Watchers in the Woods

by William W. Johnstone

“Oh, God damn it, Rich. Don’t those dunderheads realize that troops are paid wherever they are? They get the same pay sitting in the barracks as they do out in the field. It’s Ron Arnold, isn’t it?”

  “He, ah, is certainly very vocal about it, yes.”

  “I’m going to kill that son-of-a-bitch when this is over, Rich.”

  “Husky, don’t say things like that over the phone!”

  “I mean it. That asshole is dead meat.”

  Matt hung up on Richard’s frantic sputterings. The acting DCI knew only too well that Matt Jordan meant every word.

  At the two-story lodge they all watched Matt as he slammed down the phone and cut loose with a stream of profanity that would have awed a drunken dockworker.

  “Wow!” Walter said, as Matt finally wound down.

  “Totally awesome,” Traci said.

  “What language was that last bit in?” Milli asked.

  “Portuguese,” Matt said. “Sorry, people. I usually keep a better lid on my temper.”

  “Cars coming up the drive,” Tommy called from a front window. “Two of them.”

  Matt walked to the window and looked out as Norm and Wade and their families pulled up. “Well, the gang is once more united.”

  “Let’s hope this reunion is quieter than the previous one,” Susan said.

  Matt picked up his Mini-14 and walked out onto the porch. He jacked a round into the chamber in reply.

  * * *

  “I’m pretty sure we weren’t followed,” Norm said. “At least, not on the last leg, anyway. I linked up with Wade in Stockton and we both were pretty careful getting there.”

  “We’ll know in a few hours,” Matt said, glancing around at the darkness that was slowly circling them. ‘Come on. Let’s get settled in.”

  The lodge was built of stone native to the area, Matt guessed. With the exception of a small bedroom downstairs—probably built with live-in help in mind—all the bedrooms were on the second floor. Matt took the downstairs bedroom. He intended to do some prowling at night if the tribe members-gone-bad found their hidey-hole.

  After a supper of hot dogs, beans, and potato chips, Matt checked his perimeter bangers and the few boobytraps he’d been able to set before darkness had stopped him and then took a nap, telling the others to wake him when the last ones were ready for bed.

  Susan touched his shoulder and he was wide awake. “Easy,” she said. “I stayed awake while the others went to sleep. I knew you’d probably want to be up the rest of the night.”

  “You got that right. What time is it?”

  “Midnight. How do you feel?”

  “Good . . . very refreshed. Ready for some action,” he added with a smile.

  “Oh?” she returned the smile. “What’d you have in mind, big boy?”

  He stretched out on the bed, hands behind his head, and met her gaze in the dim light coming from the other room. “It’d be a hell of a time for the breakaways to hit us.”

  She began unbuttoning his shirt. “I’m hoping it’d be worth the risk,” she said, her voice low.

  It was.

  6

  Matt gently untangled himself from her arms and dressed quietly. He looked at the bedside clock: 12:45. It had been a frantic first ten minutes, then a short rest, and then a slow, measured lovemaking. He made sure the window over the bed was securely locked, then picked up his Mini-14 and slipped out of the bedroom.

  He was not surprised to find Norm on guard on the front porch. Norm grinned at him. “If I’d told Susan I was out here, you and she would never have had so much fun.”

  “Did we make that much noise?”

  “Only an occasional moan or two.” He laughed softly. “No, I’m just kidding. But I was about to come and get you. I saw lights down the road about five minutes ago. Several sets. Then they went dark. I think we’re going to have company in about fifteen minutes. I figured the perimeter bangers would jar you from the throes of ecstasy.”

  “I’ll stay out here if you’ll double-check the windows on the first floor,” Matt said. “Then you take the back.”

  “Will do. See you when the action is over.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  Matt was alone on the darkened front porch. He clicked the Mini-14 off safety and put his back to the wall. It was eminiscent of his days in ’Nam: he knew the enemy was out there, could sense them drawing closer, but he couldn’t see them. And he was too old a hand to shoot at shadows.

  He wanted to tell them to give it up. They could not win. He wished he could tell them to go home, fight the killing urges that silently screamed at them, but he knew he could not do that. To call out would be to give away his position and to die. He waited.

  He heard a very faint sound: a leather sole scraping against gravel. He did not move his head at the sound; only his eyes shifted. The urge-followers were about a hundred yards from the lodge, very faint shapes in the cloudy night. Was it them? Or some kids playing games in the night? Maybe some locals up in the mountains come to frighten the tourists? He just couldn’t be sure.

  They came in a rush and there was no more doubt. One tripped a perimeter banger, and Matt dropped to one knee at the sound of the mini-explosion and filled the night’s darkness with lead death in the form of .223s.

  In the rear of the lodge Norm was laying down a heavy pattern of gunfire, the reports of his rifle shattering the mountain stillness.

  Matt shifted position and ejected the near-empty clip, slipping in a full thirty-round clip, jacking in a round as he moved away from the wall.

  “Lights?” he heard Dennis shout the question from above him.

  “Yes,” Matt yelled. “Flood it.”

  All around the lodge floodlights clicked on, filling the area with harsh light. The lights caught the urge-followers by surprise, momentarily freezing them in the yard. Dennis and Wade had shotguns, the plug taken out of the tube and the tube filled with double-ought buckshot. Dennis ran to the front of the house, Wade to the rear. Their shotguns roared and the buckshot ripped into flesh. Several men and at least one woman lay dead on th ground. Two men were screaming in pain on the rock lawn as they bled to death in the artificially brilliant light

  A man leaped onto the porch, his shape making long shadows from the light to the gloom. Matt shot him twice and he fell over his side, one foot catching on the rail. He dangled and died. Another urge-follower made the porch howling his rage and frustration. Matt stilled the wildness in him forever.

  “Back, back!” came the call from the edge of the lighted area. Matt recognized the voice as Cathy’s. He lifted his rifle and emptied a clip in her direction.

  “No!” he heard someone scream. “God damn you, no!”

  “Is she hit?” a voice called.

  “She’s dead.”

  Savage howling and screaming followed that.

  Matt quickly changed clips and emptied that one in the direction of the screaming. The screaming stopped, fading from a painful choking gurgle into silence.

  As he again changed clips, he heard running footsteps, the sounds fading away. “Hold your fire!” Matt yelled.

  In a few moments, far below the lodge, one vehicle pulled away, its headlights blazing. “Call the sheriffs department, Dennis. This has to be reported.”

  “What if they are some of them?” Milli called.

  “It has to be reported. Just keep your guns handy.”

  * * *

  The sheriff shook his head at the carnage. He had carefully inspected Matt’s credentials and handed them back to him. “I got two deputies who didn’t show up for work on this shift,” he said. “Now I know where one of them is.” He pointed to a dead man lying on the rocky lawn. “We started blood testing yesterday afternoon. I guess he figured it was all over but the shouting.”

  “It’s nationwide, Sheriff . . . if that’s any consolation,” Matt told him. “We had them in our department, too.”

  “Les was a pretty good cop,” the sheriff said. “But looking back,
he could act, well, strange at certain times.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He never liked to work when the moon was full. And when he did, those who were his partners said he seemed to be fascinated by it. Maybe I should have put it together . . . I don’t know. You folks going to stay on here after this?”

  “Right here, Sheriff.”

  “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  “Here’s Cathy!” Wade called, walking around the body-littered lawn with a deputy.

  Matt walked over to the body, the sheriff with him. “You know this woman?” the lawman asked.

  “She was married to a friend of ours. We graduated from high school together. His kids killed him in Denver.”

  “I got a teletype about that. You folks had been on a camping trip in Idaho. You’re the one found that lost tribe of . . . whatever the hell they are. Frank somebody.”

  “Nichols.” Matt looked down at Cathy. She had been shot at least half a dozen times, several of the slugs striking her in the face. She was no longer pretty. “Did theauthori-ties ever track down her kids?”

  “Not that I know of. I just hope to hell they aren’t in my area. This is not the first killing tonight,” the sheriff admitted.

  “Nor will it be the last,” Matt told him.

  “You’re just a real bundle of glad tidings, aren’t you?” the sheriff said.

  * * *

  The sheriff’s deputies and the city police stayed busy that night, and not just in the one county in California where Matt and the others were staying. All over the nation people were staying up, loaded guns by their sides, praying for the dawn to break to bring an end to the horror.

  Lab technicians were working around the clock all over the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Hundreds of people failed to show up for work, left their homes to go to work and never returned, or stuck guns in their mouth: and put an end to the nightmare they’d been living. At the sheriffs office in Los Angeles County, Ken went berserk, killing a dozen deputies and wounding a dozen more before other deputies shot him dead. At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a paratrooper burst into the officer’s club and began spraying the crowded club with M-60 fire before he was shot by an MP. An airline pilot put his jet into a dive and took more than a hundred passengers to their deaths. A bus driver spun the steering wheel and plunged over the side of a mountain in Georgia. The few survivors said he was laughing hysterically all the way down. A truck driver floorboarded his 18-wheeler and crashed into a crowded truck stop in Arkansas.

  The President stayed up all night, close to a bank of phones and to his advisers. He reached the point where he would cringe each time the phone rang, knowing it was a body count as across the nation it continued to mount.

  In Omaha, a man was shot dead as he went out into his back yard to check on his dog. A neighbor thought he was an urge-follower and killed him with a shotgun.

  In Austin, Texas, a teenage girl was killed by a gang of vigilantes after she refused to stop her car at their illegal road block. They told police they were checking for them blood-sucking and cannibalistic monsters that might be trying to infiltrate their neighborhood. The police told them they were under arrest for murder.

  In Detroit, a full-blown race riot erupted after police tried to arrest a black man who bolted after refusing to take a blood test. He was shot dead. At dawn, parts of the city were still burning as firefighters could not get close enough to fight the flames due to the many thrown bottles and bricks, and an occasional gunshot.

  In Miami, a group cornered an urge-follower who had killed several people and had been run down by the mob. The urge-follower was Hispanic, the mob mainly black. Riot police—already short-handed—just sealed off the area and let them fight it out.

  The President looked at the new body-count chalked onto a blackboard and shook his head. “Is this night ever going to end?”

  At dawn, on the edge of the Great Primitive Area of Idaho, six men swung into their saddles and rode toward the newly declared reservation area of Ty and his tribe. An animal was an animal—whether it walked upright or on all fours (didn’t none of them believe that no animal could talk English like they’d read in the newspapers and heard on the TV) and nobody had the right to tell them they couldn’t hunt one. They were going to, by God, get them all a trophy to stick up on the wall.

  They carried weapons ranging in power from a .30-.06 to a .458 that was capable of bringing down a rampaging Cape buffalo at full gallop.

  “What’d your old lady say when you left, Al?” Art Callahan asked.

  “Told me I was a fool for comin’ in here. I told her to kiss my ass.”

  Russell Weaver laughed. “You wouldn’t tell a lie, now, would you, Al?”

  “Nope. I want to see her face when I drag one of these ugly bastards home with me and have it stuffed.”

  Steve Simpson winked at his son Sonny and said, “Since them hotshot army ranger soldier boys pulled out, we don’t have nobody to fool with except the forest service people. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble bagging us each one of these cannibals. Last time we was in here, Sonny got him a bald eagle. Sure looks pretty, all stuffed up and sitting on that perch in his den.”

  “Maybe I can get another shot at a wolf,” Baxter Campton said. “I only wounded the last one I shot at. I guess the son-of-a-bitch drug hisself off and died. I never could find him. He was a beauty, too.”

  “We’re gonna have us a good time, boys!” Art said. “The weather’s good, we got lots of booze on the pack horses, and we gonna kill us a monster apiece. Goddamn, we gonna have some fun!”

  “You reckon they’ll kick and squall like that bear we shot last year?” Russell asked. “That was a show all by itself, wasn’t it?”

  They all agreed it was indeed quite a show watching the bear die.

  “Yeah,” Sonny said. “Until that bunch of hunters come up and killed it. Said people like us shouldn’t be allowed to hunt. Said it was wrong to allow an animal to suffer like that. Said if it was up to them we’d all be put in jail. I can’t figure out why they got so upset about a damn bear. I still think we should have kicked their butts.”

  “Candyasses, son. That’s all. Just a bunch of damned candyasses. They wasn’t worth getting into a fight over. Wearing all that damn hunter orange. Hell, you could see ’em coming for a mile and a half.”

  “I’m with Sonny,” Al said. “We should have laid down our guns and kicked some butt.”

  “Yeah,” Baxter said. “It’s people like that bunch that give huntin’ a bad name.”

  7

  Once the final tally was complete, it proved to be the bloodiest night in American history. The death count moved past five thousand just before dawn. The nation’s jails, already packed to overflowing, were now jammed full of both suspected tribe-followers and those who had been taken alive during their acts of savagery and cannibalism. The ACLU was screaming in outrage and was totally ignored; the populace was in no mood for their tirades.

  Blood testing was proceeding at the fastest pace possible and the doctors were learning, and passing on to the public, the fact that only about one in fifty of those whose ancestors came from the tribe were dangerous. The rest were just normal, decent, hardworking citizens who were just as frightened for their lives as anyone else.

  All the military had been called out in the United States, Canada, and Mexico to assist the local authorities in keeping order and in rounding up what remained of the savage element of the tribe.

  Frank and Cathy’s kids had elected to go down bloody. They were killed during a raid in a home on the outskirts of Denver, along with several others of their kind.

  Ron Arnold, several hours after one of his on-air and near-screaming tirades against the tribe, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Army Rangers, was enjoying a cocktail in his luxurious New York City apartment. I was to be his last cocktail. Divorced from his third wife and with no prospects of marriage in his future and no knowing how to boi
l water, he had ordered Chinese anc was expecting the knock on the door. He did not get his Chinese food. He threw open the door, opened his mouth to scream, and got a big knife blade across his throat, the savage force of it almost decapitating him. Ron Arnold died with a very surprised look on his face. The food delivery man arrived just a few moments after the police got there. He gave his box of food to a cop and got the hell gone from the apartment building. A NYC detective ate the moo goo gai pan. He commented that it needed just a touch more salt and then went wandering off looking for an antacid tablet.

  Matt called Simmons at his Denver office. “I think we’ve finally got a handle on the situation, Matt. We’re going to miss a few of them, and there’ll be more killings, but nothing like what we’ve seen so far.”

  “That was a chancy thing the President did, declaring martial law and suspending most constitutional rights pertaining to arrest and questioning.”

  “A damn ballsy thing on his part. But for once the majority of the press kept their damned mouths shut about it. You heard about Ron Arnold?”

  “No. What happened to the sleezebag?”

  “He’s dead. About an hour ago. Somebody cut his throat in his apartment.”

  “I hope you’re not waiting for me to offer condolences.”

  “I don’t know of any cop who’s all that torn up about his demise. That man stayed on the backs of law enforcement. How’s your situation out there?”

  “Stable. The sheriff out here is a good man. He got the lid on his county in a hurry and didn’t do it gently. As soon as things are back to normal here, I’m going back in to see how Ty is getting along.”

  “Let me know when and I’ll go in with you.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  Matt walked out on the front porch and sat down beside Susan. “It is over?” she asked.

  “Just about. They’ll be scattered incidents of killing by the urge-followers for a long time to come—maybe for the rest of our lives—but nothing to match what’s gone on the past few days. I think maybe a couple more days here and you can all go home.”

  “And you, Matt?”