buildings surrounding the street. Just as the head woman leaped down from the truck, Liam fired his rifle into the pavement near the corner where the big woman with the handgun had been crouched. Then he turned and ran, while Mike let go one of his shotgun rounds into the rear windshield of the car that had been pinioned by the crossbow bolt. It shattered all over the road with a satisfying crash, and then he too turned and high-tailed it after his little brother. The gunfire that erupted behind them was alarming, but seemed to be mostly meant to intimidate, as only a single bullet found its way up the street to ricochet off the curb nearby. In seconds they had gained the tree in the median where they had first entered the forbidden zone now, and ducked under the flag line at a dead run.

  Then a rifle shot echoed up the street behind them, and Mike fell to the pavement with a grunt, feet swept from under him. Liam turned, terror spreading across his youthful face.

  “I’m okay. Just go!” Mike shouted. Liam helped him to his feet anyway, and they ran. Two more shots barreled up the street after them, but neither found its mark. Then they were away, gone down a side street and putting several houses between them and the dangerous purple-flag zone.

  “Are you hit?” Liam asked, dropping behind a pace to look his brother up and down for blood.

  “I don’t think so,” Mike said. “I just fell over. Maybe I just tripped. I feel fine.”

  “That could just be the adrenaline,” Liam said. “Let’s find a safe place and we’ll check you out.”

  “No, keep going,” Mike replied. “If I can run, I’m good.”

  They ran for half a mile without stopping. They had cut to the right outside the purple zone, so they were in new territory, and their route took them along the northern border of the women’s area. They stopped one block past the point where the lines with the purple flags dropped away to the south, and then they turned south themselves.

  “We can probably circle back around to Tara’s neighborhood down this street,” Mike said, checking his map. “As long as those crazy gun-women stay in their marked area, we should have at least one city block between us and them the whole time.”

  Panting for breath, Liam spun his brother around to look over his legs and feet. “Let’s see, there’s no blood on your shirt, nothing on your pants. Can you feel all your toes okay?”

  “Yes! For heaven’s sake, Liam,” Mike protested.

  Suddenly Liam let out a belly laugh between gulps of air. “Oh my gosh. Look at your boot, man!”

  Mike knelt to examine the hiking shoe Liam was pointing at. The bottom of his right sole was missing, or at least a good chunk of it. A slim channel had been bored through the rubber of his shoe, and much of the flat part on the bottom torn away as the bullet expanded and penetrated into the pavement under Mike’s foot.

  “She shot the bottom of your shoe off,” Liam laughed. “But your foot’s okay?”

  “Yeah,” Mike said, bemused. “I thought it felt funny as I was running, a little lopsided. Huh!”

  They grinned for another moment, then stood up.

  “Hey, we need to hurry this up,” Mike said. “We’ve been out here probably three hours now. Time to move.”

  “Okay. Let’s get after Tara!”

  Turning down the street Tara lived on, they finally arrived at her address. Thankfully, it was well outside of the purple-flag zone and they didn’t seen anyone else in the area.

  “This is it, right here,” Mike said, pointing to the lettering of the street number on the wall of the brick apartment building where their sister had lived. They gazed at the small property, once a tidy little dwelling but now with a lawn that was dried out and weedy with a stray dog loping away through a hole in the hedge.

  “Do we just go knock?” Liam asked.

  Chapter 24: Hunting for Tara

  Looking all around, they approached the building and went up the stairs to the apartment with the door number corresponding to the one in Tara’s address. Neither of the Leonhardt men had ever visited their sister in Denver, but it looked more or
less like the kind of place where they had imagined her living.

  Liam knocked loudly, but of course no one answered. The door was still locked. They peered in the windows, and then knocked on every other apartment in the building. No response.

  Two of the ground-level doors had been smashed in, and one bore the marks of an axe on its frame and in the splintered chunks of the broken door. One had been lived in recently by squatters, as evidenced by the moldy blankets, charred wood in a metal garbage can in one corner, and traces of food trash.

  Several windows were broken around the building, including a side window of Tara’s apartment. Liam climbed through it and looked around, but emerged clueless.

  “It’s her place, all right,,” he told Mike. “There’s a calendar on the wall with her handwriting on it. And the clothes in the closet look like what she wears. But there’s no note or clue where she went, and it looks like she took her most important stuff with her.”

  They were standing on the apartment balcony wondering where else Tara might have left a note to indicate where she had gone, when a chilling sound reached their ears. It was the scream of a full-grown man, a cry of desperate pain and fear. It was coming from a building across the street, one they had assumed was as empty as Tara’s.

  The two Leonhardts couldn’t see any sign of danger in the street, so they hurried down the stairs and along the hedge that bordered the parking lot next to Tara’s apartment building. The cries of pain continued, ringing out across the quiet residential street like a beacon to any predators that might care to investigate.

  As Mike and Liam watched, a door opened across the street and a large man shambled down the steps to the sidewalk. He looked around sullenly, then turned and walked away, stumbling across the curb and into the street. He carried a dripping knife in one hand. Behind him in the house, the pitiful cries continued.

  When the man had was out of sight, Mike and Liam moved out again. “Should we keep heading deeper into this neighborhood?” Liam asked. “Look for somebody to ask about Tara?”

  “I don’t like that idea,” Mike said. “That’s where that guy with the knife is headed. I’d rather avoid his type. Maybe we should see who’s caterwauling in there, maybe they can tell us something.”

  Liam grimaced at the thought, but followed his brother toward the house across the street. Before they got there, another man stumbled out of the building and into the yard. This one was short, balding, and clutching at a stomach wound. Blood streamed from between his fingers, and he kept up the moaning and screeching at high volume.

  “I’m dying!” he cried when he saw the Leonhardts standing at the curb, looking at him. “I’m bleeding. Help me!”

  The man didn’t look very healthy to begin with, having clearly lost a lot weight very quickly during the past few weeks. Liam hung back, but Mike approached the man.

  “Hey, look,” he said. “You need to quiet down. You’re going to bring the whole city down on us if you don’t shut up. Now, I might be able to help you if you’ll stop moaning and cooperate. Okay? Here, take off your shirt and let’s use it to stanch the bleeding.”

  The man nodded, and sat weakly on the grass outside the home. Mike helped the man pull his stained button-up shirt off and then wadded it up and pushed it firmly against the stomach wound.

  “Hold that there, and press as hard as you can,” he told the man. “Did that guy stab you, or slash you, or what?”

  “He stabbed me. He killed me. I’m gonna die!”

  “All right, whatever. Stab wounds aren’t good. But you might make it,” Mike said, rummaging in his backpack. “I’ve got a first aid kit here. You tell us what we need to know, and I’ll do my best for you.” Mike hated the way his mercenary words sounded once they were out of his mouth, but the man didn’t seem to expect anything more.

  “Sure, whatever you want. I can tell you where to find the best leavings, and when the marauders usually come through on their way to Cavendish Street.”

  Liam stepped forward and watched his brother work, taking out a roll of gauze and applying antibiotic cream to it. “Look, we don’t care about that stuff,” he said. “We came here to find our sister. She lived across the street, in apartment two-twelve over there. Have you seen her, or can you tell us where you think she might have gone?”

  The bald man looked up at Liam like he was an alien. “Buddy, nobody’s been here for a while. Just a couple of us, scavenging and hiding out.”

  Mike pushed the man’s shirt away from the wound and shoved his gauze roll into the bloody opening. Then he taped it onto the man, and replaced the shirt. “Keep pushing on that. Apply some pressure. This wound isn’t as deep as you were screaming about, so that’s the good news. The bad is that if it gets infected, you’re screwed. Did you know anybody in this neighborhood, and did any of them leave any word about where they were going when they abandoned it?”

  The man nodded. “Sure. I knew the old lady, the one that lived downstairs in one-eleven. She let me stay with her when I arrived, after I got driven out of my subdivision by the mob. But she’s gone now. It was the contaminated water that got her, I think. She got dehydrated, vomited too much out and didn’t have anything good coming in, and you know how it is with old folks…” The man trailed off as he realized that it didn’t say much about his character that he’d let his elderly benefactor die while he found enough to live on himself.

  “Okay. She would have been my sister’s neighbor,” Liam said. “Did she say anything before she died about where everybody had gone?”

  The man’s eyes lit up. “Yeah! Now you mention it, yeah, she did. She said…” Suddenly the man stopped and his eyes got small and beady. “She did say something. But you know, I can’t quite remember… maybe if I had something to eat.”

  Mike stared back at the man, incredulous.

  “Something to eat, anything. I’m famished. And if you could leave your first aid kit with me, that would be real nice. It might jog my memory—”

  Liam planted a foot on the man’s thigh, nudging his stomach wound with the toe of his boot and swinging the barrel of his rifle perilously near the man’s head. “We won’t take any of that, sir. You tell us straight up, or we’ll leave you to the wolves right now.”

  The man squealed in anguish and Liam took his boot off the man. Mike shook his head in wonder. “Unbelievable. Here I am playing doctor for you, mister, and you’re trying to weasel more out of us?”

  “It’s not my fault,” the man sobbed. “I’m so hungry. And now I’m dying of this knife wound, and Jackson is probably going to come back any minute and finish me off.”

  “I could hardly blame him if he did,” Liam said, disgusted. “You heard my brother, you’re going to live if you can manage to keep that stab wound clean. It’s probably finished bleeding all ready. Now are you going to tell us what you know about where our sister ended up, or should we call that knife dude back here right now?”

  “No! Don’t do that,” the man pleaded, taking Liam at his word. “I’ll tell. It’s not much, but she did say all her neighbors had left early on, headed for a ritzy neighborhood on the edge of Aurora where they had some dentist guy they were going to hole up with. I can’t remember the name, Castle or Crestwall or something. That’s all.”

  Mike pulled out his map and scanned it eagerly. “Crestwood? Was that it?”

  “Yeah, that was probably it. A few miles southeast of here, right? I thought of going there myself, but it’s kind of a long way, and why would they take me in, you know? I’d probably just be turned away, or shot at, or worse.”

  “Come on, Liam. We’ve wasted enough time here,” Mike said, getting to his feet.

  “We got that much out of him, didn’t we?” Liam replied. “Thanks, mister.”

  The bald man whined at Mike while Liam jogged back over to Tara’s apartment and scrawled a message on the door in case their father followed to her address: GONE TO CRESTWOOD 3 MILES SE. He signed it and then met Mike in the street. The
bald man followed them all the way to the end of the block, moaning and clutching at his stomach wound, but they ignored him and soon he fell behind.

  “I guess Dad was right,” Mike said. “Tara probably stuck with some friends and moved to safer territory. Good for her.”

  “I hope she’s still there,” Liam replied. “We don’t have time to play treasure-hunt all over Denver today. It wouldn’t be good for our health.”

  “Tell me about it,” Mike chuckled. “I only have one sole left to soak up the bullets.”

  Many blocks away, Walt Leonhardt emerged from the space between two abandoned buildings and reentered Estela’s neighborhood. He was breathing hard, having run for over two miles to get there. Estela and Jorge came out to meet him.

  “How are the preps coming?” he panted.

  “Good,” Estela replied, handing him a bottle of water. “Jeremy reports that the bad guys haven’t left their camp yet, and we’re finished putting up barricades.”

  “But is everyone going to be ready to move come nightfall?”

  “They should be,” Estela said. “We’re going to have to leave some stuff behind, though. Unless we load up a pushcart or something.”

  “No pushcarts,” Walt said, swallowing some of the water. “I found our route, but it will require some climbing up and down and through culverts.”

  “You did? What is it?” Estela asked excitedly. “Show me!”

  Walt pulled out his map and pointed to a line he had traced in bold pencil leading west from the northern edge of the neighborhood. “We can get into this canal a quarter mile north of here. Either the water’s dried up or somebody’s intentionally blocked it upstream, but either way it’s our golden path. The sides are fenced, sections of it are walled in nicely, and it cuts straight through many of the most difficult parts of the city to get through. We can travel quickly and quietly along its entire length, about five miles, until we get to Lakewood. Then we go northwest out of the city.”

  “But to get into it we have to closer to the danger,” Jorge pointed out.