“Fuck ya. Die wondering.”
Bolan replied, “Okay,” and went away from there.
The piercing odor of gasoline vapors was strong in his senses as he stepped around the rear of the wreckage; and then a movement in the bushes a few yards away sent him in a sprawling dive toward the shadows.
He had a flashing perception of a large bulk of a man with a pistol outstretched and spitting flame at him; in that same instant the entire area was brilliantly illuminated by flames as the gasoline vapors ignited with a whooshing explosion.
He felt the bullet from that fateful firing sing past him. By the time he had completed his roll and was coming up to return the fire, his target was a staggering fireball, the brightest thing of the night, spinning in confusion and seeking an escape from the inescapable.
The guy must have been lying in gasoline, soaked in it.
Bolan’s appropriated revolver instinctively jerked into the firing lineup and pumped three quick mercy rounds into that tortured hell on earth … and he walked quickly away without looking back.
Afoot now, bleeding anew from the old wounds, and with a thousand Jersey guns awaiting him somewhere out there, Bolan nevertheless sent out a quiet “thanks” to the universe at large.
For the moment, at least, he was leaving death behind him.
2 THE FARM
He dreamed interminably of the infinite river and eternal warfare, and he awoke somewhere within that eternity with bright sunlight upon his face.
He was lying in straw, and he was naked. The sunlight was coming through an overhead window, a sort of skylight set into a high ceiling. He was warm, woozy, completely without pain.
A large man in blue jeans and a striped shirt sat on a bench beside him, watching him with attentive eyes.
Someone else was at his other side. He was too comfortable to make the effort of turning his head to see who was there.
From somewhere off in that direction came a gasp and an excited female voice. “Bruno! He’s awake!”
Okay. That other someone was a woman, obviously. The big dude in blue jeans must be Bruno. So what?
Bruno looked okay. Balding, a bit overweight, pleasant face, worried eyes.
Bolan tried to ask, “Bruno who?” but his tongue clung to the roof of his mouth, and somehow he couldn’t get it loose.
Then the woman leaned over him; and she wasn’t a woman, at all. A girl, a mere slip of a girl, dressed also in blue jeans and a shirt made from the same material as Bruno’s.
Bruno’s daughter?
The eyes were huge pools of dark compassion, framed in smooth flesh of almost dusky hue, but alive and glistening. Long, shiny hair fell in smooth cascades across the shoulders—jet-black, silken.
A kid, and here lay Bolan mother naked.
He made the effort and got a hand in motion, sending it to a flopping and heavy rest somewhere about the thighs. A towel was draped across him down there—or something with a terrycloth feeling.
Okay. Okay, kid, nothing to worry about, don’t look so scared.
She was asking him, in a concerned but musical voice, “How do you feel?”
He tried the tongue again and gave it up, settling for a crooked smile that somehow felt all contorted and clownish.
What the hell was wrong with him?
As though reading his thoughts, the girl told him, “Bruno found you in the brook. We’ve stopped your bleeding, and. we’ve given you something to ease the pain. Can you tell me how you feel?”
Reality crashed in on him, then. Somehow he got an elbow under him and tried to push himself upright. The girl pressed him back down, gently but firmly, and she told him. “You must lie still.”
The tongue came unstuck, but his voice sounded like quacking as he mumbled, “No, you don’t know. Danger, dangerous for you here.”
She was trying to calm him, and the guy came over to place a heavy hand on his head.
He was trying to tell them that their lives were not worth a piece of the straw he was lying upon—not as long as he lay there—but he felt that he was speaking into a well, a deep well which began enlarging and closing in around him; and it was the last lucid moment he had that day.
When next he found an edge of reality he could hang on to, he was lying between soft sheets, and he felt as though he’d been dropped from a highflying aircraft without a parachute.
The girl was seated at a window just across the room, bright sunlight streaming in on her, writing something on a large tablet which she held on her knees.
She was beautiful.
He watched her for a long moment; then her eyes raised to his with a start, and he was again impressed with the dimensions of those deep pools.
The well, maybe, into which he had become absorbed the last time around?
Bolan did not know, offhand, what else to say, so he asked her, “How long have I been here?”
“This is the second day,” she replied in a voice with very little air pushing it.
“Where is it?”
“What?”
“Where am I?”
“This is … my bedroom. Our farm, my brother and I. Chicken ranch. Near Manalapan.”
“What is Manalapan?”
“A town. On Route Thirty-three, mid-state.”
“Now close to Perrineville?”
“Not far. Less than ten miles. We’re just about halfway between Philadelphia and New York City.”
Bolan groaned at that and raised himself to a sitting position. “Then you must have a special angel,” he told the girl. “That’s not nearly far enough.” He swung one foot to the floor and felt himself toppling off-balance toward the headboard of the bed.
He wasn’t even aware that she’d left her chair, but the girl was there instantly, arms about his shoulders, guiding him down to the proper spot on the pillows.
“Don’t try that again,” she commanded almost angrily. “You’re not that tough, Mr. Bolan.”
His eyes must have asked the question. She perched there beside him and answered it in a no-nonsense tone. “Yes, we know all about you. There’s been nothing else on radio and television for the past two days. Bruno took the bullet out of your side, and we did what we could for your other hurts. The rest is up to you, though. You must lie still, or you’ll bust loose and start bleeding again. How about some food? Think you could handle some?”
He muttered, “I’ll eat a cow if it’ll get me out of here.”
“That’s thanks for you,” she said in a solemn little voice.
“The thanks you have coming, kid, will be a bullet up the nose if they find me here. You just can’t know—”
“If you mean those hoods, they’ve already been here twice. We had you hidden in the brooder house all through last night.”
“They’ll be back,” he argued. “Those guys don’t know the meaning of quit. Now, you go get my clothes while I get the cobwebs out of my brain.”
The girl ran from the room, and he heard her outside a moment later, calling for her brother.
Bolan made another try for the floor, and reached it, then sat there on the edge of the bed and examined himself.
The guy had done a good job with the chest wound. Very little soreness, obviously no infection. Nylon thread for stitches. He grinned wryly and pulled the injured leg up for a look-see.
Inflamed, yeah, swollen … and hurting like hell. The ten-mile stroll through that creek bed had not helped it at all. Some sort of evil-smelling poultice was taped over the wound. Bolan removed it and bent down for a closer look. He just hoped that Bruno had cleaned it out thoroughly before he sewed it up. He was still inspecting the mess when Bruno himself came huffing into the house.
The guy was not as old as he looked, Bolan was betting.
Looked fifty.
If he was the kid’s brother, though, then he was probably somewhere under forty—certainly no more than that.
He was standing there in the doorway and filling it, a real ox of a man, giving Bolan th
e concerned gaze.
Bolan showed the guy a scowl and told him, “You’re a good medic, Bruno. Thanks. Will you get me my pants?”
“You don’t recognize me, do you?” Bruno asked quietly.
Bolan looked him over more closely, then replied, “Should I?”
“I guess not,” the guy said. “We met only once, and you were in quite a hurry that time, too.”
Bolan was giving him a quizzical smile.
“Dien Huc,” the guy explained. “The field hospital. I was on duty there the time you brought that column of kids in. You know, those kids from—”
“Small world, Bruno,” Bolan said tautly. “That was Doc Brantzen’s headquarters.”
“Right. I was one of his medics, surgical assistant.”
“And now you’re raising chickens.”
“Right, now I’m raising chickens.”
“Brantzen’s dead. I got ’im killed. I’ll get you killed, too, Bruno. You and that beautiful kid, both of you. Now, get me my pants and point me toward the coast.”
“No way,” the guy told him. “You’d never make it. Not on that leg. You could lose it yet.”
“Just how bad is it?”
“Bad enough. No vital tissues lost. Everything will rebuild if you’ll give it a decent chance. And if you don’t lose it to infection. I’ve got you on antibiotics.” The big guy grinned. “Same stuff I give my chickens. If you don’t start crowing, I guess you’ll survive it.”
Bolan said, “The leg. What about it?”
“Use it too soon, and you’ll lose it. Give it a couple days, anyway.”
“You know I can’t,” Bolan growled. “The headhunters, Bruno. You know what those guys are. They won’t stop with mine. They’ll take yours and the kid’s, just to keep in practice.”
The girl stepped through the doorway and said, “Stop calling me ‘the kid.’ The name is Sara, no h. And I’m no kid.”
“That’s right, she’s not,” Bruno told Bolan in a matter-of-fact tone. “She lost her man in ’Nam. She’s a widow already.”
Bolan was reminded that hot wars make many young widows, but this was ridiculous. He’d pegged her age at about sixteen.
She caught his look, and repeated, “I am no kid. And we didn’t pull you out of the brook to make an amputee out of you. So get back in that bed and stop acting silly.”
Bolan glared at her for a moment; then his gaze flicked to the man. “How long,” he solemnly asked him, “do you think it will take the headhunters to put together a make on two ex-GI’s—one wounded and needing medical attention, the other a surgical nurse who just happens to live in the search zone?”
“I figure it may take them another couple of days,” the guy replied soberly. He spread his hands and added, “Look, man. What choice do you have?”
What choice? Bolan already knew the answer to that. It was coming from his head, in spinning circles of dizziness, and from that swollen leg, on cresting waves of pain and nausea.
“Okay,” he replied weakly.
He lay back down and closed his eyes, returning very quickly to flowing rivers and eternal warfare, and to a new twist in skin-crawling nightmares—a chicken ranch overnight becoming a “turkey” farm.
Yeah. It was the grand-slammer, Doc Brantzen special. Brantzen had been the first turkey on Mack Bolan’s soul. But a hell of a long way from the last one.
3 THE HEALING
They were nice people, both Sara and her brother; but during the next forty-eight hours of around-the-clock nursing, feeding, and constant attention, Bolan got to know quite a bit more about his tenders than they of him—or so he thought.
Both of these people had, in effect, already retired from the problems of life—in so many ways.
Sara, as it turned out, had just a few weeks earlier quietly marked her twenty-second birthday. She still looked sixteen to Bolan, but that was just surface stuff. Down in there where she really lived, Sara Henderson was a resigned old lady in a rocking chair, quietly filling in her days the best she could until death overcame her.
She had married David Henderson, her college sweetheart, at the age of nineteen. Two weeks later David kissed her good-bye and went to war. He did not survive. And neither did Sara. She came home—to the chicken ranch—and watched her father die of cancer. The mother had been dead for some time.
Mother and Father Tassily had emigrated from Romania just in time to get in on America’s big Depression. Bruno and Sara were their only offspring—their only living kin in America—and now Bruno and Sara were all that was.
Sara ran the farm on her own until big brother Bruno came home from Vietnam; and he returned a maimed man, but not in body.
Bruno had helped the field surgeons hack off too many shattered arms and legs from despairing young men. He had seen too many savageries, too much inhumanity, and far too much senseless death and suffering. He had gone to Vietnam as a conscientious objector on medical assignment. He returned a confirmed athiest in need of considerable medical attention himself.
These were the people who were laying their lives on Bolan’s line. Somehow, without actually saying so, they conveyed the idea that they did not regard the event as any sort of sacrifice, but as some weird atonement for nameless sins.
Bolan appreciated what they were doing, of course. But he was appalled by the unspoken implications that he had come along merely to collect their tithes of atonement.
During one of those quiet moments with Bruno, he had told the big Romanian, “The master clock of life doesn’t beat just to the ticks, you know. It needs the tocks, as well.”
And he’d told Sara, in the still hours of one of those endless nights, “When I sleep, I dream. And when I dream, I think I’m more awake than at any other time. Life is like that, Sara. Paradoxical. Every hurt carries the seed of some great joy. And every great moment has but one place to go from there, and that’s back down to the valley of despair. But we live in neither place, you know. We live in the middle, and we visit the other places from time to time. Try living in the extremes—either one, Sara—and you’re resigning from life.”
Bolan was no preacher man. He didn’t even know whether or not the things he felt made sense to anyone else, but he did feel them very strongly, and he quietly got in his points with Sara and Bruno whenever he could.
To an outside observer, it may have seemed as though Mack Bolan had been “sent” to the Tassilys. As he mended, so too did they—in so many subtle ways.
By the third day, Bruno had become much more talkative, less solemn and brooding, even humorous and playful at times.
Sara had definitely become aware of Bolan as a man. She’d taken to doing things with her hair, wearing a hint of makeup, and she’d even abandoned the blue jeans in favor of a couple of bright little fashions which she’d whipped out on her sewing machine while Bolan slept.
On that third day, also, Bruno took his chicken truck off to Manhattan on an urgent errand for his star boarder. He left at daybreak, promising to return by nightfall—otherwise, “ring the bells and say a prayer for the rummy Romanian.”
Bolan was not overly worried about the safety of the mission. Bruno frequently took his own birds to market. This trip into the city would appear to be routine, in case anyone was keeping watch over the comings and goings at that farm. And he was sending the guy to a trusted friend.
They had moved Bolan back to a loft in the brooder house, which now was alive with thousands of cheeping baby chicks—the move being made at Bolan’s insistence. He also took along the remainders of his war armaments—the empty Beretta, the nearly empty AutoMag, and the Talifero revolver with three live chambers.
Bruno had built him a hideaway bunk in the loft above the chicks and padded it down with clean straw covered with a couple of heavy quilts. It was very comfortable. His medications were out there, as was a variety of high-protein “nibblings”—cheeses, boiled eggs, and so on. In addition to that, Sara came out every couple of hours and poked a ration of ho
t food into him.
On the morning which saw Bruno off to Manhattan, Sara came to the loft at eight o’clock with tape measure, pad, and pencil in hand.
“What’s that for?” Bolan had growled at her.
“To see where you’re at, with what,” she’d replied, twinkling, and took his measurements at every conceivable point and angle.
A couple of times during that operation their eyes locked for overlong periods, and it seemed that things were getting a bit out of hand.
She’d gone out of there without another word, though, and at ten o’clock she was back, with a very close copy of his favored combat outfit—a black, skin-tight two-piecer with all the handy pockets in the right places.
Bolan was deeply impressed.
“How’d you do that?” he marveled.
“Just a little something I whipped up,” the girl replied, trying to conceal her pride in the production. “It wasn’t all that hard.”
She handed him a folded sheet of heavy paper. He recognized it immediately as coming from the large writing tablet which he’d seen in her possession so often. Obviously the tablet was an artist’s sketchpad, and she had very artistically sketched Bolan, probably as he lay sleeping in her presence, but as she’d imagined him to look in full combat regalia. All of it was there—the weapons, the utility belts, the gadgets—and she’d captured a catlike poise in that rangy body as well as a savagely snarling face which somehow still had a somewhat saintly cast to it.
Very quietly he asked her, “Is that the way I look to you?”
“Yes,” she replied, just as quietly.
“How’d you get the combat rig?” he asked.
She shrugged daintily. “Lifted it. I guess you’ve been sketched by every police artist in the country. I’ve seen it many times, in the papers.”
He said, “I see.”
“Try it on. The suit.”
“Later,” he told her, sighing.
“I’ve seen your pinky toes before, plenty of times.”
Jersey Guns Page 2