Threat warning

CHAPTER TWENTY – EIGHT

As they opened the doors to the church, the cold air hit Christyne like a wall. Fear and frigid temperatures combined to trigger a spasm of trembling. The bright lights blinded her. She drew to a stop just short of the doorjamb, but hands fell on her, squeezing her biceps and nearly lifting her off her feet.

“Keep going,” the female voice said quietly in her ear, the sound muffled by the veil that wrapped her face. “It will be over soon.”

Christyne looked at her. “What will be over soon?” Even though she knew, she wanted some kind of acknowledgment that she was about to die.

A crowd had gathered in the night. She could feel them as much as see them, a terrible malignant energy that sickened her as she watched their covered heads and robed bodies undulate in the artificially lit night. When they saw her, the crowd erupted with jeering. Fists pumped the air. Somewhere out there, a ripple of gunfire tore at the air. She saw the flashes of light. Women in the crowd ululated. It was as if by walking through the doors into the night, she’d passed into a different part of the world. It was as if someone had brought the Middle East to West Virginia.

“Killer!” someone yelled. Or was it “Kill her”?

Others picked up the chant, and as the noise grew, she realized that either interpretation meant the same for her.

The hands tightened around her arms as she was half guided, half pushed out the door. She found herself standing on a kind of stage in the front of the building. Maybe it was just the porch, but if that was the case, it was a big one. As she approached the front edge, the crowd surged forward, hands reaching for her. One hand grabbed her ankle and she kicked it away. Two of her robed guards hurried to take a position between her and the crowd, as if to provide personal security.

Off to her left, the generator that was responsible for half the noise and all of the light churned away, pumping exhaust fumes into the night.

Once her guards were positioned on either side, another commotion arose from the crowd on the far right, the other side of the stage. More gunshots filled the night. More ululating.

Christyne watched heads turn, and people stand on tiptoes. They craned their necks to see who or what was approaching, and as they did, she scanned the crowd and the night for some way to get away. Even if she were able to shake free of her captors, the crowd would tear her apart as soon as she entered it. This was a frenzied herd of animals, and she was the red meat that would soon be thrown out to keep them sated.

There had to be a way.

Boomer would find a way.

No, she thought, Boomer would never have allowed himself to be taken in the first place.

“Killer!” the crowd yelled. They started chanting it again, and as they did, she was surprised to see so many looking away from her.

She bent forward to see what they saw. It couldn’t be.

There was Ryan, dressed identically to her, looking small and bent as he was ushered up some stairs to the same platform as she, but separated by twenty feet.

“Ryan!” she cried.

His head snapped up. “Mom!”

“Kill them both!” someone yelled. “Avenge Brother Stephen!”

Now they had a new chant: “Avenge Brother Stephen! Avenge Brother Stephen…!”

“I love you!” Christyne yelled.

True to form, he looked embarrassed and cast his eyes downward.

These people are all crazy, Ryan thought. It sounded like a friggin’ football game, with people shouting and chanting. Then the idiots with the machine guns, firing them into the air.

He’d picked up a couple of extra guards as soon as he stepped outside the house into the cold, and they formed a kind of flying wedge to escort him through the mob. There had to be two hundred people out here. At first, he moved as if he were invisible, with everyone’s attention distracted by something toward the front of the crowd. He didn’t look up to see, because he was too busy trying to keep track of where he placed his bare feet on the freezing ground. When everyone else in the world is wearing heavy boots, you become keenly aware of your feet.

Then they started to recognize him. He didn’t know how they even knew what he looked like, but he heard his name muttered nearby. Then the same voice shouted, “That’s Ryan!”

The focus of the crowd turned. They pushed and shoved, trying to get closer to him, their hands reaching out to grab him as if he were some kind of rock star in hell. Everyone wanted a piece of him, and every bit of jostling launched new pain through his arm. Through his whole upper body now.

As he approached a set of stairs, he tried to settle himself. As Sister Colleen had told him, he was going to die with dignity.

Someone yelled, “Killer!” and then all hell broke loose. More shouting and gunshots, and that weird warbling sound he’d heard on the news from Arab countries when they get all spun up.

“Keep walking,” Brother Zebediah said to him. “Don’t slow down.” There was fear in his voice, as if his reading of the crowd was as dire as Ryan’s.

He had no idea where they were going. For the longest time. All he could see were his own feet and the ass of the guard in front of him. There were occasional flashes of hooded faces, too, but they freaked him out so much that he didn’t want to look at them.

Finally, he was at the foot of some stairs, and hands were lifting him to help him climb. He yelled in pain, but no one seemed to care.

The stairs led him to a stage, and when he got there, the crowd really went wild.

He saw the man in black robes holding a knife. It was a long, ugly thing with a tarnished blade and an edge sharp enough to see from here. And somehow, Ryan knew it was for him. His body stiffened and he thought about running.

“Remember what I said,” Sister Colleen said.

“To hell with dignity,” Ryan spat. His words brought an agonizing squeeze that triggered the purple flashes again.

“Ryan!”

He recognized that voice. He looked up, and there she was, dressed to die, just like he was. The crowd yelled, “Avenge Brother Stephen! Avenge Brother Stephen!” over and over again, yet somehow over the din, he was able to hear his mom say, “I love you!”

His sense of shame overwhelmed him. He’d failed them both, and now they were going to die.

“Oh, Lord, Scorpion,” Venice moaned over the radio. “Both Ryan and Christyne are on the stage now. Can you see them?”

“Not yet, but we’re close,” Jonathan said.

“Hurry! A man with a hood covering his face is wielding a knife, and the crowd is cheering. He’s making a speech.”

“What’s he saying?”

“There’s no audio.”

Of course not, Jonathan thought. They were trying to convince the world that whatever this was, was unfolding from the Middle East. An audio track would kill the illusion. This Brother Michael guy knew what he was doing.

One hundred yards ahead, the crowd, dressed all in black, moved less like humans than a swarm of bees on a tree branch. Too many to count, they surged and ebbed at random. Whatever was going on had them fired up big-time. Even with the windows up, Jonathan could hear the cheering plainly.

“What do you want me to do, boss?” Boxers asked. “I can ram the crowd, but the bodies’ll probably disable the vehicle. That’d suck.”

Yes, it would, Jonathan thought. “We stick with the plan. Get Gunslinger in close enough to where she can make the shot on the generator. We need darkness.”

Which meant that they dare not draw attention to themselves too early.

“The angle’s gonna be a problem,” Boxers mused aloud. “All those people. Unless the generator is on a damn scaffold, it’s gonna be hard to get a shot.” While he spoke, his foot got heavier on the accelerator.

“Slow down,” Jonathan warned. “We get made too early, we’re screwed.”

“Scorpion, Scorpion. Mother Hen. Oh, my God, you have to hurry. Something awful is happening!”

Michael Copley stepped forward to the edge of the assembly hall’s massive porch, and he held aloft the knife that would change the future. How fitting that it was a butcher knife. The crowd-this flock that adored him, to whom he was more beloved than their own blood-cheered at the sight of it, because they thought they understood what it meant. They thought exactly what he’d intended them to think, and the response was a thunderous cheer.

With the blade raised high, he allowed the cheering to peak, and then he raised his other hand for silence. They obeyed.

Aware of the camera, he wished that he could remove this ridiculous mask and face the world who watched from afar so that they would know the identity of the man who would soon bring true justice. That was not possible, of course, because the world needed to continue to think that they were who they were not. The world needed to continue to believe that the Army of God was the Army of Allah-the Islamic enemy that they wanted so badly to hate. That was, after all, what the computer experts would determine when they saw that this signal was beaming from Pakistan.

As he addressed the crowd, his voice boomed. This was oratory of the old school, and his disciples would know exactly how to react. They had been in training, after all, for twenty years, the last decade made so much easier by the fortuitous disasters in New York, Washington, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Thus, when he released his own carnage in Kansas City, Washington, Detroit and now in Maddox County, West Virginia, the states of America would truly unite in their natural hatred of Islam, and with their attentions distracted, he could fulfill his ultimate goal.

“Brothers and sisters,” he yelled, “God bless us all.”

“God bless us all,” they answered in unison.

“We warned them, did we not? We gave our demands, and they did not listen. We made a promise, yet they did not believe. And here we are on this night to fulfill that promise.”

The crowd cheered louder, and he let them go for a while. The world didn’t need to know what they were saying. They didn’t need to know the reason for the executions; they needed only to watch a mother and her son die in each other’s presence.

Copley looked over his right shoulder to Brother Franklin. “Bring me the boy.”

Ryan saw the man coming for him, and he panicked. “Please don’t,” he said, and he dug his frozen bare heels into the unyielding concrete of the porch deck. He pushed back, trying to run, and someone squeezed his arm again. He yelled. He screamed. Like an animal caught in a trap.

“No! Please. I’m sorry! Please don’t hurt me any more!” He heard the words leaving his mouth, and he knew that he was giving the crowd exactly what they wanted to hear, but he couldn’t stop himself.

The big man’s hand extended from the sleeve of his robe like a snake emerging from its hole, and it grabbed Ryan by the back of his neck. The hand had a ring with a red stone on the finger.

“Please!” Ryan sobbed. He wanted to run. He wanted to disappear. He wanted to fight back, but it just hurt too much, and there were too many of them. “I’ll do anything. I swear to God, I’ll do anything.”

Across the stage, he heard his mom screaming for him.

The man’s hand clamped hard around the back of Ryan’s neck, and he shifted behind the boy to more easily escort him to the anointed spot at the front of the stage.

Ryan allowed his legs to fold under him like a petulant two-year-old, and for an instant, he was free. Using his left hand for leverage, his feet found traction and he started to run.

Then it became unthinkable.

“Now, Scorpion!” Venice yelled into her mike. Never the calmest one under pressure, this was the sound of panic.

“Stop,” Jonathan commanded, and Boxers stepped on the brakes. They couldn’t plow through the crowd. Even discounting the useless carnage, there was no way for them to make it even halfway through the throngs. And if they did, what then? They’d be at every form of disadvantage, with no chance for escape.

“What are we doing?” Gail asked. Her voice wasn’t as stressed as Venice’s, but it was close.

Jonathan opened his door. “We’re adapting. Gunslinger, take your shot from here. Whatever shot you can get. Then take the truck and drive around back of Building Alpha. We’ll meet you there.”

“We will?” Boxers said. “That’s a plan?”

“That, or you stay with Gunslinger.”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He was already on his way to the back of the crowd when Boxers got his door open.

Christyne was screaming. No words, just the guttural, animal sound of panic and pain and fury. She saw the panic in her baby’s eyes and the pain wracking his body. She lunged and kicked to get away, to help him, but whoever had her by her bound wrists held her fast. He was unyielding.

“Let go of me!” she shrieked. “Ryan!”

Her captor’s grip tightened, and new hands found her arms and her shoulders. She whipped her head around to the hand at her shoulder and she bit it. Hard. Her teeth pierced flesh, and the taste of blood filled her mouth. A new scream-this one of sheer agony-filled the night, and Christyne felt fulfilled.

Someone hit her in her left kidney, and the pain was exquisite. She bit harder, and she twisted her head, the way a dog would with a chew toy. If they were going to hurt her little boy, and they were going to hurt her, then by God she was going to hurt them back.

Across the stage, Ryan dropped from view. Had he gotten away?

That glimmer of hope made her falter, and at the same instant that another punch landed in the same kidney, and her legs buckled from the blow, the person whose arm she’d ruined let her fall.

Agony flowed as a wave through her back and abdomen, and when Christyne spit blood, she wasn’t sure that all of it belonged to the man she’d bitten.

Ryan shrieked.

It was remarkably like the sound he made as a three-year-old, when his Big Wheel dumped him onto the concrete outside their home in Fayetteville. There was blood that day, too, and a cut whose ghost was lost in the bristly fuzz that sprouted from his chin. It was a sound that no mother could ever forget, and her response to it was so hardwired that she felt sick to her stomach the instant she heard it.

Then she saw why.

As they lifted him by his arm, she saw the bones shift under the shredding bonds that held them to his splint. He howled.

“Stop it!” she shouted. “You’re hurting him!”

But the crowd loved it. They cheered as if it were a sporting event. “Kill them both! Kill them both!”

They brought him to the front of the stage and kicked the back of his knees. They hit hard against the concrete.

“Brother Zebediah!” the leader called. “Step forward.”

A different robed figure, one of the ones who had manhandled Ryan, stepped forward, and the leader handed him the ugly knife with the shiny edge.

Ryan tried to stand.

Jonathan strode into the crowd as if he belonged. He approached from the rear, and instantly he wished he were a taller man. From back here, even with the action on the stage, he could barely see over the hooded mob.

The sick bastards were yelling, “Kill them both! Kill them both!”

As a cheer rose, Jonathan snapped his head up and saw them lifting Ryan Nasbe by his broken arm. Even over the cacophony of the crowd, he could hear the boy’s shrieks of agony. But they were nothing compared to the animal howls of his restrained mother.

“Excuse us,” Jonathan said as he elbowed through the crowd.

Someone said, “Hey,” and pushed back, but Jonathan merely caromed off another spectator and kept focused on the action up front. Dressed as he was, more or less in the uniform of this zoo’s own security forces, he seemed to be of little concern. Besides, they all had something far more interesting to watch.

“Scorpion, Mother Hen,” Venice said on the radio. “Do you see this? If you’ve got a shot, now would be the time.”

But that was the problem. He didn’t have a shot.

Jonathan switched his radio selector from PTT-push-to-talk-to VOX, voice-activated transmission. From here on out, until he switched back, everything he said would be transmitted over the radio. “Big Guy?”

“No shot yet,” Boxers said.

“My angle’s bad, too,” Gail said. “With the M4 at this range, I’m fifty-fifty to hit the kid.”

“Then take out the goddamn generator then. Give me something.”

They kicked Ryan’s knees again. This had all become an exercise in pain.

Whatever they’d just done to his arm had screwed him up big-time. The pain enveloped his entire body, from his waist to his neck. When his knees slammed into the concrete, they screamed, too, but there comes a point where a little more pain stops mattering.

In front of him, the masked crowd cheered. He could feel their hatred, taste their desire to hurt him. This was it. This was the end.

And he was too wiped out to do anything about it.

The asshole leader in the black gown called, “Brother Zebediah!” and another asshole in a black gown stepped forward. The leader handed Brother Zebediah the knife. The crowd somehow grew even louder. “You do it,” the leader said.

Brother Zebediah said, “Thank you, Brother Michael.”

The executioner held the knife up for the crowd to cheer. Ryan felt a hand on his head, and suddenly it felt as if someone were using his hair to pull his scalp off his skull. He tried to stand against the strain, but someone planted his foot in the crook of his knee, effectively nailing him to the floor.

Brother Zebediah pulled back and down on his fistful of hair, and Ryan found himself staring at the sky.

His mother screamed.

The knife flashed against the blinding, artificial light. He saw it shift in the executioner’s hand and he saw it come down.

Blood sprayed everywhere.

And then it was dark.

“I’ve got him,” Jonathan said into his mike.

The shot materialized because some tall guy turned to say something to the shorter guy next to him, opening a V-shaped window that exposed the executioners. Jonathan was still seventy-five feet away, but once he saw them pull the kid’s head back, he knew that all options had expired.

He planted his feet, whipped his M4 to his shoulder, and snap-shot two rounds. The first one reduced the executioner’s head to a bloody mist, and he dropped out of sight. The second took out someone else on the stage who’d had the bad luck to stand directly behind a killer. The knife dropped out of view.

Immediately in front of him, the kid who’d turned his head to talk dropped like a stone, too, knocked senseless by the muzzle blast and the ballistic crack of the bullets passing within two inches of his ear.

Without hesitating, Jonathan shifted his aim two degrees to the right to take out the man who was standing on Ryan’s knees, but just as he felt the trigger break, Gail’s burst of gunfire found the generator and the world went dark. The status change startled him just enough to make him twitch, so he had no idea if he’d made the shot or not.

It takes a human being about a second to register a frightening incident with a physical twitch, and another two seconds to process its meaning. In a crowd, reactions are slower because of so many conflicting inputs. Against experienced warriors, you’ve got about six seconds to complete an assault without counterassault. With an inexperienced cadre that is caught completely off-guard, call it ten seconds. That’s the window of opportunity for true shock and awe.

After that, the calmer, more experienced troops will start gathering their wits and organizing their comrades. Ten or fifteen seconds after that, you’ve got a good old-fashioned firefight on your hands.

“NVGs,” Jonathan commanded as he flipped his night-vision goggles back over his eyes. The world turned the luminescent green that was natural to him as a sunny day.

Panic swirled around him. People yelled and pushed, stumbling over themselves and each other to get to safety. They buffeted Jonathan, but they were nowhere on his radar. He had his sights on the people on the stage, where the panic was every bit as alive as it was on the ground.

“How you doin’, Big Guy?” he asked.

“I’m right behind you, but I think the crowd is catching on.”

Just as the words left his mouth, someone yelled, “That’s them! Gun!”

This was bad news of the first order.