by Ethan Cross
With his injuries tended to and only a few seconds of time wasted, Yazzie shakily pulled himself to his feet and limped over to a spot where he could see the smoke-filled encampment, but where he was still partially obscured by the dip in the roadway. Along the way, he scanned the area for his hat and glasses, but they were nowhere to be found. Checking his holster, he also realized that he had lost his weapon, the pearl handled Colt Peacemaker that he had been holding in his right hand when the bombs had gone off. Luckily, he saw a glint of the flames reflecting off of the silver a few feet away. He felt much better with the gun back in his hand. It seemed to strengthen him and bring the world back into focus.
He checked the barrel and spun the cylinder. Finding it in working order, he slid it back into his holster.
Looking over the top of the roadway, Yazzie could see less than fifteen feet in front of him. The rest of the blockade was completely obscured by the smoke. Within the clouds, he heard gunfire and screaming.
88
Francis Ackerman Jr. had recently begun keeping a diary, after being turned onto the idea by Baxter Kincaid, a private detective and blogger from the San Francisco area with whom they had worked with to capture the Gladiator and take down the crime lord known as Mr. King. Kincaid actually made a good living peddling his musings, but Ackerman would never be able to share his journals with anyone, at least not while he was still alive. But he still felt it good measure to preserve his thoughts for study by future generations.
As such, throughout the day, he had taken to thinking about the diary entries and what he would write later on.
He wondered what he would note about this situation. How did he feel? That was often difficult for him to describe to the normals, since he didn’t feel emotions in the same way that they did. His first thought was that his current experience in the smoke would be likened to a prima ballerina on opening night. On further consideration, he decided that wasn’t quite right. The idea implied a certain level of anxiety and fear, or at least he supposed it did, and that was where the analogy broke down. So what imagery could he use to describe his feeling in this moment in a way someone like his brother or Officer Liana would understand?
All of these considerations were, of course, made in the back of Ackerman’s mind as he waded into battle and began to dispatch enemies. He almost felt bad for them. They had assault rifles and a desire to kill, while he had only a pair of push daggers. But that didn’t take into account the thermal imaging displayed on the inside of his mask. Canyon’s thugs and the cartel mercenaries were all trapped in a suffocating world of smoke and tear gas, which Ackerman had added for good measure. While his enemies contended with the acrid fumes coming from so many sources, he was safely tucked away under his mask, watching all of them groping around in the dark through thermal imaging.
Suddenly, he realized what he would write about in his journal.
This situation was much like that film his brother loved so much…Predator, Ackerman believed it was called. Like the titular alien of the film, Ackerman was now able to see where others were blind. A part of him felt badly that his brother—who was such a fan of the film, while Ackerman had only seen glimpses that Marcus had forced upon him—wouldn’t be able to enjoy the experience.
Ackerman used the first target he came to as a guinea pig. He needed to determine the distance at which he was invisible to his prey. The young man—whom he saw mostly as different shades of red, orange, and yellow through the thermal imaging system—was crouched beside the wreckage of a pickup truck with his assault rifle, another AK-47, up and at the ready. Of course, the weapon was aimed in the opposite direction from which Ackerman was coming.
He then initiated a series of movements, testing to see how the young man would react. Once satisfied with his experiment, he plunged both push daggers into the flesh of the unsuspecting young man. Ackerman’s right fist punched the pistol grip of the assault rifle, puncturing straight through the young man’s left hand. At the same time, Ackerman struck the bicep of the man’s right arm with his left hand.
The trauma had the desired result, and the young victim instantly dropped his weapon and fell back clutching his wounds. And the injuries had been inflicted in such a way that Ackerman doubted the man would be picking up any other weapon for a very long time.
He felt the bloodlust building now as he pushed forward and started to hack, punch, and slash his way through the sea of potential victims. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt so alive. He felt euphoric. He was soaring.
In his ear came the voice he had expected earlier.
“You’re a bird, now fly,” said Thomas White.
And so he did.
He floated through the smoke like the spirit of retribution and death itself, a dark wind of divine wrath.
He dove and pirouetted and rolled and zigzagged his way through the throng of men. He felt like he was on top of the world. Soaring now, high above the mortals. He was a bird, and he could fly. Why would a bird choose to remain on the ground? He punched one man in the side of the face with a right hook, the push dagger puncturing the side wall of the man’s cheek and likely knocking out a few of his teeth. Another victim he stabbed in both thighs before punching up beneath the man’s jaw, just hard enough to puncture the skin. With a slightly longer knife, the blow would have gone up into the man’s brain, killing him instantly. Ackerman knew that his blow would only leave a scar.
But still, he was staying on the ground. He wanted to fly. He wanted to let go.
Instead of fighting every second of every day to keep the darkness inside of him at bay, he longed to merely relax and let go and allow the himself to fulfill all the desires of the monster living inside of him. He longed for release. Leaping into the air, he punched the push daggers into both shoulders of one gunman. Another, he drove his right fist into the inner side of the man’s right knee and followed by driving the blade in his left hand into the man’s right pectoral muscle, hoping that he had pulled back on the punch enough to make sure that the blade didn’t puncture the young man’s lung. But he was heading toward takeoff now and such things were becoming of less concern. These men were in his way. All of them wanted to kill him and his brother and would do so in a second. Why not let go? Why not have a little fun with them? Why not be the bird of prey that he was meant to be?
Why not let go?
89
Liana supposed she had always had a bit of a thing for dangerous men. There had been the Todacheeney kid in high school. He had been her first real love, and a cousin to John Canyon’s operations manager. He had been a bit of a daredevil: a BMX racer, skater, and freestyle rock climber. He had amazed her with his ability to scale a rock wall like he was Spider-Man or some kind of Skinwalker. She supposed now, that she would’ve ended up marrying him, if not for the fact that he had died young. Then, college for her had been a revolving door of bad decisions. Still, falling for a self-proclaimed serial killer would probably take the cake.
And now, she was considering risking her life to help that man. She already regretted her decision, but the continued sound of gunfire spurred her into action.
As Liana had walked out of the garage and looked down the lane toward the point where sloping rock met flat road, she realized it was at least a hundred meters farther than she had previously thought. She could try to run it, but there was virtually no cover along the way, so if the smoke cleared and Canyon and his men emerged, she would be a sitting duck.
An idea came in a flash as she stepped out of the garage and imprinted on a memory from her childhood of watching the Little Rascals build a pinewood derby car. The lane which Canyon and his men had blocked off was a long, straight slope, and there was only one other thing on wheels at the trading post: the cast iron bathtub. The old man must have built in on a rolling cart so that he could pull it out into the sun and warm his bath water, but it also made the tub a passable entry for the pinewood derby.
Pushing on the bathtub and getting its a
ttached wheels rolling, Liana steered as best she could along the side of the building and through the small parking area where the lane began to angle down. From this viewpoint, she could see that the road wasn’t perfectly straight. Instead, it contained a few slight curves. A sense of vertigo now assaulted her as she looked down the steep slope. Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea.
The sound of gunshots clanging off metal and screams of pain spurred her forward. She needed to get down there and help Frank. She needed to fight.
So, with the shotgun and the assault rifle both inside the tub, Liana pushed her makeshift vehicle far enough to get it rolling on its own. Running behind the tub, to make sure that it picked up enough momentum, Liana pushed until she was sure and then leaped up and into the tub herself. As the rolling bathtub picked up speed, she tried to see if she had any steering at all by shifting her weight or pulling a certain way. She found that she could affect a little of the tub’s direction by throwing her body weight around, but it was also picking up speed a lot faster then she had anticipated.
The momentum and the swirling smells of gun oil, mold and moss flourishing inside the tub, and fire and death wafting up the hill threatened to make her sick.
She hit the first jog in the road too fast and nearly lost control, but the extra speed helped and she was able to jump back on after the wheels slid off the roadway into the dirt. The next small curve she was ready for and made without issue, the maneuver only requiring minimal course correction. She was getting close now. Realizing, she had hadn’t breathed since she had hopped up into the tub, Liana began gasping in greedy mouthfuls of air.
Then she heard a strange sound. Something was tinking off the front of the tub. And it didn’t sound like rocks. Looking ahead, she saw one of the cartel thugs had stumbled out of the haze of smoke and had apparently found a target in the form of a police uniform riding down the hill at him in a bathtub.
The man started running up the hill toward her, screaming and squeezing the trigger of his Mac 10. A sound suppressor had been threaded over the gun’s barrel, and so all she heard were little thump-pings as he opened fire.
Luckily, the old tub was built to last and seemed almost impervious to the gunfire. She kept her head down, only peeking over the edge to see where she was headed.
Then, in a flash of realization, Liana recognized that her plan didn’t include how she was going to stop.
Only having a couple of seconds to react, Liana raised the AK-47 to her shoulder, took aim, and squeezed the trigger. The gunmen jerked back, having been hit at least once. Figuring that was much as she could ask, she dove off the side of the runaway bathtub, trying not to break her neck in the process.
The gravel came up to meet her with surprising force, the hundreds of small rocks feeling like they had been shot from a cannon. As she pulled herself to her feet, retrieved her assault rifle, and looked back to where the cartel gunman had been, she discovered that her shooting had been more than effective. The man was dead, sprawled out across the gravel like a child preparing to make an angel in the snow.
The runaway bathtub had missed the debris of the first and second trucks from the barricade and had disappeared into the smoke. She heard it crash into something, but she had no idea what it had hit. Thankfully, there had been no screams connected directly to the collision.
Staring into the black cloud of smoke, she now wished that she would’ve grabbed for the shotgun rather than the assault rifle. The shotgun with its wide dispersal pattern would be more effective where she was going. But it was too late to change now, the shotgun having traveled along with the bathtub into the void. Tucking the butt of the rifle into her shoulder and aiming into the swirling mist in front of her, Liana moved toward the fight.
90
From the moment Maggie went missing, Marcus had felt like a homing missile without a target, and now that he had a target, he could barely see two feet in front of his face. His left leg had gone numb, and he still felt woozy from the scorpion sting. At least, the ringing in his ears had subsided, so that he could now hear his enemies before he saw them.
With his adoptive father’s brass knuckles held tightly in each fist, dragging his left leg, Marcus pushed forward in the direction that he had last seen Yazzie. From the moment he had pulled himself from the ground after the explosion he had been stumbling around blind with everything he bumped into trying to kill him, but he still hadn’t found his target. The original plan had been that Ackerman would be in position at the front and detonate the bombs. After which, Marcus would come in from the opposite side, with both of them using thermal imaging to easily subdue Canyon and all of his men. Marcus hadn’t liked the plan from the moment of its conception. He had killed in the past, but it wasn’t something that he ever wanted to do again. But war had casualties, at least that’s what he told himself. Not to mention the fact that he had never intended for events to escalate to this point, but situations had a way of spiraling out of control. At least, they did around him and his brother.
Within ten steps of stumbling through the smoke, he had encountered and brutally knocked unconscious one of the cartel members and two of Canyon’s men. Canyon’s men had been noisy and disoriented, but the cartel thug had put up a bit of a fight. Still, Marcus had overpowered the shooter with strength of will.
The next two he encountered were on Canyon’s crew, both armed with AK-47s. Since assault rifles were ineffective in close-quarters combat, he was able to see the barrel of their gun moving ahead of them like a beacon. The two had been working together, both unharmed from the explosion.
Marcus grabbed the stock of the first man’s rifle and pushed it back up, slamming the barrel into the gunman’s face. The second man turned to fire but Marcus stepped forward, caught the stock, and dispatched him with a blow to the side of head from the brass knuckles. He wasn’t sure how hard he was hitting them and whether or not they were unconscious or dead, and he hated to admit it, but in that moment, he didn’t really care one way or another. All he could think about was finding Yazzie and, by extension, saving Maggie.
He heard the next group of attackers before he saw them. Dropping low to the ground, he waited for the closest man to pass, then positioning himself just right, he remained still and quiet until he had a clear shot at a shinbone. Cocking his arm back like a crossbow ready to fire, Marcus punched the gunman in the shin so hard that he felt bone snap from the impact
Crying out in agony, the gunman toppled over, but as he did so, he squeezed back the trigger of his AK-47, spraying his two companions with lead.
Marcus supposed that he wasn’t directly responsible—why in the hell did the kid have his finger on the trigger like that?—but he still felt the weight of their deaths being added onto his shoulders. The next attacker he encountered appeared to have suffered some burns and was more than a little disoriented. Marcus disarmed him, and wrapping one of his arms around the man’s neck, he applied pressure, his bicep and forearm tensed like a coiled anaconda, until the burned man was safely unconscious.
He continued on in this way for what felt like a mile. A mile of stumbling and coughing on acrid smoke and fumes and punching and grappling through the throng of Canyon’s men. His eyes burned, and his nose ran; Frank must have thrown in a few teargas canisters. Still, he had to fight his way forward. He had to find Yazzie.
He felt like he should’ve broken free of the smog by now and hoped that he hadn’t been stumbling around in a circle. Still, like a shark, he kept swimming.
He heard the next danger a second before it killed him. At first, he wasn’t sure what to make of the sound, but he could tell that whatever it was, it was on collision course. Diving out of the way just before being run down, Marcus landed against the debris of one of Canyon’s truck. The metal was hot and seared his shoulder. He turned back in time to see that what had nearly ended the battle for him appeared to be a runaway bathtub.
Suspecting that he may have a concussion or some other injury that was ca
using visual and auditory hallucinations, Marcus pushed himself to his feet and continued forward. Luckily, he only had to push on for another few feet before he was rewarded with the smell of clean air and the gradual dissipation of the haze. Gulping in greedy lungfuls of air and trying to wipe the teargas from his eyes, Marcus was finally able to look up and see a police officer, who he assumed to be Officer Liana Nakai, about twenty feet up the road. The young officer was headed toward him, an assault rifle at her shoulder.
Marcus kept his hands raised as he lumbered forward, but as he closed the gap, he saw a man creeping up behind her. Captain Xavier Yazzie already had his arm reared back to pistol-whip Liana across the back of the head.
Marcus, dragging his left leg and motioning frantically for Liana to look behind her, tried to speak but broke into a coughing fit instead.
Nevertheless, his game of charades had apparently been effective because Liana turned back toward her attacker. But not in time to avoid the blow.
Now—standing beyond the cover of the veil of smoke and staring face-to-face with an armed man who knew exactly what would happen when Marcus got ahold of him—he really wished that he had picked up one of those AK-47s.
Liana was still falling when Yazzie took aim at Marcus with his Colt Peacemaker and, slapping down on the hammer of the single-action revolver like an old west cowboy, he fired off three shots in quick succession.
Marcus felt all three hit him in the chest, driving him backward, once again into the rolling clouds of smoke.
91
After knocking his former deputy unconscious and shooting the big fed in the chest, Xavier Yazzie decided it was time that he made a quiet exit from the party. The smoke was now clearing enough that he could make out the van which Canyon had parked in the center of the roadway between his two pickup trucks. Estimating that the van, which appeared to be relatively unscathed by the explosive attack, would be the best transportation away from this mess, he picked up Liana, throwing her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and then headed toward the back of the van.