Blood Bought: Book Four in The Locker Nine Series

by Franklin Horton

  On a street of tall houses, they lost track of the stone bell tower. After a block or two, they regained sight of it. Asbury pointed it out. Muncie nodded and they headed for it. There was a brief window of relief where they felt like this half of their mission was nearly over. That feeling of hope and accomplishment faded quickly when they approached the stone building from the front. The bell tower had been hiding a steeple with a tall iron cross mounted atop it.

  All this time it had been their assumption that the tallest building in town, constructed of stone and concrete, would most certainly be the county courthouse. Instead, it was a Methodist church.

  Asbury frowned. "What the…?"

  Like an old married couple that could finish each other's sentences, Muncie picked up where Asbury left off. "No idea. I just assumed this was it."

  "Then where is it?"

  "Where is what?" came a voice from behind them.

  The two men cursed themselves for losing focus, for allowing someone to approach them. Even as they processed this regret, they were spinning in place, hands dropping to clear shirts and draw handguns. When Muncie saw what they were facing, he didn’t draw, instead letting his hand rest on the grip of his weapon.

  Asbury didn’t show the same reluctance. He whipped out his Sig and leveled it center-mass on the grizzled old man standing in the street.

  The man was unfazed. He gestured at his chest with both hands. "You gonna kill me? That's okay. Go ahead, I been killed before. Twice. And here I am."

  There was a moment of uncomfortable silence that Asbury finally broke, asking the question that both he and Muncie needed to have answered, and it wasn’t about the courthouse. "You been killed twice?"

  The old man nodded rapidly, his eyes blinking in rhythm to the bobbing of his head. "First time was over to the state hospital in Marion. Ain’t sure how I got there but I figured out what they were up to pretty fast. I knew who they were under their skins. They weren’t really people, you know. They killed me to keep the secret."

  Asbury made a face. This was a situation cops faced on a regular basis, someone feeding you a line of utter bullshit and looking at you like you’re supposed to buy it. Sometimes he felt ridiculous having to address it, having to humor them, but it was the nature of the job. "So if they killed you, what are you doing here?"

  The man gave Asbury a look that said the answer would have been obvious if he weren’t so ignorant. "You can't kill the truth."

  Asbury nodded. He gave Muncie a look that said “get a load of this guy.”

  Muncie opened his mouth to ask about the location of the courthouse but Asbury cut him off. He couldn't give up on the fact that old man said he’d been killed twice. Asbury could be that way. Just couldn’t let things go. It was part of what made him such an irritating person to be around.

  "You said you’d been killed twice. How did it happen the second time?"

  "Second time was the police. Now I'll admit, I’d gotten a bit rowdy. Sometimes I can be a handful. I was bothering folks and drinking a little bit. Somehow the police found out I quit taking the poison that the alien doctors gave me at the state hospital. See, I’d figured out what it did to me. I knew it was all about mind control. They were trying to control my body and my mind. After I quit taking the medicine, I was living under a bridge and the police came for me. I have this tin can that I can use as a weapon sometimes. It collects and focuses my mental energy into a beam, but it didn’t work and they were able to take me."

  Asbury smiled. "Like a can of magical whoop-ass?”

  The old man became serious, his expression flat. "Now you're just making fun of me." He turned and walked off, shaking his head as if Muncie and Asbury were a lost cause. As if he’d tried to warn them and they wouldn’t listen.

  Muncie cut Asbury a sharp look. “Asshole! We needed him.”

  Asbury shrugged. “Who knew he was sensitive?”

  "Hey, care for some jerky?" Muncie called, trying to recapture the departing man’s attention.

  The old man stopped in his tracks turned around slowly. He gave Muncie a wary look. "You asking serious or is this just more poking fun?"

  “I’m serious.”

  The old man raised an eyebrow. “What flavor? I prefer teriyaki. Regular is boring as a jail cell and the spicy ones make my butt burn.”

  Asbury swore and shook his head. “Get a load of this guy. He’s a hobo and a jerky snob.”

  Muncie shoved a hand in the cargo pocket of his pants. He pulled out a handful of sealed jerky strips and shuffled through them. He picked out one and extended it toward the old man. "Teriyaki. Here you go. I’ll trade it to you for some information."

  The old man raised a bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrow. "What kind of information? I know about lots of things, including things they don't want you to know. Stuff about the government, the aliens, and the secret intersection where they come together to decide the fate of our world.”

  Asbury sighed in exasperation. "I'm sure that's all interesting crap and I’d love to hear about it sometime but right now I'm only looking for one thing. We’re trying to find the courthouse and we mistakenly assumed that this building, one of the most prominent in town, was the courthouse. Apparently it's not. Can you point us toward the courthouse?"

  The old man looked at them with a thousand yard stare. He was attentive but wary, and obviously disturbed. He tore open the jerky and raised the leathery meat to his mouth. His hands shook and Muncie recognized that this side-effect often accompanied long-term use of anti-psychotic medications. The old man tore into the jerky like a crow on a sunbaked rabbit. He chewed slowly.

  “Any day now,” Asbury said impatiently.

  The man raised a trembling arm and pointed north. "Yonder direction.”

  “How far?” Muncie asked.

  “Maybe twenty miles."

  Asbury couldn’t contain his frustration. Sensing no more threat from the situation, he holstered his pistol and raised both hands to the old man in a pleading gesture. "Twenty miles? There's no courthouse in this town?"

  The old man gnawed rat-like. "Ain’t the county seat. County courthouse is always at the county seat."

  Asbury paced, then stopped and glared at Muncie like it was his fault. "We walked all this way for nothing?"

  Muncie shrugged. He couldn't argue that this indeed seemed to be the case, although it hadn’t been their choice. They’d been following orders.

  The man showed no reaction to their obvious frustration. He continued eating the jerky with a soulless intensity, as if he would've eaten a shoe had they placed it before him.

  Muncie wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. Maybe there was a way to salvage this effort. "Are there any other places that have records?”

  "There used to be a department store that sold records. Nowadays I figure folks mostly use them compact discs and cassette tapes. You ought to look into one of those. Salvation Army has records sometimes. I bought one there once that had the Captain Kirk off Star Trek singing Hey Mr. Tambourine Man. He did a fine job."

  "Not those kind of records, you French fried freak!" Asbury snarled. "Official records."

  “You didn’t specify,” the old man pointed out.

  Asbury turned to Muncie. “Can I shoot him? You won’t tell, will you?”

  Staring at Asbury, the old man was unblinking, a line of slobber dangling from the corner of his mouth and fixing there to one side of his chin like a boneless appendage. "Is an official record anything like a permanent record?"

  "What the hell is a permanent record?" Muncie asked.

  Before answering, the man shoved the last bites of the jerky into his mouth, using a grimy finger like a ramrod to push it all the way in. His packed mouth impeded his speech so he held a finger in the air, asking that a moment’s consideration be granted before he continue his thought.

  Muncie pondered the irony of the old man choking to death when he tried to swallow that great chaw of jerky, forever leaving them in limbo as to what h
e might be referring to.

  When he was ready, he gave a great swallow like a heron working a trout down its gullet. "When I was in school I showed my private parts on the school bus. Someone told on me and I got a whooping at school and another one when I got home. Principal said it would go on my permanent record."

  Asbury’s mouth grew tight in anger, as if this was the final straw. He dropped a hand to the grip of his pistol and appeared to be struggling to not kill the old guy. "Not that kind of record either, you old coot. Permanent records are a fairytale. They’re a lie teachers made up in an attempt to make you behave." He spun on Muncie. “I’m done here. We leave now or I pop him.”

  Muncie held up a hand. “Just wait a minute. He might be on to something. Robert Hardwick might have kids. Before we go back empty-handed, we should find the school and check for any records on the Hardwick family. Schools keep family addresses and stuff. If he has kids, they might have it.”

  “It’s probably on a computer,” Asbury said. “We can’t get to it so it will be a waste of time.”

  “We don’t know that. There could be paper files.”

  Asbury appeared unconvinced. "Where's the school, Crazy Horse?"

  The man pointed in the same direction he’d pointed earlier, the road leading north.

  "Let me guess, twenty miles that way?” Asbury asked.

  The man shook his head. "Nope. One or two."

  "That the high school or elementary?" Muncie asked.

  "Both. They’re close to each other."

  Asbury smiled and gave a nod to the old man, glad to finally be parting company with him. "Hope you enjoyed your jerky, snotwaffle." He wasted no time heading off in the direction the old man had pointed.

  Muncie fell in beside him. They hurried, more than a little frustrated. They were sore from the previous day, roasting from the heat, and now they had a couple of more miles added to their journey.

  The old man watched them go, picking jerky from his teeth with a dirty fingernail. He raised his other hand and attempted to flag them down but they were done with him. Seeing that they were paying no attention, he lowered his hand. “Look out. They’s trouble waiting,” he mumbled.

  No one heard his warning.

  "I think this is a bunch of crap," Asbury growled. "We’re out here running around on some harebrained mission without even the most basic intel. This is a waste of time."

  "What exactly are we supposed to do about it? They made it pretty clear this is why they brought us along. It’s our job. If we aren’t willing to take orders and do the grunt work they got no place for us."

  “I’m getting tired of it.”

  “Did you have some better offer come along? Because I haven’t seen one. I think we have a pretty good gig here. Maybe we have to hold our tongue on occasion but I think it’s worth it.”

  "Yeah, well I’m not sure if it’s worth it or not,” Asbury retorted. "Maybe there are better opportunities out there. Maybe there’s even a place here locally where we could hole up without the burden of the congressman and all his BS."

  “If you got something on your mind, just say it,” Muncie said. “I’m getting tired of all this cryptic, guessing-game crap."

  Asbury spat and shrugged. “All I'm saying is if we find an address and if they send us out to locate this Hardwick guy, I don’t feel like I’m under any particular obligation to come back for the congressman and the rest of that dead weight back at camp. They can fend for themselves as far as I'm concerned. If we find this compound and can take it without backup, I say we do it. Then we keep it and give the congressman a big old middle finger if he tries to come and take it."

  Muncie wasn’t one to reject any idea without thinking it over, even if it sounded a little crazy.

  Asbury didn’t know what to make of the silence and goaded him. "Come on, what do you think? You think I'm full of it?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You think we should continue doing all the hard work and other people getting all the benefit? That’s exactly what’s going to happen. You know what it’ll be like once we get up there. We do all the heavy lifting, risk our lives to secure the place, and then the congressman will move in to live like a king. We’ll live out the next year as second-class citizens doing all the shit duties. When winter comes, you think we’ll be sitting around a fire drinking hot chocolate? No, we’ll be out there pulling guard duty in the snow, hunting for them, and cutting their firewood. Am I wrong?"

  "No, you're probably right," Muncie agreed. "Doesn't mean it's the right thing to do though. I’m not judging you, but I’m the kind of person that follows through on my obligations. Yeah, this may be a raw deal but I knew that when I signed on."

  "Well I missed that part of the job description," Asbury mumbled. "I missed the part where I was gonna risk my ass every day while everybody else sat in air-conditioned campers telling me what to do. That division of labor chafes at me a little bit."

  Muncie didn’t know what to say to that so the two men continued walking in silence. Muncie hadn’t been surprised that the job duties fell the way they did. They were working for a congressman–what did they expect? Muncie didn’t feel like anything he could say would make a difference to Asbury. Muncie wasn’t easily swayed; he was a careful and considerate decision-maker. Asbury was more like a wind chime, rattling a different tune depending on which way the wind was blowing.

  The exposure of their new route made Muncie nervous. He would have preferred a side street or a shortcut but they didn’t have GPS or even a map that would allow him to find an alternative. They walked onto Main Street, following the direction of the old man's trembling gesticulation. It would lead them right onto Route 58. They didn’t know it, but it would also lead them right into a roadblock operated by the hikers now controlling the town.

  While the two men should have spotted the trap, the unlikely cluster of vehicles completely blocking the road, they didn't. They assumed there had been a car accident, a traffic backup, and the vehicles had been abandoned where they ran out of fuel. When they attempted to pass through they were caught flat-footed.

  Somewhere in the bushes, the man in charge gave a signal and his men stood. Six men and six rifles bore down on Muncie and Asbury, neither of whom had a weapon at hand. Certainly they had concealed weapons they could draw but could they do it and survive?

  “Hands up!” a man barked.

  Muncie and Asbury exchanged a look. They had totally screwed up.

  15

  Had Muncie been asked to predict what would take place next he would have called it perfectly. He knew Asbury, knew he was pissed off at the world in general right now and that surrender was not in his vocabulary.

  Asbury swept his shirttail clear of his weapon and drew his handgun, moving sideways at the same time to present a harder target for the rifles leveled at him. The first shot from his Sig dropped the man who’d instructed them to raise their hands. Asbury figured him for the leader and assumed correctly that dropping him would throw the rest of the crew into chaos.

  While moving and shooting bought them a little time, the unavoidable fact of the situation was that they were trapped. Cars blocked their forward progress and their attackers formed a gauntlet to each side. Any attempt to escape meant exposing themselves to potentially fatal gunfire.

  Asbury seemed intent on dropping as many of the opposing force as he could. Muncie knew that to stay and fight this out was certain death. He threw a half-dozen poorly-aimed shots then dived beneath a pickup, crawling for all he was worth. He experienced a moment of terror when his pack snagged on a muffler bracket and he thought someone had caught him. He kicked wildly, his adrenaline spiking, before he realized what had happened. He forced himself to calm down, unhook himself, and keep moving.

  On the opposite side of the truck, he dared to raise his head and saw Asbury still giving it back to them.

  “Get out of there!” he yelled.

  Asbury paid him no attention. He was on
a knee now, dumping rounds into the bushes. Two men were slumped dead over decorative hedges, then Asbury ran dry. He went for the magazine change and his attackers opened up on him. Only then did Asbury attempt to find cover. It was too late. When he sprinted for a brown Toyota Celica a round caught him in the hip and he crumpled like a puppet with its strings cut. He screamed but did not quit fighting.

  On his back on the pavement, he finished his mag change and dropped the slide. He gave a scream of rage and fired wildly at anything that moved. Unfortunately, the fact he was no longer moving made him an easy target. A volley of rounds pounded him. One caught his temple and a section of his head erupted into a bloody mist. He sprawled backward, his Sig clattering across the pavement.

  Muncie did not have the same desire to stay and fight this out. He had no interest in engaging whatever force remained alive at the roadblock. He bolted for the nearest house, vaulted a chain-link fence, and disappeared into the alley behind it. He sprinted down the gravel alley, his handgun in his hand, eyes rolling wildly, searching for pursuers. He changed course randomly, zipping between houses and cutting down side streets, anything to make it harder to follow him.

  He turned so many times he lost his bearings. He couldn’t tell what direction he’d been headed when the attack came or even how to get himself back to his camp. That was bad. He needed to slow down and find a place to hole up for the night. If he wasn’t careful, he could run directly into the hiker encampment or into another trap.

  Turning down another gravel alley, he spotted an old storage building of peeling white plywood, the shingle roof sagged and rippling with decrepitude. There was no lock on the door. He swung into that backyard, panting and heaving, staring at the house. He looked for faces pressed to windows, curtains fluttering with movement, any signs of life.