by Alex Grecian
She unclipped her Glock and stood, held the gun down at her side, and trotted along the outside of the stone wall, looking for a door.
6
“Where’s that generator you saw?” Goodman kept his voice low and adjusted his grip on the heavy bolt cutters. “Maybe we should cut their power? Give us a little advantage.”
“Up closer to the church,” Travis said. “But I think it was just for backup.”
Goodman nodded and they moved out along the inside perimeter of the fence. When they reached the first outbuilding, he wiped a window clean and looked inside.
“Somebody’s bunking down here,” he said. “You think it’s that army they got? Or maybe this is where they keep the women and kids before they transport ’em out?”
“I had the feeling the women were already in the truck yesterday. The driver did not wait to load it; he hurried out of here as soon as Heinrich gave him the word.”
“So they keep them in the truck? This just gets more awful. Dad’s nutty as a Snickers, but Heinrich’s always been the schemer. This has to be him. Gotta be about the money for him.”
They moved on, looking inside each shed as they passed, but every building stood empty. With only two sheds left to check, Goodman stopped and held up his hand. When he had Travis’s attention, he pointed past the outbuildings in the direction of the parking lot.
“You look in that garage?”
“No,” Travis said.
“You said they were keeping that truck in the parking lot. Right out in the open. Why do that if you got a garage you can park it in?”
Travis raised his eyebrows.
They left the shadows of the fence and crossed an open area, watching men in brown shirts run through a calisthenics regimen just a few yards away. Bear stayed nearer the fence, weaving between the outbuildings while keeping Travis in sight. They reached the back of the garage without being seen and crept around to a door on the sheltered side. Goodman tried the handle and shook his head.
“Solid lock, solid door. Didn’t come with the building when they bought it. No windows, either.”
Travis produced his leather pouch and went to work again. The lock on the garage was several steps better than the one on the front gate. Heinrich had gone to some extra trouble to keep people out of his garage.
Goodman shuffled from one foot to the other. “Hurry up.”
“This is difficult.”
It took him three minutes before he heard the familiar sound of a dead bolt drawing back. He straightened up and put the pouch back in his pocket, traded it for the Eclipse.
“A lock like that,” Goodman said, “building’s probably alarmed.”
“Maddy may be in there,” Travis said.
“Or your dad.”
Travis turned the handle and the door swung open. There was an immediate ear-piercing squeal, and they ducked down, entered the building low, and separated on either side of the door. Bear stayed close to Travis, breathing hard. Goodman straightened up and found a light switch. He flicked it and overhead fluorescents blinked to life. There was a plastic box mounted to the wall next to the switch that had a series of buttons and a red blinking light. Goodman gave Travis a thumbs-up and used his bolt cutters to chew through a thick cable that led up toward the rafters. The alarm continued to sound and he frowned at it, then raised the bolt cutters over his head and brought them down hard on the box. It broke in half and hung limp against the wall. Its lights blinked green and it went silent.
Travis shut the door and bolted it.
“Shit,” Goodman said. “Somebody’s gonna have a key to that door. We got maybe a minute before them goons are all over us.”
Maddy was not in the garage, that was obvious at a glance. The double-wide building was filled with pallets, stacked with crates that stretched from the door to the back wall. An olive-green truck with a canvas top was parked, nose out, in the narrow space between crates. Goodman went to the back of the truck and used his bolt cutters again to remove a padlocked chain, while Travis pried open the nearest crate.
“Guns,” Travis said. “Rifles.”
There was a commotion on the other side of the garage door and the handle rattled. Travis could hear men’s voices. Bear looked back and forth between the door and his master, his brown eyes watery. Travis moved to the next crate and opened it.
“Kalashnikovs,” he said.
“Machine guns?”
“A lot of them.”
Goodman lowered the truck’s gate and took a step back. “Come here, Doc.”
Travis went around and looked inside. The cargo area contained an enormous object that was dominated by tall metal cylinders that had been welded together and spray-painted matte black.
“A bomb,” Goodman said. “They’re going to war?”
“I think Heinrich may be supplementing his slave trade by selling weapons.”
“He’s selling bombs?”
“I do not think this is a regular bomb.” Travis pointed at a lever that protruded from a smooth panel that was welded to the right side of the device. “Unless I am wrong, this is an NNEMP.”
“A what?”
“A non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse generator. If we were to push that lever and arm it, we could potentially kill every electronic device in the area. Everything would stop working.”
“How big an area?”
“I could not say. Possibly the entire compound.”
They stood contemplating the contents of the truck for a minute, listening to the people on the other side of the door.
“What have we got to lose?”
“Nothing, really,” Travis said. “Shall we?”
“How’s it work?”
“There should be a remote control somewhere.”
Goodman went to the driver’s-side door and opened it. He came back a moment later holding a small flat plastic box with a single red button on one side. He handed it to Travis.
“This all looks homemade.”
“It is,” Travis said. “We will not want to be near this when it explodes.”
“You said it wasn’t a bomb.”
“It still has an explosive component.”
“Keys are in the truck,” Goodman said. “How ’bout we send it on a little trip?”
“Yes,” Travis said. “Let us hope those people out there have the good sense to run.”
Goodman went back to the cab and climbed in. Travis reached out to the device and flung the lever upward just as the truck started. There was a low whine that made Bear back away and snort. The truck rolled forward and Goodman jumped out.
“I rigged the gas pedal,” he said.
He walked back to Travis and they stood side by side watching as the truck hit the garage door and kept going, crumpling the corrugated tin and pushing through it into the gray air outside. People in brown shirts scrambled in every direction and the truck rattled on, over the ruins of the door, through the brittle grass and away, finally bouncing to a stop at the far edge of the basketball court.
Travis pushed the red button on the remote control.
There was a muffled thump, the back end of the truck popped up and slammed back down, and the lights in the garage winked out.
7
Skottie’s flashlight went dark, leaving her in the pitch black of the church hall. She checked the switch, pushing it in with her thumb three or four times, but it was dead. She clipped it to her belt and waited for her eyes to adjust.
What if Maddy wasn’t even in the compound?
She pushed the thought out of her mind. She would scour the church for her daughter and, if Maddy wasn’t there, she would move on to the next logical place and search it. She would keep looking until she found her.
The building appeared to be deserted. She had gained entrance through the unlocked front door and gone through the vestibule to a long hall with a red carpet, just as Travis had described. From there, it had been slow moving, stopping to check each empty office along one wall
, then doubling back and checking the rooms along the other side of the passage.
She heard people yelling outside, and she hoped Travis and the sheriff hadn’t been caught. She rolled her shoulders to loosen the tension in her neck, then adjusted her grip on the Glock and moved to the next office along the hall.
8
Goodman lifted a machine gun from one of the crates and hefted it. “I’m thinking if Maddy’s alive, she’s over there in the church,” he said. “And these guys are gonna figure out we’re still in here and come lookin’ any old time now.”
“I would prefer we not shoot our way out.”
“You’re not a real fun guy, Doc.”
“I am a fun guy. This is not a fun situation.”
“You go help Skottie look for her girl. I’m gonna create a distraction.”
Travis considered arguing, but he agreed with Goodman’s logic. Their phones and radios were dead. Skottie was cut off in the church. The longer they spent searching, the greater the odds they would be caught. Once that happened, the chance of finding Maddy alive would plummet.
“If I can get to that truck, will it still run?” Goodman said.
Travis shook his head. “It would have to be a Faraday cage. Clearly it is not.”
“You ever get tired of me asking what you’re talking about?”
“It would have to have been altered to withstand the pulse, but it has a canvas top. At this point it is as useful as your nephew.”
“It might still make decent cover.” He patted the stock of the machine gun. “You see any clips for this thing?”
They hunted quickly through the crates until they found ammunition for the Kalashnikov. Goodman slid the safety lever up and inserted a magazine into the weapon, then took three more clips and stuffed them in his pockets. The sound of voices outside the garage grew louder as Heinrich’s men returned.
“Follow me as soon as you can,” Travis said. “Try not to get killed.”
“Beer’s on me when this is over.” Goodman flipped the gun’s safety back down.
“I will hold you to that promise.”
They flattened themselves against the wall on either side of the opening. Goodman took a deep breath, then ducked and launched himself out across the crumpled tin door. His hat fell off and tumbled down the corrugated slope. He fired off a burst from the Kalashnikov that sent up a spray of mud and ice, then scrambled to his feet and grabbed his hat before heading toward the basketball court.
Travis waited a minute for the brown shirts to give chase, then slipped out through the gaping hole in the wall and sprinted for the church. Bear loped ahead of him, then circled back and got ahead again, keeping pace. The sky was a deep silky purple at the edges of the cloud cover. Fat raindrops spattered on Travis’s face. The world went silent for a split second as lightning flashed across the sky, and then came the rolling drumbeat of thunder.
Goodman was running in a zigzag pattern, going the opposite direction, using short bursts from the gun to tear up divots of grass. One of the brown shirts caught up and grabbed the end of Goodman’s flapping shirttail, but the sheriff bashed him with the butt of his gun and the man went down in a heap, blood spurting from his nose. When Goodman reached the basketball court, he dove behind the truck, then clambered up on the hood, and fired another burst into the air. Everyone except Travis stopped in their tracks and looked up at him.
“You all know who I am,” he said. “And you know I mean business, so drop your guns and raise your hands high.”
Travis kept going. As he drew close to the church doors, he could hear the church’s flags rippling above him and a rope banging against the solid metal flagpole. A tall woman, the skin of her face drawn tight against her skull, stepped around the corner and raised a handgun at him. Her fingernails were painted bright red. Bear leapt forward and Travis raised his Eclipse, but he knew they were reacting too late. An instant before the woman could pull the trigger, her head exploded in a soft plummy mess of gray and red. The woman toppled forward, her gun skittering away under a hedge.
Travis looked for Quincy up on the cell tower, but the rain was coming down harder. He waved in the right direction, knowing the deputy could see him through his rifle scope, then turned and ran to the church.
9
Skottie was coming out of the last office at the end of the passage when the door to the vestibule opened, a black rectangle in the deeper darkness. She raised her Glock and pointed it down the length of the hall. Something nudged her leg and she jumped, startled. She reached down and felt a familiar furry mane under her hand. Bear snorted into her palm.
“Skottie?” Travis said from somewhere. “Skottie, it is me.”
She lowered her gun. “You didn’t find her?”
Travis entered and let the door shut behind him. “No.”
“None of the lights are working in here, and my flashlight’s dead, too.”
Travis filled her in on what they had found.
“So Maddy’s not out there,” Skottie said. “And she’s not in any of these rooms here.”
“That gives us only one direction in which to go.”
They were little more than silhouettes moving through the murk, but as their eyes continued to adjust, they were able to pick out details. Travis pointed to the series of framed photos as they drew near the double doors that led to the nave.
“Pride goeth before a fall.”
“Why isn’t there anybody in here?”
“Too much going on out there,” Travis said. “But Rudolph is here. I feel sure of it.”
They stood sideways and pulled the doors open, keeping themselves close to the walls on either side, presenting minimal targets for anyone in the nave. Bear looked to Travis for a signal, and when Travis crooked his index finger at him, the dog charged silently through into the church. Travis and Skottie followed him. Tall candles lined the center aisle, flicking shadows at the stone walls around them. A man stood alone at the far end of the room, resting his hands on the edge of the podium as if about to give a homily.
“Welcome, friends,” Heinrich said.
10
The hardest thing Ransom had ever done was to walk from the outbuilding, down around the swimming pool and the far corner of the church, and out to the parking lot. When he started, it was still dark. There had been a few early risers in the compound, perimeter guards and cooks preparing breakfast, but no one had questioned him. They were used to Rudy’s experiments, people like Kenny who showed up out of nowhere and disappeared as quickly as they had come. All of these poor creatures moved erratically and spoke slowly, if at all, so Ransom’s presence there wasn’t unusual.
By the time he had reached the green van with its bloodred spots, Ransom had lost what little control he had over himself. It was hard to remember how to move his arms and legs, and muscle memory was slipping away. He had rested for a while, sitting with his back against the van, and then spent another long while standing back up, working the key fob and opening the door. He fell with his upper body and head on the driver’s seat, the door still open, and then drifted into sleep.
When he woke up, the sun was rising and he could hear shouting across the compound. A soft rain was coming down, pattering gently against the van’s metal roof. Ransom grabbed the other side of the bucket seat and pulled himself up behind the wheel. He sat for a few minutes, getting his breath, mustering his energy, then maneuvered the key ring in his hand until he was holding the key by its base. Unable to bend down and look, he stabbed blindly out in the direction of the steering column and managed to insert the key in the ignition on his first try.
He took a moment to savor this small victory, then began the process of turning the key. The engine chugged, then died. He held his breath and worked the muscles in his shoulders, down his arm, clasped his fingers together. He turned the key again. The van made a sickly rasping sound, then chugged harder and shuddered to life.
Ransom smiled and began the painstaking process of puttin
g the van in reverse.
11
“All we ever wanted was to be left alone,” Heinrich said. The golden lightning bolt fastened to the altar loomed huge behind him. “All you had to do was let my father live out the rest of his days in peace.”
“Bear,” Travis growled. “Ataku!”
Bear leapt silently forward, moving fast and sure up the red carpet toward the altar.
“No!” Heinrich ducked behind the podium and came back up with a Kalashnikov identical to the guns being stored in his garage. “Call the dog off!”
But he didn’t wait for Travis to obey. He fired off a burst that tore up the carpet and splintered the sides of several pews, but missed Bear by at least a foot.
“Bear, haltu!” Travis said. “Preta.”
“ ‘Preta’?” Heinrich said.
“Tell my friend where she can find her daughter, and tell me where my father is.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Dr. Roan. You have no leverage here. Please put your pistol down. And you, lady, drop your gun and lay down those rifles you’ve got on your back.”
Travis and Skottie glanced at each other, and Travis shook his head. Bear was still too far away from the podium. There was no chance. The two of them laid down their handguns, and Skottie unslung her rifles, set them on the floor.
“Kick them away from you.”
“Why are you doing this?” Skottie said.
“Doing what? You came into my home.”
“After you came to mine,” Skottie said. “Give me my daughter back.”
“I didn’t take her.”
“You ordered Deputy Puckett to do it,” Travis said. “You are responsible for that and for countless other crimes, including slavery and weapons dealing.”
“You want to know what I’m responsible for?” Heinrich said. “I turned a freak show into a profitable enterprise. Do you know how much this church made last year? How much we’re predicted to make by the end of this year?”
