No mercy

by John Gilstrap

  At the height of the workday, there would be as many as fifteen cars parked in the lot on the back side of the firehouse; at this time of night, it was usually barren. Tonight, however, the lot hosted a single vehicle, parked as far from the security light as possible. He thought he could see a silhouette behind the steering wheel, as if someone was watching the back door. He paused there in the mouth of the alley before continuing his stroll back up the hill toward the church.

  Dom glanced up at the third floor as he strolled, hoping to see some sign of activity, but the blinds were all pulled, as they so often were when Venice worked alone at night.

  Maybe he was overreacting. Jonathan was paranoid as hell that his friends and his staff might be victimized as a result of his work, and he’d years ago insisted that Venice and Dom both have sensors implanted under the skin near their armpits that would allow for easy tracking if the worst happened. He also insisted that they both carry panic buttons-Dom’s in the form of a crucifix, and Venice’s in the form of a gold pendant-that would kick emergency procedures into gear if needed. Venice had a panic button in her desk that would accomplish the same thing. If she were in the kind of trouble that Dom suspected, wouldn’t she have activated the system?

  He decided he didn’t care. His father had once bestowed upon him some great advice: sometimes, if there is doubt, then there really is no doubt at all.

  Dom took a deep breath and found a shadow where he felt most invisible. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed the number for the police department. He briefly thought about calling 9-1-1, but decided against bringing too much attention to what was fundamentally a gut feeling.

  The smoky voice that answered the phone could have been male or female. “Fisherman’s Cove Police Department. Is this an emergency?”

  “No emergency,” Dom said. “Is Chief Kramer in his office?”

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  “This is Father D’Angelo with St. Katherine’s Parish. I’d like to speak with the chief if I could.”

  “Good evening, Father. I’m sorry, sir, but the chief is not available at the moment. It’s a little late.”

  Of course it was a little late. After ten-thirty, for hese the mines!”

  “No!” Thomas and Stephenson answered together.

  “Scorpion might be out there,” Thomas added.

  He realized they were losing. Throwing Scorpion’s instructions to the wind, he’d changed the selector on his rifle from single-shot to three-round burst. The improved volume of fire slowed the attackers down, but as the breech on his weapon locked open for the third time and he inserted his fourth and final magazine, he realized that he was thirty rounds away from being in real trouble. Even as the thought passed through his mind, he fired another two bursts. Make that twenty-four rounds from a world of hurt.

  He slid the empty mags across the floor to his mother. “Hurry, Mom!” he shouted. She moved in slow motion, as if in a trance.

  There were no targets, per se, to shoot at. Instead, he found himself targeting the sparkles of muzzle flashes along the tree line and in the grass. His father had repositioned to the rear of the house again, where he apparently had all kinds of targets to shoot at, emptying clip after clip of automatic weapons fire through the two windows he commanded.

  Out front, the man Thomas had shot would not shut up. He screamed like a wounded animal, begging for someone to help him. If it hadn’t been so unnerving, it would have been sad. Twice, as Thomas stuck his weapon through the open widow to take another shot at the tree line, he’d considered helping the poor bastard to a bullet to his head, but both times he stopped himself. What was the point of wasting a bullet on someone who was already hit?

  He fired two more bursts. “Mom! Hurry on the reload! I’m almost out! You’ve got to work faster!”

  But she’d either gone deaf or was ignoring him, because she just kept her head down and continued to fumble with the rifle he’d already slid to her. “Jesus, Mom! Hurry.” She was unmoved. It was as if she’d set a pace for herself, and was by God going to stick to it.

  A two-man team charged forward, and he cut them down.

  His breech locked again. Unarmed now, and facing a yardful of attackers, just what the hell was he supposed to do? As the wounded man continued to scream, Thomas heard his father fire another six or seven shots through the back window.

  “This is fucking crazy,” he mumbled, and he scrambled on hands and knees across the wooden floor to his mother, who was crying as she struggled with the bullets.

  “I’m sorry,” she snuffled. “I’m trying, I’m really trying.”

  He snatched the magazine from her, along with the box of bullets, and scooted back toward the window. It felt about half-full. There had to be a better way.

  Wait. There was a better way.

  No, it was crazy.

  No, it was the only answer.

  Spinning like a propeller on the smooth pine floor, he scrambled back to his mother and grabbed her arm. “Mom, come with me,” he said.

  She looked horrified. “I can’t.”

  “You have to.” He tightened his grip and dragged her toward his window.

  “Ow!” she hollered. “Thomas, you’re hurting me!”

  He ignored her, even as he heard his father boom his name from the other room.

  Once again at the window, he peeked up long enough to fire again into the night, and then he ducked down again. He was hined. “Someone has to reload. I have to reload. I promise I’ll do it faster.”

  “Mom, goddammit, shut up and listen to me. All you have to do is fire out the window. Just for a few seconds.”

  “I can’t.”

  “And try not to hit me.”

  That last part flew right by her, unnoticed. “I can’t do it, Thomas. Please don’t make me.”

  He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. “Then don’t,” he said.

  He snapped his night vision back into place, and hefted himself up and over the sill into the night.

  The rate of fire outside doubled.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Dom entered the sanctuary through the side door and locked it behind him. He made a beeline for the space behind the confessionals where a semiconcealed door led to the concrete stairway into the basement. As intimidating an underground space as Dom had ever seen, the cavernous basement under St. Kate’s had been blasted out of solid rock during construction back in the thirties, and as far as Dom knew, it still contained every item that had ever been deposited there. Boxes of old bulletins and stacks of broken furniture lined the walls, and in the middle, stoutly constructed metal shelves held all manner of old toys, tools, gardening equipment, and even three cases of beer that might have dated back to Prohibition. Even with the overhead lights turned on, you needed a flashlight to find anything. Over the years, Dom had considered assigning children to the task of cleaning the place up as a form of particularly aggressive penance, but always backed off in the end.

  He hurried to the far side and pushed an ancient Nativity scene out of the way to gain access to the mostly blocked heavy door that would take him into Jonathan’s tunnel. A crooked picture hid the keypad, which was recessed into the concrete wall.

  Dom settled himself before entering the code, knowing that he only had three shots at getting it right. He punched the 14 numbers carefully, using the ridiculous mnemonic that he’d never shared with anyone. “TRA HELEFUNT BOX” produced the numeric code, 8-7-2-4-3-5-3-3-8-6-8-2-0-9, an entirely random cipher. He pressed Enter, listened as the locks slid out of place, and then pushed the heavy panel open. Using the green glow from his cell phone, he found the light switch. Fluorescent light tubes flickered to life, revealing the passage.

  Once inside, he didn’t bother to close the door on his end. Instead, he took the eight steps to the tile floor in two strides, and ran the distance to the other end, where another heavy door stood between him and the basement of the firehouse. As he entered the identical code,
it occurred to him that he’d never passed through this portal without Jonathan at his side. In fact, be believed that this was the first time he’d even been in the tunnel alone. What would be the point? When the locking pin cleared, he pushed on the door to open it.

  It resisted him. It felt as if something on the other side was in the way. He pushed harder, and when the door still pushed back, he gave it everything he had. The door gave way, and as it did, Dom realized what had been holding it back.

  He’d forgotten about the empty oil tank that Jonathan used to ca angry look at Venice, but whatever it was had startled her, too.

  He snatched his cell phone from the desk and pushed a button. “What the hell was that?” he asked. He spoke into it as if it were a walkie-talkie.

  “What was what?” a voice asked.

  “That bang. I heard a big bang.”

  “I heard nothin’ out front,” the voice said.

  “What about you, Garino?” Charlie asked.

  A different voice said, “I didn’t hear anything either.”

  Charlie scowled. “You seen anything unusual?”

  “I’ve seen nothin’,” the first voice said. “Not even any people, for Christ sake. This is one dead town. Only thing I saw was a priest out for a night stroll.”

  Venice’s heart jumped.

  Charlie’s eyes narrowed as he looked straight through her. Into the radio, he said, “Garino, I want you to come in through the back and check out the downstairs.”

  “What am I looking for?” Garino wasn’t being difficult; his question sounded heartfelt.

  “Anything,” Charlie said. “A priest, maybe.” As he said that, he watched Venice and smiled. “And if you see one, shoot him.”

  “You want me to shoot a priest?” He sounded horrified.

  “A little late to worry about hell, don’t you think?” Charlie jabbed. “Let me know whatever you see.”

  Thomas fell hard onto the wooden porch, and as he did, the tree line became a light show of flashing strobes. Bullets slammed all around him, pulverizing the wall and the floor and peppering him with shredded wood. Moving faster than he knew he was capable of, he rolled two times to his left and dropped from the porch onto the ground, where a long divot caused by years of rainwater erosion along the front edge of the porch provided some shelter.

  “Thomas, get in here!” his mother shouted.

  “Jesus, Mom, shoot!”

  This was a really, really bad idea. He was in the middle of a war without a weapon, with the whole world trying to shoot him. Paralyzed by terror, he tried to figure a way to move either backward or forward without getting torn to pieces. Pressing himself into the ditch, he inchwormed backward, parallel to the porch, until he was even with where he thought the now-silent screaming man had fallen.

  Suddenly the man’s gun and ammunition seemed less important. With remarkable clarity, he decided that he was fucked. The moment he raised his head, he would die.

  Then he heard the rapid fire of a machine gun from behind him, and his father’s voice yelled, “Go get it, Thomas! I’ll keep their heads down.”

  It was his best chance. Thomas closed his eyes, made himself as skinny as possible, and hoisted himself out of the trench onto his belly. He kept his butt low as he crawled like a frightened lizard toward the lump that was the fallen attacker.

  A giant crescendo of incoming gunfire made him cringe, but the piercing impact of a bullet never came. In fact, the bad guys’ aim seemed to have worsened. His dad’s distraction was working, drawing fire away from him toward the front window.

  Quickening his pace, he dug his fingers and toes into the cold hard ground, filling his sinuses with the smell of dirt and his own fear. Then there was something else, a horrific stench that brought images of rotted dog shit. The ground grew damp, and within a few feet, it became wet and slipperfinally was upon the body-and that’s clearly what it was now, with its open eyes and lolling tongue-he realized that he was lying in the man’s spilled intestines.

  The horror of it hit Thomas hard. Without thought or preamble, he vomited all over both of them.

  Jesus God, what had he done to this man?

  Two bullets slammed into the dead man’s side, and two more whizzed past Thomas’s head, their supersonic whip crack pounding his eardrums.

  Fuck this. Now was not the time for reflection or regret. It was time to load up with ammunition and make more of these bastards look like their friend here.

  The dead man’s rifle-an M16, Thomas remembered from the History Channel-lay on the ground next to the body. He snagged it by its sling with his right hand, and pulled it in close. But a rifle by itself was no good without the ammunition to feed it, and this dead man carried his ammunition all over his body, the way that Scorpion did. Thomas started to remove the man’s vest, until another near hit changed his mind. Grabbing the man by his collar, he dragged him back toward the shelter of the divot. He ignored the long rope of entrails that snaked along behind them.

  Jonathan tried one more time to raise someone on the radio, and cursed at the continued silence. He considered that the Hugheses might be dead, but if so, then who was everybody shooting at up there? Given the heat of the battle, he was willing to forgive Stephenson for losing track of his radio, but there was no excuse for Venice leaving her post like this.

  He crossed the final rise and saw the scale of the assault being mounted against the lodge. This really was a war.

  Ivan’s strategy was obvious. The attackers had formed a wide V-shaped formation, coming at the lodge from its front and right. He imagined that there were attackers in the rear, as well, but that part of the house was invisible from his angle. Jonathan cursed himself for having underestimated his opponent. There wasn’t much he could have done differently, short of reading Ivan’s mind, but that didn’t change the fact that their tactical situation sucked.

  He keyed his radio. “Hey Box, are you close?”

  “Right behind, you,” he said, inches away from Jonathan’s ear.

  He damn near shit his pants. “Goddammit, don’t do that.”

  Boxers laughed. “This doesn’t look good for the good guys,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, just wait.” He explained what he wanted to do.

  To Dom’s ears, the crash of the oil tank was louder than an explosion. It reverberated off the concrete walls, echoing like a gunshot in the Grand Canyon.

  Running was out of the question. If Venice was in trouble, he had to help her out. And staying put was out of the question, too. The words of a long-forgotten football coach bloomed in his memory: If you’re not moving forward, then you’re going backward. Reborn in the acid bath of panic, he heard the advice as, If you don’t get out of this basement, you’re going to die.

  Again using the light of his cell phone as a guide, he navigated through the assembled junk and glided up the stairs into the old hose tower, and from there, through the utility room. He held his breath as he cracked the door to the living room open an inch and looked around. Everything looked as it always did: neat, organized. In the glow of the street light that painted parallelograms of light through the old bay doors, he could make out the outlines of the furniture. There continuhovrom the end of the porch you can run around-”

  A fusillade of bullets ripped at the floor of the porch just above Thomas’s head. They’d locked in on his position. He needed to move. Now. His only viable plan was to emerge from the trench as fast as he could, then dash around back and hope that there weren’t a thousand bad guys waiting for him.

  “Thomas, did you-”

  “I heard you!” he shouted. And so did everybody else, he thought. Where the hell was Scorpion?

  He rose to his knees, with his elbows still pressed to the ground, butt up, then raised his head to take a look. The flashes in the trees had become people now, and they were moving toward him in a wide line that ran parallel to the front of the cabin. With the distorted vision, he had no idea how far they were, but it couldn’t ha
ve been more than forty or fifty yards.

  On impulse, Thomas brought his new rifle to his shoulder, rested the forestock against the ground, and picked a target. He squeezed the trigger just as he’d been taught, and jumped as the muzzle spit out a long burst in full-automatic mode. The target he’d picked flopped like a rag doll onto the ground, and the four or five attackers closest to him dove for cover.

  His hidey hole became the battleground’s most popular target. Bullets shredded the wood and churned the turf at the edge of the porch. Thomas heaved himself out of the trench onto the open ground, falling forward into the grass and eating a mouthful of turf. Behind him, the section of ground he’d just left was consumed by a sustained burst of incoming fire. Scrambling to get his balance, his feet found traction and he ran for the nearest corner of the house.

  Three steps later, a sharp jolt slammed him hard and he yelled in horror and pain as his leg hinged up at mid-thigh and his own foot kicked him in the face.

  Venice could see the fear in Charlie Warren’s eyes and hear it in his voice as he tried unsuccessfully to raise his people on the radio. He glared at her. “What’s going on?”

  Completely immobile, and at the whim of this man who seemed intent on killing, Venice opted to say nothing.

  “Do you know a priest?” Charlie asked.

  “We live next to a church,” she said. “This is a small town.”

  “What would he be doing here?”

  She shook her head. “I have no idea.”

  “Call out to him. Tell him that you’re busy and can’t be disturbed.”

  That didn’t even make sense, she thought. Why would she say such a thing?

  “Say it,” Charlie repeated. This time he pressed his pistol to her head. “If I see anyone, I’m going to shoot.”