Authors: Bryan Smith
Not that she was ungrateful for the interruption. Up until a few moments ago, Jade had been brutalizing her, stomping on her with her heavy boots and kicking her all over the room. Her face was bruised and bloodied and she had at least one broken rib that was causing an excruciating amount of pain.
The plump woman sneered at Jade. “Wait until John Wayne—”
Jade pointed her gun at the woman’s face and squeezed the trigger.
The last gray light of dusk had faded during the drive out to the compound. Night was fully upon them by the time Echo steered the Impala down the access road to the ranch house. The lack of streetlights meant Echo had to put on the car’s high beams to navigate the twisty stretch of road. The radio was off and no one was talking, the excitement of before giving way to a familiar, tense preparedness. They knew the feeling well from their many criminal endeavors. There was the elevated pulse, the breath lodged in the back of the throat, and the faint tingling in the gut that straddled the line between pleasant and nausea-inducing.
The Impala’s high beams illuminated an open gate and the faint outline of a big house in the distance. Though the gate was open, two black Hummers were parked nose-to-nose in the road, blocking the way. Two guards with assault rifles were standing in the road near the Hummers. As Echo guided the Impala to a slow halt, one of the men raised a hand to shield his eyes against the glare of the high beams.
They approached the car when Echo shut off the high beams.
Echo kept her gaze straight ahead as she said, “Remember, we’re lost.”
Lana nodded. “So we’re not visitors?”
Echo shook her head. “I’m thinking they’d just tell us to go away if we went with that story.”
She parked the Impala and opened her door, stepping out before the armed men could reach the car.
The men stopped in their tracks and aimed their rifles at her.
“Halt!” the one to her right shouted.
The other girls climbed out of the car to flank Echo, each posing with a hip cocked outward in a manner meant to be distracting while not being obvious about the intent. It was a tactic that had worked well other times, and Echo was pleased to see it was already paying similar dividends here.
The men glanced at each other before lowering their rifles. The one who’d already addressed them spoke again. “What are you ladies doing out here? This is a private road.”
Echo summoned a smile intended to convey guilelessness. “Oh, that’s interesting. We’ve actually been looking for a…private…party…”
She trailed off as a noise she hadn’t expected to hear yet became audible somewhere off in the night. The guards ceased paying attention to her and turned toward the distant ranch house. The sound steadily grew louder, eventually becoming identifiable as helicopter rotors. And soon after that multiple sets of lights appeared in the night sky somewhere to the rear of the ranch house.
Before Echo could think of what to do next, Dez broke for the Impala and bent down to stick her head through the open window. She reemerged seconds later clutching two handguns. She kept one for herself and slapped the other into Echo’s hands an instant before she streaked toward the oblivious guards.
One of the men started to turn toward them.
He was a millisecond too late.
Dez put the barrel of her gun to his ear and shot him. He slumped to the ground, a puppet with his strings cut. The other guard spun around and reeled backward, his gun raised ineffectually toward the sky. Echo aimed at his face and fired once. The bullet made a ruin of his face as he staggered backward another step and collapsed into the brush by the side of the road.
Dez nodded approvingly. “Good shot.”
Echo looked at her. “You taught me well.”
Dez smiled. “Ah. You still love me. I was beginning to wonder.”
“Wonder no more.” Echo approached the Hummers and took a closer look around. She saw more dark vehicles farther down the little road, but no people. It was difficult to be sure about that in the dark, but she felt a certain deadness from that direction that strongly indicated a lack of human presence. “I thought there’d be more guards.”
Dez sidled up next to her, leaning close to whisper in her ear. “I get so excited when I see you in action. I wish it could just be me and you again.”
Echo looked into her eyes and, for the first time in a while, felt a stirring of Dezsexuality. She understood what Dez was saying. Only other people like them would get it. There was nothing quite like the buzz you got from killing people. She had almost forgotten it with Casey around again. “I…need to think about things.”
Dez smiled. “You do that. Just don’t think too long. Opportunities have a way of slipping away.”
Lana cleared her throat.
Echo and Dez turned to look at her.
Lana had liberated an assault rifle from one of the dead guards. The way she held the weapon—with a comfortable familiarity that would surprise anyone but her friends—made her look more like a trained killer than a professional stripper.
Dez and Echo, of course, knew she was both those things.
“If you bitches are done sharing your intimate moment, what do you say we get up to that house and save the fucking day before the boys can get there?”
Dez and Echo smiled as they shared a look.
Show up the guys at their own game?
That sounded like an excellent idea.
Two military-grade helicopters packed with heavily armed mercenaries seemed like overkill to Casey, though he supposed going into a situation like this with more than you needed was preferable to being caught short when the fireworks started. The noise the big birds made rendered stealth impossible. There would still be something of an element of surprise, but Casey soon realized the air approach had little to do with that anyway. Ted’s overall philosophy was pure cowboy and his true motivation for doing things this way was easy to figure out—it was all about one-upping the other guy.
Oh, so you’re gonna send some soldier boys to bust up my contraband distribution point? Okay, well, guess what? I’m gonna launch a goddamn AIR ASSAULT on your asses.
Death from above, motherfucker!
Even more absurd was the stogie-chomping maniac’s insistence on playing music through the retrofitted helicopter’s stereo speakers. The speakers produced a punishing level of volume, which was necessary to be heard over the sound of the rotors. Casey spent the flight out from the private helipad to the de Rais compound feeling like he was trapped inside a speaker cabinet at a death metal concert. The playlist was of Ted’s own devising and the song playing as the ’copter flew in low over treetops just before arriving at the compound was “Undercover of the Night” by the Rolling Stones.
The guy probably saw himself as a drug kingpin version of that character from
Apocalypse Now
,
with the Stones in place of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”. How the pilot could hear to communicate with the pilot of the other bird was a mystery to Casey. He breathed a huge sigh of relief once they finally touched down safely in the field behind the ranch house and the assorted outlying buildings.
Wilkinson’s mercenaries wasted no time streaming out of the helicopters and commencing a door-to-door search of the cabins. The area was lit up by a sea of bobbing flashlights. Casey and Wilkinson brought up the rear, allowing the professionals to take care of business with machine-like efficiency. A trend was soon established—the cabins were all empty. Focus then shifted to a larger building closer to the big ranch house. Other than the ranch house, it was the only illuminated structure in the compound. Light was visible through a few small windows. A mercenary kicked the door open and went inside, followed closely by several of his comrades.
Casey made like he was about to go in after them, but Ted stopped him with a hand splayed across his chest. “Hang back a bit longer, son. Let these men do their job first.”
Casey already felt ridiculous outfitted in full military gear and body armor, especially since they were encountering no resistance at all so far. This should have come as a relief, but it somehow felt oppressively ominous instead. Something had gone very wrong here. He couldn’t put his finger on what it might be, but he felt the bad vibes in his bones. Other things had dominated his attention over the last few days, but now his concern for Keely’s safety returned in full force.
She’s either dead already or soon will be. Shit.
In addition to that, there was this issue of what to do about Ted and his domineering sister. He had a hunch the real reason Ted was keeping him out of the action—or lack thereof, given how things were developing—had more to do with her desires than letting the professionals do their job. She had probably ordered him to keep her new boy toy safe and sound. His forefinger twitched outside the trigger guard of the M16 clutched in his hands. It was tempting to put a bullet through Ted’s temple and be done with that part of it. The only thing that stopped him was the suspicion that one of Ted’s hired men would kill him immediately afterward.
The building’s front door creaked open and a mercenary stepped out onto the little porch. His expression was grim as he addressed Ted. “Sir, the building’s been secured, but you’ll want to take a look inside. It’s…pretty bad.”
Casey experienced a deep sense of dread upon hearing those words. “Shit.”
Ted glanced at him. “Sure you want to go in there?”
No.
He grimaced. “Got no choice. I have to know.”
Ted clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s have a looksee then.”
Casey held his breath as he followed Ted and the mercenary into the building. He let it out and felt a rumbling deep in his gut once he stepped through the door and got his first look at the horror inside.
“Oh…fuck.”
Ted swept off his helmet and palmed sweat from his brow. “I echo that sentiment. I’ve seen some shit in my day, son, but this takes the cake.”
They were all dead.
Casey walked numbly down the aisle between the rows of chairs, scanning the faces of the dozens upon dozens of slumped-over bodies in search of Keely. Most had fallen out of their chairs to the floor. Their frozen expressions were contorted and their limbs were twisted in ways that indicated they had died in extreme agony. Everywhere he looked he saw discarded plastic cups and red stains on the floor. But the stains were spilled punch rather than blood. These people had been poisoned. Casey felt a flabbergasted rage building inside him that pushed aside the numbness. These people had gone willingly to their deaths. There had to be at least a hundred corpses in this building alone. What brand of follow-the-leader insanity could compel so many to throw their lives away?
He reached the front of the stage and turned around to face Ted. “She’s not here.”
“You sure about that?”
“Positive.”
Ted scratched the side of his head. “Well…that’s good, right?”
“Yeah, but—” A faint popping noise made Casey turn his head and stare out one of the dark windows. “What’s that sound?”
Ted’s brow furrowed as the popping sound came again. “Sounds like gunfire.”
Casey dashed up the aisle, brushing past Ted and stepping on bodies in his haste to get back outside. Keely wasn’t among this mass of dead. That meant she was still out there somewhere, possibly even still alive. And as long as any chance of that remained, he meant to be in the thick of the action until he knew for sure.
The back of the plump woman’s head exploded in a shower of blood and brains. The heavyset man screamed and struggled to his feet, apparently intending to charge at Jade. Keely understood his rage, but his attempt to get at Jade was ill-advised. He was unarmed and she, well…
Jade fired two more times. Both bullets hit the man in his chest, each impact making his body jerk before he fell over and landed on the floor with a tremendous thud that shook the furniture in the room. The female couple separated and screamed as they scooted rapidly away from Jade. The guard by the door had the thin, hollow-cheeked features of a young man barely out of adolescence. His nervous, darting gaze also betrayed his youth and inexperience. He had taken a tentative step away from the door and looked like he knew he should take some kind of action but lacked the decisiveness to do anything without being told.
Jade shot him in the face.
One of the women got to her feet and bolted toward the door.
Jade shot her in the back.
Something in John’s top surviving female lieutenant had snapped, yielding at last to the monumental pressure she had to have been feeling all along as she contemplated her own imminent demise. It was either that or she was just a murderous lunatic. On reflection, Keely decided it was likely a combination of those things.
And it’s only a matter of time before the bitch works her way around to me again. Gotta make my move.
The other half of the female cult couple had her back to the wall and was struggling to stand, her hands held palms-out in front of her in a pleading gesture. She was crying and shaking her head.
Keely didn’t get it.
All these idiots had been so sure they wanted to die…up until the moment someone was pointing a gun at them.