Authors: Arthur Bradley
“Let’s move through, quick and quiet—grab a car and a weapon, and then get back on the road.”
She stepped back from the church door as if suddenly realizing that something dangerous might be inside.
“Right.”
Across from the church was a large brick building with massive white columns. At the top of the pillars was a sign that read
Bland County Court House
. There was a flagpole out front, but nothing flew on it. The building itself looked to be in relatively good shape, with its doors and windows intact. The same white symbol was painted on a large granite marker resting beside the walkway.
“Why would they mark a court—”
She was interrupted when the church door suddenly opened. Before either of them could decide what to do, people began spilling out. When they saw Tanner and Samantha, they stopped and huddled together, as if afraid of the strangers. They seemed especially surprised to see Samantha, perhaps because she now looked rugged enough to be the daughter of Crocodile Dundee.
After some hushed deliberation, a heavyset man, wearing dirty white pants and a blue suit coat turned and hurried back into the church.
“So much for quick and quiet,” Samantha mumbled under her breath.
Seconds later, a tall gaunt man clad in a black suit and top hat gently threaded his way through the parishioners.
“Hello there, strangers,” he said, walking toward them with a hand extended.
“He looks like Abraham Lincoln,” whispered Samantha.
Tanner stepped forward. He shifted the gaff to his left hand, which would enable him to shake the man’s hand or hook him through the eye, depending on what the situation dictated.
The remaining parishioners reluctantly stepped from the church, slowly fanning out into a large semicircle facing the town’s visitors. There were at least two dozen of them.
“I’m Brother Bill Lands,” the tall man said, shaking Tanner’s hand. The man’s grip was soft, and his skin cold and clammy, like he had spent the night digging in a graveyard.
Tanner offered what he hoped looked like a friendly smile.
“Tanner Raines, and this is my daughter Samantha.”
Samantha looked up at him, not at all surprised by his lie. Tanner had used such introductions in the past, explaining that it kept questions to a minimum.
“Are you folks from around here?” Lands asked, smiling with teeth that seemed impossibly big for his mouth.
“Just passing through. Our car broke down yesterday, and we’ve been forced to hoof it.”
“Oh my, that’s awful. I hope you’ll allow what’s left of the good people of Bland to help you in some small way.”
Tanner shrugged. “What we really need is a car.”
Brother Lands smiled. “I believe we can help you with that. We’ve moved all the cars that still run over to the transformer plant.” He looked over at the fat man who had fetched him from the church. “Brother Carl, would you see what you can find for these good people? And put a little extra gas in it too.”
The man nodded, offering a nervous smile.
“It’ll take me an hour or so to get over there and back.”
Lands turned back to Tanner.
“Can you suffer our company that long?”
“We’ll take an hour of waiting over a day of walking, anytime.”
Lands chuckled and motioned for Brother Carl to go ahead and retrieve the car.
“Would you care to come inside and wait for a spell?” A nervous murmur sounded from the crowd of worshippers behind him. “Across the street in the courthouse would probably be most comfortable place,” he clarified.
Tanner glanced at the huge T-shaped brick building off to his left. He couldn’t remember a single occasion when anything good had ever happened to him inside of a courthouse. On the other hand, he could find no logical reason to decline the invitation and risk insulting someone who was trying to help get them back on the road.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
CHAPTER
11
Something warm and wet slid across Mason’s face. He jerked forward and reached for his Supergrade. Bowie stared at him, smacking his lips together, as if trying to decode what flavor of dirt and sweat had collected on his master’s face.
Mason yawned and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep, and the sun was already starting to show in the eastern sky. Whether or not Bowie had slept or kept watch, he couldn’t say. All he knew for sure was that nothing had found them in the night, and for that, he was thankful. Unfortunately, Nakai was still no closer to being caught.
He studied the highway below. Even at a distance, he could see the bright red stains of blood covering the cars and asphalt. It had been a massacre, plain and simple.
“What do you say?” he said, scratching Bowie under his chin. “Should we go and have a look?”
Bowie yawned loudly.
Mason stood up and slowly worked the kinks out of his back. He had slept on the ground more times than he cared to count, but the older he got, the more his bones reminded him of the benefits of a mattress. He took a moment to stretch his shoulders, arms, and hands. Then he pumped his legs up and down a few times to get the blood flowing. Bowie stood watching him with his head tilted.
“I realize I must look like I’m getting ready for an early morning jog. But I’m not going down into that mess at anything less than one hundred percent.”
He practiced drawing his Supergrade a couple of dozen times, making sure that the entire motion was fluid and once again ingrained in his muscle memory. Mason could put a single round on target in less than half a second, but that only held true when nothing went wrong. And as he had told his students at Glynco many times, the key to nothing going wrong was practice. He smiled, remembering a student’s question on the subject.
“Do you have to practice every day?”
“No,” Mason assured him. “Only on the days you want to live.”
Mason had gone on to explain that, if a lawman were lucky, he might only have to draw his firearm a few times in his entire career. Of those, he might discharge it once. But the outcome of that one encounter would likely be dictated by the hundreds of hours he had spent preparing for it.
When Mason was satisfied with his warm-up, he picked up his M4, checked it, and started slowly descending the steep slope toward the interstate. Bowie walked beside him, occasionally stopping to sniff traces of gunpowder still swirling in the air.
Daylight brought with it a disturbing clarity to the carnage. Bodies were strewn in every direction with gallons upon gallons of blood spattered on the cars, asphalt, and concrete dividers. Arms had been torn off. Heads had been bashed in with such brutality that brains had been expelled through the ears. Bodies had been eviscerated, with long cords of guts strewn about like strings of Christmas garland. It was as if bloodthirsty Vikings had decided to prove that, with enough brutality, hand axes could win out over modern weaponry.
Mason had witnessed the horrors of war before, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he had found that the only way to keep from being overwhelmed by the gore was to develop an almost clinical detachment from those who had suffered. They were dead and gone. The piece parts that remained were no different than meat in a butcher’s shop. That rationalization only went so far, though, when he found himself slipping on entrails and tripping over severed heads. Butcher shop or not, it was an unsightly mess.
As he arrived at the far end of the bridge, he spotted two figures dressed in black fatigues cautiously working their way up the on-ramp. One was a short, dark-skinned man, Hispanic or perhaps American Indian, and the other a giant African American who looked meaner than Kimbo Slice. No doubt this must be Nakai and his fearsome partner, Jeb.
Mason ducked behind one of the tractor-trailers and quickly surveyed the area. There were plenty of places to hide, but hiding wasn’t what he had in mind. The odds had greatly improved, thanks to a horde of maniacal zombie-like monsters, and the interstate was as good a place as any to make a stand. But even if he could win a ranged firefight with two trained mercenaries, which he doubted, it wouldn’t get him what he needed. He sought more than justice for his fellow marshals; he sought information. And that was something that couldn’t be extracted when trading bullets.
An idea came to him, and he turned to Bowie.
“Stay here.”
The dog looked at him and squinted, like a child testing to see how serious a parent really was.
“I mean it. Don’t you move.”
Bowie reluctantly lay down and flopped his head on his front paws.
Mason rose to a crouch and hurried down the freeway until he got to the first of the two HMMWVs equipped with a .50 caliber machine gun. Two soldiers lay nearby, one a lieutenant and the other a corporal. Both looked like they had been put through a blender.
Mason climbed up into position behind the heavy weapon. It had been more than ten years since he had last stood behind a Browning M2, and it took him a moment to remember the ins and outs of operating the weapon. The M2HB was by all accounts one of the finest heavy machine guns in the world, air cooled and able to put out nearly six hundred rounds per minute.
The ammunition had been torn away from the weapon during the melee, so he would need to ready it for operation. He checked that the feed tray cover was down and the bolt forward. Quietly lifting a long string of .50 BMG ammunition, he inserted it into the feed tray until the pawl engaged the first round. Then he pulled the retracting slide handle rearward and released it. It made a distinctive
clunk
as it flew forward. He cycled it a second time to chamber the first round. He double-checked that the gun was set in automatic mode and locked down the bolt-latch release. Ma Deuce was ready to rock and roll.
Mason swung the M2 in the direction of the on-ramp. The two men were not yet visible, so he squatted down and stared out through the broken windshield of the HMMWV. Less than three minutes later, he saw them. Nakai and Jeb moved carefully from one point of cover to the next, one man bounding ahead and then waving the other on. Professionals, he thought. Not to be underestimated.
He waited until they were about halfway across the overpass, too far along to retreat back down the ramp but not close enough to pose a serious threat. When they had just come up alongside the Greyhound bus, he stood up and gripped the handles of the Browning. He gave the butterfly triggers a quick press with both thumbs. The gun bucked back and forth, and a short burst of .50 caliber slugs smashed into the grill of the bus. The hood flipped up, and pieces of its fender tore away.
Nakai and Jeb immediately dove to the ground, using the wheels of the bus to shield them. Both men no doubt knew that the Browning would make short work of any such cover, but their options were limited.
Mason leaned over from behind the gun and shouted to them.
“Toss the weapons!”
Neither man moved.
“Okay,” he muttered under his breath, “if you need a little persuasion...”
He sent another burst toward them, this time smashing out the bus windows and chewing through the metal that held the roof in place. The entire top of the bus caved in.
“Last chance!” he shouted.
One of the men tossed something about thirty yards in front of them, and a cloud of thick gray smoke billowed out. Within seconds, the wall of smoke completely concealed the bus and everything around it. The smoke didn’t reach all the way to Mason, but it did a fine job of obscuring everything else.
He started to squeeze off another burst, planning to sweep from left to right, when he heard Bowie growl. The dog was now completely enveloped in the smoke, and Mason had no way of knowing whether he had moved. More likely than not, Bowie was already making his way toward the enemy.
“So much for this bright idea,” grumbled Mason. Throwing his feet over the side of the HMMWV, he dropped to the ground.
When the first volley of .50 caliber rounds hammered into the bus, Nakai and Jeb instinctively dove behind the bus. It not only minimized their silhouette, it also put something solid between them and the heavy weapon.
“He’ll cut us to pieces,” Jeb said, high-crawling forward a couple of feet and peeking around one of the huge bus tires.
They heard a man shout for them to toss out their weapons.
“He thinks we’re pinned down,” said Nakai.
“We’re not?”
Another burst of gunfire tore into the bus. When the shooting stopped, the roof started to collapse in on itself, like it had become the victim of giant metal-eating termites.
“I’ll pop smoke,” said Nakai. “You go right, and I’ll go straight up the middle, fast and hard.”
Jeb nodded.
Nakai pulled the pin and tossed the smoke grenade as far as he could from a prone position. A cloud of gray smoke poured out, quickly filling the roadway.
Jeb rolled all the way to the right side of the road, scrambled to his feet, and followed the concrete divider forward. He let his AK-47 hang across his chest, freeing his hands to feel his way through the thick smoke. He came to the back end of a car but managed to squeeze past it. The smoke was incredibly thick, and he began to cough. He fought off the panicked feeling of not getting enough oxygen and continued his careful advance. If he could come out along the wall when the man’s attention was on Nakai, he could end things with a careful shot to the head, quick and easy.