The driver nodded. “Yeah. There’s a bend where a vehicle would have to slow way down. Perfect place to spring an ambush on this thing,” he said, slapping the dashboard. “They were set up by the road right there.”
“I can trust you to blow through if they try to ambush us there again?”
“Yeah. I can handle this thing around a curve like that.”
“I sure hope so.” The benches along the bed of the truck were stacked with sandbags, so the men back there would have some protection if they were fired on. Prange knew that the doors of the truck’s cab had been fitted with armor plates, but the windows were just plain glass. He and the driver would be relying on the inherent difficulty in hitting a moving target for protection.
The driver hit the starter and the old diesel engine roused itself with a fit of coughing. With a noisy grind of gears, the truck slowly lurched forward and left the town.
Not five minutes later, Prange saw what was undeniably the bend in the road where his men had been ambushed. It was a sharp hairpin on the way up out of the valley that seemed to slope off-camber, lower on the outside of the curve than the inside. He imagined it was terrifying to take that one coming downhill in the winter.
The driver downshifted two gears to power the truck up the steep road and pressed the accelerator hard to the floor to keep from losing too much speed. As they cleared the curve and the driver started straightening the wheel, Prange let himself hope for just a second that there was no ambush waiting. He let out a long breath and—
A bullet shattered the windshield.
The driver kept his foot on the gas, and rocked back and forth in his seat, as if he could force the truck to speed up that way.
Two more bullets went through the cab of the truck, both coming in from the side.
“Pull up a hundred feet and stop,” Prange told the driver. He lifted the flap over the window in the canvas wall between the cab and the back of the truck. “As soon as we’re slow enough, get out there and run these guys down.”
He tried to guess the number of guns firing, but between the noise of the truck itself and the startle of another couple of bullets whizzing past him, he couldn’t even guess.
“Here,” Prange called out. “Stop! You guys, go!”
As the truck ground to a halt, Prange heard the tailgate drop and men start hitting the pavement. He spun in his seat and drew his pistol with his left hand. Two bullets slammed into the armored door of the truck, seeming to come from behind. He hoped that meant they’d passed through the ambush, and that there wasn’t anybody in front taking aim at him through the windshield of the now stationary truck.
“You stay put. Watch the front and be ready to get this thing going,” Prange said, turning his attention to the sounds of gunfire behind the truck. A couple seconds passed without anything hitting his door, so he opened it and dropped to the ground.
His men had already formed a line along the bank at the edge of the road and were keeping a steady stream of fire going uphill. It didn’t look like anybody was down or hit yet. Prange followed their example and pressed himself against a jutting boulder. He was about fifteen yards back from the nearest of his men, and it didn’t seem like he’d drawn any attention to himself yet. It freed him up to peek his head around the rock and get a look up the hill.
The ambushers were likely in hunting camouflage, so he had to wait until he heard some shots to try and narrow down where they came from. It also gave him the opportunity to try and get a count of how many people might be firing at his crew.
One of his men suddenly yelped and stumbled backward, dropping his rifle and grabbing at his arm.
“I got one! I got one!” It was a young voice off in the distance, maybe a teenager.
Prange’s head pivoted toward the voice, which stood out sharply against the din of gunfire. He wasn’t the only one that had picked it up, and violent volley started up, shredding a tree. In the midst of it, Prange heard very clearly a different sound than the impacts of bullets into wood or the ground, a harsh choking “Ugh!” followed by a body noisily twisting and then tumbling down toward the road. The firing from uphill seemed to pause briefly, even as the rhythm of shots from the roadside picked up.
As bullets slammed into the rolling body, Prange opened his mouth to tell his men to ignore it and worry about the living enemy. Three of his men seemed to figure it out on their own, and they broke from cover, hauling themselves up the slope at some target only they could see. It wasn’t a controlled advance they made, two at a time laying down protective fire so a third could dash forward to the next protected position. It was a straight-up charge, all three firing away, snapping out bursts of bullets as they jogged forward.
One of the men spun suddenly and fell. The other two kept on, roaring as they ran. Another gun opened up from the hillside. An unfamiliar voice shouted, “I give up!” Homing in on it, Prange caught sight of the person his three men had broken out to charge. He was throwing his gun to the side, one hand already up, but Prange’s two remaining guys were in no mood to take prisoners. Both of them riddled the surrendering man with bullets.
Prange was about to breathe a sigh of relief, thinking the tide of the battle was flowing in his favor, when a rifle opened up from a direction he hadn’t heard one come from yet. He looked toward the sound and caught movement. It was beyond the limit of his accuracy with a pistol, and he didn’t want to give away his position on a shot that was most likely going to miss its target. He held his fire and scanned left to see if he could pick up a closer target.
He heard another voice along the side of the road bark out in surprise as a bullet found home. The man he’d held off on shooting rapidly squeezed off several rounds, drawing Prange’s attention back toward him. The agonized yowl of one of his men told him at least one of the shots had landed.
The man Prange was watching quickly looked behind him, then fired again, three shots, the last one having the distinctive sound of a bolt locking back. Prange watched as the man took his hand off the stock of his rifle to hit the magazine release. He almost took advantage of the opportunity to run up for a closer shot, then realized that some of his guys had started upslope and were quite possibly aimed in his general direction. Instead of running up, he yelled, “He’s reloading!” and ducked down.
Several AR-15s opened up at once on the man. Prange hugged the ground as he heard rounds from his own gang go sailing over his head. From the volume of fire, Prange was sure the man couldn’t have survived. For the second time, he dared to think the battle had been won. To prove him wrong, from much farther up the hill, two more rifles sounded off. Prange heard another person shout out in sudden pain. He wanted to lift his head to see what was going on, but there were still way too many rounds flying past his position.
He heard one of his men yell, “I’m out!” as the new rifles from uphill kept on firing. They weren’t firing fast, but Prange could pick out a steady rhythm. Another rifle opened up just a few feet in front of him. Prange chanced a peek through a crack in the rock outcrop he was hiding behind, and saw the man that had been reloading making a careful retreat. He had no idea how the man hadn’t gone down in the storm of lead that had gone flying his way, but there he was, fresh magazine loaded up, firing. Another one of Prange’s men shouted that he was out of ammunition.
Prange wanted to think it was a ruse but wasn’t sure his guys were smart enough to come up with something that clever on the fly. “Pull back! Back to the truck!” It was his driver now giving commands. Prange realized he was out of sight of the truck, so it wasn’t completely unreasonable for his driver to make the call. He wanted to tell his men to hold, to keep fighting, but being cut off from the rest of them, with at least one foe steadily moving in his direction, he didn’t dare advertise his presence. Instead, he dared a careful peek out from behind the back side of the boulder he was hiding behind.
The man was now easily in range. As Prange was bringing his pistol up to take aim, there came a sha
rp snapping noise just to his left, and he felt something tear into the side of his face. He almost dropped his pistol as the intense pain crashed through him and he stumbled right, putting a hand up to his head. He immediately felt warm blood flowing. He joined the chorus of men shouting to fall back. Another bullet ricocheted off stone, unnervingly close. “To the truck!” he shouted. From his right eye, he could see one of his guys dragging another toward the back of the truck. Another man was motionless in the road. His driver was leaning out of the cab, weapon on full automatic, spitting out bursts of bullets at some target behind Prange. “Come on, sir!” the driver shouted.
Prange broke out into a run for the truck, surprised when he made it up into the cab without taking a bullet in the back. Somebody in the back of the truck shouted, “Go!” The driver threw the vehicle into gear and ducked down behind the cover of the dashboard, driving blind for several seconds before popping up to take a quick look, adjusting course, and sinking down again. The remaining glass in the windshield shattered.
Slowly, the sound of gunfire faded, and the driver sat back up in his seat. “You got a map, sir?” he asked. “We’re not getting back to town that way.”
Prange reached for the glove compartment. His hand was trembling so hard he couldn’t work the latch.
“Here,” the driver said, handing him a rag. Prange didn’t care if it was clean or not as he pressed it hard against the side of his face. His cheek and temple were throbbing in pain, and by the amount of blood flowing down his arm, he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t dead. After a dozen slow, deep, steadying breaths, Prange was finally able to think again. He experimentally pressed at the most painful spots on the side of his head through the sopping-wet rag. One of them sent fresh, searing pain through him as he touched it, his fingertips detecting something very hard and loose. He let the rag slip down and picked at it, pulling a splinter of stone just a bit bigger than a grain of rice out of the wound.
With the realization that his wounds were caused by rock shards from a ricochet, not a bullet embedded in his head, Prange was able to calm himself enough to be useful.
“Right. Map,” he said, this time getting the glove compartment open. He profusely thanked himself for having marked the day’s route on the map before they set out that morning. “Have we gone through any intersections?” he asked, looking out the window of the truck to try and get his bearings. It was hard to tell, with trees growing up to within a few yards of the road, but the level pavement made him think they were on top of one of the ridges.
“Just one, right after the last switchback, maybe half a mile behind us.”
Prange traced his finger up the line on the map, finding one place where the road he hoped they were on straightened just before another road crossed it. “All right. Keep on this one. Second left looks like it’ll be a sharp hairpin. Take that.”
“Got it, sir.”
“Looks like two miles down, you’ll hit the highway again. Pop another left, and that will take us back into town.” Prange pressed the bloody rag up to the side of his face again, then flipped up the canvas flap so he could see into the back of the truck. “What’s the situation back there?” he asked.
“Lost two, two of us got hit,” one of the men said. “One real bad.”
Prange could see two guys doing their best to bandage up a man writhing silently on the floor of the truck bed. They had a good-sized med kit in the truck, but as far as Prange knew, the actual military veterans were the only guys he had with any formal first-aid training. Of the three he’d brought with him, one was driving the truck, one was tending to the badly wounded man, and the third was the wounded man.
“Lean in a bit here, let me get that cleaned up a bit,” one of the men in the back said. Prange twisted in his seat and poked his head through the canvas flap. His man poured water from a canteen onto a gauze pad and started wiping blood off the side of his face. “Scalp wounds tend to bleed like mofos,” the young man said.
It was obvious the kid knew what he was talking about. He was maybe twenty years old, raised on the streets, and bore the scars of a real scrapper. “We got some of that med-grade superglue back here, if you want me to seal the worst of these up. It’ll leave a scar, though. You want any of this to heal clean, maybe you’ll need to apologize to the fire chief for locking him up.”
“Just get the bleeding to stop for now,” Prange said. “I hear chicks dig scars.”
16
Jerry Grossman blinked as he stepped out of the town hall and out into the daylight. After a few days in a basement room lit only by a couple small windows up near the ceiling, walking out into full sun was a bit of a shock.
Ten minutes earlier, he’d been handed a document signed by Daniel Prange informing him that no compelling evidence had been presented that he’d committed any crime, and that all charges had been dropped. He’d been surprised that Prange was nowhere to be seen as one of the town’s police officers had returned his belt, shoes, and whatever else they’d confiscated from him when he’d been arrested.
The first thing he noticed after his eyes adjusted to the light was that one of the military trucks was missing. He looked up and down the road and didn’t see it parked elsewhere on the main street.
“We’ve got a crew out looking for your brother,” Carter said. “You sure you don’t know who he might be holing up with if he’s here in town?”
Jerry shook his head and chose his words carefully, worried that the informal agreement between him and Prange—his brother’s location in exchange for his freedom—was about to be suddenly rescinded. “Sorry. I’ve known very little about his life in town over the past couple decades, and after the way he really stepped in it out at Dollar King, I couldn’t even start to guess who might still trust him enough to shelter him anymore.”
“Well, if we’re lucky, he’s off at his property outside town you told us about. Or is limping on up to Eau Claire or something with his tail between his legs.” Carter handed Jerry a paper lunch bag. “It’s not much, but it’s better than what we were feeding you downstairs.”
“What about my buddy Rocky? You guys got any good reason to keep holding him?” Even though Jerry didn’t particularly want to take responsibility for his old, volatile friend again, it just didn’t seem right to leave him rotting in some impromptu jail. Especially since Rocky was in Bowman because of him in the first place.
“If there’s someone that can take him in, we can let him out,” Carter said. “Otherwise, we’ll hold him. Can’t have vagrants just wandering town in times like these.”
“Yeah. Let me check with the guy I’m staying with and see if there’s room for a third.”
Carter looked over his shoulder, at Frank Miller just coming out the door. “You mean this guy?”
“Yeah,” Jerry said. “Let me chat with him, and we’ll get back to you.”
“Damn, it’s good to get out of there,” Miller said. “I think I still have a couple beers left. Shall we crack ’em open?” he asked Jerry. “Assuming nobody’s been messing around with my house.” He eyed Carter as he said this.
“We’ve been making sure nobody’s out looting anybody else’s stuff,” Carter said. “Getting that weak mayor out of the picture seems to have reminded people to respect each other’s property.”
Jerry wanted to make a comment about the fear of getting beaten or shot being more of a factor but held his tongue. He hadn’t yet figured out exactly what Carter was all about. The guy seemed to be able to take a joke here and there, but there was also a cold hardness in him that Jerry didn’t want to bounce up against. He opted for a simple, “Thank you,” instead.
“Let me know about that thing we were just talking about,” Carter said, clapping him on the back and then heading into the building.
“What thing?” Miller asked Jerry.
“Rocky. They’ll let him out if he’s got a place to stay.”
“I’m going to have to think about that. Didn’t make the best i
mpression on me while we were sharing a room.”
“Yeah. I get it.” Jerry opened his bag lunch while he followed Miller back to his house. The sandwich inside was noticeably better than the fourth-rate meals he’d been getting in detention. The bread felt a little stale, the half-slice of cheese was dried out, and there wasn’t quite enough chicken salad to really satisfy him, but it was seasoned well. Jerry figured the town’s supply of herbs and spices was likely to outlast the staples unless something happened pretty soon. For all the trouble he’d stirred up for his brother, Jerry didn’t envy the task he’d been up against. He had no idea how much food was still on hand, but worried that once it ran out, with or without Carter and his troops, things were going to get mighty ugly real fast.
As he and Miller walked past Larson’s Landing, one of the town’s bars, he noticed that the windows and front door had been hastily boarded up with sheets of plywood. There wasn’t any sign of a fire, no broken glass on the ground that might indicate it had been looted or anything. “What do you suppose happened here?”
“Don’t know,” Miller said. He stopped and looked up the block. “The Double G is boarded up, too. Can’t quite make out if the rest of the bars are sealed up or not.”
Jerry stepped into the middle of the road and squinted. “Yep. Think Prange’s some sort of Mormon or a closet Muslim or something?”
Miller laughed. “He’s a bit odd, but not in that way.”
“Too bad all the water holes are shut down. Beer sounds good, but I’m suddenly in the mood for an Old Fashioned.”
“Always want what you can’t have, huh?” Miller asked. He stood in the road, looking at the closed bars for a long time, scowling. “Couldn’t get one even if these guys were open. I’m sure they’re out of oranges.”
“You’re right. Wouldn’t be the same without the fruit.”
“Besides, I’ve still got a bottle of Korbel. I’ll pour you up a couple fingers of that.”
Age of Survival Series | Book 2 | Age of Panic Page 14
