“Try!”
“Too many images in my brain.”
“Just do them all,” Amanda shouted.
One bullet after another blew holes in the building, front and back. A round slammed into the railroad ties beside us and sprayed chalk dust from the cement board. Without the kid’s barricade, we would be dead, but I didn’t know if it would hold up against repeated hits.
“Help me.” Jenny’s voice was weaker now. “Get the computer.”
“Jenny,” I called, “we can’t move.”
“Get the computer.… Turn the lights on.”
Wham! Another round struck the railroad ties near us.
“We need to do what she says,” Amanda said.
“We can’t move. Lights would only make it worse.”
“We have to do something.”
“Get the computer.” Jenny’s voice had a remote tone to it.
“Shit,” I said. “All right. I’m coming.”
To Amanda, I said, “Call 911. Then Mike Owens.”
I grabbed my shotgun, rolled onto my back and blasted a hole in the ceiling. Let them know we had guns.
Amanda lay on her side, punching her cell phone. I flipped onto my stomach and started crawling out of the bunker toward T and Jenny’s room.
Chapter 55
Betrayed
Behind me, Amanda pumped a shot into the ceiling, showering the room with plaster.
“Keep firing, babe.” I slid on my belly, collecting shards of glass and wood splinters with every move. My hands were sticky with blood by the time I reached the bedroom door. I poked my head through as another round tore through the wall above me.
“Jenny, how did they get so close?”
I meant, how did they evade the outer rings of sensors; Jenny told another story in a broken voice.
“T called… He called Colonel Owens.”
T! The fool had given us away. I saw the red of bleeding orchids.
“Do the computer, Sebastian.”
Jenny’s voice was fading.
“Do what?” I yelled, trying to make myself heard over the sudden sound of continuous firing.
The assassins had given up taking potshots. They were making an all-out attack. Our time left could be measured in minutes, at the most.
“Enter.… Hit enter.”
“What will that do?”
“Hit enter.”
I groped for the laptop in the dark, and a needle of glass drove into the palm of my left hand. I cried out in pain and rolled onto my right side, picking up more glass and splinters in my arm. My head bounced onto the floor. A spike of glass stabbed my right cheek and jabbed into my tongue.
I screamed loud enough to be heard over the cacophony of the world collapsing around us. The pain brought stars to my eyes and tears to my cheeks. Blood leaked into my mouth, but I couldn’t spit. Mad with pain and anger, I felt for the shard and yanked it out. Blood flowed freely. I turned my head and let it drip over my teeth and onto the floor.
The railroad tie barricade stood, but the walls and ceiling above were shredded. Time was running out. I either found the computer and hit the right key, or—who knew what?
Still on my stomach to keep the blood from pooling in my mouth, I swept my right hand back and forth over the floor trying to locate the computer. I finally touched metal. It was lodged under T’s motionless body. My aching and bloody hands wrestled the machine out from under him. He remained ominously silent.
In the other room, Amanda banged away, unloading one shotgun after another. Soon she would have to reload, and our noisy defense would go silent. What then?
I expected a grenade to fly through a hole any moment, and I realized Mike Owens was either wrong or had played me. No two men, no matter how good, could make all the noise that engulfed us. There was even the sound of a helicopter. The chaos was making me giddy.
Watch me die, Empaya Iba, I thought. Watch my blood run out.”
I laughed aloud.
Iba, can you feel it? Huh? Who will take my head?
I cackled and levered myself up against the foot of the bed, pulling the laptop onto my lap. A burst of bullets struck the house behind me. Amanda stopped hammering with the shotgun.
“Amanda,” I shouted as loudly as my swelling tongue would let me. “Answer me.”
Jenny made no sounds, not even a moan.
I flipped the laptop open, and even the faint light from the screen blinded me. I plopped my hands on the keyboard, slimy with my blood and spit. Why was I bothering? What was supposed to happen?
I shook my head, trying to focus. There it was, over on the right side of the keyboard. Enter! I banged a bloody index finger onto the key.
Brilliant light flashed through the holes in the ranch house walls, blinding me. Outside, shocked and wounded screams replaced the sound of gunfire. On and off, a thousand times a second, the incredible whiteness strobed.
Faces flashed through my brain—Amanda, T, Jenny. I pushed them aside. Joe. Mike. Where had they come from? More faces swarmed in my brain.
People I didn’t recognize. Terrible images, eyes wide, mouths open, agony and fear streaked across each one. So many assassins! I wished them dead. Willed them dead. Ordered and commanded them to shrivel up and die.
I sucked the images into a cyclone of swirling color, blood red turning to black, thinning and separating into wispy threads, knitting a pattern I had seen before, every time I looked into a mirror.
I had never envisioned anything like it, never experienced such a surge of raw energy rushing through my body.
A huge explosion in the foothills rocked the remains of the ranch house, flashing an orange tinge into the white light streaming in.
“Sebastian!”
It was Amanda. Her voice boomed in the new silence.
“What’s happening?”
“I’m here,” I called.
I crawled out of T and Jenny’s bedroom, leaving a trail of splinters, glass shards and blood.
“Sebastian, what happened?… Oh, my God. You’re covered in blood.”
She scrambled to her knees and gently took my face in her hands.
“Your face.”
I swatted her hand as she tried to wipe my face with the hem of her nightgown.
“Later. I’m going outside.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Did you get Mike?”
“No. There was no answer, so I started shooting.”
I tried to smile.
“You did great, babe.”
My voice sounded hazy, remote.
“Call 911. See if you can get some help. Our hideout isn’t secret any more. T told Mike where we are. That’s how they found us.”
“Oh, T,” was all she said.
*
The front door was a shamble, littered with holes big enough for small dogs to scrawl through. Beside the door, lying on the floor, was the ax I had sharpened to a surgical edge. I picked it up and jerked the door handle; the door flew open on me.
“Sebastian. Please don’t go out there.”
I staggered outside into lights as bright as day—T and Jenny’s ambush.
But I didn’t need the flashing high-intensity lights. My feet knew where to go, and I let them carry me there, ax in hand.
Chapter 56
The Reckoning
Everywhere I looked, charred bodies cast shadows.
Behind the ranch house up the rise toward the tree line, I came upon Mike Owens motionless on the ground.
Farther up the hill, flames 30 feet high ate dried brush, tinder and pine trees, adding a pulsing red glare to the manic disco ball of the lights.
“Mike?”
I knelt by his body.
“Seb—”
Pain streaked across his face.
He gasped, touched a black-gloved hand to his throat.
“My men—I got down, then the lights went on. The chopper blew.”
It was a whisper competing against harsher sounds: Sire
ns blaring from the south and the whump-whump-whump of a helicopter to the north.
I shook my head.
“I didn’t know. I—I didn’t realize it was you.”
He grabbed my arm and squeezed.
“Two rogues from Brant—we came for you,” he whispered.
I pried his fingers off my arm.
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
The sirens sped up Bridger Canyon Road, and a helicopter circled overhead in the darkness beyond the lights.
I stumbled off to my obligations.
*
“Alpha, respond. Alpha, respond.”
Maj. Sturgeon croaked, his voice loud in the sudden silence. His night vision goggles hung loose around his neck, and his eyes burned in the strobing lights.
“Alpha, are you there? Acknowledge. Over.”
Words from his past whispered in his ears.
“Failure lasts, only if we let it.”
You bet, general, he thought.
It was silent again, as it had been when he and Alpha had crawled in for the attack after disabling the Wi-Fi signal. They had coordinated fire. First Alpha, from up the hill behind the house, then Sturgeon. Their muffled rifles took the house apart, foot by foot, working from the bedrooms to the living room, then out toward the sides. Arnett and his friends should have died from the first few explosive rounds, but they potted back with shotguns. Shotguns!
It was nothing they couldn’t handle, he and Alpha had agreed over their headsets.
The chopper had surprised them. Owens’s men—it had to be Owens—fired blindly, sewing confusion, as they circled, searching for a place to drop their rappelling lines. Sturgeon and Alpha hunkered down, challenged for certain, but hardly defeated.
Then the ranch house burst into blinding light, temporarily searing eyeballs behind night vision goggles. Then the strobe.
With the blinding light, the helicopter tipped to one side, a blade catching the tree tops, throwing the entire machine off balance and into the trees where it exploded in a tooth-rattling roar and burst into flames, ejecting burning bodies to the ground.
The shock waves tossed Sturgeon to the ground and squashed him. It was the oddest sensation. A pulsing, or was that his heartbeat?
That’s when Alpha stopped communicating.
Now, Sturgeon felt dazed, only vaguely aware of his surroundings, a sense of calm enveloping his body, like being swaddled in a blanket.
“Alpha—”
Sturgeon couldn’t make his voice work. He struggled, really struggled, to sit up and aim his rifle again. The lights bap-bap-bapped his brain. A shadow fell over him, blessing him with partial relief from the eye-piercing strobe.
A shape took form over him.
“Alpha?”
“Omega,” a strange voice said.
Sturgeon shielded his eyes with one hand and struggled to lift and aim his rifle at the shadow. His finger tightened on the trigger, and the lights went out.
Chapter 57
Accounting
I started awake from a horrible dream filled with guns, explosions, blinding lights—and blood.
For an instant, I could not recall where I was. A hospital room, for sure. A monitor high above the bed tracked the patient’s every breath.
Ah, yes. Deaconess Hospital in Bozeman. T’s room. After the surgery to save his face. Thinking I couldn’t sleep anyway, I’d sent Amanda home to get some rest. Then I’d dozed on the padded bench that ran along the window.
I looked around the darkened room. Joe’s silhouette emerged from the shadows, sitting silent in a recliner in the corner, his feet up. From steps away, I could smell the Hendricks gin and lime.
“You want some?” he asked.
“When did you get here?”
“Not long. Greyhound stops every town.”
My very own mysterious medicine man takes the bus to make house calls. Not so strange, maybe, not after what had happened the last few days.
“How did you find me?”
“That Maria, she knows. She tells me you need help.”
“Humph. That was a couple days ago. I really needed help then. Now—”
“Maybe you need it more now.”
I stared into the dim light.
“Maybe.”
“You spook that soldier good, you know. One who finds you with those heads.”
“I don’t remember it. I never do.”
“You sitting in the hills, looking down on the world you make, two heads between your legs. Spider crawling on one, black flower on the other. Never seen that in Iraq, Afghanistan, I bet.”
I squirmed on the padded bench, trying to get comfortable.
“Jenny’s dead,” I said.
“Yah.”
“You didn’t know her.”
“No.”
“She was lying on top of T, trying to protect him, I guess. He doesn’t know yet. He’s going to feel a lot of guilt.”
“Yah. Someday, it will pass.”
“Maybe. I guess.”
I sighed.
“T lost his right eye.”
“Hmm. Maybe be ugly like you. Give you two something in common. Maybe you fight less.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“Amanda, she take care of things.” It was a statement, not a question.
“She’s going to have T live at her place in Denver for a while after he gets out of here. And she’s setting up education trusts for the kids of Mike Owens’s team. They all died. Mike is pretty broken up that he survived and they didn’t.”
“You feel guilty about that?” It was a question, but the old Indian already knew my answer.
“Yeah. I feel guilty about everything. And that damned spirit didn’t do a thing. Just left. Like it was never there.”
“You think that?”
I sat up sharply.
“Of course, I do. It’s the truth. I called on him. Taunted him when I couldn’t make those two guys die. Instead, I turn on those damned lights, blind the pilot and crash the helicopter. If Mike hadn’t been rappelling down the rope, he would have died in the crash and burned up like the others.”
“You think it was them lights killed everybody?”
The shadow that was Joe pointed a crooked finger at me and shook his head.
“You are one crazy white man. Lights don’t crash that helicopter. Lights don’t stop those bad men. Your demon—you—do that.”
I listened, astonished with recognition.
“That demon don’t leave you. You give it that blood sacrifice it wants. Maybe needs. No, that demon, he don’t give up. He is just starting.”
Empaya Iba Speaks
I am Empaya Iba, spirit of the Black Orchid People, guardian of the Mother Soil, giver of the Long Sleep, seer of the Many Eyes, mage of the Many Legs.
The one who bears my mark brings me gifts,
And I am well pleased with him.
Together, he and I will share my powers,
And all will be well with the Children of the Black Orchid.
Believe in me and my servant.
So say I, Empaya Iba.
Acknowledgments
Numerous friends and associates gave their time and support to this project.
My son, Richard D. Haase, a sci-fi savant and discerning reader, told me honestly what worked and what didn’t through one telling of the story after another. Next one’s for you, lad.
Donna Verdier, a genie of the thesaurus and style guide, offered enthusiastic support through multiple drafts, so much so that she earned the right to name a character, Maria Reina.
My friend and professional editor, Sylvia A. Smith, kept me from making several insensitive mistakes.
Ken Lawrence, my accidental writing buddy—we met at a writer’s conference in New York only to discover we live several blocks from one another—answered dumb questions, demanded progress, and always provided an understanding ear.
Ken and the other members of the Royal Writers Secret Society reviewe
d chapters during our monthly critiques and forced me over and over to remember the reader. They include Bill Grigg, Patrick Hyde, Tom Milani, Rick Pullen, Patricia Schultheis, and Alan Simon.
Their feedback was priceless; the errors are entirely my own.
Also by
David L. Haase
HOTEL CONSTELLATION: Notes from America’s Secret War in Laos
It’s 1970. War rages in Viet-Nam, while intense, sometimes violent protests against it rage at home. Impelled to test his courage against that of his WWII hero father, college student David L. Haase arranges to study at the Buddhist University in Saigon. Detained on arrival and quickly deported from Viet-Nam, he searches for a way to get back in.
Instead, he stumbles into the secret CIA war next door in Laos. For the next two years, he witnesses the unraveling of the American politico-military strategy, the decimation of a primitive hill tribe people, and the destruction of a tiny jungle kingdom, all of which he laboriously transcribes in limp, lined school notebooks each day. Those handwritten notes became this memoir of a young innocent abroad growing older and cynical.
Memoir
The Mark of the Spider: A Black Orchid Chronicle Page 27