“But you were willing to help, right? You didn’t go down fighting, or anything like that.”
“They’re the government,” he replied simply. “They had warrants and everything. Deputy Gordon turned out to be an informant for them, or an agent undercover. He said this was all part of a plan, and that dangerous subversives like the sheriff had to go.”
“Who signed the warrants, deputy?”
“Congressman McCorkle. And now he’s some kind of Regional Director for Homeland Security. He’s a member of Congress, of the House of Representatives. That means he’s in charge.”
I shook my head. “Not quite. Look, do you want to live through what is coming?”
For the first time since Jefferson’s head exploded, I saw something besides animal terror in the man’s eyes. Yes, he wanted to live. He nodded ever so slightly. “All right. I give you my word. I will not kill you if you do everything I tell you.”
“You swear to God?”
“I swear to God, Deputy. A lot of people are going to die today, but if you follow my simple instructions, you will not be one of them.”
I don’t know if he fully believed me or not, but I think the alternative was too horrible for him to contemplate, which made Deputy Mark one of the smartest men I’d met in a while. From the growing volume of automatic weapons fire, the battle still raged, and I fully intended on killing every Homeland agent I found. They would all die, and some would die screaming in agony before I was done.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
The inferno I found at the front gate showed my people had not gone down easy. From the blast pattern and my quick peek, I calculated the homemade Claymore mines probably killed at least a dozen agents and destroyed the two lead vehicles in the attacking force. That left the other four stuck since the two deadlined SUVs blocked the now destroyed gate. Beyond the gate, I saw the two bunkers were likewise engulfed in flames, and I didn’t want to find out who died in there with Scott.
The ground just outside the gate was littered with dead and wounded federal agents, so I headed there first.
After tearing ass back to the turn for our driveway, I’d ditched the car with Deputy Mark firmly trussed up in the trunk. He didn’t like it, but as I explained, the alternative was that bullet in the head that his good behavior so far had spared him. He saw the light.
I was practically tripping with weapons from what I liberated from Mark and the unfortunate Mr. Jefferson. I also wore Deputy Mark’s body armor, since he had a longer torso than the dead agent. In addition to Jefferson’s M4, I took both men’s sidearms since they carried Glocks chambered for the 40 S&W caliber and all their magazines. I tucked the tiny Keltec PF-9 back in my front pocket in case I really needed another holdout pistol. But I opened with Deputy Mark’s Mossberg shotgun as I trotted up to the temporary aid station set up between a pair of parked SUVs.
The one agent assigned to guard the medic never saw me coming. He was busy holding a gauze pad over the seeping wound of another agent while the medic worked to get an IV in the arm of a second downed agent, this one suffering from what looked like a sucking chest wound. Apparently, that excellent body armor couldn’t stop a two-foot-long spear made out of rebar. Good to know.
I gave the guard a load of buckshot to the side of the face from about six feet away. The pellets had no chance to pattern and completely obliterated his skull in a shower of gore. Messed up the armor, but nothing a little elbow grease couldn’t fix later.
Not even looking at my downed target, I worked the slide automatically and caught the pair of wounded men on the ground in a spread that made all their other issues instantly moot. They weren’t even wearing their armor and died in a heap. None the three men I’d just murdered had a chance to even scream.
I nearly killed the medic at that point, but decided he might be of use to my people when the shooting stopped. Instead, I spun the shotgun and clubbed him across the head once, twice, with the butt of the shotgun. A gash appeared across the man’s forehead and I quickly secured him hand and foot with zip ties from the belt of one of the dead agents.
I might have hit him too hard, but at least I tried. This would be my only attempt at a prisoner today. If he died from the head wound, well, fuck him. This was my family. I thought about Amy being in that bunker with Scott, and I felt the frenzy rise inside. They attacked the people I care about, and they could burn in hell. These animals would get no mercy from me today. Sorry, fresh out.
Helping myself to some party favors left for me by the dead agents, I immediately snatched up a discarded satchel and filled the canvas bag to the top. I caught myself humming an old tune, a song from the 1960s that I couldn’t place. Maybe it would come to me later.
Quickly reloading the shotgun, I slung it in favor of the scoped M4 and hustled up to the pair of burning bunkers. The first bunker was engulfed in flames, which was actually fine since this one had always served as a distraction. The shell was rough finished but we never used it. Instead, it was a decoy to attract just this kind of attention.
The layout meant attackers might be able to use it as cover for taking the second bunker, but the distance between the two meant anyone trying to use the forward bunker to flank the second would expose themselves to rifle fire from our house. When I saw three dead bodies slumped just around the corner, I saw where my father’s plan had worked so far.
The second bunker, I noted, was not burning, but smoke trailed up from one of the gun slits cut in the reinforced block front side. No time to check it now—I could hear the heavy hammer once again of machine gun fire, and I could tell it was coming from the direction of my house.
I hunched down and sprinted to the first series of corpses laid out on the grass and was heartened to see they wore the twisted camouflage of the DHS troopers. Head shots. I hit the ground between a pair of bloody corpses and began to scan the battlefield. It didn’t take long to find the fight.
A rough ring of helmets encircled the front and side of our house, and I counted another two dozen men intent on assaulting the structure. I wondered what their plan was until I saw one trooper rise up slightly and trigger a 40mm grenade at one of the shuttered windows. He fired while supported by suppressive fire from his colleagues.
The steel shutter flexed under the explosive impact but did not buckle. That was encouraging. The sounds of explosions I heard from the far side of the house, not so much.
“Screw it,” I decided and a plan quickly fell into place. I was already feeling the adrenaline kick, the fierce song of violence spiking through my soul. This was the berserker coming, as I hoped and feared it would. This time, though, I instinctively knew I could direct the flow and bend it to my will.
Laying out the six hand grenades I’d taken from the dead agents up front, I straightened out the pins and mentally targeted each one, fixing the point in space where I wanted the explosive to land. Then, starting with the first, I hurled each grenade, sans pin, in a pattern of overlapping fields of death.
By the time the last grenade hit the ground, rolling between the spread legs of a trooper laid out in a prone shooting position, the first one exploded. These grenades weren’t like what you see on TV, so the blast didn’t shake the trees two hundred yards away, but the shrapnel and concussion seemed to take out most of the clustered men. For the rest, I thought I had plenty of bullets.
Rising to my feet, I charged the beleaguered agents, my battle cry a shriek as I cut into their numbers. I quickly emptied the shotgun and dropped the weapon in favor of the M4. I fired on movement, or anything that looked like it might move. The grenades caused lots of wounded but failed to kill as many as I had hoped. Legs and arms were mangled and peppered with shrapnel, but the armor managed to protect the torso in many cases. By the time the survivors managed to reorient on my position, I was taking fire from three different groups of attackers.
Hitting the ground, I tried to burrow into the knee-high grass as bullets ripped through the air over my head
. Rolling rapidly, I made a fast magazine change as I moved and got the M4 to my shoulder and began squeezing off rounds once again. At this range, less than fifty yards, I didn’t really worry about the zero on this weapon. I was likely to die before it made a difference.
I managed to score two more head shot hits before I heard renewed firing from someone inside the house, and then the machine gun opened up again. Risking a split-second glance, I saw the up-armored Hummer come tearing around the side of the house. Mike looked to be up on the gun, but I couldn’t tell who was driving as the vehicle skidded into the turn.
Seeing my chance, I reloaded the M4 again, dropping the partially expended magazine, and started punching targets. With the Hummer to my left on a ninety-degree angle, the camouflaged men began to melt under the onslaught. That armor might technically be proof against 7.62x51, but three or four rounds to the torso managed to knock them down. And Mike was aiming at the thighs and legs. Since the front of the house formed my background, I was careful to pick my shots but Mike had no such problem as he steadily and methodically gunned down the last of the doomed attackers.
BANG!
With my hearing nearly shot from the constant hammer of gunfire, I felt the bullet as much has heard it. The projectile came so close to my head that I could feel the heat seem to scorch my cheek. I dropped and rolled right, then tried to use my optics to spot the source of the shot.
Bingo, I breathed. There, falling back into the woods bordering the north side of the ranch, I saw two men leapfrogging away from the scene of the carnage. Through the scope, I saw the camo and took a shot. Missed. Shot again. Missed. Third round, leading the runner at four hundred yards, and I saw the man stumble, then fall. From the way he fell, I could tell the femur was broken by the way his midthigh seemed to hinge backwards. There was no joint there for sure.
When the cover shooter saw his partner stumble to the earth, I saw the rifle swing my direction even as I scrambled to acquire the target. We fired at the same time. He fired a three-round burst, then another before the sixth round from my rifle snapped his head back. Down, and hopefully out.
Slumping back to the ground, I loaded my last ready magazine and began scanning the scene of the battle. Despite the hammering my ears had endured from the near constant firing and the explosions, I could still hear screams. Some close, some sounding like they were from around the backside of the hill.
The Hummer continued to circle through the front yard and toward the Big House on the other side. I heard continuing fire coming from the vicinity and realized the fight was not over. Just moved on without me. Jeez, I wondered, how many guys do they have?
As it turned out, counting the second force they tried to slip in the back way, it was seventy-two.
Rising to a hunched crouch, I shuffled up to the nearest dead and began stripping off magazine pouches in search of more ammunition. I saw two that looked to be still breathing and shot them in the face without pausing. I angled the shots to keep from messing up their Kevlar helmets.
On the second corpse, I found a long-bladed knife sheathed at the hip. Thinking it might come in handy later, I cut the scabbard loose and stuffed the rig in my bag. I might need to cut some throats before the day was done. Because in the back of my mind, I still had another mission to plan. According to one fairly unreliable source, my father and Sheriff Henderson were being held for a kangaroo court. Their lives might hang in the balance of how quickly I could get them out.
After a few weeks respite, the war had once more come to my home, and I fell back on my training. Both the formal stuff I got from my dad, and what I picked up on the road.
Topping off the satchel with more grenades, I slid the shoulder strap across my chest and went to follow the sound of the guns. Our shooters in the houses were keeping up their fire, but I calculated I could do more killing out here.
As that old saying goes, I’m in the business of killing, and business is good.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
William “Wild Bill” Messner fought for the Ultimate Fighting Championship in Las Vegas when I was just a kid. I didn’t get to watch the fight at the time, but I did see it later on YouTube. He went in as the unbeaten challenger and took on a man mountain of a fighter with a reputation for early-round knockouts. After a brutal first two rounds, Uncle Billy got the beast in a submission hold and the tattooed behemoth finally tapped out. None of the viewers could tell my uncle won the match while barely able to stand on his nearly destroyed knee.
Uncle Billy retired as an undefeated champion after two knee surgeries and never looked back. He just took his fight to a new goal, and this was building a successful sports complex and gym in Dallas. He was family, but he was also a friend to me when I needed one in the worst way. And now he was dead. He’d died like a champion, too.
After the shooting finally stopped, I went in search of our missing personnel. Scott wasn’t missing, since I found him in the bunker. My friend had stayed at his post and fought to the end. He’d suffered shrapnel wounds as a result of a near miss from a missile that penetrated the thick walls of the structure, and Beth was grim faced as she worked feverishly to treat his multiple injuries. He might live, but his recovery would no doubt be long and painful. Others, like my uncle, were not so lucky.
Amy had been driving the Humvee for Mike, but she wasn’t the first pick. Connie, flighty and aloof Connie, had volunteered to dash across the distance to the machine shed first. Dad never counted on having a war wagon, and thus we’d made no plans to retrieve the uparmored machine. That was a mistake, and one we would no doubt rectify. Maybe dig a tunnel between the house and the shed over the winter. If we survived.
When the attacking force started hitting the house with rockets, or missiles, and he feared we might otherwise be overrun, Mike had bravely decided we needed the Hummer. He survived the mad dash, but Connie was cut down before she made it halfway across the open ground.
When Mike drove the Hummer up to the side door and asked for someone to run the rig while he operated the machine gun, Amy ran out without a moment’s hesitation. Lori related all this to me as we worked together to carry Uncle Billy’s body down from the fighting position he’d used on the backside of the hill.
“She just ran, Luke,” Lori said with a huff as we stepped off the incline and down onto the flat ground near the side door. The slope was steep but we both made it down without mishap. “As soon as Mike ended his call, she was out the door before anyone else could move.”
That Amy would rise to the challenge came as no surprise. She would do whatever it took to help, and to fit in here, even if it killed her. The thought made my stomach hurt again and I felt my rage rise, but the sight of my uncle’s lifeless, broken form stilled the anger. I was wasn’t angry at Amy, anyway, just the men who did this. They’d paid, and the ones behind them would continue to pay.
We laid Uncle Billy’s body down next to that of Connie and the new woman, Kate. Sadly, so wrapped up in my own grief, I barely noticed she was there. She’d scarcely had a chance to recover from one gunshot wound and now she was dead. I didn’t even know how she’d died.
And those weren’t our only deaths. Wes, my hunting buddy, was likewise laid out on a sheet over at the Skillman place, along with Rulon Sanders, another one of the Greenville group. They’d tried to slow down the invaders and ended up buying us time and giving warning of the second attacking force coming at us from the backside of the property.
The second attacking force came closer than I would care to think about. It was that force that killed my uncle even as he whittled down their numbers from his elevated perch. His position on the side of the hill gave him a commanding view of the backside of the property, and he managed to take out over a dozen attackers before their concentrated fire killed him. But again, he bought time, and we made them pay. Of course, nothing would bring back our dead.
“Motherfuckers,” Lori hissed and kicked at an offending hedge growing close to the
door. “Why would they do this? We haven’t done anything. We just wanted to be left alone.”
“I’m not sure, Lori. But I think it has to do with something bigger. They took my dad, and the sheriff, too.”
“What? What are you saying?”
“I don’t have all the details, but I have a deputy that will tell us everything he knows. Everything.”
And he would, too.
Just then, I heard the door open and Amy came out, holding on to a struggling Helena. I honestly didn’t know the young woman that well. She was always the quiet one, the thoughtful, bright-eyed girl who seemed to take in everything, but was reserved with everyone except for Scott and her little brother, Kevin.
Now her mother was dead, and her boyfriend was fighting for his life. Amy seemed to be trying to restrain the older girl, but Helena wasn’t having any of that.
“Momma!” she shrieked, and broke away from Amy to hurl herself at the corpse. Mike and I had wrapped her in an old sheet, hiding the hideous wounds on her torso while leaving her untouched face exposed. She really did look like she was sleeping, unlike my uncle. His face, while relaxed by death, still seemed to be locked in an angry scowl. I recognized the look from his days in the ring.
I listened to the heartbroken girl’s plaintive wail and wished I could be somewhere else. Somewhere away from the dead and the hurting. I’d caused plenty of death in the last few months but seldom did I stick around to count the cost after.
Suddenly, Amy was in my arms and I reflexively wrapped her up in a tight embrace. Her head turned and her lips found mine in a burning, intoxicating kiss. She ended the kiss with a whimper, and for a moment, I felt myself tense at the idea she was hurt. But her wounds were on the inside.
“Oh, Luke,” she whispered. “I can’t believe it. They found us. What can we do now?”
“We do what we’ve been doing,” I declared, trying to make myself believe the lie. “We’ll take the fight to them. This ain’t over yet.”
Walking in the Rain (Book 4): Dark Sky Thunder Page 17
