Threat warning

by John Gilstrap

  “I’m coming in on the green side,” Jonathan said. “How does it look there?”

  “I’m looking forward to you telling me when you get here,” Boxers said. Translation: Hurry the hell up.

  “What’s going on?” Ryan asked.

  “The beginning of a long night,” Jonathan said. “I need you to do exactly what I tell you, in exactly the way I tell you to do it.”

  Ryan nodded.

  Behind them and to the right, the crowd was catching on. They needed to get inside now.

  Jonathan moved to the green-side door and tried the knob. Thank God it was unlocked. If he’d had to blow it to gain entrance, there’d have been no way to lock it behind him. He pushed Ryan flat against the wall. “Crouch down,” he said, and the kid did exactly as he was told.

  Jonathan cracked the door. It was thick and heavy, true to its suspected role as the castle keep. He peeked in. It appeared to be an anteroom of some sort, not unlike the vestry in St. Katherine’s Church, where he’d spent hours of his youth as an altar boy. It was empty.

  “Come on,” he said to Ryan, training his weapon down the side of the building now, in case any of the panicking mob saw them and decided to take action.

  PC-One reacted instantly, slipping through the opening and into the room. Jonathan followed and pushed the door closed. It moved with the kind of momentum that would take a hand off if it got caught in the jamb. On the inside, Jonathan used the heavy metal lever to slide steel pins into the sides of the jamb with a resonant thunk.

  “What was that?” Ryan asked, reminding Jonathan that in the zero-light environment, the kid was literally blind.

  Beyond the interior door, a battle raged.

  The anteroom provided no decent cover. Jonathan escorted Ryan to the exterior corner. “Stay here,” he instructed. “No matter what, stay right here.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “Say it,” Jonathan said. In stressful moments, people are many times more likely to remember something they’re told if they say it aloud.

  “I’ll stay here.”

  “No matter what.”

  “No matter what. Can I have a gun?”

  “No.” He didn’t have time for this. Boxers needed “A knife, then,” Ryan said. “I’m not letting them take me again. I’m not letting them cut off my head.”

  Something in the words resonated with Jonathan. There was a desperation to them, but also a visceral commitment. And the kid had a point. At Resurrection House, Jonathan told the children that if someone tries to snatch them, they should fight to the death.

  How was this different?

  He lifted the trouser flap near his right calf, and produced a. 38-caliber snub-nose revolver. It was his last-resort backup weapon. He placed it in Ryan’s hand.

  “Tell me you’re left handed,” he said.

  “Okay, I’m left handed.”

  Jonathan caught the tone. “But you’re not, are you?”

  “ No.”

  “Consistent with the rest of the night,” he said.

  “Scorpion, Big Guy,” Boxers shouted in his ear above the chatter of gunfire. “Sit rep? I sure could use some company.”

  Jonathan kept his focus on Ryan. “You don’t have to cock it,” he instructed. “Just point it and shoot. You’ll have to pull the trigger kind of hard. You have five shots.”

  “If they get to me, I’ll only need one,” he said.

  That one stunned him. He clamped his hand around the gun. “Listen to me, Ryan. I made a deal to bring you and your mom home safely. If you shoot yourself, I swear to God, I’ll kill you.”

  Even in the artificial light, he saw the boy smile. He got the irony.

  Now it was time to join the war.

  Gail understood that the promise to come get her was an empty one. This vehicle was their only way out. Without it, the entire mission was doomed. Looking back, she realized that it had been doomed from the beginning. The whole thing had been driven by too much testosterone and bravado, and not nearly enough thought.

  Yet, she’d gone along, and here she was. Having witnessed what they’d tried to do to that little boy, she could only imagine what they had in store for her. She wasn’t going to give them that chance.

  It was useless to resist as the mob rolled the pickup truck all the way onto its roof so that they could drag her out through the broken windows. She closed her eyes as she passed through the shards, and once her face was clear, her gear kept her pretty well protected from the rest of the wreckage. Her only hope was they would be so distracted by manhandling her that they wouldn’t notice in the dim light that the tactical holster on her thigh was empty.

  They stood her up and pushed her backwards against the side of the vehicle. Hands started to paw at her. She fired her Glock from her hip, and the attacker closest to her dropped. Perhaps the noise was lost in the gunfire coming from the church, but the remaining attackers did not react until she fired again. And again. As two more attackers fell, the others caught on. Most backed away a few steps, some ran. Two raised their rifles. She shot them both, one in the forehead, one on the point of her jaw.

  Startled, the rest of the crowd dove for cover. She knew they wouldn’t stay down for long, and from what she could see, most of them were armed; they just hadn’t yet set themselves to fight. She emptied her Glock at the assembled crowd as she scooted away, not so much aiming as peppering them. The intent was to keep their faces in the frozen ground long enough for her to get out.

  When the slide locked back, she dropped the empty mag and slapped in a new one on the run. She slid the pistol back into its holster and switched her hands to the M4 dangling from its sling.

  Nothing in her FBI training had ever addressed full-out retreat like this, but she instinctively knew to run in a zigzag and to keep low. She thought she heard firing behind her, but she didn’t turn to verify. All that mattered was that she hadn’t yet been hit. As long as that was the case, she was fine.

  Her only hope at this point was to get to the black side of the church. From there, she’d at least have some cover. After that, well. ..

  When she got to the red-black corner, Gail hook-slid on her butt and rolled to her stomach with her weapon poised on her shoulder. Even without night vision, she could make out a cluster of five or six of them running after her. When they saw her go to ground, two dropped to their knees and brought weapons to their shoulders. The others assumed standing firing positions.

  She saw muzzle flashes and she opened up on them. They all dropped, though she wasn’t at all sure that she’d hit any of them. Moving with speed she hadn’t mustered in a very long time, she belly-crawled to the shelter of the back wall, where she switched to a left-handed grip and peered back around the corner at the troops she’d just shot at.

  She felt a huge relief as she saw them all running away.

  The first indication she had that anyone was behind her was when something heavy smashed into the back of her head.

  Jonathan pressed his mike button and said, “I’m entering from a door on the green side.”

  “About damn time,” Boxers replied. “If it’s the door I think it is, you’ll be able to hook left a few feet and enfilade these assholes. They’re all hunkering under pews and shooting like girls. I’m at the green-white corner. When you’re ready, I’ll lay down covering fire for you.”

  Jonathan inched the door open enough to slither out on his belly and pushed it closed again. It was indeed a church, and it was lighted by a massive, three-tiered candlestick chandelier, which cast a bizarre, dancing light in Jonathan’s night vision. “Ready,” he said.

  The second syllable had barely left his mouth when Boxers opened up from Jonathan’s right. The M4’s muzzle flashes nearly whited out Jonathan’s NVGs.

  To his left, he saw chunks of wood flying from the wooden pews, and he knew precisely where the bad guys were. He pivoted to his left, rose to a crouch, and with his weapon up and ready, he advanced down the side aisle until he was even wi
th the rows Boxers was targeting.

  There they were. He didn’t have time to count, but it looked like eight or ten of them. They all wore the stupid caftans, and each of them was armed with some form of rifle, not that they were doing them any good at the moment. They looked more like they were trying to melt into the floor.

  They looked so frightened that Jonathan decided to give them a single chance at survival. He said into his radio, “Cease fire.”

  Boxers’ fusillade ceased as quickly as it had started.

  In the silence that followed, Jonathan bellowed, “Nobody move! Stay down or I will kill you.”

  Instinctively, he supposed, two of the shooters raised up. Jonathan stitched the wood above their heads with a three-round burst, and they dropped again.

  “Down means down, assholes!” His tone was equal parts madman and drill instructor, specially cultivated for moments just like this. “Flat on the ground, arms out, fingers splayed. That’s the only way you survive.”

  He sensed movement to his right from the white-green corner, and a quick glance confirmed that Boxers has risen to give him better cover.

  “Everybody over there good, Big Guy?”

  “One of us is bruised up and scared shitless, but-” He cut off his words and shifted his aim toward the back wall. “Guns!”

  Boxers opened up at the back wall, where a black-clad figure pivoted and fell.

  Jonathan dropped to a knee and brought his own weapon to bear on the shadows.

  “Goddamn idiots!” Boxers boomed.

  Where there was one gunman, there almost always was another. Jonathan held his aim, scanning the altar for a target to shoot. In the enhanced artificial light, he looked for curves where there should be straight lines and straight lines where there should be curves. And he looked for movement.

  He saw it on the right-hand side of the altar, someone emerging from the shadows, and he swung his aim on it to take it out. He was half a pound from trigger break when he realized that the emerging target was Gail.

  “Hold your fire!” he yelled. “It’s Gunslinger.”

  She moved awkwardly, sidestepping out just a few feet into the open. Her weapon was gone, and he thought he could see a smear of blood in her hair.

  Then he saw the pistol pointed at her head from behind the curtains that framed the altar.

  “Take them, brothers and sisters!” a voice yelled from behind the curtain. “They won’t shoot as long as-”

  Boxers’ rifle shot severed the man’s hand at the wrist, and the pistol dropped harmlessly to the floor. It hadn’t yet bounced when Jonathan raked the man’s location with bullets. Gail dropped out of sight.

  In those two seconds of bedlam, mass insanity was born.

  It started with a single voice launching a guttural yell from the cowering fighters huddled among the line of pews. It was the sound of raw emotion, and in two seconds, it had metastasized to the entire room.

  “This can’t be good,” Jonathan said.

  It wasn’t.

  As the chorus of voices rose from all corners, he shot a look to Boxers. The Big Guy seemed hopeful for a fight.

  He got his wish.

  As the ear-shattering eruption of noise crescendoed, robed gunmen seemed to materialize out of ether. One second, the church seemed mostly empty, and the next, it was filled with target silhouettes, each one standing, and each one brandishing a rifle of some sort.

  Jonathan eliminated the most immediate threat by unleashing the remainder of his M4’s magazine-twenty-one steel-jacketed rounds-down the length of the gunmen to whom he’d tried to show mercy. The bullets left the muzzle of his rifle in seven three-round bursts, and the bad guys were so well aligned that individual bullets had to be taking out multiple targets as they passed through one person into the people standing behind him. He did it all from his knee, and in less than five seconds, the bodies were everywhere.

  With that threat neutralized, he shifted his aim to the rest of the cavernous room. He saw one gunman in the far right-hand corner-the red-black corner-but even as his finger tightened on the trigger, he saw blood spray from his shoulders, and he dropped, dead on the spot from a burst delivered by Boxers.

  As quickly as the sound had peaked, the room was now silent, save for the moans of the wounded. Jonathan yelled, “Big Guy?”

  “Fully satisfied,” Boxers yelled back.

  “And PC-Two?”

  “Still scared, still okay.”

  “Gunslinger?”

  Gail sat up on the stage, her legs crossed, and pressed her hand against her bleeding head. “I’m fine,” she said.

  Jonathan started his check of the room and the wounded. The issue at this point was not to provide them with medical assistance-they’d lost that courtesy when they opened fire en masse-but rather to disarm them to make sure that they could pose no further threat.

  The numbers were astounding. Jonathan counted eighteen dead and seven wounded, all of whom would likely be dead before the sun rose. With the gift of marksmanship came the curse of accuracy. While he surveyed the carnage from the green-side aisle, Boxers shadowed him from the red side. When they were done, they’d collected an impressive arsenal of weapons.

  They met in the middle, near the altar, where a Klansman lay with his head unzipped and his brain excised. Jonathan said, “I think we’re clear.” He walked a few steps to Gail, and stooped to assess her head wound. “Are you okay? Here, let me take a look.”

  She pulled away. “I’m fine.”

  “Let me see anyway,” he said. He pulled his NVGs out of the way for a better look. The candlelight wasn’t nearly bright enough, but he didn’t dare give the enemy outside a white-light target. He thought he saw a one-inch gash, maybe worthy of a couple of stitches, maybe not. “I think you’ll be fine,” he said.

  “I already told you that,” Gail replied. She surveyed the carnage, really taking it in for the first time. “What’s with these people? That was like a mass suicide.”

  “I write it off to zealotry,” Jonathan said.

  Christyne Nasbe stood from behind the pew where Boxers had taken shelter. “Where’s Ryan?”

  Boxers pointed his forefinger as if it were a gun. “You stay down.”

  “Shut up!” she shouted. “Where’s my son?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY – ONE

  Kendig Neen found himself overwhelmed. As faithful soldiers of the Army swarmed him, looking for leadership and a plan, he was desperately looking for Brother Michael. Unbelievably, several soldiers had reported seeing him and Brother Franklin running away after Brother Franklin bolted from the stage using the Nasbe boy as his shield.

  With Michael and Franklin both gone, Kendig was in charge, if only because of his position on the Board of Elders. He’d sidelined himself from the main event of the execution after Brother Michael berated him for showing cowardice.

  Oh, the irony.

  With a veritable war being fought inside the assembly hall, he needed to form a counterassault, and he needed to form it quickly. As the soldiers of the Army of God fled for their lives, he stood in the open, his arms extended, trying to stop them and bring order to chaos.

  Some stopped, most didn’t. Of those who did, the majority were members of his security unit. Virtually everyone who had gathered for the execution was armed, so firepower would not be a problem.

  He felt pleased that they’d only lost a few minutes to chaos. “Gather ’round me, brothers and sisters,” he shouted above the din. Those who heard-those who admitted that they’d heard-stopped and formed up around him.

  “Everybody settle down!” he called. “Who has hard data?”

  “Brother Zebediah is dead,” someone said.

  “Brother Neil and Sister Sonia Mary,” someone else said.

  Kendig waved off that information. “I don’t need a casualty report. I need to know how many people we’re facing and where they are.”

  “There must be many in the assembly hall,” someone said. “Listen to the
gunfire in there.”

  “That’s speculation,” Kendig said. “I want fact. I want to hear from people who have seen things with their own eyes, and who can report fact. ”

  A young lady-Kendig always had difficulty with names-stepped forward. “I saw a very large man take one of the prisoners inside the assembly hall.”

  “I saw Brother Franklin running away with the boy. With Ryan,” someone else said.

  The phrase running away triggered a disturbed murmur through the crowd.

  “Where’s Brother Michael?” a soldier asked.

  Kendig ignored the question. He needed to motivate these young men and women for action, and if they perceived that the top leadership had run for their lives, nothing good would follow. “What’s going on in the assembly hall?” he asked. “Who are the Users shooting at?”

  “Brother Benjamin was in there preparing for services after the executions.”

  “How many people did he have with him?”

  “Twenty. Maybe twenty-five.”

  “Did anyone see the assault force?” Kendig asked. With as many as twenty-five soldiers inside, maybe this whole incident could go away quickly.

  “I saw that one big soldier,” someone said.

  “Huge,” someone else corrected.

  “I think I also saw someone running after Brother Franklin.”

  Kendig turned his gaze toward the soldier who spoke of Brother Franklin. “So of course you hurried to help him.”

  The soldier looked at his feet.

  The crowd around him continued to grow, and as it did, a plan began to form in his mind. Two against many was impossible odds. If he could just “Brother Kendig!” someone yelled from the night. The tone was frantic.

  As one, the gathering crowd turned toward the voice. A clot of soldiers emerged from the night, still dressed in their ceremonial robes. Two appeared to be spattered with blood. “She killed four of us,” one of them said hurriedly. Kendig thought he remembered the young soldier’s name to be Brother Kurt. “We tried to stop her, but she fought us.”

  “A woman fought all of you?”