The Battle: Alone: Book 4 (19 page)

Chapter 33

     Several hours had passed. Sarah and her friend Jessika were taking turns on death watch. Lindsey was pulling her turn handcuffed to the bed in the next room, Swain’s “insurance policy.”

     Jessika walked out of the kitchen, two cups of very stale coffee in hand, and placed one on the lamp table for Sarah.

     “I’m ready to take over now. How’s he doing?”

     “His pulse is weaker and slowing. His breaths are shallow and unsteady. He’s bleeding out internally. It won’t be long now.”

     She’d been watching his torso. It was warmer than it should have been, and his abdomen was hard to the touch. The blood they’d prevented from escaping the body was still oozing, but was pooling inside his body instead. It was just a matter of time before there wasn’t enough blood left in the veins to trigger the heart’s urge to pump it. Then he’d drift away to nothingness.

     It wasn’t a bad way to die, really. The pain he’d felt after being shot had spurred his brain into action. He’d blacked out and felt nothing after that. And in the hours since he staggered into the house, he still hadn’t regained consciousness.

     Sarah wasn’t kidding herself. She knew he never would.

     He was doomed from the start. Without qualified surgeons and scrub nurses, sterile tools and an operating table, it was just a matter of letting nature run its course.

     The human body wasn’t made to be violated with bullets. It didn’t like a tiny hole suddenly opening up on one side of the body and a gaping hole appearing on the other side.

     It didn’t appreciate it when the bullet shattered bones and organs and wreaked havoc as it passed through the body, causing blood to go to places it was never meant to go.

     The body had few ways it could respond to such insults.

     One was unconsciousness. Another was death.

     While McDonough was laying there dying, the farm house was a beehive of activity.

     The man behind the wheel of the Explorer was still out there. No one risked getting shot to go get him.

     The engine was still running, and would continue to run into the night, before it finally ran out of fuel.

     Sarah had been hoping for a chance to talk to Lindsey alone, out of earshot of Swain’s men, to see if she’d noticed the same things Sarah had as they were looking out that bedroom window.

     But from the time McDonough had been placed on the couch to die, they’d been surrounded by angry and frightened men, barking orders and running in all different directions.

     Then, as things started to calm, Lindsey had to report to the insurance room, as it was now called, to pull her shift handcuffed to the bed, the end of a rifle inches from her head.

     Swain, the man who was still in charge but rapidly losing control, had done what all cowards do in a tense situation.

     He’d run, to the relative safety and comfort of his upstairs bedroom, and hadn’t been seen by anyone in at least three hours.

     Sarah had no doubt he was shooting up, or smoking his junk, or hot-railing it through a heated glass pipe.

     Oh, before he left he’d barked out a bunch of orders to his men.

     And even though they, to a man, resented him just a bit because he thought a time of crisis would be a good idea to retreat to his room to do his drugs, they did as they were told.

     Because they feared him more than they resented him.

     McDonough had confided in several of them that a mutiny was in the works. He was planning to overthrow Swain and run the operation with a little more integrity. A little less drug-induced paranoia. And perhaps a little more compassion toward the hostages.

     But McDonough was gone now, or almost so. He was within a couple of hours of death. And none of the others were strong enough to take Swain on.

     So they, like Hitler’s henchmen so many years before, carried on their leader’s orders although they thought he was going insane.

     Or at least was out of his mind most of the time on drugs.

     Swain had ordered everyone inside, as soon as the hours of darkness gave them cover.

     They were hunkered down at various places throughout the compound, he said, hiding in the cornfields or barn or other outbuildings. Out of touch and out of reach of the sniper’s bullets.

     Swain didn’t even know how many men he’d lost, and wouldn’t until darkness allowed them to assemble within the house.

     They assumed they’d lost at least two, besides the man in the truck and McDonough. Someone peeking out the window noticed that not one, but two, riderless horses, had returned to the front of the house. They appeared to be waiting for someone to unsaddle and feed them and put them up for the night.

     In the meantime they grazed on the lush green grass.

     It was just over an hour before darkness now. Those inside the house peeked through the window blinds, wondering what other chaos was headed their way.

     In the dining room, three of them were secretly making plans to high-tail it after they could safely sneak out and make their way to the forest.

     “Screw this,” one told the others. “We’ve had a good run here, but I’m not hanging around in a place where we’re being picked off one or two at a time.”

     Upstairs, Swain was blissfully unaware that he’d lost the men’s confidence and their trust. Through glassy eyes he stared out into a room where things were slightly out of focus, still delusional in his thinking that things were still going relatively well.

     And trying to fight his way through the fog that was his drug-damaged mind, in search of a plan to defeat his enemy.

Chapter 34

     Dave was back at the farm just before sundown. He knew they would wait until dark to make their next move for fear of coming out of the house and being picked off. He also knew they’d take no action to relieve the sentries that were still out there. By now the sentries on duty would have realized something was wrong. Anyone still in the hay barn would have seen the sentry in the hayloft get shot.

     The men riding the fence line would see the black SUV in the yard with a dead body inside when they made their circuit and rode past the front part of the house.

     As each man realized they’d been hit again, Dave expected they would go to ground. They’d dismount, hug the dirt or find something sturdy to hide behind. And they’d wait until dark to move to the house to be relieved.

     They had no idea that Dave’s long-range rifle had night vision capability.

     But they soon would.

     There were doors on three sides of the house: a front door and a back door on opposite sides, and a service entrance on a third side.

     Dave positioned himself dead center on the side of the house with the service entrance. From that vantage point, he couldn’t see either the front or the back door.

     But he could darn sure see anyone approaching any of the three doors from anywhere in the compound.

     Only a man approaching from the blind side of the house, then shirting the house’s exterior walls to work his way around to either the front or the back door, had any chance of avoiding Dave’s view.

     Anyone else’s ass belonged to Dave.

     He guessed correctly when he assumed they’d go to ground once they realized they’d been attacked again.

     They tied their horses to whatever trees were available. The riders themselves hiding in the corn and hay fields waiting for dark. And they were doing a pretty good job. As the waning minutes of daylight ticked away, Dave scanned the area and was unable to spot a single one.

     But he knew they were out there. He didn’t know how many were left alive, or where they were. But he knew they were there.

     The bad guys, meanwhile, were less certain. They knew they’d been hit by snipers again, but didn’t have a clue whether the snipers were still out there. Or how many there were. They might have been surprised that only one man was shattering the tranquility of their world. They might have been surprised that any one man was capable of causing such turmoil.

     But then again, they didn’t know Dave Speer.

     While he waited for his shot, or shots, Dave sniffed the air again. His senses were well tuned. Rain was on its way. He hoped it held off until he’d taken out a couple more of the enemy.

     His eye remained on the scope, scanning the area on each side of the house for any hint of movement. But as he did so, his mind wandered just a bit, back to the days when he and Sarah were a young unmarried couple learning each other’s ways.

     She thought he was kidding when he mentioned that rain was coming.

     “You’re nuts. There’s not a cloud in the sky.”

     “Not yet. Give it a couple of hours. My nose never deceives me.”

     Her mouth had dropped and she’d said, “Are you meaning to tell me you can smell rain?”

     “Well, duh… can’t everybody?”

     “You’re kidding, right?”

     “No. I’m not. I swear. I can very clearly smell the rain, even as we speak.”

     Sarah wasn’t sure whether Dave was playing one of his stupid practical jokes, so she let the subject drop.

     And then her best friend walked into the bar.

     She said, “Hey, Becky… this clown claims he can smell rain when there’s not a cloud in the sky.”

     Becky looked at Sarah and said, “Well, duh… can’t everybody?”

     Sarah went into a minor funk, disappointed that she couldn’t do something practically every other human on earth could do.

     Super Dave brought her out of it by saying, “You know, if you have to have one single flaw, that’s a small one to have. From what I can see, you’re perfect in every other way.”

     That was the night, after Dave drank several more beers to steel his nerves, that he proposed to his sweet Sarah. He thought he could never love her more than he did that night.

     But all these years later, he did indeed love her even more.

     He wondered if she saw the Explorer in the yard. He wondered if she knew that Super Dave was on his way to rescue her again.

     He saw movement to his right. Someone was crouched against the side of the barn, preparing to make a run for it.

     Dave never gave him a chance.

     As the man stood up to run, a bullet entered his chest and caused his heart to instantly explode.

     The bullet made a slight sound not unlike someone pumping his fist into his palm, as it passed through the body and splintered rib bones and spine.

     But no one more than a fifty feet away heard it.

     He was dead even before his body crumbled to the ground.

     Nobody heard him fall, either.

     Probably the loudest noise was that of his rifle, which fell on the end of its barrel and bounced a couple of times.

     But even that wasn’t loud enough for anyone to notice.

     No alarm went up. No shots were fired. There was nothing to tell the others it wasn’t safe to try the same thing.

     Dave smiled and waited some more.

     Another fifteen minutes went by.

     A shadowy figure ran from the corn field toward the house, a hundred yards away.

     He was carrying a rifle. It wasn’t a hostage.  

     Dave lined up his shot carefully, knowing he had several seconds to make it. He led the man just a bit, then squeezed the trigger.

     The man went down, and appeared to be rolling around, holding his midsection.

     “Damn!”

     Dave’s shot was low. He wondered, “How in hell did that happen?”

     But he didn’t have time to ponder it. His target was now immobile, and much easier to hit.

     Through his scope he aimed for the man’s head, so he could silence him before he started to cry out. He gently, almost tenderly, squeezed the trigger and saw the man’s head shatter into a dozen pieces.