Authors: Brian Hodge
7
And the morning unrolled with the road.
Peter Solomon could feel every drop of blood racing through his veins, and every fiber of his existence flamed with passion and fury. It was just a matter of time now, they were down to mere moments, for when the road was stretched out just right, they could see glimpses of their prey.
Sweet victory and slaughter. Theirs for the taking. The
world
for the taking. He bared his teeth in a grin, eyes bluer than the sky, blazing hotter than the sun.
“Check it out,” said Travis, pointing far ahead and down the road. “What’s going on?”
A single car, canary yellow, sat at the roadside. Was there brief movement down there? Too far to tell in this heat, when ripples from the baking earth could play tricks with your perception.
One car, one car only. The rest? Still moving? Was it even theirs?
“Maybe it broke down,” Hagar said. “Or blew a tire.”
“Or maybe not,” Solomon said.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be the wisest move to charge in with guns blazing just yet. Tactical purposes might be better served by first getting a feel for the lay of the land. The sporting way also meant knowing when to exercise due caution.
“Hang back,” he said to Travis. “Let somebody else take point through here.”
Travis grumbled about it, but cut their speed and thrust his arm out his window to wave the others ahead. One truck, two trucks, three, four, until they were bringing up the rear. The yellow car was a scant fifty yards away, and they were closing fast.
And then Hagar pointed. “Aw shit. Someone’s up there.”
* *
They’d spent precious little time dicking around with the Sunbird. No time for that when this latter day Genghis Khan and his horde of cutthroats were two minutes behind.
Rich Patton crouched behind the wall of the overpass, directly over the southbound lanes. It was probably the safest spot any of them had, though he puffed from getting up here. It had been a long time since he’d had to climb a hill like the grassy slope that led up here from the highway.
Hope Jason knows what he’s doing.
Back down by the highway they’d had all of fifteen or twenty seconds to drum up a course of action to even things up a little more. Jason had been the first with an idea. Part of it was planned and the rest they’d have to improvise, depending on how many vehicles were coming down the pike.
Five, it looked to be, when Rich peeked over the rail.
The last moments of calm were diffuse with memories close and distant, the flashes of a life that forever remain to be savored like a fine wine. Recollections of the younger, slimmer man he used to be, and the golden shade of blond Pam’s hair once was. He remembered the squalling infant daughter he’d held for the first time, terrified he would break her. He remembered his absurd portrayal of the lecherous Santa Claus a few Christmases past. He remembered how Erika had come to them last summer, fragile enough to shatter into a thousand fragments. She could never take the place of their daughter, but if anyone could come close, Erika was the one.
Then it came time to cork the wine and put away the past, or there would be no future. He swung the AR-15 up and over the railing and drew his sights on the windshield of the lead truck. And tightened his finger on the trigger.
* *
Jason hunched on the far side of the Sunbird, shoulder pressed into the right headlight. He’d pulled his shirt off and ripped it into long, wide strips. He still had one of the gasoline cans remaining; the other he’d already taken care of.
With the approaching trucks drawing nearer, louder, he unscrewed the can’s metal cap. He stuffed half a strip of cloth into the open mouth, leaving a long swatch hanging out.
Timing was crucial with this. Timing was everything.
Jason raised up high enough to peek through the Sunbird and check the distance. Close, they were very close. He flicked his lighter into life, set the dangling strip of cloth aflame.
One last glance back at Erika and Caleb and Diane, hidden behind the scrubby line of trees and brush. He couldn’t see their eyes, and a moment later was glad of it.
The lead truck roared past the Sunbird without slowing, and he sprang to his feet as the second truck followed. Rich’s first shots cracked out from the overpass.
The cloth burning, the fire crawling up the side of the can…
Jason launched himself toward the road, the third truck barreling in fast, faces within the cab only now registering they’d seen him, men in the beds of the first two concentrating on the sudden eruption of gunfire from Rich. He lugged the gasoline can up with him, spinning like an Olympian athlete ready to hurl a discus. Screaming now, he whirled past the nose of the Sunbird and toward the highway, inches from the path of the third truck.
As he spun, momentum took the can out to arm’s length and shoulder height. As the flame reached the wad stuffed into its mouth, Jason released the can’s handles and let it fly. It smashed through the right side of the truck’s windshield with an implosion of safety glass that showered the men in the cab, and caved in the chest of the closest passenger. The ruined windshield buckled in after it.
As the truck careened past, Jason went diving for the grass at the roadside. A moment later, after he’d rolled onto his belly with his arms shielding his head, the truck blasted into an inferno, gushing flames from every portal. Fire spewed out the back window onto the men crouched in the bed. They tumbled screaming from the back, heedless of how cruel asphalt is to unprotected flesh at sixty miles an hour.
He and Rich couldn’t have timed this any better if they’d had a month to rehearse it.
The first and third trucks were totally out of control, and as the first spun out from the AR-15 fire Rich was pouring into it, the second truck was sandwiched between the other two. A tremendous wrenching of metal ripped through the air, and a tire sailed across the median into the northbound lanes. Men, some burning, spilled from the truckbeds to scatter across the highway like loose cargo. Caroming off the other two, the third truck rolled over once, twice, three times, losing doors and tailgate and trailing all manner of flaming wreckage in its wake.
Then Jason was up on his feet in a crouch, one hand on the grip of the shotgun and the other on its pump. Blasting into the knot of men straggling up from the highway, he kept glancing north, because trucks four and five still had to be dealt with.
* *
At last Caleb was beginning to understand. This was it, the moment for which he and Erika had been brought together so many months ago. To shut down Travis Lane and Peter Solomon and their goon squad, along with whatever evil they’d sought to sow in what remained of the world. Caleb felt it deep inside, a part of the ecological clock that years of farming had instilled within him, and ticked along with the changes of seasons and marked time from planting to harvest. The clock that had signaled the stroke of midnight within him, at once an ending and the beginning of something new.
As the Bible said, for everything there was a season. Even for dying.
Whatever his part was in the next few minutes, he’d play it out without hesitation. Despite the hellish devastation erupting on the highway, he felt a peculiar sense of calm seeping throughout. Of meeting destiny head-on, on its own terms, and refusing to blink.
He would continue to do so for as long as he could, for as long as he was needed. Maybe he couldn’t run and twist and roll like Jason out there, or cover the scene from above like Rich. But he still had his old bolt-action rifle, the bane of hundreds of critters on a long-ago Ohio farm. And he still knew how to use it.
Shoot,
he thought,
I
ain’t never gonna see Texas.
Caleb squinted and drew the rifle to his shoulder and sunk a bullet into the heart of a bloodied man coming up on Jason’s blind side, then looked to see what else needed doing.
* *
Concealed in the scrubby growth of trees, Erika watched Jason and Rich take out the first three trucks in one fell swoop. In her hand was a lighter, ready to use when the time was right. If the opportunity presented itself.
A single thought punched through her mind like a spear:
The birds. I forgot the birds. There weren’t any birds.
The highway sign had indeed listed a name beginning with N. And she’d been so intent on labeling this as the place in those recurring dreams that she forgot about the damned birds, lifting in flight from the sign. It seemed like too significant a detail to have been superfluous.
What if I’ve made a mistake?
she wondered. Her insides felt ready to cave in and wrap themselves into a tight, freezing ball. Because five of their lives were on the line, and at a point of no return.
* *
For a moment, Diane could only stare in awe, transfixed by the morbid beauty of the first three trucks in their death throes, swerving and clashing and rolling about as if in some choreographed dance of carnage.
And Jason, the architect of it all, was a thing of terrible beauty himself—lean and stripped to the waist, his tanned torso striped with scars. He seemed more than human, like a young Achilles, a demigod of war.
She heard the brakes locking up on the last two trucks even before she saw them veering off the highway. The fourth arrowed down onto the grassy shoulder as if to bear down on their position behind the trees and brush, and Erika made her play. She touched a lighter to the ground and a thin tongue of fire leapt out to the shoulder. A second later a wall of flames leapt up from the ground. Jason had used the other can of fuel to soak several square yards of earth.
The fourth truck came rocketing through the fire anyway, jouncing from side to side, four men in its bed reeling to maintain balance.
The fifth truck, the last…Diane could no longer see it past the flames and the plume of smoke boiling upward.
Travis, where are you, you son of a bitch?
She hadn’t gotten a good look at the first three trucks, but Diane intuitively knew he wasn’t in them. It wasn’t his style, no. He wasn’t the type to let himself get taken out of action that quickly.
But if she did anything else that day, she would see him dead. No matter what the cost to her.
Diane deemed it her turn, taking the first pipe bomb from her bag, gripping it by the end, and lighting the fuse. She left the cover of the underbrush, sprinting past Caleb and out into the open. She saw Jason dodge the fourth truck like a toreador dodging a bull, as he and the guy in the passenger seat scrambled to get off a clear shot at each other. The four men in the bed had righted themselves, bringing up weapons, and she knew that once they started shooting, Jason couldn’t dodge them all. It would be like trying to dash through a rainstorm without getting wet.
As the truck came out of its skid, the bed was facing her. And Jason was dead if she didn’t do
something.
“You! Assholes!” she screamed, and every single man in the bed turned around to look back. She’d never knock generalizations again.
She pitched the pipe bomb with as much force as her arm could muster, sending it end over end, fuse sputtering a pinwheel of sparks. Okay, so it wasn’t a graceful pitch, so she threw like a girl…
Like that even mattered when the bomb dropped clattering into the truck bed, its bristling points nearly invisible against the electrician’s tape. The men scattered against the sides of the truck, Jason forgotten, except for one foolishly brave man.
His eyes met hers and he grinned, and she knew what was coming next.
He stooped to retrieve the bomb and fling it back. All he saw, she was certain, was an inch of fuse left to burn. He grabbed it around the middle, jolting upright, his sneer suddenly a shriek. His hand opened, fingers splaying wide to drop the damn thing, and the bomb stayed stuck right where it was. His hand was drizzling blood when the pipe went off like a stick of dynamite.
An instant later, his arm ended at his elbow.
A stray bullet from the highway ripped through the fabric of her jeans, laying a raw stripe across the front of her thigh. She barely felt it. Instead a throaty cry of victory burst from her lungs, and she reached into the shoulder-slung bag for another pipe.
* *
Jason had never seen a truck corner so fast and still maintain control. He felt one fender nose into him, knocking him off his feet and pitching him back onto his ass, giving his tailbone a knock. The truck shuddered to an earth-slinging halt and a sudden lurch as the engine died, as if the driver’s foot had slipped off the clutch.
The starter ground. If they got it moving again, they’d run him over, no doubt about it.
The shotgun was empty. He’d fired his last loaded shell a couple moments before. Jason rolled backward, one hand digging into his pocket for another round, fingers closing over hard ribbed plastic, slipping in sweat and closing again.
Bullets chewed up the earth next to his head, spraying dirt into his eyes.
He managed to jam the single shell into the loading port of the shotgun just as the truck roared to life, rolling onto his knees as he jacked the pump, then bringing the weapon up with one hand, like a pistol. The recoil knocked him backward again, the discharge spraying a storm of buckshot and glass into the driver’s face. The truck hitched and jerked again, bucking, finally dying again less than a foot away.
The men in the bed tumbled to the ground, and the guy in the passenger seat was scrambling out the door. As Jason pushed himself upright, he knew there was no time to reload, not now, not with five of them dropping to the ground in front of him.
Instead, he charged at them, because to run meant to die shot in the back, and then he saw that most of them were bleeding already, one of them staggering in a daze and waving a bloody stub of an arm in the air.
Diane
…
Another of them had lost an eye, the socket oozing red pulp. Jason swung his shotgun like a club, the impact jarring to the bone as it connected with someone’s skull.