by Mark Dawson
He looked at the woman, and she gave a firm, sure nod. Magrethe was a hard woman. She wasn’t squeamish, not like so many people were these days. Seth had always left it to her to euthanize the cattle that couldn’t be saved. She would take them out around back and put a bullet in their brains. Lundquist knew that he could rely on her to see that the job was done.
“Can you do that, son?”
“Sure. I can do it.”
“What about Milton?” Finch asked.
“We have to assume that he’s coming.”
“How could he know we’re here?”
Lundquist had thought about that. How would he know that? There was nothing to say that he would, but he might have spent a little extra time with Tom Chandler, or any of the others he had killed, and maybe he would have been able to get the information out of them. He was resourceful. They couldn’t assume that he would be ignorant.
“He’s coming. You need to be ready for him. You need to take him down.”
LUNDQUIST OPENED the door of the trailer and pulled himself up and inside. He took out his flashlight and played the beam over the large barrels of ammonium nitrate, diesel, and nitromethane. The blast would be triggered by four hundred pounds of Tovex Blastrite Gel. A time-delayed fuse led from the cab to a dozen blasting caps. The explosion would be enormous. Volcanic. What a statement it would be. Like the Israelites sounding their horns and the walls of Jericho coming crashing down.
The other militias would come to their side.
The country was like a powder keg. All it needed was a spark.
The start of the Holy Revolution.
The return of the Lamb, riding at the head of God’s army.
He jumped down onto the wet yard and closed the door up nice and tight.
Michael was waiting for him at the door to the tractor cab. He had an M16 in his hands.
“I’m sorry, Pops.”
“What for?”
“If we’d been more careful up there. The other day. If… I don’t know, maybe this wouldn’t have happened the way it has.”
“It’s God’s will,” he said. “Do what I told you and we’ll still make history.”
“You think?”
The boy’s doubt was pitiful. The same for his need for Lundquist’s approval, but, as much as it irritated him, he couldn’t deny that he had affection for him.
He extended his hand. Michael took it, and Lundquist gripped his hand hard.
“You’ve done well, son. I’m proud of you. Maybe we see each other again when this is all said and done, maybe we don’t, maybe we have to wait until we’re both in Heaven, but you take care of things here and then I guess you’ve done everything I could have expected from you. Can you do that?”
“I can do it.”
“I can’t ask for any more.”
Lundquist let go. Michael’s eyes were damp. He proffered the M16 and Lundquist took it, sliding it into the cab.
He reached for the rail and hauled himself up.
“Good luck, Pops,” Michael called after him.
“Ain’t nothing to do with luck, son. ‘Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not into thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and He shall direct thy paths.’”
“Amen,” Michael said.
“Amen.”
Lundquist turned the ignition, and the truck’s engine rumbled. He pressed down on the gas, feeding it revs. Michael looked up at him, his eyes still wet, and slammed the door shut. Lundquist put the truck into first gear and rolled slowly out of the yard.
He figured he could make Green Bay in four hours.
Chapter 44
MILTON WAS slow and cautious as he made his way back into Truth. He knew that the focus of the search would be up in the wilderness, that the Guards would not have expected him to have been able to slip through the cordon, and, even if they could have anticipated that, they would not expect him to head back into town again. They would expect him to take a car and drive away as far and as fast as he could.
That had never crossed Milton’s mind.
He had made promises, and his word meant something to him.
He had promised to kill Lundquist, and he would.
He had promised to come back for Mallory, Arty, and Ellie, and he would do that, too.
The town was eerily quiet. The storm was unabated, and that would have been more than enough to clear Main Street of pedestrians, but there was no traffic on the road, either. The stop lights at the junction flashed red, amber, and green, reflecting on the wet asphalt, but there were no cars to observe them. Perhaps the residents were frightened. Soldiers were abroad, and men had been killed. A maniac was running amok. Perhaps they were all hiding indoors.
Milton moved from cover to cover. He was absorbed into the welcoming darkness of an alley, and then he rushed to hide in the lee of a big industrial bin. He ducked down behind the wing of a car and pressed himself into a doorway.
He heard the grumble of an engine, deeper than a car, and ducked down behind a bus stop. A Humvee, olive green, with a fifty-calibre machine gun mounted atop it, rolled at a medium pace right down the middle of the street.
Milton waited until it was out of sight and then hurried on.
HE WAS passing a takeaway that he had seen when he had first come into town when he saw him.
Arthur Stanton.
He was inside, using a payphone that was fixed to the wall. Milton stood in the doorway for a moment, assessing the place, and then stepped inside.
There was a table and a couple of chairs just inside the door, and Milton sat down so that his back was facing the door. Arty had the phone pressed to his ear and a frown on his face.
“I told you,” the proprietor called out to him from behind the counter. “Everything’s down. Storm’s knocked the whole thing out.”
Arty put the receiver back onto its cradle and turned to the door. His face was anguished, pale, and it looked like he had been crying. He was distracted and he didn’t notice Milton until he reached out and took his sleeve.
“What—” he said, his face twisting with fright.
“It’s me, Arty. Remember? John.”
The disquiet seemed almost to worsen.
“It’s Mr. Milton.”
He stopped. The shock lifted to be replaced instead with upset.
He gestured to the seat opposite. “Sit down.”
He swayed from foot to foot, unsure what to do, but, with a softer “Arty,” Milton gently tugged on his sleeve and he sat.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said.
“Where are Mallory and Ellie?”
He didn’t hear the question. “I got out. I climbed up, got out through the roof. I tried to open the door, but it was locked. Mallory said I was to call a number, 313-338-7786—I remembered it, see—but they say the telephones aren’t working, and I can’t do what she wanted me to do. She said I had to go south, to Detroit, but I don’t know how to get there.”
“Arty. You have to tell me where they are.”
“In the big shed,” he said, his face open and surprised, as if that was something that surely Milton must have known. “On the farm.”
MILTON FOUND a car on a back street, put his elbow through the window and unlocked it from the inside. He got inside, with Arty in the passenger seat next to him, hot-wired the ignition and drove away. It took less than a minute, and it didn’t look as if he had been seen.
“Which way?”
Arty pointed to the south. Milton turned onto Main Street and drove carefully, wary of attracting attention.
“How did you get away?”
“I climbed out. There was a hole in the roof.”
“And then?”
He repeated himself. “I tried to open the door, but it was locked. Mallory told me to run into town, so I did. But the telephones don’t work and now I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
He was getting agitated again. “It’s okay, Arty. Don’t worry. I�
�m here now. We’ll soon have this sorted out.”
“But what are we going to do?”
“Fix it.”
Milton drove on. “How many people did you see there?”
He screwed up his face. “There was a woman and Mr. Finch, the plumber. We saw them most of all. There were a lot of people in the other barn the night they took us there but they all disappeared. We didn’t see any of them again.”
“Did anyone have any weapons? Guns?”
“The woman and Mr. Finch—they have shotguns.”
“Anything else?”
“No. I didn’t see anything.”
“Well done, Arty. You’ve done very well.” Milton cleared the outskirts of the town and put his foot down. “Hold on.”
MILTON KILLED the lights a mile out and rolled up to the start of a long drive that led towards farm buildings. He switched off the engine and rolled to a stop, water splashing beneath the tires as they passed through deep puddles.
“I want you to stay here,” he said to Arty.
“What about Mallory? And Ellie?”
“I’m going to go and get them. But you have to stay here. Do you understand?”
He shuffled awkwardly in the seat.
“Arty—you have to stay here. Do you understand?”
“I just want to help.”
“I know you do, but I don’t need help. And you’ll get in my way. Stay here.”
Arty grunted that he would. Milton opened the door, exited the car, and slipped into the cover of a clutch of fir trees. He crouched down, flexing his sore arm, and assessed the terrain ahead.
The farm was encircled by a fence. Thirty yards behind the fence was a log gatehouse that reminded him of a frontier stockade. A log was lowered across the dirt road like the arm of a highway toll booth. An oblong of light stretched out from the side of the gatehouse, a door that Milton couldn’t see. The oblong was split in half by a shadow; someone was in the booth and had come to the doorway.
The farmhouse was at the end of the road, lights glowing in the downstairs windows. There was another light above the porch, swaying in the wind. Surrounding it were sagging sheds, bungalows. There was a bunkhouse, probably added as farm and family grew. Now the house was empty and silent, huddling under cedar and pinon trees. He saw other buildings: a tall grain silo, two barns. Faint light glimmered from a number of ramshackle constructions he could see in the distance. There was a long line of vehicles parked along the shoulder of the lane between the guardhouse and the farm.
Save the lights, there was no sign of life.
And then there was.
He heard the sound of a powerful engine. He ducked right down as a pair of high beams swung out from behind one of the barns. A truck, a big eighteen-wheeled semi, crawled slowly out of the yard and rolled through the gate and onto the lane. He saw the figure of a man in the yard, but he was much too far away to be able to identify him. The truck bounced along the potholed track towards him, the lights stretching out across the furrowed fields until they were interrupted by the trunks of the fir trees, casting inky black shadows for a dozen feet behind him. He couldn’t make out any detail through the darkness and the rain and he stayed down low as the semi drew nearer. The brakes sighed as it reached the end of the track, the tractor swinging onto the main road and the trailer following after it.
Milton was close enough now to make out the driver.
Lundquist.
The engine growled again as Lundquist fed it more power. The truck was old and in bad shape. It rumbled away, passing the car with Arty inside and heading southeast.
Milton worked his way around the boundary of the property until he had enough cover between himself and the buildings to make an approach without being detected. This stretch of the fence was old and in need of repair, and Milton was able to duck down and slip between the top and bottom rails. He stayed low, sliding through long grass, moving quickly to a grove of black gum trees with a tangle of young buttonbush beneath their boughs.
He was halfway to the barns. The figure he had seen earlier was still there. It was a man, but he was facing away from him. His silhouette was slender. There was a line of chokeberry and cinquefoil ahead, and he was about to make out for it when another person emerged from the farmhouse. A woman. She was carrying a double-barrelled shotgun, the action open. The first man turned as she approached, and the light from the porch fell onto him.
Michael Callow.
Milton felt the jolt of adrenaline and felt his lips as they pressed tight against his teeth.
Milton heard the sound of a door creaking on rusty hinges. Callow and the woman turned to one of the barns. Two people emerged.
Mallory.
Ellie.
A third person followed them outside.
A man he hadn’t seen before. Big, obese.
Ellie’s wrists were cuffed.
He waited for them to turn away from him, but, before they could, he heard the sound of someone approaching from behind him. He turned his head back towards the car and saw Arthur Stanton’s large figure, moving low and quickly, headed towards the yard.
There was nothing he could do. Arty hadn’t seen Milton or, if he had, he was deliberately avoiding him because he knew what he would say. He was thirty feet away to the right, heading towards another clump of buttonbush. He couldn’t call out or Callow and the others would hear him. But if he stayed silent, what would Arty do?
Milton knew. It would be bad.
He clenched his teeth. Helpless.
Callow stepped in front of Ellie and said something to her, his harsh laugh sounding like a bark as it rang around the yard.
He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her down onto her knees.
The man standing behind Mallory did the same to her.
The woman closed the shotgun.
Milton couldn’t wait.
If he left cover, if they saw him… a spread from the shotgun, medium range, it would pepper him.
But if he didn’t…
Chapter 45
ELLIE TRIED the cuffs for the thousandth time, and they still held firm. Her knees and legs were inches deep in a thick slop of mud. She looked across to Magrethe Olsen’s boots, smothered with the same mud, and then followed her legs up until she was looking into the barrels of the shotgun aimed straight at her. She had imagined dying in service, like her father before her, but it had always been an abstract idea. The kind of thing that happened to other people. Now, though, it was horribly, awfully real.
She was going out, kneeling in mud and pig shit in some backwater hick farm. She found herself thinking of Orville. If she ever got out of it, ever told him what had happened, she knew that he would find it hilarious.
But she wasn’t getting out of it.
“I’m a federal agent,” she said, again, knowing that it wasn’t going to help them here.
“You know what’s going to happen tonight?”
“Why don’t you tell me.”
“That truck, that’s the biggest bomb this country’s ever seen. It’s going to make Oklahoma City look like powderpuff.”
“So why don’t you tell me where it’s headed?”
She laughed. “Don’t think so. All you need to know, when that bomb goes off, it’s going to start the war to end all wars. All the Jews and the niggers and the wetbacks, the liberal intelligentsia, the sickness in the federal government, they’re all going to get swept away. All of it. The Messiah is on his way. The Second Coming. Tonight is the start of it.”
Ellie saw, in the corner of her eyes, that Mallory had closed her hand around a large stone.
Callow was just behind her. “Just get on with it.”
Magrethe raised the stock and pressed it into her shoulder.
Ellie started to close her eyes.
There was a sudden blur of motion.
She looked up.
Arthur Stanton.
He came running out of the undergrowth. He moved with a clumsy gait, but he
was big and strong and he bellowed with fury. Morris Finch was between him and Magrethe. Arty drew back his fist and pummelled the man in the side of the head with enough impact to spin him around on his standing leg, flipping him so that when he landed it was face first, out cold even before he splashed down into the mud.
Arty headed right for Magrethe.
There was ten feet between them.
Too far.
He roared at the top of his lungs.
She swivelled quickly, too quickly, the barrel swerving away from her and at him.
Her aim was quick, inaccurate, but the shotgun was loaded with buckshot.
She pulled the trigger and fired a spread.
Arty screamed, his legs collapsing beneath him as he slammed down to the earth.
Mallory shrieked.
“Arty!”
MALLORY SCREAMED.
Milton crashed out of the chokeberry, put his head down, and pounded the ground. There were twenty feet that separated him and the woman with the smoking shotgun, and she was facing Arty, a quarter turn away from him.
She hadn’t seen him.
He sprinted, his muscles burning and adrenaline surging through his veins.
Callow saw him and shouted a warning.
The woman started to turn, her attention straying away from Ellie and Mallory for a moment.
Long enough.
Mallory bounded to her feet. She had a rock in her hand.
Callow made a move on Milton, trying to block him.
The woman turned back, too late, and saw Mallory.
Milton lowered his shoulder and barrelled into Callow, wrapping his arms around his waist and picking him up, driving him backwards, slamming him into the barn wall.
Mallory swung her arm, the stone clasped in her fist, the impact thumping into the woman’s temple, dropping her backwards.
Callow grabbed Milton’s shoulder, trying to draw him down onto the ground with him, trying to hold him there. The young man was strong.
