Crisis Event: Jagged White Line (7 page)

The window was narrow and high on the wall—at least four feet at the sill. There was no ledge to step on outside, or any tree branch or trellis to grab onto. But Sadie had committed and she couldn’t change her mind now, so she shoved the old window open. She discovered right away that someone had removed its sash weights. The window slid back down and banged into its frame.

“Great,” Sadie said when Noah began pounding the door.

“You open this door right now, little girl!” he yelled.

“Kiss my ass, freak!” Sadie yelled. She snatched up the candle sitting on the small corner shelf and tossed it into the oil pooled beneath the bathroom door. It ignited again as Sadie lifted the window and pushed her right foot out into the night. That was when the flashing white light began to light up the sky and the ground below, as if nature had decided to throw a disco party for the people in the farmhouse.

“What the heck?” she said, then dipped her shoulder beneath the window and shoved upward with her back to get through. The bottom of the window scraped over her backbone, and she told herself to remember to put some disinfectant on the scratches when she got free.

If she got free.

She was pulling her remaining leg through the window when Noah hit the bathroom door with his shoulder and came crashing through. Sadie yelped and turned to slide off the edge of the sill. She let herself swing out into the night, twisting to grab the window sill at the last second. The sudden stop jerked her shoulders and the window slammed down onto the sill, barely missing her fingers.

Sadie looked down and saw the ground in the strobing light. She hung suspended for a second, afraid to let go until Noah’s arrival at the window spurred her onward.

“I’m going to whip your butt bloody,” he yelled, and lifted the window.

Sadie let go and fell back, trying to keep her feet beneath her. She bent her legs at the knees as she got ready to roll when she hit. The explosion came while she was still falling, a boom so powerful the air moved around her as her feet touched down and she fell away from the house.

Her back, which was sore from landing on her pack an hour earlier, reminded her of how much of a beating she’d taken in the last forty-eight hours. But the shaking house and shattering windows and the orange glow now lighting up the night grabbed her attention.

The explosion had to have come from a weapon, Sadie reasoned, and she wondered which of Titman’s freaks she would see first. But then there was another explosion, this one upstairs at the front of the house.

A scream sounded in the night, and glass spears and splintered wood flew in all directions, and Sadie ran as fast as she could for the back of the house, hoping her backpack and clothes were where she’d left them, and that there was no one there she’d have to fight to take them.

Chapter 8

“Ain’t this some shit!” Blakely mumbled in the second before he pulled the pin, popped up to his knees, and flung the stun grenade out into the darkness as hard as he could. He dropped flat in the ditch as bullets slammed into the dust around him. Squeezing his eyes closed, he waited.

When the “boom!” came seconds later Blakely leapt up and ran.

He carried three road flares in his right hand, and as he popped the cap off one and ripped the striker over the flare end. When it sparked he tossed it ahead of himself so that he had to run by it as he raced toward the old pickup.

He’d never tried this before, but the theory was sound. The fact that he hadn’t caught a slug yet meant the stun grenade had worked, so he popped another flare to life and hurled it forward. The question was whether or not the road flares would create enough light noise to spoil the night vision his attackers were using.

If any of them had thermal gear, he could expect to die at any second.

He didn’t die. Instead he reached the truck, unharmed, and saw that Sadie had already gone. He followed her tracks to the side of the road and saw it would take some real tracking to follow her.

Part of him was elated. But another part was worried. He sensed the attack didn’t have anything to do with him. They were trying too hard to kill him.

It meant they wanted Sadie.

    And who would want Sadie? She wasn’t exactly an agreeable girl. But the sheriff in Shanksborough had seemed to want her to stay.

Blakely abandoned Sadie’s tracks and ran along the road.

He sparked the last road flare and tossed it in front of him, then snatched a flashbang out of his jacket pocket and pulled the pin. He went right and leapt over the ditch while simultaneously tossing the grenade in a high arc toward where he guessed an attacker was hiding.

As soon as his feet hit the ground he rolled and shoved his face into the crook of his elbow. Even through the shielding and his tightly shut eyes he saw the flash. He counted to three before pulling his arm away from his eyes and slipping his own night vision goggles down over his face.

He avoided the glare of the flares and searched the land away from the road. Immediately he caught sight of someone forty meters away. The enemy was dressed in all black, and was squatting down behind a bush of some kind, shaking his head and trying to recover from the flashbang blindness. He’d been flanked and was facing toward where Blakely had been thirty seconds ago.

Blakely didn’t hesitate. He snapped his rifle up, took aim, and popped off three shots, all of which hit the enemy in his shoulder and neck. The enemy went down, and Blakey jumped up and sprinted hard for the downed enemy, hoping the other people trying to kill him were still blind or confused or both. No shots rang out as he reached the man, so Blakely flipped him over and checked for a pulse.

There was nothing.

Blakely lifted the man’s night vision goggles off his head and found out he’d killed a boy.

“Shit,” Blakely said when he saw the kid couldn’t have been more than twenty—as young as his own soldiers. “Who the hell are you?”

The Shanksborough sheriff hadn’t seemed like the type to send out a boy on a rescue mission. She’d have come herself. So who the hell were these people?

Blakely noticed the boy’s walkie-talkie—a civilian model, of course—had fallen and lay on the ground next to his foot.

“Idiots out playing soldier,” Blakely muttered.

“Eli!” someone whispered. “You there?”

“Yeah,” Blakely whispered into the walkie-talkie after depressing the “talk” button.

“You still in position?”

“Yeah,” Blakely whispered again. He wondered what kind of moron would send kids out with suppressed automatic weapons and walkie-talkies to attack strangers in the middle of the night.

“You see him?” Samuel whispered.

“No,” Blakely whispered.

“You got him, Samuel?” a woman’s voice said. She didn’t whisper, so Blakely assumed wherever she was, she wasn’t an immediate threat.

“He ain’t trying to fight us,” Samuel whispered. “He’s just running.”

“You take him down, now,” an older man’s voice blurted suddenly. “Don’t disobey me.”

“Yes sir,” Samuel whispered.

Blakely scanned the night with his goggles, searching for any movement. Half a mile away he caught a flash of movement. He squinted and turned his head slightly and was able to catch a glimpse of two figures. They were heading north, disappearing into a stand of dusty, stunted trees.

“I see him,” Blakely whispered suddenly, putting urgency into his voice and gambling that the people listening wouldn’t know he was a fake. “He’s coming right at you Samuel. Three o’clock.”

“I don’t see him,” Samuel said, sounding as if he was on the verge of panic.

“He’s coming up through some bushes,” Blakely whispered. “Put some fire on him and I’ll flank him.”

Almost immediately the “clang-clang-clang” of Samuel’s suppressed automatic sounded. Blakely squinted again, staring hard toward the west. He was rewarded by the faint spark of a muzzle flash on the final shot, about two hundred meters from where he was kneeling.

“He went down” Blakely whispered. “a hundred and fifty feet from you. I couldn’t tell if he was hit. Stay put till I get closer, then we’ll hit him together.

“Okay,” Samuel said.

Blakely picked up the kid’s suppressed automatic—an AK-47 with a big bulky black tube screwed over the muzzle. He racked the bolt and stood up and ran across a field of dead weeds and shrubs, back toward the road where the sputtering flares were still throwing up red sparks.

Blakely crossed the road and descended into the ditch. He used the abandoned cars to shield himself from Samuel’s position, a point he had fixed onto the 3D map his mind. Once again, he was high above the battle looking down, watching himself run along the road while his enemy lay or squatted in the dark. Soon his breath was wheezing in and out. He kept running, and after counting to twenty he stopped and crossed the road and went down to his belly, using the dead shrubs as cover.

“Can you see me?” he whispered into the walkie-talkie.

“No,” Samuel whispered

Blakely nodded. He shrugged his backpack off and reached into it and pulled out another stun grenade. After yanking the pin and pausing for a two count, he sprang up and hurled the short steel tube high in the air, hoping he’d put enough heat on it to send it over his prey. Then he dropped to his belly and covered his face.

The “boom!” shook the ground, and the flash turned the night to day for the third time.

“Ahhh!” Samuel wailed in the darkness.

Blakely leapt up and ran straight for him, risking hidden branches or logs or chuckholes. He didn’t want to kill any more kids, and the best way to avoid it was taking this one by surprise.

    Samuel was still shaking his head and rubbing his eyes and trying to clear his vision when Blakely said “Don’t move,” and gave him a swat across the back with his rifle stock.  

Samuel went face-down to ground and rolled over, trying to bring his rifle up to aim at Blakely. Blakely stepped on the rifle, then kicked Samuel’s walkie-talkie out of his hands so hard it shattered into several pieces.

“Hey, man!” Samuel said and fell back flat, putting his hands out to his side and looking as if he was surprised his attack had brought such a vicious response.

He was just another kid, Blakely saw, probably twenty-two, and he was terrified.

“Where’s Eli?”

“Dead,” said Blakely. “Like you’re about to be.”

“Oh man,” the kid said. “Please, I didn’t want to do this…”

“Save it,” Blakely said. “Roll over.”

“Yessir,” Samuel said, and flipped onto his belly.

Blakely slipped off his backpack and dug in it until he found several zip ties. He cinched the kid’s wrists behind him.

“Got a respirator?” Blakely asked, and the kid shook his head.

“Dust mask,” he said. “In my pocket.”

Blakely checked the kid’s pockets until he found the wadded white mask.

“This won’t do shit in this dust,” he said, but slipped it over the kid’s face anyway. It was better than nothing. The kid probably already had silicosis, Blakely mused, then pulled out the walkie-talkie.

“Next time someone asks if you got me,” Blakely said. “I’ll hold this up. You’ll tell them ‘yes.’ Got it?”

“Yessir,” Samuel said. “You’re not gonna kill ‘em are you?”

“Not if I don’t have to. But that girl means more to me than a million of you. I’ll kill every last one of you to get her back. Understand?”

Distant thunder rumbled to the west.

“Yessir.”

“Good,” Blakely said. “Now get up.”

Blakely hoisted the kid to his feet and put his night vision goggles on him. Then he slipped his own backpack onto his shoulders.

“Was that your who dad took the girl?”

“Yessir,” he said.

“What’s his name?”

“Noah. Noah Shoddy.”

“Okay, Samuel, take me where he’ll take her.”

“Yessir,” Samuel said, and stumbled ahead, bent forward and clumsy with his arms cinched behind his back. They didn’t have to wait long for the kid’s father to check in. “You going to trade me for her?”

“Something like that,” Blakely said.

“You boys get him?” Noah asked.

Blakely grabbed the kid’s arm and spun him around. He held the walkie-talkie to Samuel’s face. He also pulled out his pistol and put it against the kid’s neck. Then he pushed down the button.

“Yessir,” Samuel said. “We got him.”

“Is he dead?”

Blakely pulled the walkie-talkie away and told Samuel what to say.

“We got him alive. He’s hurt.”

Blakely released the button and they waited.

“Did you not hear me tell you to kill him?” the voice yelled. “You ain’t trying to be Saul against the Amelekites, are you?

“No sir,” Samuel said, and his voice trembled. When Blakely let go of the button the boy shook his head.

“Well do what you’re told, boy!”

“Yes sir,” Samuel said, and Blakely pulled the walkie-talkie away from Samuel’s face. He tucked it into his jacket pocket and cocked his pistol.

“Please, mister,” Samuel said. His whole body was shaking.

Blakely pointed the gun at Samuel’s face.

“I don’t know your daddy,” Blakely said. “But he sounds like a real asshole. Religious nutjob, yeah? Loves Jesus and all that?”

The kid nodded.

“I want you to remember this,” Blakely said. “For the rest of your life, however long that is. I could kill you right now. And I could kill your daddy and any other chickenshits you’re running around out here with. I could do that by myself. But I’m not by myself. I got a whole platoon of men just like me who could do the same.”

Blakely paused and stared right into the kid’s night vision goggles. Then he raised his pistol into the air and fired. When the shot faded, Blakely spoke.

“No matter what happens, you don’t even think about coming after us. You take the loss. You picked on the wrong people this time and you got beat. You understand?”

“Yessir,” the kid said.

Blakely nodded.

“Now move.”

They walked onward, the boy leading Blakely around dead shrubs and trees and over dry creek beds until they came to an open flat field of dust that stretched away to the north. They crossed the dust field, their boots crunching as streaks of lightning lashed the sky to the north. Soon they were back in the scrub, climbing a low woody hill and descending down again to tilled land that resembled a giant sheet of corrugated tin.

Soon Blakely saw a white farmhouse with a barn next to it.  

“That it?”

“Yessir,” the kid said.

“Okay then,” Blakely said. “On your belly.”

The kid whimpered, but went down anyway.

Blakely pulled out another cinch tie and used it to secure the kid’s ankles together. It wouldn’t hold him forever, and if he really wanted to, he could probably roll himself along, or get up and hop. But the kid wouldn’t be able to interfere.

    “You keep your mouth shut,” Blakely said. “Or I’ll walk back over here and cut your liver out. You’ll die looking at home. Of course that’ll take a few hours, and it’ll hurt like a mother.”

    Blakely didn’t wait around to hear the kid respond. He was already sick of this mission and wanted it over. As he jogged over the dust-choked field he found himself getting angry. At Titman and Getter and Mallick. At the girl. At the idiots who’d taken her.

    He got so consumed with rage at the foolishness of the evening that he covered the four hundred yards to the farmhouse without even noticing it.

    “Dumb,” he said, but then he chuckled. The morons in this house didn’t even have a sentry.

At forty yards from the back of the house he hid behind the barn. He studied the back of the house and saw Sadie’s pack and clothes on the porch. They’d stripped her before taking her inside, which meant they weren’t complete pigs. They were making an attempt at hygiene, even if keeping all the dust out was an impossibility.

Blakely quickly scouted around the rest of the house, keeping a thirty yard buffer between himself and the farmhouse’s mostly darkened windows. He noted the rooms with flickering lights in them. Three minutes later he was out at the front of the house, lashing a flashlight to one of three small dead apple twenty meters from the front porch. He wound electrical tape around the tree’s narrow trunk, positioning the flashlight to point directly at the old farmhouse’s front door.

As soon as he was satisfied the light would stay in place he selected the strobe function and flipped the switch. Instantly a blinding white beam began to light up the front of the house with rapid eye-irritating bursts.

Blakely pulled off his night vision goggles and tucked them into his jacket pocket. He moved toward the house, careful to keep his eyes down and away from the front door to minimize the eye irritation. When he reached the porch he dug a stun grenade out of his pocket. His plan was simple—surprise and destroy the enemy before they could do a thing about it. It had always worked in the past for him and he didn’t see where a farmhouse full of peckerwoods would be any different.

Blakely pulled the pin and sent the grenade flying. It shattered the window of what Blakely assumed would be a front room on the right corner of the house—a common living area where a television probably once held sway. Then he ran to his left, reaching the corner of the house as the stun grenade went off.

The second grenade was a fragmentation weapon, cold and heavy and round in his hand. He pulled the pin and hurled it onto the porch, aiming at the door. Then he stepped around the corner and ran along the side of the house. He ducked under the first window and went several steps beyond it to avoid any glass fragments that might come spraying out. He squatted down to await the blast, but in the split-second before the grenade detonated he heard a thump behind him. He spun as the grenade went off and fire and flaming debris lit up the night. He saw Sadie roll up to her feet and sprint toward the back of the house.

“Hey!” he shouted, but it was at the same moment someone inside the house screamed. Before Blakely could stop her, Sadie had reached the back of the house, poked her head around the corner to look into the back yard and then disappeared.

“Was she naked?” he asked no one, then shook his head and tried to forget the way her buttocks and hamstrings had tensed and flexed in the fireglow. Then he turned back toward the front of the house and let his instincts and experience guide him through the battle. He headed for the porch.

The front door had been blown open, and parts of the room were on fire. The window drapes were quickly turning black as orange flames chewed at them, catching the wallpaper on fire. Blakely stepped inside, his pistol drawn, looking for someone to kill.