They dashed out the front door of the parsonage and hesitated, for the rain that had been falling all night was still coming down hard. With no other option, Beth charged down the porch steps into the deluge.
There was no way to know how much time was left before Echols and his thugs put their plan, whatever it was, into operation. It might already be playing out. This realization fueled a panic in Beth that made it hard to think. It didn’t help that the cold rain hammering on her head had instantly soaked her hair and begun to run down the neck of her jacket. Fearing there was no time left, she hurtled across ten yards of slippery grass and ran up to one of the big windows on the outer wall of the corridor ringing the sanctuary.
A few steps behind her, Roger hit a very slick spot, and his feet shot out from under him. As he fell onto his butt, the gun flew from his hand and landed in a pool of thick, muddy water.
At the church window, Beth began banging on the glass with the palms of both hands, screaming as loudly as she could, “Stop the service. Stop the service.”
At first Roger couldn’t find the gun. Then he saw it, barely visible above the surface of the puddle where it had fallen. He retrieved it, jammed it in his pocket, and added his efforts to Beth’s at the window.
As if trying to drive them away, the rain picked up in intensity, thudding on their heads and shoulders, penetrating their clothing down to their skin.
But even two voices and four hands weren’t enough to carry their message through the inner wall of the sanctuary and over the sounds of the organ and choir inside. Realizing this, and freshly aware that her wish to create an immediate disturbance had caused her to choose the first idea that came to her, not the best, she stopped banging on the window and bolted past Roger, heading for the front entrance.
Dashing up the steps a moment later, now under the dry portico, she grabbed at one of the big brass doorknobs and yanked.
Locked.
In a futile gesture, she tried the opposite door, which of course, was also locked.
“Wait,” Roger said. “I’ve got the keys from the guy whose gun I took.” He fumbled in his pockets and produced the key ring in question. He quickly ran through the available choices while Beth stood by anxiously watching.
But it was all wasted motion. None of the keys fit.
In anger and frustration, tears mingling with rainwater dripping from her stringy hair, Beth stepped back and rammed the door with her shoulder. She then began pounding on it with her fists, shouting, “Stop the service. You’re all going to die. Stop the service.”
Roger added his efforts to the door beside her and together, they tried to make themselves heard over the thunder outside and the music within. In truth, even if the sky had stopped its rumbling and her friends inside grew still, Beth and Roger’s puny efforts would not have carried through the sanctuary walls and heavy secondary doors off the inside corridor.
She looked at Roger, her eyes wild with desperation. “Think you could shoot around the part of the door that accepts the bolt and damage it enough to get us in?”
“I can try,” Roger replied, pulling out the gun. “But I dropped it in a puddle back there. So I don’t know . . .”
Despite this bad news, Beth tried to stay optimistic. “Even if the shots don’t work, maybe someone inside will hear the noise.”
Beth stepped back, and Roger aimed at where he thought the bolt met the opposite door. Wincing in anticipation of the noise and recoil the gun would make if it fired, Roger pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
He tried again, once more making nothing happen. “I was afraid of that.”
“C’mon,” Beth said, heading down the steps. “Fellowship Hall is right next door. If we can get inside, there’s a passageway that leads to the church.”
IN THE CHURCH basement, Echols tied the string from the blower compartment of the second furnace to an overhead pipe just as he had rigged the string from furnace one. Then he picked up the big bottle of sulfuric acid and began carefully filling the glass bowl of furnace one under its suspended bag of cyanide pellets.
DOWN IN THE MINE, where Carl had now made his way into the main shaft, he understood why Beth and Roger had to go without him. But he was angry that his wound had made him a liability. He wanted in on this fight. But in truth, being gimped up like he was, what the hell could he contribute?
Directly across the shaft, he saw a set of ascending, narrow steps he hadn’t noticed before. Curious as to where they led and hoping they might take him to a weapons cache or some other place where he could contribute at least a little to Beth and Roger’s efforts, he moved across the shaft and started up those steps.
Climbing stairs with a crutch was not only difficult and slow, it was impossible to do without some pain. But considering the danger Beth and Roger had put themselves in, he was not going to pay any attention to that. Step by step, he moved away from the mine to whatever lay above, praying it wouldn’t just be a locked door. Because if it was, he could do nothing about it.
WITH EVERYTHING else ready, Echols unrolled a length of fuse cord from the spool he’d brought and wrapped it around the first string he’d tied off. Wanting to make sure that when the fuse cord was lit it would sever the string, he wound the cord around it for about eight inches and tied the two together. He unrolled the spool of fuse material until he reached the door they would use to escape, then cut the length from the spool.
CARL WAS SWEATING and his pulse was clipping along at warp speed. Happily, he had reached the top of the stairs without suffering a cardiac event. He reached out for the wooden door in front of him and grasped the knob.
It wasn’t locked. But as the door swung open, he saw on the other side, two familiar and surprised faces: Echols and Lothian. In an instant, Lothian pulled his gun and ran toward Carl.
Chapter 59
“NO GUNFIRE IN here,” Echols shouted as Lothian ran past him. “They might hear it upstairs. Wait ’til you’re in the mine.”
Carl slammed the door shut, his mind shouting the obvious. Jesus, am I in trouble.
There was no way he could retreat. Lothian would be on him before he got down two steps. In a move that had no exit strategy, Carl dropped his crutch, leaned his shoulder against the door, and braced himself with his good leg. He’d heard Echols warn Lothian against shooting, so he didn’t think there was any danger of a bullet hitting him through the door, but how he was going to turn this small blockade in Lothian’s path to a greater advantage was not apparent.
“IT’S LOCKED,” Beth moaned, working the latch and pulling on the handles of the door to Fellowship Hall. She turned to Roger. “Try the keys.”
Again, none fit.
“The gun . . .” Beth said. “You still have it?”
“Don’t know why I’m keeping it, but yeah, it’s right here.”
“Come with me.”
Roger followed Beth back into the cold rain and then to a window five feet from the hall’s front entrance.
“See if you can throw it through that glass.”
His lips turning blue from the cold, Roger cranked his arm back and let the gun fly with more force than Beth thought he could muster. The weapon hit the window with a dull thump and bounced to the ground, leaving the glass unscathed.
“Damn,” Roger said. “Whoever built this thing, went way overboard on the specs. Got any other ideas?”
Her voice filled with despair, Beth said, “Let’s go back and tell Carl we can’t get in. Maybe he can think of something.”
CARL FELT PRESSURE against the door and it opened a crack, but he drove hard with his good leg and sealed it again. There was a brief interval, and then something on the other side, presumably Lothian’s body, slammed against the door, popping it open a bit farther than before. Like the first time, Carl dug in and regained the ground
he’d lost.
Another short interval led to a second bruising slam against the wood from the other side. And again, Carl resisted. But his strength was failing.
A third blow jarred his teeth and drove him back two inches that he regained with the utmost difficulty. What the hell was he going to do to get out of this?
Then he had an idea. He took his weight off the door and stepped to the side.
The next blast against the door came right on schedule, but this time, without Carl resisting, the door blew open and Lothian came through the gap under far too much steam to stop himself. He stutter-stepped off the landing and toppled down the stairs in a spectacular display of rolling and clawing.
Without waiting to learn the outcome, Carl turned and slammed the door shut in hopes that if Echols couldn’t see what was going on, he might not join in. Carl then grabbed his crutch and hurried down the stairs to where he could see Lothian lying motionless. His only chance now was to reach Lothian before the thug regained his senses.
ECHOLS WAS SO busy rigging his fuses he didn’t see Lothian fall, but he did hear a lot of noise. Surely an armed man could handle an unarmed gimp. But even if Lothian got in trouble, Echols could take care of things in a minute. Getting those fuses lit was his first priority.
CARL HAD ONLY six steps more to go. And Lothian still had not moved. Hurry . . . hurry . . . He listened hard for the sound of the door above opening.
Five steps . . .
Four . . .
He reached the floor of the main shaft, where Lothian still lay just as he had fallen. Wasting no time checking the thug’s pulse, he looked around for the man’s gun . . .
There . . . halfway across the shaft.
He hobbled over and picked up the weapon.
He’d had only a quick glimpse of the interior of the room beyond the door at the top of the stairs. In that brief moment, he’d seen Echols tying some kind of dark rope to a string fixed to an overhead pipe. He’d also had the impression the room contained some bulky objects that were probably furnaces. The most likely explanation for what he’d seen was that Echols was rigging some kind of poisonous gas to be delivered into the church through the heating system.
He turned and started toward the steps, intending to do what he could to stop Echols, but then he heard the door at the top of the stairs creak open. He stopped moving.
Did that mean Echols was finished with what he was doing? Was gas this very moment pouring into the church?
Conflicting thoughts raged through Carl’s brain. Rush the steps, and try to kill him . . . But Echols was far better at handling a gun than he was. If Echols killed him, there would be no one to stop the slaughter.
In a monstrously difficult decision and one that was counterintuitive to his goals, Carl turned and hurried away from the steps, across the shaft, and down to his right, toward another unlit side tunnel.
BEHIND THE BASEMENT door, the hot spots on the two lit fuse cords sizzled and crept along the concrete floor. Once they severed their respective strings, the two bags of cyanide pellets would drop into the acid below and there would be an almost instantaneous generation of hydrogen cyanide.
CARL HAD JUST managed to reach the side tunnel and get out of sight when Echols cautiously came down the steps, his automatic ready to do some damage. From where he stood, hugging the right wall of the shaft he was in, Carl was out of Echols’s line of fire, but would have to do an awkward pivot move on his crutch and reveal himself to get off a round in Echols’s direction.
Fulfilling both those caveats, Carl moved into the open, where he snap fired the gun four times. The instant he started to drag himself back to safety, he saw two puffs of dust erupt from the rock beside the steps. He also saw Echols lurch once, obviously hit.
ECHOLS GRUNTED from the force of Carl’s slug as it slammed into his Kevlar vest. Standing in the open like that, he was an easy target even for a novice. He couldn’t retreat up the stairs because the cyanide was about to drop and some of the resulting gas would likely seep through the door. He had only one option, take the offensive. Being right handed would make the maneuver harder, but it wasn’t as though he’d never practiced this one or done it before under fire.
SEEING THAT ECHOLS had caught one of his rounds, Carl edged back into the open, intending to finish him. He was not prepared for what he saw: Echols, weapon raised, running along the far wall, getting nearer with every step. Staying on the move, Echols began firing in rapid succession.
BECAUSE OF THE poor angle, Echols knew his first slugs had little chance of connecting, but were simply protective fire to keep his opponent pinned back against the wall, so when the angle became optimal, the guy would have to waste precious time getting his arm into firing position.
IN THE SIDE tunnel where Carl was hiding, he heard two of Echols’s initial rounds whisper past his face and ricochet like the other two, off the opposite wall, far back where they were no danger to him. Faster than he could think, two more rounds whizzed past him, but hit nothing, his adversary’s improved angle sending them straight down the dark passage. This was about to get intensely serious.
Four more slugs zipped into the shaft, this time clanging off Carl’s side of the tunnel, barely a foot away. He needed to return fire, but couldn’t muster the nerve to lean out into the barrage Echols was laying down.
HIS COURSE FORMING a gentle arc as he ran, Echols deftly avoided the old railroad tracks down the center of the shaft. Clear of them, he continued his flawless footwork as he dropped the now empty magazine out of his Herstal automatic and jammed a new one in. The next rounds he fired would end this little skirmish and he could go onto other things.
Barely a second later, he was in position where he could now clearly see Carl jammed against the side wall of his hiding place, the arm of Carl’s gun hand fatally hanging at his side so he would present the flattest profile. By the time Carl got his arm extended, he would be dead. Echols slowed his sideways dance just a bit to make sure his aim was true.
Suddenly, behind him, Echols heard a voice: “Leave him alone and go back to hell where you came from.” At the same instant he felt something sharp strike him in the back of the head. Disciplined as he was, this broke his concentration and he delayed firing.
Even before the object struck Echols, Carl was straightening his arm to fire. Echols’s hesitation allowed Carl to get off a single round before the man recovered enough to pull the trigger on his Herstal. But before Echols could complete that motion, Carl’s slug hit him above the left eye and tore through his frontal sinus. Traveling only marginally slower now, it pulped its way through eight inches of his brain and blew a bony map of Brazil out the back of his skull. He crumpled to the floor.
This should have been a time for Carl to beat his chest and howl like an animal. He had survived a deadly assault and had revenged his father’s death all in the same instant. But he had no thoughts other than the room at the top of the stairs.
It was Beth who had shouted and hit Echols with a rock. As she and Roger hurried toward him, Carl pointed across the shaft. “Up those steps . . . poison gas about to be sent through the heating system . . .”
Without even pausing to think about whether it would be safe to go up there, Beth changed direction and bolted for the stairs. The danger made Roger hesitate, but then he followed.
Beth took the stairs two at a time and threw the door at the top open. Her attention immediately went across the room, to a sizzling fuse cord barely an inch from a string leading to something she didn’t have time to figure out. To her left, another fuse was creeping toward a second string.
Already on the move again and sensing Roger behind her, she shouted, “Take the other one.” Reaching the more distant string, she saw that the fuse cord was wrapped around it and tied off. Much too complicated to deal with in the minuscule amount of time left.
&nbs
p; She followed the string with her eyes . . . to a hanging bag of something.
She didn’t know what was in the bag, but it was obvious she needed to keep it from falling into the liquid under it.
“Catch the bag,” she shouted to Roger, who had just reached the same decision.
Simultaneously, they each lurched for the opening to the blower unit at the end of their string.
Beth slid to her knees and thrust her hand under the bag of cyanide just as the fuse severed the string. Roger, too, caught his just in time.
They dropped the bags on the floor and then, wearily, left the room and went down the steps to where Carl waited.
“It’s okay,” Beth said. “We stopped it.”
THEY WERE STILL sitting there ten minutes later, when outside, three helicopters swung in low and landed on the church lawn. In seconds, National Guardsmen in full battle dress poured from the choppers and swarmed over the site, their actions under the direction of County Sheriff Kendall Cord, a steely eyed fellow over six foot six, dressed in a crisply pressed tan uniform and a Smokey the Bear hat.
Chapter 60
SHERIFF CORD SET up a command post in the dining area of Fellowship Hall and sent all the townsfolk to their homes so he could sort out what was going on without being overwhelmed with input from close to three hundred confused people. Hanson and Meggs were being held in separate rooms of the hall, three armed soldiers at each location making sure they stayed there. He had spoken at length separately to Carl, Beth, and to Roger, whose face was still swollen from all the excitement. All three now sat facing him in folding chairs, while Cord stood in front of the table he was using as a makeshift desk.
“Without a doubt, you all have told the damnedest story I’ve ever heard,” Cord said, looking at each of them with hard, gray eyes.
“Wild as it sounds, it’s the truth,” Carl said.
“If I wasn’t hearin’ a lot of the same things from so-called Father Hanson and the town doc . . . that Meggs character, I might make each of you tell it all to me again . . . see if I could catch you changin’ your stories.”
The Blood Betrayal Page 29