The John Milton Series Boxset 2

by Mark Dawson

  Milton raised the rifle. He tried to sight it, but he could barely raise his left arm to brace it, and the barrel twitched to the left and right. He fired anyway, the round drilling into the rocks on the side of the bank.

  He fired again.

  The shot landed short, throwing a jet of spray into the air.

  He fired again.

  Wide to the right.

  Callow must have noticed that they were being fired upon, for instead of fighting the current, he submitted to it. They were drawn back into the centre of the river, the water picking up speed. The two men, treading water to try to keep their heads above the surface, were spun backwards, sucked downstream, and borne out of sight.

  Milton closed his eyes and rolled over onto his back.

  He drifted into unconsciousness, woken by a boom of thunder like the sky being ripped asunder. He raised his head. He couldn’t stay here.

  He had to get down.

  Had to follow them.

  He went back to Chandler’s body. He had died, his hands grasped uselessly around the shaft of the arrow that was still planted in his gut. He searched his body, found a packet of trail mix and three energy bars, and stuffed them into his pockets. There was nothing else of use.

  He went back to the lip of the cliff and tossed the bow down. He slung the rifle over his shoulder, and then slithered over the edge. He remembered the first few handholds from before, but he was weaker now, much weaker, and his feet slid off the ledges and out of the niches that should have offered an easy start to the descent. He almost fell twice, both times saving himself with his right hand, and, as he swung out from the rock, his fingers burned as they clawed the roots and handholds as if they were functioning independently of the fuzz in his brain.

  He made it to thirty feet down, halfway, and then somehow slid and scraped down another fifteen feet. He had neglected to plot a route, and now he found himself above a particularly sheer stretch of the face. He knew that there was no way that he would be able to find the strength to go back up again, or even to shimmy across so that he could get to the easier part of the face.

  Nothing else for it.

  He closed his eyes and pushed himself off, a fifteen-foot drop with an impact strong enough that his legs buckled, and he slammed back down onto his chest.

  The crash and boom of the falling water was like white noise, and before he could fight it, he lost consciousness again.

  Chapter 39

  MILTON TRIED not to close his eyes, but they were intolerably heavy, and he couldn’t resist.

  His tiredness engulfed him like floodwater overwhelming a levee.

  HE COULD hear the thunder of the waterfall and voices and the sound of a car and then the long boom of a jet’s engine. The sound of a door opening softly. The sound a magazine makes when it clicks home, the sound of a bullet being pressed into the chamber. He heard the sound of children’s voices and a plastic ball bouncing against the ground, but it was faint and peaceful, and it did not disturb him. He was on a motorbike. He was wearing the uniform of a motorcycle courier. He was in a favela, but he couldn’t remember where, and then he wasn’t, he was somewhere else, and he heard a doorbell. A finger pressed the doorbell, his finger, and then he heard the sound of the door being unlocked and opening on hinges that needed oil. He saw a face, a man who didn’t know him, but a man that he knew.

  SOMEONE FAMILIAR laid her hand on his shoulder and pointed to the dark square of a grave and said, “We need to dig a little deeper,” and she lifted a shovel and sank it into the soft earth. She had a tattoo on the side of her torso, eight bars of black. He was holding a pistol. Now he was on a wide road next to a river he recognised. A car crashed into a tree ahead of him, a man ran from the car, and Milton knew that he was supposed to follow the man. Someone familiar was holding another pistol. He saw blood: splatters of blood on the walls, blood on his shirt, blood on the floor. He was Death, come to drink his fill. He saw a group of children in the favela playing with their ball. He saw more blood. He saw a woman. She was young and pretty and scared. He saw the pistols, both of them, and saw them turn to the woman, and then there was the sound of a click and then an explosion and then—

  MILTON AWOKE to the sound of crashing water. He was lying on the ground, on a hard rocky floor, sharp edges pressing into his back. He opened his eyes into complete darkness. He closed them and then opened them again. Still dark. He reached out with his left hand, tried to put pressure on it, and felt the now familiar throb from the bullet wound in his arm.

  He remembered being shot.

  He remembered the men he had hunted down.

  Six men.

  Six more dead men on his ledger.

  He remembered Morten Lundquist and Michael Callow going over the edge of the falls, disappearing into the pool and then being borne away on the swollen current.

  He had been wrong, though, about the dark. It wasn’t complete. He rolled over onto his right side and saw how it lightened, just a little, in the direction that the sound of the falling water was coming from. He made out the irregular, jagged mouth of a cave.

  He saw a fire, an arm’s length away, damp wood spitting and fizzing.

  A small pile of firewood sat next to it.

  Who had made the fire?

  Had he made it?

  He tried to keep his eyes open, but he couldn’t. Sleep swept up at him from behind, and despite his attempts to keep ahead of it, it was faster than he could ever hope to be.

  He closed his eyes.

  WHEN HE awoke again, the storm had passed. He could still hear the crash of the water from the fall, but there was no thunder and, as he listened to the quality of the noise, he couldn’t hear the beat of the rain. He opened his eyes, and the cave was brighter, too, faint sunlight entering the chamber and reaching halfway inside, where it was eventually consumed. Milton was lying on a bed of springy ferns. They were damp, but not wet, and more comfortable than the naked stone of the floor. He was close to a small fire, a lattice of branches that had burnt about halfway through.

  He had no idea how long he had been asleep.

  He had no idea where he was.

  He had been feverish, he knew that, but it seemed to have passed. His head felt clearer than it had for a long time.

  He gingerly brought his left arm around so that he could look at the injury. He felt pressure in the wound, and when he touched his fingers to the dressing, he felt the soft, gentle motion beneath. He carefully peeled it back. He looked at the maggots, white and fat, twisting and turning as they finished the work that they had started. The wound was clean and beginning to heal. They had done an excellent job. The dead, necrotic flesh had been eaten, and the blood that gathered at the edges as he abraded them was fresh crimson. He poked the new, pink flesh and felt a prickle of discomfort. Another good sign. It was healing.

  He tipped his arm over and shook it, the engorged maggots falling to the ground. They lay there for a moment, bloated and stunned, before they started to wriggle and crawl away.

  He would wash the wound in the water outside, use the ointment in his pocket and—

  He heard voices.

  He held his breath, straining his ears.

  He heard a voice, a man’s voice, and then the squelch of static.

  What did that mean?

  Lundquist?

  No.

  He remembered: the National Guard.

  Lundquist had warned him.

  Five hundred men.

  He crawled to the entrance to the cave and looked out.

  The opening was nestled in the face of the cliff, screened by underbrush.

  There was a patrol of four men at the foot of the fall. Ten feet away from him. They had stopped there, one of them operating a field radio that he wore on his back. The falling water obscured the conversation too much for Milton to be able to eavesdrop, but the occasional word was audible: “sector,” “nothing,” and an enquiring sentence that concluded with “orders?” The operator listened
to the inaudible reply, nodded his satisfaction, and put the radio away. His comrades gathered around as he faced away from Milton and relayed what had been said.

  Milton had no choice but to stay where he was. If they came any closer, they wouldn’t be able to miss the mouth of the cave. They would look inside, see the signs of his habitation, and find him. If they did that, he wouldn’t resist. They had done nothing to him. They were just following their orders. He could imagine how Lundquist had painted him. It was possible that their orders were to shoot him on sight.

  Milton would have to accept that.

  But they did not come in his direction.

  Instead, they turned to the east and set off into the underbrush, following the line of the ridge.

  Milton realised what had happened. The soldiers had carved the area into sectors. Each team would have been given a group of sectors to investigate. He had been fortunate; he was in the seam where one sector ended and the next one began. If there was a team from the uplands atop the falls above him, then they must have been tasked with the path down the face. Or perhaps the face was the boundary, and they had neglected to check it. These four boys were being routed away to continue the search in the adjacent map square.

  Milton had enjoyed very little luck since he had arrived in Truth. This was luck. Perhaps it marked a change in his fortunes.

  He knew that he would have a narrow window within which he could drive home his advantage. The search teams were likely to advance in a rough line so as not to leave gaps that he could slip through. That meant that the team that was adjacent to the one that he had just seen was most likely to turn east at the same time, and that they would be at the fall before too long. The cordon behind him, from the uplands heading south to his position, would also be moving. But the path directly to the south was open now. It had been searched and would have been reported as clear.

  If Milton moved quickly, he might be able to slip between them and get out of the woods.

  He hurried back to the fire, broke it apart, and returned to the mouth of the cave. He scoured the tree line again, but he could not hear or see anything. He emerged into the sunlight and trod carefully on the wet rocks, reaching the still swollen river that had carried Lundquist and Callow away, and then followed it to the south.

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 40

  MORTEN LUNDQUIST and Michael Callow had been swept downstream. Lundquist was sure they were going to drown, such was the ferocity of the current as it was swamped with more and more water from the falls, the spate supercharged by the torrential deluge of the last few days. He had struggled to stay afloat for as long as he could, but he was old and tired and the water was cold, and he had started to feel himself slide beneath the surface. The water had pressed into his nostrils and then his mouth, and he was ready to submit to it when his son had surfaced next to him, grabbing him around the shoulders and holding him up, kicking for the quieter waters at the edge of the swell.

  The current had spun him around so that he was looking back at the top of the falls. He had seen Milton on the lip of the rock face, trying to aim his rifle with one working arm, the barrel kicking as he had fired. The round passed harmlessly overhead, striking a rocky outcrop. He fired two more times, both shots harmless, and Lundquist realised that they were going to make it. The river would carry them out of range. Tom Chandler was still up there—he was dead, Milton had killed him, obviously—and they didn’t have to worry about him slowing them down any more. Milton would take time to climb down the falls, if he even could, and by then the river would have swept them out of his reach.

  They were swept downstream for two miles.

  Michael swam them across to the bank when the fierce downstream tug of the river had finally abated. They clambered out, shivering in the cold, the rain a foolish irrelevance now.

  “Where are we?” Michael asked.

  Lundquist looked around and tried to gain his bearings. “A good way to the south.”

  “How far to town?”

  “I don’t know. Three hours?”

  “We made it. Praise the Lord.”

  “Amen,” Lundquist muttered.

  He couldn’t stop shivering.

  “Do you have the radio?”

  The radio! He had forgotten he had it. He reached up to his pocket and patted where it should have been, but there was nothing there, just the damp squelch of his jacket.

  “Where is it?”

  “Must have lost it… the river…”

  He felt a sudden wash of helplessness. If he could have used the radio, he would have been able to call for help, send an SOS to the National Guard and have them send men or a helicopter or something, anything, to get them down out of these godforsaken hills and back to civilisation again.

  He dropped to his knees. He was done.

  “Come on, Pops,” Michael said. “We have to keep moving.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “We have work to do. God's word. He spared us for a reason.”

  His chin slumped onto his chest. He didn’t have the strength.

  “Remember the scripture: ‘Be strong and of good courage, do not fear nor be afraid of them; for the Lord your God, He is the one who goes with you. He will not leave you nor forsake you.’”

  “Deuteronomy 31:6,” he mumbled.

  “If we stay here, it’s all finished. Think of all the work you’ve done. We can’t let that go to waste. We are the Sword of God. We have a duty. You preached it. These are the End Times, right? We need to strike the first blow.”

  Lundquist nodded. The boy was right. He thought of the truck and the load that they had put together. All the effort it had taken. He thought about what they could achieve with it. The original plan, as he had conceived it, was dead. Milton had seen to that. But perhaps that plan was not God’s will. Perhaps he had another use for them. For Lundquist.

  He grabbed Michael’s coat and used it to help drag himself to his feet.

  “Come on.”

  They set off, both of them aware that Milton was somewhere behind them. Lundquist was cold, and he knew that he needed warmth and dry clothes. Michael, too. Hypothermia didn’t take long to take hold, and if it did, Lundquist knew that they would be in trouble. Done for, most probably. He had seen plenty of hikers caught out by the weather, stumbling around in the woods with no idea where they were or even, sometimes, who they were. He trusted God to keep them safe.

  They followed the camber down into the forest.

  “Who is he?” Michael said. “Milton. Who is he?”

  “I don’t know,” Lundquist admitted. “A soldier.”

  “What he did… I mean…”

  “Maybe he is what he said he is.”

  “An assassin?”

  “Maybe.”

  “He’s not an assassin,” he said, although there was doubt in his voice.

  “He’s killed…” Lundquist tried to remember how many people Milton had killed. Four? Five? He couldn’t remember. Seemed like there was a lot of blood and death all of a sudden. The dead flashed through his mind: a knife, the arrows, the detonations as the two shacks were blown to kingdom come. How many? No, it wasn’t five. He had forgotten Sturgess and Sellar. Stabbed and shot. Seven, then? No. More. What about Randy Watts and Archie McClennan? Where were they? He must have killed them. There was Pelham, too, his neck snapped and his body dumped in the field for them to discover. And Lars Olsen, who had to be cut out of his crushed car. Twelve. He had killed twelve men.

  Twelve.

  Lundquist felt fuzzy headed, and as they stumbled ahead, a memory appeared through the haze. It was a face, grizzled and dirty, a man with evil in his eyes, and Lundquist remembered that this man had been a member of his patrol in Vietnam, a vicious man with no regard for human life and a particular talent for death. Lundquist could remember his eyes, icy blue and devoid of any flicker of humanity, as if the things that he had seen and done had burnt the compassion from them. Lundquist thought of that man ma
ny times through the years and, since his conversion, he had become certain that he had looked upon the face of Satan.

  He had looked into Milton’s eyes as they had struggled with the rifle atop the falls, his eyes just inches from Milton’s eyes, and he realised that those cold blue orbs were just the same.

  He doddered onwards, only half aware that he was leaning on Michael for support, when he felt his son stop.

  “Hands up!”

  Michael stiffened. “Pops…”

  “What?”

  “Hands where I can see them, now.”

  Lundquist grabbed Michael’s shoulder and raised his head. There were four uniformed men blocking the trail ahead of them, two of them with automatic rifles raised and pointing straight at them.

  Praise God, Lundquist thought.

  LUNDQUIST EXPLAINED who they were and what they were doing in the wilderness. One of the soldiers radioed their descriptions while the others stood guard. Their identities were confirmed, and the men escorted them the final mile south. They had blankets in their packs, and Lundquist wrapped himself in one, the shivering gradually easing. He was still in soaked clothes, though, and still cold. He needed to get changed. A hot drink. A long bath would have been nice, but that was out of the question. He didn’t have time. He had so much to do. He didn’t know if he could afford to stop.

  They broke through the tree line into the fields of corn that fringed the northern border of the town. An olive green Humvee was waiting for them there. Two more soldiers were in the Humvee. They disembarked as the patrol brought them out of the trees.

  “Lundquist?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Lieutenant Colonel Alex Maguire. We spoke on the radio.”

  “I’m glad to see you.”