Walt nodded. “But there are buildings between us and the Carniceros’ camp. I think we’ll be okay under cover of darkness.”
Estela’s eyes gleamed as she gazed at the map. “You’ve done it, Mr. Leonhardt. You’ve saved us. I can’t tell you how thankful I am.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” Walt said, hiking his pack up on his shoulders and slinging his rifle behind him. “We have a long way to go tonight, and I’ve only scouted the first mile or two. There may be obstacles later on that we’ll have to tackle as we come to them. Right now I have to go after my children, but I’ll be back. You have everyone ready to go at sundown, and station your spare men along the perimeter to keep the enemy back until you have a chance to slip out.”
Estela nodded, and she and Jorge watched as Walt took off to go find his sons and daughter.
“That man was a godsend, Jorge,” she said. “An angel sent to us directly from heaven, an answer to our prayers.”
“I hope he makes it back here in time,” Jorge said.
Chapter 25: A Very Dangerous Situation
The sun was sinking inexorably toward the jagged horizon line of the cityscape when Mike and Liam arrived at the gate barrier of the Crestwood neighborhood. Unfortunately, they got there several minutes behind another group of people that wanted in.
They had heard the screams, yells, and gunshots for three blocks prior to arriving. It wasn’t the sound of a pitched battle, but of a nasty, drawn-out low intensity conflict. When they crawled through some bushes and peered out into the intersection, they saw four bodies lying in the street, two of them moving feebly, two of them still. The aggressors were arranged on the other side of the street behind a low brick wall and a couple of cars. The defenders were behind their barricaded gate, and neither side appeared to be making much headway.
“What do we do?” Liam asked.
“I dunno,” Mike whispered back. “I didn’t expect to find Tara’s location under direct assault!”
As they watched, a young man with dark hair waved a pistol and two men with him rushed out into the street to launch burning bottles at the barricade. The missiles at first appeared to splash harmlessly on the outside of the iron gate, but flames quickly spread out along the underside of the gate and in a few minutes had caught fire to a sheet of plywood that was hung on the gate for additional protection.
“You open up that gate,” the dark-haired young man yelled, “and we’ll let you get away. But if you’re still in there after we have to break our way in, then you’re dead meat.”
“Yeah,” another man next to him bellowed. “We’re hungry, and we’re at the end of our ropes. You’re either going to give us what you got, or you’ll all die!”
The only reply from inside the gated neighborhood was a shotgun blast that took a chunk of brick out of the wall the attackers were hiding behind, forcing the dark-haired man to duck down out of sight.
Then, before the Leonhardts had time to formulate a plan of action, all hell broke loose inside the gate. It seemed that someone had taken advantage of the fire distraction and scaled one of the side fences. Now the men inside the barricade were fighting for their lives.
Across the street, the dark-haired ringleader leaped to his feet. “Come on!” he shouted. “They’re in! Now’s our chance!” He sprinted toward the gate, followed by a wave of fellow attackers. They all looked desperate, but there was more anger and greed in their faces than fear. They threw themselves against the gate, shaking it and tearing pieces away from it, searching for an opening. Several of them jumped up on the gate and heaved at it, making it sway back and forth with a groan of bending metal.
“Should we shoot at ‘em?” Liam asked, aiming his rifle at the backs of the mob. “If they get in there, they might get to Tara!”
“Wait,” Mike cautioned. “If they turn on us, we’re screwed. There’s only two of us and a lot of those guys have guns. Let’s see if we can circle around to another side of the place, maybe sneak in a back way.”
Liam was about to refute that idea—they’d almost certainly be taken for attackers and shot by the defenders. But he had barely opened his mouth when the gate came down with a deafening crash and the mob swarmed over it and into the neighborhood.
The Leonhardts could now see how sparsely the gate had been defended. One man was already dead, having been dragged off to lie under a tree. And now the fighting had taken its toll on the remaining three gate guards. One was bleeding out on the asphalt just inside the gate, another was being pushed up against a wall with a gun at his head, and the third was being trampled and beaten by the mob as they stormed toward the houses on the other side of the gate.
In seconds, the attackers had rushed past the entrance to the neighborhood and begun their assault on the first of the homes inside. Windows shattered, screams rang out, and guns blazed from inside and without. Mike and Liam watched in horror at the ferocity of the violence taking place. Now they understood what had happened to so many of the neighborhoods they had passed through previously. Now they knew why so many homes were empty and abandoned—even those with residents who were willing and able to stick around had been cleared out by horrific mob violence, either fleeing or dying where they stood.
Two of the attackers were shot down in the yards of homes they were trying to ransack, but more took their place and the homeowners were quickly overwhelmed. Some fled to other houses deeper in the neighborhood, but many didn’t make it that far. The mob appeared to be in a complete frenzy of blood and wild greed.
One man who had stormed inside a house came back out holding a picnic cooler in one hand and the wrist of a middle-aged woman in the other. Someone leaned out of a second-floor window and shot the man dead. He crumpled, still holding tight to the cooler, but the woman tore herself away and ran for her life.
The dark-haired man who had been leading the mob outside lit another of the Molotov cocktails that had taken the gate, and threw it into the open doorway of the home with the shooter upstairs. The orange glow from its flames made the interior of the home match the orange sky above. The brilliant sunset overhead had a serene beauty that clashed with the horror of the destruction going on below.
“Come on,” Liam said, getting to his feet. “We’ve got to get in there. If Tara’s inside somewhere, she needs us now!”
Mike leapt to his feet and the two brothers ran across the road and through the smashed gate, guns at their shoulders ready to fire. Mike stopped near one of the dying guards.
“We’re trying to find our sister, Tara Leonhardt,” he said to the man. “Have you seen her? Is she living here? Where is she?”
The man, bleeding from the head and the chest, stared back with uncomprehending eyes that were glazed and near death. Mike hurried onward.
Liam was stopped at the side of a house on the left side of the little street, and Mike joined him. They huddled against the vinyl siding and listened to the noise of the rampaging mobsters within. “How are we going to find which house she’s in?” Liam asked.
“If she’s even in here at all,” Mike said. “I don’t know. This is really dangerous!”
“Hey!” someone shouted at them. It was the young man with the dark hair that had just lit a house on fire. “Who are you guys? You aren’t with us.” He pointed his pistol at Liam.
Without hesitating, Mike leveled his shotgun at the man and shot him. The cloud of buckshot hit the dark-haired man in the thigh, spinning him sideways and causing him to fall to one knee.
Liam ran around the side of the house to the back yard, and Mike followed before the man he’d shot could return fire. They leaped over two small fences dividing yards. In the back yard of the next home over, a woman and her ten-year-old son were crouched by a small shed, eyes wide with fear, listening to the sounds of the mob plundering their home.
“Get out of here, lady!” Liam cried as they rushed past. “Your whole neighborhood is toast. Get over that fence and run for your lives!”
The Leonhard
ts continued through the back yards of two more homes, along the fence that separated the neighborhood from the street outside. Between the shadows of the homes and the trees, the gathering darkness effectively masked their movement from most of the mob. Inside one home a looter with a shotgun stared out at them as he searched the cupboards of an upscale kitchen, but he must have assumed they were fellow plunderers because he didn’t point his gun at them.
They came out into a dead end on the other side of the next home, and saw a crowd of frightened people pushing back farther and farther from the street, into the yards and homes in the rear of the cul-de-sac. Liam stopped and scanned the faces of the crowd, but didn’t see Tara among them. They were mostly women, with a few children, but none of them looked familiar.
“Hey!” Mike shouted. “Do any of you know Tara Leonhardt? Is she here with you?”
Several of the women nearest to Mike shrank back in terror, assuming the Leonhardts were attackers. Liam held out his hand. “We’re not with those looters. We’re looking for our sister, Tara. Anybody know her?”
An old man glared at them and stood in front of two teenagers he was trying to shelter against the side of a house. Some of the women turned and fled into the back yard of the home. But one young lady came forward.
“Did you say Tara Leonhardt?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Mike answered. “She’s our sister. Where is she?”
“Over there,” the girl pointed. “She used to be my roommate. She’s in that big gray house, or at least she was as of this afternoon.”
The house she was pointing to was outside the cul-de-sac on a cross-street that led along the back side of the gated community before wrapping back around to the front entrance. The two Leonhardt men locked onto it with a grim determination, sensing that finally they were near the end of their quest. “Thanks!”
They ran across the pavement and through the yard of another home, then out into the street on the other side. Up the road the way they had come, the mob was steadily advancing from house to house. They had been slowed by their eagerness to ransack the nearest houses, but now some were spreading out into the neighborhood to find easier pickings. One hungry-looking young man sprinted ahead, carrying a baseball bat, and then dashed into the yard the Leonhardts had just passed through. He paused to hurl a rock through the front window and then began climbing inside.
“Hurry,” Mike said, and he and Liam ran up the street to the gray house the girl had pointed out to them. But once again, they were a moment too late.
Just as they got into the street, three men and a heavyset woman with a BB gun in her hands came up the street from the other direction. They had evidently circled around the far side of the gated community, seeking fresh victims. They had selected the gray home as the largest and most well-kept on the street. Many of the others were abandoned and dark, but there were candles illuminating the interior of the gray house.
The woman with the air rifle stood back while the three men assaulted the door. One of them tried to kick it in and managed to splinter the doorframe, but then someone leaned out the upstairs window and dropped a chair down on his head. The man cursed and backed away, looking for a target, but the defender had retreated back inside.
“Why didn’t you shoot ‘em?” he growled at the woman, rubbing his head where the chair had bounced off him. The woman aimed her gun up at the window and took a shot, succeeding in shattering a pane of glass, but that was the extent of her attack.
By this time the Leonhardts had made it across the street and were standing in the yard behind the attackers. Both their long guns were aimed at the mobsters.
“You get one chance to get away from that door, or you’re finished,” Mike called out.
The men at the door turned and faced Mike, bristling. One had a crowbar, one a large knife, and the other had a hatchet. Only the woman had a gun, and the air rifle clearly wasn’t much of a threat. Little wonder that this group had split off from the rest to find easy pickings.
Liam covered the woman and the hatchet man with his rifle. “Beat it!” he yelled. “You take one step toward us, and we’ll shoot.”
The woman quickly retreated up the sidewalk, well aware that her BB gun would be little more than a distraction in a real fight. Two of the men sidled away from the door, staring angrily at the gun barrels pointed their way. But the third, with the knife, suddenly stepped forward and threw his blade at Mike.
His aim was pretty good, and he threw it with plenty of strength. He had probably expected it to whistle through the air and bury itself up to the hilt in Mike’s chest, like in so many action movies. All it did in reality was bounce off the strap of Mike’s backpack and clatter to the street. Mike grunted, more in surprise than pain, and wasn’t affected enough to even fire his weapon reflexively.
Liam did, though. His bullet took a chunk of concrete out of the porch behind the knife-thrower, spraying the man’s legs with debris. He was already turning to run, and quickly joined his comrades farther up the street.
“Why does everyone hit me and not you?” Mike asked his brother.
“You’re a bigger target,” Liam said.
While they were still talking, the front door opened. “Oh my gosh. Mike? Liam? Is that really you?” Tara was standing there. A few other women were clustered inside behind her. Her face was dirty and streaked where tears had washed down through the grime. Her hair was messy, which wasn’t like her. But otherwise, their sister looked intact and healthy.
“Thank heaven!” Mike sang out. “Tara, you have no idea how long we’ve been looking for you.”
Tara burst into tears and ran out to hug her brothers. “It really is you! How on earth did you get here?”
A heavy office chair tumbled from the upper window of the house, crashing to the ground right next to the Leonhardts. They jumped aside.
“No more!” Tara shouted. “Melissa, you can stop that and come down here. We’re safe now, my brothers are here!”
A short black woman stuck her head out of the window with a mix of fear and determination in her eyes. When she saw Tara hugging Mike and Liam, she relaxed a little and shut the window. Soon she appeared at the front door along with the other women.
The young woman who had pointed the gray house out to Mike and Liam ran up, accompanied by an elderly couple and a teenaged boy that followed them, frightened and pale. “Tara! Are these guys family?”
Tara nodded. “My brothers. Gemma, where have you been? Are you okay?”
“Helping the Larsens get away from their house,” Gemma replied. “Can we come in? Their house is being broken into right now.”
“Hey, it’s not safe here, inside or out,” Mike told Tara. “We’ve gotta move. We’ll guard the street while you grab your things, but then we have to vacate the area. They’re killing and burning just up the street!”
Chapter 26: Out of the Lion’s Jaws
“What about my friends?” Tara asked. “These ladies took me in and I’m not going to abandon them. And what about Gemma and all these people? Is there a way for us to escape together?”
Liam rolled his eyes. “Come on, Tara. We’re in the middle of a firefight! We came to get you, not this whole neighborhood. Get your stuff, and let’s get out of here! Dad’s waiting.”
“Dad’s here, too?” Tara asked. Hope flamed in her eyes where minutes earlier there had been only fear and desperation.
“Well, not right here with us. Look, there isn’t time to talk about it,” Mike said, watching the street behind them. Mobsters were filtering out toward the cul-de-sac nearby, but so far they had stayed away from the lawn with the two armed men standing guard with rifles facing out.
“How are we going to get away?” Tara asked. “Shouldn’t we go inside, bar the door, and try to keep everyone out of the house?”
The sun had slipped below the horizon now, and everything was dimly illuminated by the residual sunlight lingering in the cloud cover overhead. The flames from the burning house u
p the street glowed brightly against the dusky shadows. Some of the women and old men from the cul-de-sac were now running into the street toward the gray house, desperate to get away from the violence that was encroaching behind them.
“Listen up!” Liam shouted, loudly enough for both the women inside the gray house to hear as well as the people coming across the street. “Everybody needs to evacuate this neighborhood immediately. You’re being overrun. Climb over a fence, whatever it takes. But if you stay here, you die!”
That elicited a few screams and shouts of frightened dismay.
“Liam, there’s nowhere to go,” protested Tara. “These people can’t climb the fence, it’s six feet of wrought-iron with pokey spikes at the top! And the only back gate was barred and barricaded long ago.”
“Then get it open again,” Mike yelled. “If we don’t, we have to go through them to get out of here.” He pointed up the street at the looters running rampant between houses.
“Fine, then. If it’s our best shot,” Tara replied. “Everyone get to the back gate! Quickly!”
The people all began to follow. Tara led the way, with her brothers covering their back trail with their long guns. They seemed to be the only armed people in the neighborhood now that weren’t looters. Everyone else with a weapon had been caught up in the violence and killed. The only shooting now as the occasional murder or execution as the looters found someone that had decided to hide behind a locked door instead of running.
Arriving at the rear gate, they found it padlocked and half-buried under a pile of lawnmowers, crates, and patio furniture meant to keep anyone outside from forcing it inward. A box van had been rolled into place outside the gate to block it from opening the other way.
Liam guarded the street behind them while Mike tore into the pile, throwing everything aside with desperate fury. When he finally got it clear, he aimed his shotgun at the padlock. “Somebody get over that fence and move the van,” he commanded. Tara sprang into action, leaping atop the pile of clutter and swinging a coiled garden hose over the top to pad its iron spike so she could get over.
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