Threat warning

by John Gilstrap

  “We were in the process of disarming her when she got shots off.”

  Kendig couldn’t believe this. “All of you are armed,” he said. “Why didn’t you shoot back?”

  “We tried, Brother Kendig. We really tried. I think she got away into the assembly hall.”

  As if to punctuate his point, the shooting in the assembly hall crescendoed.

  “We did strip her of this, though,” Brother Kurt said. He handed Kendig a portable radio.

  Ryan had never heard so much noise. It rolled on and on, individual gunshots combining to form a continuous pounding. As he pressed himself into the corner and tried his best to dissolve into the floor he jumped at the sound of what could only be bullets sailing through the wall that separated him from the shooting. In the oppressive darkness, where his only sensory input was the bedlam of shooting and the stench of gunpowder, he found himself screaming, as if adding a human element to the cacophony would take the edge off so much death.

  And then it was over. Just like that, silence became more oppressive than the sound of battle. The silence came so abruptly that he wondered whether he’d gone deaf.

  He heard movement out there beyond the door, but it didn’t sound violent. It didn’t even sound urgent. Just voices talking about things.

  Suddenly the darkness of his room-and the loneliness of it-became unbearable. He’d been alone enough. He’d been scared and victimized enough. Now it was time for him to do something. He had no idea what that something might be, but by golly, he was going to do it. His hand tightened on the grip of his revolver.

  “Where’s Ryan?”

  Jesus, was that his mom?

  “You stay down!” boomed a voice.

  “Shut up! Where’s my son?”

  Ryan coughed out a laugh before he could stop it. That was definitely his mom’s voice; but it was attached to an entirely different brain.

  He decided that whether the good guys had won or lost, he was going to be with his mother. He stood and made his way to the door. He pushed it open.

  “Oh, my God,” he heard as soon as he stepped clear of the jamb. “Ryan!”

  He turned to his right, and there she was, dressed in the stupid white gown, her arms tied behind her. She ran toward him. She didn’t walk quickly, or jog; she ran.

  As she closed the distance between them, he instinctively turned to present his left side, shielding his right.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, I thought you were dead,” she said.

  She was still five yards away, when Scorpion stepped forward and held out his hand to stop her.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Scorpion said. He drew an ugly knife from somewhere over his left shoulder and made a swirling motion with his fingers for Christyne to turn around. The rope from her wrists fell away without resistance, and now she was ready to hug her son.

  “The arm, Mom!” Ryan said, but he knew that she knew, and he knew that there’d be no stopping the assault of kisses.

  She grabbed his face in both hands. “Oh, my sweet baby, I’ve been so scared. You’re so beautiful.” She kissed him again.

  Embarrassed, Ryan shot a glance at the other men in the room, and he saw that they were embarrassed, too. “Mom.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “You’re alive. We’re both alive.”

  She threw her arms around him, and somehow, it didn’t hurt.

  Emotion bubbled out of nowhere. One second he was embarrassed by all the mommy shit, and the next, he was completely absorbed by it. He wrapped his good arm around her, gun still gripped in his fist, and he buried his face in the crook where her neck met her shoulder.

  Wracking sobs came from a place in his gut that hadn’t been tapped since he was a kid. Shame and sadness and anger all flowed in an unnerving tsunami of emotion that startled him. And as his tears poured out of him, his mom rubbed his back, just as she’d done when he was a little boy.

  “Shh,” she said in his ear. “We’re fine. We’ll be fine. Shh.”

  He closed his eyes, and he tried to transport to a different time. A better time.

  For two seconds-maybe three-it worked.

  Then reality returned.

  Jonathan was a sucker for a tearful reunion. That was, after all, why he did what he did. But while the Nasbe family enjoyed their moment, he still had a war to fight.

  “Close those shutters!” he commanded. True to its role as the castle keep, heavy wooden shutters framed the assembly hall windows. To Jonathan’s eye, they were thick enough to stop all but the most powerful conventional firearms. Four-inch-wide slots had been cut vertically and horizontally to accommodate gun barrels in the event of a firefight. They ran from about four feet off the floor to six feet. When closed, they formed paired crosses over every window, as if to further blaspheme.

  Father Dom would not approve, Jonathan thought.

  His earpiece popped and a deep baritone voice said, “Whoever you are, we need to talk.”

  Jonathan shot a glance to Boxers, who shrugged. A glance toward Gail told him how the bad guys had gotten a radio. He unplugged the earphone jack so Gail could hear, and he pressed his mike button. “You may call me Scorpion,” he said.

  A derisive laugh. “Tough name,” the voice said. “Scary name.”

  “That’s him!” Ryan yelled, pushing away from his mother. “That’s the sheriff, the guy that picked me up. I forget his name.”

  Jonathan hadn’t. “Well, hello, Kendig,” he said.

  Kendig recoiled at the sound of his name.

  “How does he know you?” Brother Kurt asked.

  “He doesn’t,” Kendig snapped. “That boy-that Ryan-is in there. He must have-”

  “Are you in danger, sir?” Jonathan asked over the radio. “I’m sorry we let you down.”

  Kendig felt himself going pale. To the group around him, he said, “He’s playing a bluff.” He fumbled the delivery, though. He sounded too defensive, even to himself.

  “Try to run, Kendig,” Jonathan said. “Signal that you’re out of the line of fire and we’ll open up to keep their heads down.”

  He keyed his mike. “Nice try, Scorpion. Nobody out here is buying it.”

  “Oh, my God!” Jonathan exclaimed. “I didn’t know people could hear you. I, uh… I’m sorry.”

  Kendig looked to his assembled troops. Some of them were in fact buying it. “He’s trying to undermine my authority,” he said. “Brother Kurt, Brother Absalom, assemble your soldiers. Prepare them to assault the assembly hall.” Into the radio, he said, “Whoever you are, this is your one opportunity to surrender. In ten minutes, that opportunity expires.”

  When he lifted his thumb from the transmit button, he saw that neither of his commanders had moved. “Assemble your soldiers,” he said again.

  Brother Kurt shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “Where did these invaders come from, Brother Kendig?” As he asked the question, his hand shifted on the grip of his rifle.

  Kendig made himself swell larger and took a step closer to the young man. “Assemble your soldiers,” he growled. That deep baritone was a tool he’d perfected over the years. “Or I will shoot you right here and right now for mutiny.”

  “What the hell kind of gambit was that?” Boxers yelled from across the giant room as he slammed another set of shutters and slid their blocking bar into place.

  “Son of a bitch wanted to chat,” Jonathan explained, working on his own set of shutters. “So I chatted. I figured he had people nearby, and it wouldn’t hurt to throw some psy-ops into the mix.” He pointed to Gail. “Gunslinger, check the back of the altar. Make sure every door is locked and blocked. We may be here for a while.”

  As his ears recovered from the firefight, the moans of the wounded became more distinct.

  He eased by the Nasbes to block the windows of the vestry. As he reentered the sanctuary-what else do you call a big room with an altar?-he saw Christyne Nasbe approaching the cluster of Klansmen he’d shot behind the pews.

  �
��Whoa,” he said. “Stay away from them.”

  “My God, there are so many,” she gasped. “They’re suffering.”

  “They’re dangerous,” Jonathan countered. “All wounded animals are dangerous. Wounded animals who know how to shoot even more so. Stay away from them.”

  “But they’re bleeding. Can’t you help them?”

  Boxers said, “Let ’em bleed long enough and they won’t need help.”

  Leave it to Big Guy to take it one step too far.

  “What happens next?” Ryan asked.

  Jonathan answered by walking to the stacked firearms and ammunition, and coming back with two M16s and two belts of spare magazines. “What happens next is, it gets interesting,” he said. “How about giving me back that peashooter and taking this instead? Give that left arm of yours a workout.”

  The kid took it, but he wasn’t happy about it.

  “You want to shoot it out with them?” Christyne gasped. The horror was evident in both her tone and her body language. “They’ll kill us.”

  “Bet you thought you were dead ten minutes ago, didn’t you?” Boxer said. His voice rolled through the rafters of the sanctuary.

  “But there must be a hundred people out there.”

  Jonathan held out a rifle for her. “But there’s five of us.” He said it with his most charming smile.

  “That means we have to shoot twenty apiece,” Ryan said.

  “Well,” Jonathan said, “some of them will run away.” He was trying to keep it as light as he could, because the reality of their situation was at best dire.

  “Generally speaking, we prefer to plan a little more carefully,” Gail said from up at the altar. “But the whole execution thing put us on a fast track.” To Jonathan, she said, “Everything’s battened down back there.”

  “Are you really a friend of my dad’s?” Ryan asked.

  Christyne brightened. “You know Boomer?”

  “We worked together for a while,” Jonathan said.

  “So you’re in the Army?”

  Jonathan gave a coy smile. “We worked together for a while.”

  “Hey, Boss,” Boxers said from the red side wall. “I think you, me, and Gunslinger need to powwow.”

  Gail heard for herself and walked that way.

  To the Nasbes, Jonathan said, “You guys go on with your reunion. Stay away from the wounded, and if you see anything scary, yell out right away.”

  With that, he walked across the sanctuary to join his colleagues. “What’s up?” As if he didn’t know.

  “You realize our position is untenable, right?” Boxers asked, getting right to it.

  Jonathan inhaled loudly. These sorts of standoffs never worked out well for the people behind the barricade. Even with the reinforced walls, the good guys were still only one RPG round or even a bonfire away from dying in place or being overrun. “I’m open to any and all ideas,” he said.

  “Well, let’s take surrender off the table first,” Boxers said. “It’s not in my nature.”

  “Nor in mine,” Jonathan agreed. “Besides, their judicial system here sucks.”

  “We have the wounded,” Gail said. “They should give us at least a little leverage, don’t you think?”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Jonathan said. “They’re taught to kill themselves rather than submit. If that’s their worldview, the wounded are just collateral damage.”

  “I agree,” Boxers said. “So they’re coming. What do you think? Good old-fashioned frontal assault?”

  Jonathan shrugged. “If I were them, I’d run a feint attack on one side to buy time to set charges on the doors. Blow them, they’re inside and we’re dead.”

  Gail looked horrified. “You know, playing with you guys is nowhere near as fun as I had hoped.”

  Boxers said, “So, we each take a side and stick to our posts no matter what. Is that it?”

  Jonathan shrugged. “The best I can come up with. We’ll keep the Nasbes together on the green side. I’ll take white. Big Guy, you’re red. Gunslinger-”

  “Black,” she said. “I got it. And when we get home, I’m getting a new handle.”

  “All right,” Boxers said, heading to his post. “We’ll have us a good old-fashioned gunfight.” He’d never sounded more self-actualized.

  Jonathan headed off to give the Nasbes their assignments. He gave them a crash course in how to work their weapons, and then took them into the vestry and planted them in front of their assigned windows.

  “Keep your selector on single fire,” he told them for the second time. “If you see someone with a gun, shoot. If they fall down, move to the next target. If they don’t, shoot them again. Questions?”

  Each of their faces was like a giant blank oval.

  “Okay, good. I’ll be in the front. If you need anything, just shout out.” The muzzle of Christyne’s rifle had started to drift in toward Jonathan, so he reached out and gently pushed it to the side. “And try to remember to keep your weapon pointed outside.”

  “But the windows on the other side of the shutters are closed,” Ryan said.

  “They’re glass,” Jonathan said. “They’ll go away once the shooting starts.”

  This wasn’t the way an 0300 mission was supposed to go. If they came out the back end of this thing alive, he was going to owe Boomer one hell of an explanation.

  CHAPTER THIRTY – TWO

  Kendig’s ten-minute deadline was overly ambitious, but he’d known that when he’d first issued it. It would take longer than that to get the Army fully outfitted and ready to fight. Ultimately, as the deadline came and went, that would further unnerve the Users who had commandeered the assembly hall.

  The silence from inside the building seemed to have unsettled the soldiers in his Army as they moved farther and farther back from the building. There’d been no more suggestion of mutiny since Brother Kurt’s outburst, but the invader’s radio ruse had had some impact. Outside the Army’s security force, Kendig hadn’t had a lot of contact with the rank and file because there’d been no need. He was on the Board of Elders, and as such served an executive role; but living off the compound as he did, he didn’t get much opportunity to interact in routine matters.

  All of that translated to not a lot of personal loyalty.

  The ranks had thinned considerably. Some of his soldiers had been martyred, but he suspected that even more had fled. Those who remained-he figured it to be a force of eighty, maybe eighty-five-were terrified.

  The assault that lay ahead fell far outside any training that the cadre of soldiers had received. Their training had always focused on specialized two- or three-person disruption teams who focused on their particular missions. The idea of a mass assault had never been addressed.

  But now it was necessary.

  Once Sister Colleen returned from Brother Michael’s house with his equipment, they’d be ready to begin. He’d allowed her to take his sheriff’s vehicle, so it shouldn’t take long.

  As that thought was passing through his mind, he saw lights moving to his right, and he turned to see his Ford sedan pulling onto the grass from the driveway and heading straight toward him. When it stopped, he was shocked to see four people climb out. He walked over to join them, and as he closed to within a few yards, he recognized the sentry staff from the front gate.

  “I found them tied up in the trees,” Sister Colleen explained as she opened the tailgate and pulled out two cases that looked not unlike electric guitar cases, but which in fact contained Barrett M82A3 fifty-caliber sniper rifles.

  Kendig lost interest in the sentries and turned his attention to the rifles. “Only two?”

  “The other two are missing,” Colleen explained.

  Kendig scowled. “You checked the armory rooms in the basement?”

  “That’s where I found these.”

  “And the ammunition?”

  Sister Colleen pointed to the two cans on the car deck. “That’s them. Green and silver tips, right?”

&n
bsp; Kendig smiled. The heavy walls of the assembly hall made a conventional assault virtually impossible, but these Raufoss MK 211 explosive penetrator rounds would make quick work of it all. Tipped with an RDX explosive mixture, the Raufoss round left the barrel at twenty-eight hundred feet per second, but on impact with armor would launch a tungsten spike at four thousand feet per second to punch a three-quarter-inch hole. As the penetrator continued through the hole, it would spew zirconium particles, which would then ignite like a high-velocity sparkler. What wasn’t dismembered by the penetrator or blown apart by the high-order detonation of the RDX would likely be incinerated in the long-burning cloud of zirconium.

  It was a heck of a bullet.

  As he started to load ten-round magazines, he said to Sister Colleen, “Please find Brother Kurt and Brother Absalom and tell them I need to see them.”

  The narrow view allowed by the slots in the shutters rendered Jonathan’s NVGs useless. He wore them rocked back on his head and pressed his monocular against his eye. His first impression was that there were a lot of them out there, followed by a more depressing realization that they were becoming organized. What had once been a crowd of people swarming in their panic had settled down to something that resembled organized units.

  “Big Guy,” Jonathan called. “What do you see?”

  “I got nothing over here.”

  “Gunslinger?” When he got no response, he called again. This time, she responded. “Right here.”

  “Do you see any activity?”

  “Nothing back here.”

  “Hey, Nasbe family!”

  “We can’t see anything either,” Christyne reported.

  So their entire assault force was gathering in the front of the building. Why would they do that?

  “Hey, Big Guy?” Jonathan asked. “If you’re the opfor commander, why would you assemble your entire force to the same side of a structure?”

  “Got a lot of people out there, do you?” Boxers quipped. “They could just be stupid.”

  “Let’s assume they’re smart.”

  Boxers shook his head. “I can’t get there. If they knew what they were doing, they’d at least come in on two angles. Let’s shoot at them and get them to disperse. Lord knows we’ve got the ammo and weapons.”