“Who is she, Jaren? If she didn’t bring food or liquor, then get her out of here! We have business to attend to with this outsider we caught.”
Sarah frowned. “What business?” she asked Jaren. “What are you doing in there?”
Jaren closed the door another inch. “It’s none of your business. Militia stuff. You better leave, Mrs. Leonhardt.”
Jaren’s tone began as rude, belligerent, and obviously proud of the power he had to wield. But when the words “Mrs. Leonhardt” slipped from his mouth, almost by accident, it was an admission of their proper relationship: one of respect. And suddenly he was just Jaren, a high school kid that had been sort-of dating her daughter. She knew it and he knew it.
“Now Jaren,” Sarah said, resuming her motherly tone but adding a firm no-nonsense undercurrent, “you show me to where Jess is right this minute. I’m walking out of here with her, and if you want to show your face again anywhere in this community, you’d better let me by. I won’t tolerate another minute of this foolishness.”
She slowly, gently pushed the door open and walked past Jaren. He resisted at first and started to say something, but Sarah insisted, and he simply wasn’t prepared to use force against the woman.
All the way across the open meeting hall, Sarah felt Jaren’s eyes on her, but she didn’t turn around. She didn’t think for one moment he’d dare point his gun at her, and her gambit that night depended entirely on keeping up the façade of fearless, righteous indignation. Inside she was quivering and wanted to run and hide, but if Jess was in that back room, she couldn’t do it yet.
The door to the back room was still cracked open, and when Sarah opened it wide, what she saw made her breath catch in her throat. Jess was indeed there. So was a young man she didn’t recognize. Both of them were sitting in wooden chairs against the back wall, with their ankles zip-tied to the legs of the chair. Jess looked none the worse for wear, but the young man had a black eye and a trickle of blood on his cheek.
The man who had called for Jaren to get rid of Sarah was lounging against a desk near Jess, picking his teeth with a sheath knife in a manner he no doubt thought very intimidating, but which just made him look ill-bred and foolish. Sarah didn’t know him, but she could tell at a glance that he was large enough and strong enough to physically stop her from taking Jess, if it came to that. He also had another of the ugly little black guns sitting on the desk next to him. She would have to make it sure it didn’t come to that.
“How dare you,” she said, looking from Jess’s bonds to the man. He quickly stood up straight and lowered the knife. “That is my niece, sir! What do you think you are doing here, tying her to a chair like some kind of prisoner?”
Without waiting for an answer, Sarah crossed the room and began to remove Jess’s zip ties. Tugging at them didn’t accomplish much, and Sarah silently cursed herself for failing to bring a pocket knife. Even a small one would have been sufficient. For a moment she thought she would have to demand the guard’s knife from him, but then she realized that Jaren and his large friend didn’t know nearly as much about guarding prisoners as they thought they did. By simply lifting the front of the chair off the floor, it was easy to slide the zip ties past the chair-leg’s ends, which were tapered and had no capped or carved feet to complicate things. Soon Jess was standing free with a couple of loose zip ties flapping on top of her shoes.
The guard watched in stupefied dismay, and Sarah kept talking to keep him off his guard. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing. I don’t know who you think you are. But if you imagine for one minute that this is any way to treat a young lady and a valued member of our community, you are grossly in error, sir!”
Sarah moved to the other young man, whose eyes were wide with surprise and then delight at the sudden appearance of a savior. “What do you think this is, a Nazi prison camp? You should be ashamed of yourself. By what right do you hold these two young people against their will here?” She began to free the young man’s legs too.
Jaren came to the door, and the guard in the room glared at him. Jaren’s face was white and he was clearly sweating, but his only reply to the angry glare was a helpless shrug, leaving the matter to the older man.
Finally, with both his prisoners freed and their rescuer confronting him, the guard stepped forward and thrust out his chest. “Hey, lady. You can’t just walk in here and interfere. We’re Musket Militia, and we’ve been assigned to guard these two. They’re criminals!”
“Criminals?” Sarah asked, raising her voice. “Criminals? My niece, the darling daughter of my brother, a criminal? I doubt it. I sincerely doubt it, sir. You want to know what’s criminal? Holding people against their will without a warrant or a badge. You want to know criminal? Enforcing vigilante justice without a commission or deputization from the legitimate law enforcement authority of this county. That’s criminal! Now you just stand aside, sir, and you Jaren, you hold that door open for us ladies, or so help me you’ll both be held responsible for this mess.”
Sarah stormed from the room, pulling Jess behind her. The young man who had been held prisoner alongside her followed, still not saying a word.
Jaren was pushed aside and Sarah hurried through the outer meeting hall, muttering angrily and loud enough for the two militia guards to hear. “I cannot believe this. I cannot believe it has come to this, right here in America. I will not tolerate this for one more second, and neither will Walt or the rest of our community when they hear about it.”
She made it as far as the front door. The guard came after them, gun in hand, but he didn’t look any more prepared to use his on the unarmed women than Jaren did. The young man prisoner kept out of their way and stayed silent so that nobody stopped him either.
Then Sarah opened the front door and ran slap-bang into Terry Hayes, one of the militia’s top leaders.
Chapter 28: Into the Canal
“There’s the entrance to the canal,” Walt whispered, pointing out a break in a tall chain-link fence to the others. The scant moonlight glinted off the metal fence faintly. All else was covered in shadow. “Everybody ready?”
He got nods from his children and from Jeremy, who were crouched low to the ground near him.
Gemma and her two elderly friends came up behind them, breathing hard. Walt waved at them to get down. Then he repeated himself and got nods from them.
“Okay. Quietly, just a couple at a time! If the Carnicero gang is moving toward the neighborhood we just left, like Jeremy thinks they are, they could be within a hundred yards of us right now. We have to get in there, get down, and move quickly along the canal until we’re out of this area. I’ll go first with Liam. Then Tara, you and your friend can come through once you see us signal that it’s all clear. Then these two, and Mike and Jeremy will bring up the rear.”
Walt raised his head and cautiously peered around the area. It was an open stretch of street, and they had to get across the dark asphalt, through a hole that had been ripped open in the fence surrounding the canal, and then down a few feet of steeply sloped concrete. From then on they would be largely sheltered in the dry bed of the canal, with banks and fences on each side for protection.
Seeing no movement in the darkness and hearing nothing but the night breeze playing over the rooftops and blowing a discarded plastic sack along the ground, Walt got to his feet. Liam followed, rifle at the ready.
In a quick burst of movement, trying to keep their footsteps light and silent, they crossed the street and huddled by the hole in the fence. Liam watched behind and to either side while Walt pulled the torn sheet of fencing aside and slipped through. Then he held it for his son. When both were on the inside, Walt waved to Tara.
“Come on, Gemma!” she whispered. Mimicking the movements of her father and brother, Tara dashed quietly over to the fence, crouched down, and held it open for her roommate.
Gemma was halfway there when her two elderly friends stood and started hobbling rather noisily toward the fence. She heard them
and stopped to wave them back with a hiss. Too late, they froze in the middle of the street, and the old man called out to Gemma. “What?”
“Go back!” Gemma called. The old man pivoted, but his wife had already started to move toward the fence again.
“Hurry up,” Walt whispered under his breath. “Whatever you’re going to do, you fools, do it quickly!”
The group bunched up at the opening. Tara tried to hold the fence so the elderly woman could go through first, but the woman didn’t seem to be able to see where she was expected to go, so Tara crawled through to show her and then turned around.
Gemma took the coil of torn fence and peeled it back, but she wasn’t as careful as the Leonhardts had been, and it made an awful noise of taut metal releasing and snapping.
A shout rang out a hundred feet away in the street.
Tara ducked down inside the canal, nothing further she could do for Gemma and the elderly couple. Mike and Jeremy, still hiding across the street, watched in dismay.
“Over here!” a man’s voice angrily rose out of the darkness. “We’ve got a group of runaways!”
A gunshot cracked, breaking the night air, and the old man by Gemma stumbled, stricken. He slowly sank to his knees and then to the ground. His wife turned, uncertain of what was happening. And in the space of a few short seconds that seemed to stretch out for eternity, several more rifle rounds sailed downrange, cutting through the chill night air and snuffing out the lives of the old woman, and Gemma too.
Tara watched in horror as her roommate fell to the pavement, one arm coming to rest on top of the old woman she had been trying to help. Walt crept forward and pulled Tara away from the opening in the fence.
Boots running along the street alerted Mike that he had little time to react before the Carnicero shooters overran the area. Thinking quickly, he zeroed in with his shotgun on the shadows that were moving up the street, and used the sound of their unconcealed movement to keep his aim true.
Bam-bam-bam! He lit up the night with his return fire, and at least one of the shells found a victim. The oncoming men shouted and leaped aside into the shadows, looking for cover. Mike didn’t wait for them to find it and shoot back.
“Come on!” he said to Jeremey, and launched himself across the street. Jeremy was hot on his heels, and the two of them fairly dived through the hole in the fence, tripping over the bodies of the fallen and tumbling down the bank. Mike cut his face badly on the jagged edge of the fence and landed on the flat bottom of the canal in a heap.
Jeremy was up first, adrenaline fueling the spry young man’s movements. He took off down the canal, outpacing the rest of the Leonhardts.
“Go!” Mike told the others. “I’m good! I’ll be right behind.”
Walt turned and moved away, pulling Tara with him. Liam followed, looking over his shoulder at his brother.
Mike jumped to his feet, leaned against the bank, and peered cautiously into the street. It was hard to see anything in the darkness, and the sounds coming from outside the canal added to the disorienting feeling. A few gunshots rang out, but nothing came into the canal.
None of the three bodies lying outside the fence were moving or making any sounds. Mike whispered fiercely at them. “Can any of you move? If you’re alive, say something.” There was no reply.
Mike raised his shotgun and fired two more rounds down the street toward the last place he’d seen shapes moving. Then he ducked down and ran after his family, fumbling with shells to get his gun reloaded as he went.
When he caught up with them, Tara was sobbing, but Walt was hurrying her along with an arm around her shoulders.
“I’m sorry, Tara, they’re dead!” Mike reported, almost as shaken as she was. He couldn’t get one of his shells into the loading flap on the gun’s belly, and dropped it at his feet. “All three of them, down for the count. I’m so sorry.”
Tara tried to choke down her dismay and cry in silence, but the occasional sob echoed out between the canal’s concrete banks along with their hurried footsteps.
“Mike,” Walt said, “how long do you think we have until they get into the canal and chase us?”
“Hopefully it will be a few minutes,” Mike replied. “I don’t think they have any idea how many of us there are, but they know we can shoot back.”
“We need to put some serious distance between us,” Walt said. “I hope Estela and the children have gotten a couple of miles on, or we’re going to be fighting a rear action the entire way out of the city.”
Jeremy was nowhere in sight. The quick young fellow had apparently sprinted away to find his own people and he wasn’t looking back. The Leonhardts soon came to a stretch of canal that had puddles of foul-smelling water standing on one side, and after accidentally jogging into one of them and spraying the water everywhere, they watched for the reflection of starlight in the puddles and avoided the rest so as not to make noise.
Farther along, there was a fire burning at the side of a building that bordered the canal, but if anyone was tending it they didn’t come over to the canal to see who was running down its length.
Not long after that the Leonhardts saw another fire, this one much bigger, consuming a structure a few hundred yards away. The sparks rose high above the surrounding rooftops and the orange glow showed the smoke billowing up into the night sky. They continued on without stopping to rest or reconnoiter.
“Keep moving,” Walt said. “It’s a race, now. We’ve got angry killers behind us, violent forces converging from the north, and who-knows-what up ahead. We need to catch up with Estela’s group as quickly as possible and then get out of this city!”
The Leonhardt family hurried onward at a fast clip, covering ground quickly along the floor of the mostly-dry canal. They went under many bridges and culverts where a road or footpath crossed the waterway. In one culvert they scared a couple of dogs out of their hiding place, and at one they saw signs of a human camping in the meager shelter it afforded. Whoever had been spending the night there had vacated the premises, no doubt when Estela’s group trooped through, and hadn’t returned.
An hour of traveling finally brought them to the rear guard of Estela’s people. Jeremy had already caught up to them and warned them that the Leonhardts would be coming, so there was no trouble. Jorge waved them on by.
“Bienvenidos, Mr. Leonhardt and family,” he said. “Estela is up front leading the kids. Are we to expect enemies following after you?”
Walt nodded. “I’m afraid so. They’re probably a ways back, but they definitely saw us enter the canal and if they decide we’re worth following all this way, they’ll be along in ten minutes or so. I’m going up to talk to Estela, then I’ll send help back here to you.”
A hundred feet farther along, they came to the slowest of the children. The kids had been split into two groups, a slower one with more adult help, and a faster one that was traveling up ahead with Estela.
Alma was with the slower, younger kids. She stifled a low cry of joy when she saw the Leonhardts approaching.
“Gracias a Dios,” she said, and threw herself at Mike for a big hug. “I’m so happy you made it. We were afraid that was the last we’d ever see of you guys. Is this your sister?”
Mike nodded and quietly introduced Tara and Alma to each either.
Walt had moved ahead to where Estela and a few of the other adults were breaking trail. She told Walt they had a scout ranging a hundred yards ahead, coming back to report any obstacles. They hadn’t run into anything that had stopped them yet.
“You did good,” she told Walt. “This route is going to be our saving grace, I think. If the children can keep up the pace for another hour or two, we’ll be out of the more populated part of the valley.”
“They’d better keep it up,” Walt warned. “We may have pursuers arriving soon. I’m going to send my boys back to guard the rear while I scout farther ahead, maybe half a mile or so. Then I’ll be back.”
Chapter 29: Out of Patience
It was just as well that Sarah didn’t know precisely where Terry Hayes stood in the ranking of the militia, or she might have lost her nerve right then and there.
“Hey, what is this?” Terry asked, looking around at the gunman behind him and then past Sarah at the guard who was still standing inside. “Who are you?”
“Who am I?” Sarah’s eyes blazed. “Who are you to imprison my niece? Get out of my way this instant.”
She shouldered past Terry and almost got away without further argument, on nothing more than the strength of her bravado and righteous wrath. The young man who’d been held next to Jess slid quietly off the side of the porch steps and silently disappeared into the darkness, never to be seen again that night. But Sarah was stopped in her tracks by the man behind Terry, a hulking fellow who carried an AR-15 rifle.
“Stand still, lady. The boss wants to question you.”
He reached out and pushed Sarah back with firm hand on her shoulder. She was stunned by the immovable solidness of the man. Unlike Terry and the two amateur guards in their confiscated headquarters, this man had experience with unpleasant physical encounters. He was now the greatest threat to Jess and Sarah’s safety, and Sarah paused to collect her wits.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Terry asked, his voice shrill. “Joe, did you let these people loose?”
Joe, the guard who had been inside with Jaren, stepped out of the door behind Sarah. Now she and Jess were caught between two sets of hostile men. All her alarm senses were going off full blast, but she clung desperately to the feelings that had guided her so far.
“She just walked in here, Mr. Hayes,” Joe said. “I was about to—”
Sarah interrupted, desperate to regain control of the situation before she ended up tied to a chair alongside her niece. The guard named Joe had just given her the information she needed. “Terry Hayes, right? I recognize you now. You ran that ratty diner on McMillan road.” The tactic worked nearly as well with Terry as it had with Jaren, putting the man in his place and establishing a relationship between he and Sarah that favored her. “My husband used to eat there, but things didn’t turn out very well with your little business enterprise, did it?”
Lionhearts (Denver Burning Book 5) Page 18