by James Hunt
Rage flooded Rodney’s veins, and he stopped his climb while Mark, Dalia, and Yvonne continued their ascent. Rodney reached for the rifle, letting go of the steep ledge, and slid down with an avalanche of snow.
“Rodney, no!” Mark yelled, but his voice was snuffed out by the growing wind. Rodney’s boots planted against the snow and ice, and he cranked the lever of his rifle to load a bullet. He wanted to see these people. He wanted to meet the man in charge of those that would kill and rape so willingly. He wanted to see the face of the men he planned to kill.
Rodney leaned against the back side of one of the cabins near the town’s east end. Flames grew hotter and wilder on the west end, the convicts marching their way down, torching the buildings one by one.
Heat from the flames burned a hole through the cold, and ash drifted down with the snow, staining the pure white with grey. He hurried down the nearest alley and stopped at the edge. He craned his head around the corner, and what he saw burning in the light of the flames made him gasp.
It wasn’t a group of thugs, or a gang laced together with matching tattoos marching into town. The numbers that they’d estimated weren’t even close. What Rodney got a look at was a group of eighty-plus armed men. It was an army.
He quickly scanned the line of men, all of them marching without any type of structural ranking. He crouched to one knee and aimed. He could pick off four of them before they even knew what hit them.
The first man came into Rodney’s crosshairs. He steadied then squeezed the trigger. The man dropped, and Rodney moved to his right, finding a confused and frightened man aimlessly gripping a shotgun. Rodney fired again.
The second convict joined his comrade on the ground. The ranks panicked now, most of them firing blindly to the east. A few bullets nicked the front of the porch that Rodney was tucked behind, but none of them got close enough for him to even feel the breeze.
Rodney lined up another shot and fired again, this time pushing the front lines back as a third convict dropped to the ground. A brass casing ejected from the rifle’s side as another quickly took its place. He gritted his teeth and lined up another shot, but the crosshairs at the end of the scope wavered. He was shaking now. Trembling from anger, and from fear, and from the cold at his back.
One of the inmates screamed, charging forward, firing at anything that looked funny, and a few stray bullets pushed Rodney from the alley. He cut behind the back of the building and leaned against the wall, the rifle barrel tilted toward the sky. He shut his eyes, which stung with sweat. He knew he couldn’t take them all on by himself. It was a suicide mission.
In one swift movement, Rodney darted from the cabin, sprinting as fast as his legs would carry him toward the ridge. His muscles burned as he ascended the slope, and once he was at the top, he turned to find the valley below in flames.
The fire burned bright and hot, and Rodney saw the clusters of inmates forced back toward the west end near the highway. Rodney wasn’t sure how long he watched the buildings smolder into nothing but ash, but by the time he turned around, his eyes burned along with the town.
Rodney broke into a sprint and eventually found Mark and Dalia up ahead. Mark kept asking him questions. What did he see? What did he do? But Rodney kept silent. They needed to put distance between them and the army. And they needed to get to Kate before she left the highway patrol station. If it was even still there.
Dennis leaned back on the hood of an old F-150 and closed his eyes, but the light of the fire was even visible through his eyelids. He smiled, listening to a few of the men hoot and holler as they watched the place burn.
But then Dennis heard the gunshots. When he watched four of his men go down, he leapt off the truck with the agility of a cat, landing gracefully on his feet. He watched from the road as his men were pushed back. He squinted up ahead to find the shooter, but the flames were too bright, and the fire cast too many shadows.
“You don’t back down!” Dennis spit the order from behind safety, and when they didn’t heed his words, they heeded his bullets. Dennis fired four shots next to the feet of the men in the rear, and pushed them forward. “Find them, you cowards!”
One of his men broke free at the front, charging wildly, but by then the flames had caught the rest of the houses, and it forced everyone back. The fire raged so hot that Dennis had forgotten about the cold. He found Mulls and ordered Martin and Billy to him immediately.
When the pair arrived, he grabbed Billy by his collar. “I want you to search the area. You find any tracks, and you stick to them until you find whoever made them. And do not come back to me without a body or another place to burn, you got it?”
They nodded, and Dennis flung the younger sibling back, sending them off into the storm. Dennis lifted his face toward the sky, squinting due to the snowfall. He wondered if it would be another bad one like they had before, but he didn’t think so. Those types of storms they’d experienced tended to be one in a season.
The prospect of the townspeople escaping was more troublesome. He thought of the people who’d killed his men at the hospital. The fact that there were people out there that slipped away made that bug in his head skitter. But they wouldn’t be able to evade his best trackers again. Those brothers were more bloodhound than human.
“Boss,” Mulls said, coming up behind him. “Let’s get out of here. There’s nothing to salvage, and we don’t know when this storm is going to end.”
“No,” Dennis said.
“Dennis, we have to—”
“We hit the trooper station, now!” He hammered his fist in the air and leaned toward Mulls in the process. “Get the guys, and tell them to get back on the highway.”
Mulls gestured toward the sky, the wind picking up and blasting a sheet of snow against his body. “The storm is only going to get worse! We won’t even be able to see what we’re shooting at, and we haven’t sent scouts to the station to see what we’re up against!”
The bug gnawed at the bits of wiring in his brain, tearing violence and rage loose. The rest of the signals suddenly fried, and he whirled around, fist aimed for Mulls’s face, and the harsh contact caused the bone to emit a loud crack in the cold that bit and stung both men.
Mulls cupped the cheek that Dennis had hit. “Son of a bitch!” The big bear charged Dennis, tackling him hard to the pavement. His sheer weight and size gave him the upper hand as they sprawled over the snow, fists clenched and arms ramming them into whatever flesh they could find.
Dennis lifted his knee and connected with Mulls’s groin. Mulls yelped in pain, seizing up long enough for Dennis to fling him off.
Mulls rolled to his back on the pavement, scrunching his face in pain, as Dennis jumped on him to seize the opportunity.
Every punch into Mulls’s face bloodied Dennis’s knuckles. The cartilage in his nose crunched and dissolved with each blow. The tension in Mulls’s body released, and his arms and limbs lay limp at his sides. Dennis’s arm grew heavy, and he strained, but he kept beating the man’s face. The bug burrowed deeper and deeper into his mind.
“My way!” Dennis screamed into Mulls’s lifeless face. “My way! My way! My way! My way!” Each phrase was met with another blow until Mulls’s face was no longer recognizable.
Gasping for air, and exhausted, Dennis rolled off Mulls and sprawled out on the snowy pavement next to him. Blood covered his right arm, his face, and his chest. He coughed and then glanced over at Mulls’s lifeless body.
The bug stopped digging, and Dennis rolled to his side, pushing himself up off the ground. He wobbled back on his feet, and when he looked down at Mulls, he knew the big bear was dead. He turned around, finding Jimmy standing behind him, rifle in hand.
Jimmy’s gaze fell from Dennis to Mulls then back to Dennis. The thickened snowfall made it difficult to make out the features on Jimmy’s face, but it was easy to see the shotgun aimed at him.
“What did you do?” Jimmy said, his arms trembling, his voice stuck in that high octave. Three qui
ck steps put him an arm’s length away from Dennis, and the anger on his face was clear as day now. “What did you do?”
Dennis glanced down at Mulls’s body and then back to the end of Jimmy’s shotgun. “You going to shoot me, Jimmy?” He made it one step before the familiar tha-chunk of a pump-action twelve gauge stopped him cold.
Jimmy lowered his eyes to Mulls once again, and the anger faded to sadness, but it was gone by the time they returned to Dennis. “Christ. You killed him!”
“And what did Mulls ever do for you?” Dennis asked, his eyes searching for any more of his men that could be lurking, growing bolder when he realized they were still alone. “It was my idea to take the towns. It was my idea to gather supplies.” He shuffled very careful steps toward Jimmy with each sentence, unnoticeable in their small increments. “You know what Mulls wanted? He wanted us to lie low, forget about it.” Dennis pointed toward the smoldering town. “This is what happens when you lie low!”
“Maybe.” Jimmy shook his head, raising the shotgun to his shoulder and taking aim. “But you didn’t do shit for me on the inside. It was all Mulls. And he did the same for you! Go to hell—”
With his arm now within the reach of the shotgun’s barrel, Dennis lunged his hand out, ducking his head out of the way as Jimmy squeezed the trigger. The blast deafened Dennis to the world, and he felt a light pinch in his shoulder, but with Jimmy surprised by the blow, he easily snatched the gun away.
A quick adjust of his grip, and Dennis squeezed the trigger, shooting from the waist. The slug tore through Jimmy’s stomach, and blood and intestines slid down the ridges of his ribs as he tumbled backward and lay still, falling snow slowly covering the exposed wound.
With the shotgun in his hand, standing between two dead men, he heard the shouts of the others heading his way. He quickly aimed the gun at Mulls’s stomach and fired, blasting a slug through the dead man’s big stomach, and a few seconds later, Dennis was surrounded.
The convicts appeared like ghosts through the sheets of snow, and every one of their faces fell to Mulls first, then to Jimmy, and finally to Dennis. As the circle of spectators grew, so did the number of angry expressions. Before any of them could shoot, Dennis lowered the shotgun and pointed at Jimmy.
“The skinny bastard tried to kill Mulls!” Dennis heaved exhausted breaths, shaking his head. “I tried to stop him.”
“Bullshit!” A voice echoed from the circle, and a few murmurs of agreement followed. “Jimmy wouldn’t do that!”
“No?” Dennis asked, laughing. “You don’t think those two didn’t have history? You don’t think Jimmy got tired of following orders?” He searched for the source of the voice in the crowd but had no luck in finding it. “I told Mulls we should go to the highway patrol station now, and when he told Jimmy that, the bastard shot him then started whaling on him.” He pointed toward the bullet wound that he fired just moments before everyone had arrived, to help corroborate his story. “And you know why Mulls wanted us to attack the pigpen? Because of that!” he shouted, thrusting his hand toward the town they’d just turned to ash. “I told everyone here that people would eventually push back! And what happens if the people that were here find that highway patrol station before we take it out? Huh?” He walked to one of the men on the circle’s edge. “You want to give up your warm bed?” He turned to the man next to him. “You want to go back to wanking it with your hand instead of having a woman?” Slowly, the heads started to shake in response, and a few nos filtered through the air, and Dennis retreated into the circle, and the majority of the inmates’ mood shifted. “If we don’t act now, then we can lose everything! And I’m telling you right now, boys, that I’m not going back in a cell. I’ll be six feet under before that happens.”
The agreement rippled through the crowd, and it wasn’t long before even those that had been friends with and loyal to Mulls nodded. It never ceased to amaze Dennis how far fear would push people. The fear of loss, of death, of pain. Humans had fought against that fear since the beginning of time. And in that battle, there was violence that had ravaged civilization and killed millions. And now Dennis would use that violence to kill every living thing that stood against him. His wolves were hungry now, and he had no intention of keeping them that way.
By the time they returned to the cabin, Rodney, Mark, Yvonne, and Dalia were cloaked in snow and ice. They burst through the front door like a group of snow monsters in search of fire to free them from their curse. Questions were thrust at them, but Rodney could only think of the relief that the flames brought to his body. As he thawed, his mind returned to the present.
“What happened?” Marie, the doctor’s wife, asked, and then, as if she had forgotten to count the number of bodies that returned, she gasped, covering her mouth.
Marie collapsed into a chair, sobbing. Rodney walked over, placing his still snow-covered gloved hand on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry.” His voice cracked, his body still raw and stiff from the cold. He turned to an elderly woman. “They haven’t come back yet?”
The grey-haired woman shook her head.
Holly scooted past Rodney and Mark scooped her up. “How far is the station from here?”
“Forty minutes,” Rodney answered. “In good weather.” The snow had thickened outside, but it still hadn’t reached blizzard levels yet. It was uncomfortable outside but still traversable.
“You think they’d stay at the station to wait for this to blow over?” Mark asked.
“Maybe.” But as Rodney spoke, he was already on his way toward his room. Snow tracked him all the way to his bed, and when he opened the closet door to the tall, black safe that rested inside, his fingers were so cold that he still couldn’t feel the dial as he spun it. The lock opened, and Rodney swung the door open.
Inside were the components to put together a fifty-caliber machine gun, and he grabbed the pieces, his hands moving over the metal deftly. It was heavy put together, close to ninety pounds, and the tripod mount added another forty. He’d need a sled to carry it.
When he brought the gun out and rested it against the wall by the front door, its sight was greeted by a series of gasps that ended with Mark’s “What the hell is that?”
“An M2 fifty-cal machine gun,” Rodney answered, heading to his room to grab the tripod mount. “The inmates that attacked that town were close to one hundred.” He went back into his room, grabbing the crates of ammunition. The box hit the ground with a heavy thud, and Rodney grabbed the sled from the closet, along with rope. When he came back out, there were still confused faces glaring at the weapon.
Mark grabbed Rodney’s arm, stopping him in the middle of tying his knot through the sled’s loops. “What is it that you’re planning here?”
“The plan? The plan is to kill as many of those bastards as I can.”
“Jesus Christ,” Mark said, running his hands through his hair, flinging the melted bits of snow from his head.
“We need to get to the trooper station, get those cops out of there.” Rodney returned to the work on his knot. “If they’re still alive.”
Mark bent down to help Rodney with the ropes, but Rodney stopped him.
“No,” Rodney said. “You’re staying here.”
“You can’t pull this thing by yourself.”
“I’ve done it before.” Which was true. But he’d only done it once, a year ago, and it wasn’t storming outside. Rodney set the last piece of the weaponry on the sled. “You need to stay here with your kids.” Rodney stared at the weapon. Even with the glow of the firelight, the gleaming metal looked cold. He grabbed the ropes and headed for the door.
Mark gripped Rodney’s arm. He worked his mouth, at first unable to find the words, and then he sighed and wrapped Rodney in a hug. “Be careful out there, huh?”
Rodney nodded, and then Mark stepped aside, opening the path to the cold wilderness.
The slack of the rope disappeared, and it grew taut as Rodney dug his snow boots into the ground, luggi
ng the hulking machine into the storm. He kept a steady pace, the sled easier to pull than he thought even with the snowfall. He could get there in time so long as he kept this pace. He just hoped there would still be people alive when he arrived.
8
The snowfall had just begun when Kate and her group arrived at the highway patrol station. And despite the road signs, they’d nearly missed it. All but the roof was buried in snow, save for a single trench that led down to the front doors, which meant that there was still a good chance the troopers inside were alive; if they hadn’t already fled.
“Get your weapons handy,” Kate said, getting close to the door. “I don’t know what we’ll find inside, so keep your eyes peeled.”
Nervous nods answered, and Kate prayed silently to herself that she wouldn’t get anyone killed. Slowly, carefully, she reached for the door handle, and with a light tug, it cracked open.
It was dark inside. The snow that covered the windows also blocked out the light. Behind her, the snowfall worsened, and Kate entered the station, the end of her rifle barrel guiding her way. “Hello?” Her voice echoed over empty office chairs, spreading through the darkness like sonar, searching for a response in the cold.
Chair legs scraped against tile to her left, and in the same sweeping motion, every gun moved toward the commotion.
“Who’s there?” Kate asked, her eyes still not entirely adjusted to the dark. She stepped forward. “Who’s there?”
“Put the guns down.” The voice accompanied two figures that took shape in the dark, and then one of them stepped forward, pistol in hand, and wearing a highway patrolman uniform. The officer spoke like a man who’d given orders his entire life, and the greying stubble along his face suggested he’d been doing it for a long time.
No one in Kate’s group lowered their weapons. She kept the bead on the officer, her eyes scanning the rest of the office, and slowly she made out two more shapes off to her right. More officers, with guns trained on them. She flicked her eyes back toward the officer who spoke. “We didn’t come here for trouble.”
