The Sword of God - John Milton #5 (John Milton Thrillers) (34 page)

Close.

Walker Price was dead.

Leland Mulligan was dead.

Larry Maddocks.

Harley Ward.

Dylan Fox.

Dead.

Dead.

Dead.

There were only three of them left.

“Get behind the trees!” he yelled out to his son and Chandler.

Michael didn’t hear him. He brought up his rifle and loosed off a round into the bushes, then another, and another. His rifle cracked out against the sound of the rain.

“Stop firing!” Lundquist shouted, not daring to take his eyes away from the bushes where he thought he had seen movement. “Get into cover!”

Michael fired again, his eyes bugged out with fright. His finger pulled and pulled, spent shells ejecting and new ones chambering, the recoil juddering against his shoulder.

“Stop firing! Save your ammo!”

Michael heard him this time. He looked over in his direction, and Lundquist saw how terrified the boy was.

“Come on,” he shouted, starting back up the slope. There was a stand of large hemlocks, and he pressed himself behind the trunk of the nearest. Michael arrived a moment later, the barrel of his rifle trembling. He squeezed next to his father, aiming out around the side of the tree. Thomas Chandler sheltered behind another tree.

“Shit,” Michael said. “He shot Leland.”

Lundquist nodded. “Probably got Larry, too.”

“Oh fuck.” Michael’s larynx bobbed up and down in his throat as he tried to swallow the fear away.

Think
.

Milton had changed tactics. He had stopped running.

Think
.

Lundquist looked up at the sky. The thunderhead was low and as black as pitch. It could be midnight for all the difference that would make. The rain was coming down as hard as ever, and visibility was reduced to twenty or thirty feet. The rainwater fell to join the spate that was forming around his feet. Lundquist picked his shirt away from his chest, but it sucked back again, stuck to his skin, drenched through.

“Listen to me,” he said to them both, his voice low and urgent. “We can’t stay here. He’ll just circle around and pick us off. We need to get moving.”

“Where?”

“Back home.”

“We’ll never make—”

“I know the terrain around here better than he does. We—”

“
Lundquist
.”

They both heard the shout over the clamour.

Lundquist felt his heart jackhammer in his chest. He swallowed hard, feeling the anger starting to surge. He channelled that, instead, and the fear receded, if only a little.

“What do you want?”

“You know what I want.”

The voice was coming from below them, down the slope.

“The National Guard will be here soon,” he called back. “You know that, you son of a bitch? Five hundred soldiers. You’ve got no chance.”

“We’ll have to disagree on that, won’t we?”

Lundquist looked across to his son. Michael was gripping the rifle tightly in both hands.

“You asked what I used to do. Do you still want to know?”

“You were a soldier.”

“An assassin, Lundquist. I killed people for my country. I killed one hundred and thirty-six men and women.”

“Bull
shit
.”

Milton didn’t answer. Lundquist looked around the edge of the tree, trying to see him. There was nothing.

“And now you’re out of your depth,” Lundquist said, trying to get him to speak again.

“Doesn’t look that way to me.”

“How’s that arm of yours?”

There was a short pause. “It’s been better. But I don’t need both arms for what I’m going to do to you.”

“You think you can take us out with a bow and arrow?”

“I’ve got a rifle now.”

“You’re still outnumbered.”

“I’ve done all right so far. Only three of you left, plus those two you left behind at the falls. Or maybe I already took those two out, who knows?”

Lundquist tried to pinpoint the direction of Milton’s voice. He was a decent distance away and maybe off to the right, maybe moving between sentences, but it was difficult to be sure. The sound bounced around the tree trunks, and the rain deadened everything. He took his hand off the barrel of his rifle and scrubbed water from his eyes.

“Milton!”

Milton didn’t answer.

“Want to know the way I see it?”

He didn’t answer.

“We outnumber you, and you have one arm. There are five hundred soldiers coming into these woods right now. They’ve got helicopters, too, probably already on their way. If I were you, I’d come out of there with my hands up right now and hope to God that I’m feeling disposed to bringing you in alive.”

“Don’t think I’m going to be doing that.”

He turned to Chandler and Michael and hissed, “We need to move. You ready?”

Michael’s eyes were wide. Chandler’s face was bloodless. Lundquist glared at them both, nodded up the slope, and said, “You two go first, and I’ll cover you. Get up to those trees, see them?”

They nodded.

“Then you cover me when I come up. Okay?”

“Yes.”

Lundquist looked up into the sky, allowing the rain to wash off his face for a second.

He took a deep breath and tightened his grip on the rifle.

“Now!”

Lundquist crouched and swung around the edge of the tree, the rifle aimed into the forest where he thought Milton’s voice had come from last. Michael and Chandler ran liked scalded deer, their feet slipping and sliding through the mud and the cataract of water that was coming down the slope from above. He thought he saw a shimmer of movement from within a stand of hardwoods. There was the sharp retort of a rifle. Lundquist swung the rifle up and aimed at the spot, firing two rounds in quick succession. He stared hard into the underbrush, straining his eyes and ears, but there was nothing. He glanced up the slope and saw Michael at the top, turning back to him and crouching down behind a fall of rocks, aiming back down into the woods. Chandler’s head appeared around the trunk of a large oak.

Milton had missed.

He closed his eyes for a moment, remembering his scripture.

The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life.

He opened his eyes and ran. He pulled his boots out of the quagmire, each step splashing in the torrent as he ran as hard as he could to his son. He stared fearfully at Michael’s face, terrified that it would register the sight of Milton below him, the preface to the bullet that would find him between the shoulder blades, but Michael’s face remained intent with concentration. The bullet didn’t come.

“Did you get him?” the boy cried out as he slipped into cover behind him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

Tom Chandler hurried over to them.

“What do we do?”

“We need to get as far away from here as we can. We need to keep running.”

THEY HAD made it to the top of the ridge and then the uplands beyond when the radio crackled with static from the lightning.

Lundquist put it to his ear and tried to press it there as he ran on.

“We… helicopters… too… thunder.”

“This is Lundquist. Say again. Repeat, say again.”

“Dangerous… lightning… on foot.”

“I can’t hear you.”

The radio buzzed and fizzed and popped, and when the static dissolved, the voice wasn’t one he recognised, and he couldn’t even be sure it was meant for him.

“Dammit!” He was gasping from the hard running. “This is Lundquist. We are under attack. Men down, repeat, men down. We need help.”

The lightning crackled again, lighting up the uplands, and then the thunder rolled over them, on top of them, so loud that it felt like his ears were ringing. Lightning flashed again, and Lundquist suddenly worried how wise it was to be out in the open when the storm was directly overhead. The whiteness stained a lattice against his retinas, and he blinked it away, squeezing the water out of his eyes, and then it was gone and the uplands were dark again.

“They’re not coming,” Michael gasped out.

“I don’t know… this weather…”

“We’re on our own,” the boy said, his eyes still bulging.

Lundquist knew that they had to hurry. The land around here was horribly open. Milton wouldn’t need to track them; he would be able to
see
them. He remembered the creek that they had followed earlier, cutting through the uplands, down the rise and then into the thicker forest. But where was it? He couldn’t remember. What about the falls that Milton had climbed to get away from them? If they could find the river, maybe they could climb down there and get back to Truth. If they could keep Milton behind them, there was no reason why they wouldn’t be able to get to help in one piece.

“Dad?” Michael called.

“We’re going to be okay,” he shouted over the roar of the storm. “I know a way down.”

“What about—”

“He’s behind us, right?”

“Yes.”

“We keep him behind us. He’s been shot. We’re halfway home, boys, you hear? We just have to keep on going.”

Rain pelted his face. He reached up to wipe his eyes when a gust of wind swept across them, snagging the brim of his hat and tearing it away. It jerked up into the sky, twenty feet high in an instant, and then spun away behind them.

Lundquist was past caring.

They started off, rushing out of the tree line and onto the wide-open space of the uplands. They covered the first hundred feet without incident but then Chandler turned and started to trot backwards so that he could look behind them, with his eye off the path ahead. His left leg plunged down into a rabbit hole, and he overbalanced, his leg buckling with a stomach-churning crack as he fell to the left, the leg still planted in the hole. Chandler screamed.

MILTON DIDN’T think it would be possible for it to rain any harder, but he had been wrong.

It was.

He reached the top of the ridge and held himself still, listening hard. He heard nothing. His breath coming thick and heavy, he poked his head up and surveyed the terrain. The upland was as he remembered it: broad ridges with rounded summits and wide, shallow valleys. There were rough grasslands, scrub, and pockets of trees. Plantations of conifer came in geometric blocks and formed hard, angular lines across the rounded slopes of the ridges. Patches of scrubby woodland, pastures, and marsh added to the mosaic.

He saw the three men in the near distance. Five hundred yards? They were running and, as he watched them, Chandler turned around to look for him, trotting backwards and tripping. He dropped down onto his side, and Milton heard the scream even above the thunder and the ululation of the rain. He watched as Callow stooped down to him. He heard another scream of pain. Chandler stayed on the ground as Lundquist turned and knelt, his rifle sweeping the ridge as he tried to find Milton.

He pressed himself down into the wet ground and watched.

Callow slipped his hand beneath Chandler’s shoulders and hauled him upright. Another scream as his left leg was freed from the hole into which it had jammed. They started towards the south again. Chandler was hopping on his right leg, Callow was trying to support him on his right hand side, Lundquist was jogging ahead then turning back to cover them.

Knee ligaments?

A broken ankle?

A broken
leg?

Milton calculated.

The odds had swung further in his direction, but he was still outnumbered and outgunned. The magazine of the rifle that he had taken from the dead man had been almost empty, with just the two rounds left in the chamber. They were gone now. The young cop had fallen in a spot where he wouldn’t have been able to get to him without getting shot himself. He wondered whether he should go back now and look for his weapon. He decided against it. He didn’t want to give them any more of a head start. The bow would have to do.

He squinted out into the rain. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to take them if he followed them out into the upland. They had long guns, and as soon as he came out of cover, they would be able to start taking potshots at him. He could make himself difficult to hit, and the weather would mean that they would need luck to make the shot, but, at the very least they would be able to keep him out of range. It would be a stalemate, apart from the fact that he didn’t know how long he would be able to survive out in the open in the middle of the storm. They were better equipped than he was. Better dressed. They would be able to last out the weather. He didn’t know if he could.

He stopped beneath the shelter of a pin oak and tried to remember the map.

He needed a way to get ahead of them.

LUNDQUIST STOPPED, turned, and raised his rifle. He was looking back into the wind, a constant gust that seemed impossibly freighted with rain. He narrowed his eyes to slits, then scooped the water away, squinting so hard that the muscles in his brow started to ache.

No sign of Milton.

Where was he?

A wounded deer must feel like this. Injured, helpless, the hunter stalking it, sighting it, waiting for the proper time to finish it off.

“Come on! Too slow! We need to go faster!”

“This is as quick as I can manage,” Michael yelled out over the noise. “His leg, Pops… Jesus.”

Chandler moaned. The boy had snapped the tibia in his left leg. Lundquist had heard the crack, loud as a gunshot. His leg had been wedged up to the knee, and the sudden shift had torqued the bone too much. A compound fracture. The bone had sheared in two, one sharp half slicing through the skin at his shin. The colour in his face had disappeared completely now. He looked like he was about to faint.

“We’re going to have to leave him.”

“We can’t.”

“He’s going to get us killed.”

“No,” Michael shouted at him, suddenly angry. “No man left behind. You know that as well as I do.”

Dammit.

Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be men of courage; be strong.

Lundquist turned back to the south. He could leave them, he thought. He
should
leave them. He had God’s word to consider. He had been chosen by God to do His will. Michael and Chandler would give Milton something to think about, buy him enough time to get all the way clear. There was backup ahead, Randy Watts and Archie McClennan, the two men he had left at the falls. He could run back to Truth and leave this whole sorry mess to the National Guard.