Systemic Shock

by Dean Ing

  "Just his prints. The acolyte here seen 'em first at a water hole. Why shit, he didn' know what he seen."

  The others laughed uneasily. Quantrill nodded as if the joke were on himself. In a way, it was. At first he had known only that a child's sandal had made a single print in the sand, later marred by the great deep incisions of a demonic hoof. Quantrill's foot had erased the datum. Probably, he thought in sympathetic dread, that grizzly-sized brute had already tracked the child; had sought his kill many klicks from any possible help. But now he was certain that the sandal had been worn by little Sandy Grange. How long ago had she made that print?

  Quantrill felt gooseflesh at his nape, arms, calves. The superstitious awe in these murdering fanatics was affecting him, he decided. He'd give a year of his life to be left alone out there with a night-scoped H & K—but the little truck was taking him away, toward a danger he understood, and to Marbrye Sanger whom he thought he understood. Unable to contact Control in such close quarters he sat sullen, silent, listening to Beasley exult over the murder of an exhausted woman; promising himself that Beasley's ledger would balance before long.

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Decanting from the truck between the Willard house and barn, Quantrill peered at moving figures, seeking Sanger. The dark earth was splashed with parallelograms of light from the house and, as always, the women and children cowered anonymously hoping to be overlooked. Near the husky terratired truck was a group of prophets, variously armed. At their feet lay a pitiful handful of rags. “Delight?" He'd almost shouted her real name.

  "Lendal," Sanger answered in a whine, and he saw that she was restrained by two unfamiliar males.

  Quantrill hurried toward her, crooning endearments, and was felled by a backhand from Jansen. "Control your lusts, acolyte," said the big man without heat. "You'll be with your vessel soon enough. Stand over there in the light," he ordered, and Quantrill scrambled up to comply. With his body illuminated, face in shadow, he could use Control as go-between to Sanger.

  The huddled body on the ground was pitifully thin, a gray-haired husk of a woman that Quantrill saw had been Louise Grange. Jansen stood above the corpse. "Brothers, you know what'll happen if the gentiles find we're here. We have four trucks; not enough for everybody. It has been revealed to me," he said, his voice rising, peaking on "re-vealed' in a liturgical rhythm long-practiced in many a pulpit, “It has been revealed to me that we must stand ready to flee again, yes I say flee, into the wilderness. The devil's seed is still at large. If we find her not tomorrow, we must repair—to another place."

  Jansen had the knack of the old phrasing; could bind credulous minds with his spell that was more music than words.

  Quantrill spoke with Control; asked to be patched directly to Sanger who stood between two men and could not be expected to answer. To Sanger he said, "Jansen's warning 'em they'll have to travel light. That may mean killing a few people, Sanger. They'll start with me or you, so don't get separated. Uh—if you have a weapon, cough."

  Sanger didn't cough; moved her head sideways instead. Quantrill noticed that Jansen had now ripped away the veneer of equality and fraternity from his orders and was apportioning men to cruise the roads until dawn. The little Grange vessel, with or without a baby in her arms, might try to flag down a vehicle if she had not already collapsed from thirst or exposure. It had been revealed to him, Jansen boasted, that the girl was not far from where her mother had been gunned down. Quantrill's smile at this was grim and short-lived; if Sandy Grange was where he thought she was, she and the baby were between two devils.

  Grumbling, trotting away for quick meals and canteen refills, the men hurried to do Jansen's bidding.”Now then," said the mollified Jansen to the youth, "while our brothers toil in the Lord's service, you can bring some worldly goods into the fold, Acolyte Stone. Prophet Monroe, we'll need you to drive."

  "I've felt a callin'," growled Beasley, now pressing an old police revolver into Sanger's side, thrusting her forward. "It's fell to me to do the drivin', dear brothers."

  Jansen was silent for two heartbeats, then replied in pleasant tautology, "Revelations always reveal. Prophet Monroe can help guard the females of the flock in your stead."

  Jansen moved away, incisive with command, checking on fuel, weapons, a sufficiency of guards whose heartlessness he trusted if more of the flock tried to stray. Quantrill suspected that Jansen did not put much trust in Monroe or Contreras where murder was concerned. But Ryerson had shot down an exhausted mother that day, and Ryerson would again help guard the flock while others pressed their search. As Jansen conferred with Monroe and Ryerson, three of their four vehicles rolled away in convoy, running lights taped, the lead truck using one headlamp. From a distance it might have been a single motorcycle.

  Beasley motioned Sanger and Quantrill toward the four-passenger pickup, muttering. "Thinks I dunno what he's up to," he grated, and, "figgers that assbreath Monroe wouldn't insist on his cut," he snarled, and, “all we'd get is a hard luck story."

  In the dim light of the pickup's instrument cluster, the two gunsels exchanged glances; if Jansen was expected to lie about buried treasures, his young guides were to be silenced. Quantrill was neither surprised nor dismayed; he wanted isolation from the ranks as much as Jansen did, and for the same reason.

  Jansen returned in minutes with carbine and sidearm, checked the pickup for pick and shovel, then shoved into the rear seat with Sanger and stowed a recent-model assault rifle at his feet. A moment later Beasley had the vehicle jouncing in the direction the other vehicles had taken while Jansen, cool and cordial, prompted their captives to recall a number.

  "It's a little away from post five-ninety-two," Sanger said truthfully. She and Quantrill had buried the marked bills and bits of jewelry themselves before beginning their charade in the Eldorado jail. "I'll find the spot when we get near it. Prophet Jansen, you gonna treat us nice after we share with you?"

  "Of course," he said, stroking the chestnut tresses, not putting his automatic pistol away. Then his free hand moved toward her breasts, as one might idly fondle a stray cat.

  "You make me feel cared for," she said, letting her head slide onto his chest.

  "A good shepherd cares for his flock," Jansen said.

  "And we care for our shepherd," Sanger went on, her voice becoming muffled as her head slid steadily downward.

  Quantrill heard the hiss of a zipper; peered hard through the windshield, willing himself above anxiety and dull rage, watching Beasley with care. Beasley grinned to himself. By now they were four or five klicks from the ranch. Quantrill felt a tug at his seat back. Jansen was gripping it with one hand.

  The report was a thunderclap in the rear seat. Sanger's, "Beasley's yours," came a split second before the second and third explosions. Jansen's scream was only quasi-human.

  Beasley slammed the brakes, reaching for the long-barreled revolver under his left thigh. But Beasley was not left-handed and, in any case, Quantrill was braced and ready.

  The howling wheezes of Jansen, gutshot three times at point-blank range, carried too much vitality. Sanger fought hard for the automatic now, one elbow jamming into his throat as she sought the trigger again. But the fourth and fifth rounds went through the pickup's roof.

  For Quantrill the scene unfolded in slow motion. Facing Beasley, feet braced against floorboards, he swung the edge of his left hand upward, catching Beasley above the lip in a driving slam to the base of the nose. His next slash was against Beasley's throat, but now the driver had relinquished the steering wheel and hammered at Quantrill with a rope corded right forearm. Then the revolver came into view, and at the same instant the pickup began to tilt as it spun sideways into deep ruts. Quantrill harbored a healthy respect for Beasley's superior physical strength, but more still for the heavy slugs. The gunsel's right hand slammed the hand with the revolver against the window frame while he butted upward into Beasley's face.

  The revolver went out the window as the pickup tilted onto its
right side, Quantrill pivoting his legs to drive them into Beasley's ribcage when the larger man tumbled toward him. The pickup continued its roll, the windshield shattering into the myriad tiny cubes typical of automotive glass. Quantrill planted his head into the safety of Beasley's midriff while he waited for the world to quit its headlong tumble.

  Beasley felt himself flung halfway out the windshield opening and, as the vehicle came to rest on its wheels, was conscious enough to try crawling free. But one leg was still inside the cab when the phenomenon of Quantrill's reflexes came into play. The gunsel ducked away from the man's flailing brogan, caught it with both hands, wrenched it more than halfway around and held on.

  The grinding snap was audible over Beasley's cry; he tried kicking once more as Quantrill gripped his trousers, screamed as the raw edge of a fractured fibula scraped, then lay across the hood of the vehicle, pounding an impotent fist on the plastic, whinnying with rage and pain.

  The driver's door was open, the interior light revealing S anger with teeth bared, both legs locked around one of Jansen's arms as she pinioned him and waited out his final struggle holding his right arm in a double arm-bar. Jansen's head was visible, pressed against the seat back; his eyes open, his face a terrible cyanotic blue-gray. Quantrill twisted a good grip on Beasley's trouser cuff with one hand, stretched back with the heel of his free hand and triphammered Jansen's face until the prophet went limp.

  When Sanger glanced toward him, Quantrill hand-signed for a weapon. Sanger found Jansen's automatic in the seat, passed it forward, then felt at Jansen's throat for a pulse.

  Quantrill knew she was checking on the evanescence of the human soul, but he was an observer, too. He saw her eyes searching, the play of tiny muscles in the high cheeks, her tonguetip serious and prominent between pursed lips. He thought then that he had never seen Marbrye Sanger looking lovelier than that moment, as she hovered over a man she had destroyed in mortal combat.

  When he felt the youth release his leg, Beasley tried instantly to escape. He tumbled from hood to road, blinded by the headlights that still glared at the horizon, gobbling with pain. He managed to stand, testing his weight on the traitor ankle, then jerked himself off-balance as he saw the despised acolyte striding into the cones of light holding a fifteen-round automatic. For six or eight hundred milliseconds, Beasley was the picture of a beaten man.

  Then, because he depended upon the naivete of youth, Beasley was something else. Several times in his blood-spattered career, Beasley had indulged in a tactic that had always succeeded by its very strangeness. Literally, he had a fit.

  Throwing a fit is not all that difficult. One must simply be willing to short-circuit all of the shame constraints learned from infancy onward. "This or that you must not do; this shames you, that makes others feel shame.' Urination, tearing at one's own hair, speaking gibberish as though in (foreign) tongues, groveling and capering in the dirt—all public behaviors forbidden to most adults to such a degree that ‘speaking in tongues' is a legitimate topic of psycholinguistic study.

  "Don't touch me, don'ttouchmedon'ttouchme," Beasley shrieked, flopping down in fair imitation of a chimpanzee, arms slapping past his head to strike the opposite shoulders. Beasley's voice rose gradually to falsetto, ululating like an alarm, then spewing flecks of spittle with syllables crammed together in bizarre combination. He pounded the ground, screamed at the sky, cursed in tongues and in good old Texas American, and all the while he writhed closer to a stone at the edge of the road. But Beasley had to know where his enemy was, the little bastard, standing there without a word as if he knew what he was doing with that Browning in his hand; one good fling with that rock and then we'll see who's so fuggin' calm; and then Beasley paused for that necessary instant to get his bearings as he located the enemy.

  The single round, fired from two meters away, was still applauded by its echoes when Quantrill murmured, "Nice try," in compliment to a dead man.

  With Sanger's help, Quantrill tumbled the body into the rear seat, arranged next to Jansen so that a casual glance would reveal nothing. Sanger, always fastidious, used a canteen to wash the blood from her hands and blouse as Quantrill steered the pickup toward the ranch.

  Sanger kissed Quantrill under the ear before advising Control of their tally. "If we can secure their command post," she went on, “we can pick them off as they return."

  Control asked a question on Sanger's frequency.

  "An Army-issue M-27 and a new Browning auto with, um, eight rounds left. I propose circling around on foot with the carbine so Quantrill can draw them out in the open with some wild story. There's three of 'em; should be a turkey shoot."

  Quantrill doused the lights before the gleam of the ranch house showed on their horizon, heard Control's reply in his own critic. "Q qualified better with Army-issue weapons, S, and you'd be less threatening bait. Swap roles and pursue your assignment."

  Quantrill stopped the vehicle a kilometer from their goal, spent the next fifteen minutes crossing the broken plain on foot, informed Control that two of the three guards were strolling about and clearly lit from the ranch house. Only little Monroe was unaccounted for; doubtless he would emerge when the pickup churned into view.

  Presently the pickup raced in, horn tooting, obviously much worse for recent wear. Quantrill waited until he saw Monroe hurry from the barn, then slipped to the rear of the ramshackle ranch house. Its rear door had been nailed shut and inside he heard female voices raised in consternation at what they saw from the front windows.

  "From what S is saying, they're not buying her story," said Control. "They've taken her weapon."

  Quantrill could see that much. Monroe stared motionless at the carnage in the back seat, but Contreras held a sidearm on Sanger and was too near her for a safe shot at fifty meters, much less a three-round burst from the M-27. A beefy young gorilla stood by with a pump shotgun. From Sanger's description he'd be the murderer-rapist, Ryerson.

  Quantrill ducked behind the house, smashed a window with the butt of his carbine, heard screams from within. "Lights out," he hissed at them, then broke the other window at the back of the house and wriggled forward along the foundation line.

  The lights did not go out, but two dozen wails went up from within. It was just as well for Quantrill; the light gave him a good view as the heavy-set Ryerson abandoned Sanger to race toward what he imagined was a prison break. Ryerson fired one blast from his shotgun as he ran, evidently not caring what he hit so long as the sound carried authority.

  Now some of the brutalized sheep of the Church of the Sacrificed Lamb were battering at the remaining shards of windowglass as Quantrill held his finger motionless on the trigger. He lay still, in full view of anyone who happened to glance at the porch foundation. Ryerson pounded nearer, heading for the rear of the house. And still Sanger did not make a move to get clear of Contreras.

  To Quantrill's intense relief, Ryerson disappeared around the other side of the house. Then a chorus of screams as Ryerson punctuated the roar of his voice with the shotgun's exclamation. Contreras whirled in Quantrill's direction, Sanger's unerring kick sent him spinning, and with two three-round bursts Quantrill left Contreras dying. Sanger dived for the sidearm of Contreras, rolled out of the light, then followed Monroe who had run bleating into the scrub.

  Quantrill stood and darted a quick look, aghast as he saw through the front window into bedlam. The parlor partition had been removed so that one side of the house was a long dormitory of squalid pallets. Slumped in the ruined back window was a ruined human being gunned down while athwart the ledge. Two dozen women and children lay on the floor screaming, some trying to protect their small wards as another blast lanced in, blowing a hat-sized hole in the roof not far from where Quantrill stood. Quantrill did not know whether his enemy had correctly interpreted the burps of the M-27 until he saw the hulking Ryerson move into view, peering past his victim who lay in the window.

  Ryerson was grinning fiercely as he recycled the pump, but the grin fl
icked to something else as he glanced down the length of the room and saw what faced him outside the front window, ten meters away. Quantrill, knees flexed, his fire selector set on 'full auto', stared impassively over his front sight into the eyes of Prophet Ryerson. It was the last thing Ryerson ever saw.

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Control had an excellent suggestion which Quantrill followed when at last the female captives could listen to him. They trooped to the barn, there to stay until dawn unless they spied familiar vehicles returning. In that case, Quantrill advised, their best course was to fade as fast and silently as possible into the open range—and not all in one bunch. Three of the women had husbands among the prophets, but none were thinking in any terms but plain desertion by now.

  Sanger returned as Quantrill was questioning one of the women. According to Sanger/Monroe had been too slow and too loud. "The score," she said, counting the remaining half-dozen rounds in her clip, "is five to zip. Control tells me we should be setting out the pickup as bait if we're still operational."

  Quantrill did not expect the prophets until dawn but, as

  Control pointed out, the enemy would be haggard, sleepless. The T Section pair could sleep in relays and would have both cover and surprise on their side. They broke into the pantry cum weapons cache in the house, loaded the half-dozen weapons and all the ammunition into the pickup before returning to the rutted road.

  At midnight the pickup stood across the ruts in a depression where it could be seen from only fifty meters away. Beasley's massive form slumped behind the wheel as if asleep. Jansen sat erect in the back seat, held up by a pick handle under his chin. Empty weapons, each barrel and receiver filled with dirt, lay strewn widely where a questing prophet would have to expose himself to fire from two quadrants.

  From Sanger's description of the setup, Control was pleased. If the prophet vehicles returned one at a time there should be no problem. If they returned in convoy, the gunsels were ordered to be sure no vehicle was left operational, and to be ready for a day-long siege while awaiting help.