Walking in the Rain (Book 4): Dark Sky Thunder (21 page)

The bench seat was cursed with so many broken springs I wondered if some enterprising mechanic had liberated the making for the cage from this seat instead of a mattress. When I looked up from pushing down on the threadbare cloth, I saw the unnamed deputy was sitting at an angle, his cold eyes burning into me. We rode like this for several minutes and I forced my hands to stay folded in my lap.

As we rounded the first curve back toward the county road, I saw another vehicle coming in our direction. It was hard to make out at first from the dust trail, but what I saw made my stomach burn with anger, and fear. It was a big, black SUV tricked out with red and blue flashing lights in the grill guard. The dust was generated by the line of vehicles flying along behind the lead car.

“What the hell is that?” I yelled, pointing with my left hand at the approaching caravan. Deputy Mark steered to the side as the five SUVs roared by and both men looked.

Magic is the manipulation of human nature, a little bit of knowledge, and a whole lot of practice. Sleight of hand might not have been my forte, but I managed to pull off the trick while the two deputies let their eyes be drawn away by the sudden, nonthreatening gesture. You point, and the audience looks. And when they look back, the rabbit is coming out of the hat. Or in this case, the pistol is coming out of my pocket.

“Hey what…” was all Mr. Caterpillar Eyebrows managed before I added a third eye hole near the center of his forehead. The hollow point 9mm round punched through in front but blew out a chunk of skull and brain matter on the way out the other side. In the enclosed space, the report was deafening, but I just ate the roar and the brutal recoil from the tiny pistol as I brought my aim back to bear on Deputy Mark.

He was terrified. I could read the numbing terror in his panicked gaze. Whatever was going on now was not something he counted on. “You just…you can’t do that,” he said weakly, and I could barely understand his words from the hammering my ears had taken. His foot fell from the accelerator and the big, heavy car coasted to a halt.

Getting him out of the car was easy enough, and he kept his hands where I could see them the entire time. We were both nearly deaf from the pistol shot, but I was good at charades. He dropped the belt and I kept the tiny pistol pointed at his right eye from fifteen feet away.

“We were just doing the job, kid,” he said fearfully. “Now they’re going to kill the other deputies. Gordon was right. You are a danger to the public, and the recovery.”

I shrugged. I didn’t know anybody named Gordon, but I decided to roll with it. “Yeah, I know. But, I got no problem doing this all day long, Deputy. You know the truth, don’t you? I’m a maddog killer, a dangerous psychopath. If you get in my way, I’ll make what happened to Lumpy here look like a blessing.”

Deputy Mark was already scared of me. I could smell the fear. I’d already robbed him of his manhood once, and he could either fight to regain it or cower down like a whipped dog. This was simple Animal Planet psychology, but didn’t make it any less true. Sending him was a mistake, and one I intended to exploit.

“What do you want?”

There. Decision made.

I started to ask questions, but then it happened. In the distance, I heard a series of sharp explosions, followed by the steady
thump
,
thump
,
thump
, of machine gun fire. Whatever was going down at the ranch had already started without me, so I was on short time.

“What is the plan?”

“To detain your family and followers as a threat to national security. The warrant is signed and it is all legal and everything.”

Yes, I’ll bet it was nice and tidy that way. “Where is my father, and Sheriff Henderson?”

“Agents took them into custody this morning. They are being held at the courthouse in Nacogdoches to answer for their charges.”

“And who wanted me?”

“I don’t know,” the scared man whimpered. “They showed up this morning. Jefferson there was one of the agents with Homeland. Once they had control of the office, they talked to their guy there and suddenly we had orders to bring you in for questioning. Since the raid was planned for this morning, we were sent in first to detain you and transport to Nacogdoches as well.”

Their guy there? The sheriff had a mole? I would ask later. I needed to know something else now. Then I realized something. Deputy Mark. He saw us come rolling in that day in a badly disguised DHS Suburban. Maybe he said something that got me picked out for interrogation. But, first things first.

“What about any survivors at the ranch?”

He paused a long time, and I knew the truth. There would be no survivors at the ranch. All would be killed trying to resist, even if they didn’t. “And who’s running this show in Center now that the sheriff has been arrested?”

“I don’t know,” came the sobbing reply. He was expecting a bullet in the head now that his usefulness was done. “Maybe their guy on the inside. But I didn’t get to stick around long, after.”

“Deputy, did you help them? Did you provide information to these men?”

“No,” he whispered, and I knew he was telling the truth. He didn’t want to die. Of course, none of us did. I’m sure Jefferson would like to have his brain back in the original configuration, rather than spread all over the front seat. I started to giggle at the idea, and realized Deputy Mark was right to be scared.

“But you were willing to help, right? You didn’t go down fighting, or anything like that.”

“They’re the government,” he replied simply. “They had warrants and everything. Deputy Gordon turned out to be an informant for them, or an agent undercover. He said this was all part of a plan, and that dangerous subversives like the sheriff had to go.”

“Who signed the warrants, deputy?”

“Congressman McCorkle. And now he’s some kind of Regional Director for Homeland Security. He’s a member of Congress, of the House of Representatives. That means he’s in charge.”

I shook my head. “Not quite. Look, do you want to live through what is coming?”

For the first time since Jefferson’s head exploded, I saw something besides animal terror in the man’s eyes. Yes, he wanted to live. He nodded ever so slightly. “All right. I give you my word. I will not kill you if you do everything I tell you.”

“You swear to God?”

“I swear to God, Deputy. A lot of people are going to die today, but if you follow my simple instructions, you will not be one of them.”

I don’t know if he fully believed me or not, but I think the alternative was too horrible for him to contemplate, which made Deputy Mark one of the smartest men I’d met in a while. From the growing volume of automatic weapons fire, the battle still raged, and I fully intended on killing every Homeland agent I found. They would all die, and some would die screaming in agony before I was done.

The inferno I found at the front gate showed my people had not gone down easy. From the blast pattern and my quick peek, I calculated the homemade Claymore mines probably killed at least a dozen agents and destroyed the two lead vehicles in the attacking force. That left the other four stuck since the two deadlined SUVs blocked the now destroyed gate. Beyond the gate, I saw the two bunkers were likewise engulfed in flames, and I didn’t want to find out who died in there with Scott.

The ground just outside the gate was littered with dead and wounded federal agents, so I headed there first.

After tearing ass back to the turn for our driveway, I’d ditched the car with Deputy Mark firmly trussed up in the trunk. He didn’t like it, but as I explained, the alternative was that bullet in the head that his good behavior so far had spared him. He saw the light.

I was practically tripping with weapons from what I liberated from Mark and the unfortunate Mr. Jefferson. I also wore Deputy Mark’s body armor, since he had a longer torso than the dead agent. In addition to Jefferson’s M4, I took both men’s sidearms since they carried Glocks chambered for the 40 S&W caliber and all their magazines. I tucked the tiny Keltec PF-9 back in my front pocket in case I really needed another holdout pistol. But I opened with Deputy Mark’s Mossberg shotgun as I trotted up to the temporary aid station set up between a pair of parked SUVs.

The one agent assigned to guard the medic never saw me coming. He was busy holding a gauze pad over the seeping wound of another agent while the medic worked to get an IV in the arm of a second downed agent, this one suffering from what looked like a sucking chest wound. Apparently, that excellent body armor couldn’t stop a two-foot-long spear made out of rebar. Good to know.

I gave the guard a load of buckshot to the side of the face from about six feet away. The pellets had no chance to pattern and completely obliterated his skull in a shower of gore. Messed up the armor, but nothing a little elbow grease couldn’t fix later.

Not even looking at my downed target, I worked the slide automatically and caught the pair of wounded men on the ground in a spread that made all their other issues instantly moot. They weren’t even wearing their armor and died in a heap. None the three men I’d just murdered had a chance to even scream.

I nearly killed the medic at that point, but decided he might be of use to my people when the shooting stopped. Instead, I spun the shotgun and clubbed him across the head once, twice, with the butt of the shotgun. A gash appeared across the man’s forehead and I quickly secured him hand and foot with zip ties from the belt of one of the dead agents.

I might have hit him too hard, but at least I tried. This would be my only attempt at a prisoner today. If he died from the head wound, well, fuck him. This was my family. I thought about Amy being in that bunker with Scott, and I felt the frenzy rise inside. They attacked the people I care about, and they could burn in hell. These animals would get no mercy from me today. Sorry, fresh out.

Helping myself to some party favors left for me by the dead agents, I immediately snatched up a discarded satchel and filled the canvas bag to the top. I caught myself humming an old tune, a song from the 1960s that I couldn’t place. Maybe it would come to me later.

Quickly reloading the shotgun, I slung it in favor of the scoped M4 and hustled up to the pair of burning bunkers. The first bunker was engulfed in flames, which was actually fine since this one had always served as a distraction. The shell was rough finished but we never used it. Instead, it was a decoy to attract just this kind of attention.

The layout meant attackers might be able to use it as cover for taking the second bunker, but the distance between the two meant anyone trying to use the forward bunker to flank the second would expose themselves to rifle fire from our house. When I saw three dead bodies slumped just around the corner, I saw where my father’s plan had worked so far.

The second bunker, I noted, was not burning, but smoke trailed up from one of the gun slits cut in the reinforced block front side. No time to check it now—I could hear the heavy hammer once again of machine gun fire, and I could tell it was coming from the direction of my house.

I hunched down and sprinted to the first series of corpses laid out on the grass and was heartened to see they wore the twisted camouflage of the DHS troopers. Head shots. I hit the ground between a pair of bloody corpses and began to scan the battlefield. It didn’t take long to find the fight.

A rough ring of helmets encircled the front and side of our house, and I counted another two dozen men intent on assaulting the structure. I wondered what their plan was until I saw one trooper rise up slightly and trigger a 40mm grenade at one of the shuttered windows. He fired while supported by suppressive fire from his colleagues.

The steel shutter flexed under the explosive impact but did not buckle. That was encouraging. The sounds of explosions I heard from the far side of the house, not so much.

“Screw it,” I decided and a plan quickly fell into place. I was already feeling the adrenaline kick, the fierce song of violence spiking through my soul. This was the berserker coming, as I hoped and feared it would. This time, though, I instinctively knew I could direct the flow and bend it to my will.

Laying out the six hand grenades I’d taken from the dead agents up front, I straightened out the pins and mentally targeted each one, fixing the point in space where I wanted the explosive to land. Then, starting with the first, I hurled each grenade, sans pin, in a pattern of overlapping fields of death.

By the time the last grenade hit the ground, rolling between the spread legs of a trooper laid out in a prone shooting position, the first one exploded. These grenades weren’t like what you see on TV, so the blast didn’t shake the trees two hundred yards away, but the shrapnel and concussion seemed to take out most of the clustered men. For the rest, I thought I had plenty of bullets.

Rising to my feet, I charged the beleaguered agents, my battle cry a shriek as I cut into their numbers. I quickly emptied the shotgun and dropped the weapon in favor of the M4. I fired on movement, or anything that looked like it might move. The grenades caused lots of wounded but failed to kill as many as I had hoped. Legs and arms were mangled and peppered with shrapnel, but the armor managed to protect the torso in many cases. By the time the survivors managed to reorient on my position, I was taking fire from three different groups of attackers.

Hitting the ground, I tried to burrow into the knee-high grass as bullets ripped through the air over my head. Rolling rapidly, I made a fast magazine change as I moved and got the M4 to my shoulder and began squeezing off rounds once again. At this range, less than fifty yards, I didn’t really worry about the zero on this weapon. I was likely to die before it made a difference.

I managed to score two more head shot hits before I heard renewed firing from someone inside the house, and then the machine gun opened up again. Risking a split-second glance, I saw the up-armored Hummer come tearing around the side of the house. Mike looked to be up on the gun, but I couldn’t tell who was driving as the vehicle skidded into the turn.