The Forgotten Holocaust

Chapter Forty

Both Erin and Detective Morrell stood frozen in the shadows of the car park, gawking in the direction of the fast-approaching roar of engines. Then, as they watched, a blue Ford Taurus burst into sight. Through the dazzle of its headlights Erin instantly recognised it as the one parked near her house earlier that day. Its front wheels hit the bottom of the slope, compressing hard against the suspension and making a squeal that echoed around the concrete walls and pillars of the underground space. The Taurus was closely followed by a white GMC van. Erin vaguely registered that the van was missing a headlamp and half its radiator grille.

But that was the least of her concerns as the two vehicles swerved across the car park and accelerated right towards where she and Morrell were standing.

‘Look out!’ the detective yelled, reaching out to grab her hand and haul her to safety. But Erin was already moving. She retreated quickly through the gap between her Honda and the Toyota pickup next to it, ducked down behind them and crouched low. Morrell quickly joined her.

The blue Ford screeched to a halt next to Morrell’s Lincoln, rocking on its tired springs. The van pulled up at an angle to it. Doors flew open. Three men piled decisively out of the Ford, all wearing grim expressions. Erin only caught a glimpse of them, but she recognised one as the man who’d been sitting waiting for his buddy to dope her with tranquillisers so they could stuff her in the trunk and take her away. The other two she’d never seen before.

But the pair jumping down from the cab of the battered white GMC van: she got a clear look at them and she knew their faces very well. They were faces that had haunted her nightmares ever since that night at the cabin on Oologah Lake, and seeing them again hit her with a chill that made her gasp. McCrory’s henchmen, his killers for hire. Moon and Ritter, Morrell had called them.

She recognised the van, too. It had been there that night. They’d used it to dispose of the dead Kirk Blaylock.

She looked at Morrell. His face was etched with tension. He reached under his loose shirt, and she saw the concealment holster tucked into the hem of his jeans. He drew out a pistol. It was a Colt 1911 government model, big old-fashioned heavy iron. ‘Stay down,’ Morrell hissed at her.

The attackers were striding towards them, their steps echoing. Five against two. Erin heard a muttered command. She wanted to close her eyes and shrink into a tiny ball. Beside her, Morrell jacked a round into his Colt’s chamber. ‘Police!’ he yelled. ‘Back off or I’ll shoot!’

The response was a deafening thunder of gunfire that filled the car park. Erin flinched, covered her ears, didn’t know what to do. Bullets ripped into her little yellow car and howled off the concrete, tore chunks out of the wall behind. Morrell let off a wild shot and crawled around the back of the Honda. Now he and Erin were separated by about eight feet of open space. More shots sounded. The Honda’s windows shattered as if a grenade had gone off inside it, throwing out hailstones of glass that bounced all around the concrete floor.

Cringing behind the Toyota pickup, Erin suddenly realised that they were only firing at Morrell. The detective threw himself into a sideways prone position so he could aim his gun out from behind cover, firing back between the cars. Erin saw the white muzzle flash erupt three times, four times, from his Colt. The big .45 was extremely loud at close quarters. A spent shell case tinkled across the gap between the Honda and the Toyota and lodged under her arm, burning her skin. She hardly felt it.

Two of the men from the car dived for cover from Morrell’s gunfire. The Taurus’s back side window shattered. Morrell let off two more booming rounds, but he was in a bad position to shoot from and his shots went off target, punching fat round holes in the car’s blue bodywork.

Erin shrank deeper underneath the back of the Toyota. It had jacked suspension and oversized tyres that lifted its chassis high enough off the ground for her to get tucked right under. Peering out from her hiding place she could see a pair of feet. Lightweight combat boots, belonging to one of the attackers sheltering behind the white van. Her mind was beginning to focus now after the initial panic. She could feel the Springfield inside her pocket. There was just space under the car for her to get it out, but not enough to aim it properly. She had to hold it flatways and had no idea whether her sights would still line up. She fired anyway, letting off three shots as quickly as she could control the snappy recoil of the nine-millimetre, screwing up her face at the lancing pain in her eardrums. Her hearing was now just one big singing whine of tinnitus. She saw the combat boots dance quickly away and realised that her shots had all gone wide, punching into Morrell’s Lincoln.

The detective let off another round from his .45 and then its seven-shot magazine was empty. Exactly the reason why most people favoured high-capacity nines these days. Erin twisted around under the Toyota and saw him drop the empty mag from the butt of his gun, saw him reach to his left hip for the spare in his belt pouch. In the brief pause, the driver of the Ford broke cover from behind his car. He kept low as he sneaked up between the Honda and the pillar next to it, clearly intending to work his way around Morrell’s flank. The detective hadn’t noticed because he was focused on reloading his gun. Erin spotted the movement through what was left of the Honda’s shattered windows. This was the jerkoff who’d come to kidnap her earlier.

‘Morrell!’ she shouted, and opened fire from underneath the Toyota. She couldn’t shoot to kill. She lined the sights up on his shoulder. The Springfield snapped in her hand, twice, the bullets passing right through her car’s interior. The man fell back out of sight with his face contorting in pain and his hand slapping to his shoulder where he’d been hit. There was blood on the concrete pillar behind him.

Morrell flashed her a thumbs-up sign and an earnest look of gratitude. Despite her terror, Erin’s heart soared. We can win this, she thought.

But in the next few moments, she saw that she was wrong. A chattering blast of automatic gunfire riddled the side of the Honda and hammered the concrete between it and the Toyota, driving her back as far as she could scramble underneath for cover. She caught a fleeting glimpse of the two men from the van, steadily advancing towards Morrell’s position. They were holding black assault weapons of a kind she’d never seen before, weird and futuristic. Whatever the hell they were, they weren’t the sort of thing that was available to ordinary citizens, not even to ordinary criminals. They were full-blown military hardware and the two men seemed terrifyingly adept at using them. They were rapidly turning the Honda into Swiss cheese.

Morrell scampered for cover around the back of the car like a jackrabbit flushed out by hounds. The firestorm coming at him was so intense that he couldn’t return a single shot from his pistol. The Honda was literally coming apart. One corner settled as its tyre was shredded, then another. Its thin yellow body panels were more silver-edged bullet holes than intact metal. The two shooters kept coming. The ponytailed one did a lightning-fast reload while the other covered him, then they switched over. Empty cases streamed from their weapons. Their muzzles were lit up with strobing white light. It was a continual outpouring of bullets, the noise so bad that Erin wanted to scream. She couldn’t move, couldn’t shoot for fear that they’d direct the fire at her.

Morrell didn’t have a chance. He was so tucked in under the back end of the devastated Honda that all that was visible now was one leg sticking out, bent at the knee, bracing him tightly in behind his rapidly diminishing cover. Erin couldn’t see the rest of him. But she saw the blood that spattered up the wall behind the parked cars as the bullets ripped into him. Still they didn’t stop firing. The leg Erin could see started jerking and spasming, as if Morrell was having a fit. It was the impact of the bullets hitting him and the convulsions of his body as he died.

Now it was just her. She rolled over twice and wriggled out from under the dirty bottom sill of the Toyota. Leapt to her feet, squeezed off three shots behind her without looking back, and took off as fast as she could sprint between the wall and the line of parked cars. The way through towards the shopping mall was less than twenty yards away, but it might as well have been a thousand. She knew there was little chance of making it, and even if she did, they’d come after her. But she was going to try anyway. She’d rather die than let herself be taken captive.

She was nearly halfway to the exit when they shot her.