Threat warning

CHAPTER THIRTY – ONE

Kendig Neen found himself overwhelmed. As faithful soldiers of the Army swarmed him, looking for leadership and a plan, he was desperately looking for Brother Michael. Unbelievably, several soldiers had reported seeing him and Brother Franklin running away after Brother Franklin bolted from the stage using the Nasbe boy as his shield.

With Michael and Franklin both gone, Kendig was in charge, if only because of his position on the Board of Elders. He’d sidelined himself from the main event of the execution after Brother Michael berated him for showing cowardice.

Oh, the irony.

With a veritable war being fought inside the assembly hall, he needed to form a counterassault, and he needed to form it quickly. As the soldiers of the Army of God fled for their lives, he stood in the open, his arms extended, trying to stop them and bring order to chaos.

Some stopped, most didn’t. Of those who did, the majority were members of his security unit. Virtually everyone who had gathered for the execution was armed, so firepower would not be a problem.

He felt pleased that they’d only lost a few minutes to chaos. “Gather ’round me, brothers and sisters,” he shouted above the din. Those who heard-those who admitted that they’d heard-stopped and formed up around him.

“Everybody settle down!” he called. “Who has hard data?”

“Brother Zebediah is dead,” someone said.

“Brother Neil and Sister Sonia Mary,” someone else said.

Kendig waved off that information. “I don’t need a casualty report. I need to know how many people we’re facing and where they are.”

“There must be many in the assembly hall,” someone said. “Listen to the gunfire in there.”

“That’s speculation,” Kendig said. “I want fact. I want to hear from people who have seen things with their own eyes, and who can report fact. ”

A young lady-Kendig always had difficulty with names-stepped forward. “I saw a very large man take one of the prisoners inside the assembly hall.”

“I saw Brother Franklin running away with the boy. With Ryan,” someone else said.

The phrase running away triggered a disturbed murmur through the crowd.

“Where’s Brother Michael?” a soldier asked.

Kendig ignored the question. He needed to motivate these young men and women for action, and if they perceived that the top leadership had run for their lives, nothing good would follow. “What’s going on in the assembly hall?” he asked. “Who are the Users shooting at?”

“Brother Benjamin was in there preparing for services after the executions.”

“How many people did he have with him?”

“Twenty. Maybe twenty-five.”

“Did anyone see the assault force?” Kendig asked. With as many as twenty-five soldiers inside, maybe this whole incident could go away quickly.

“I saw that one big soldier,” someone said.

“Huge,” someone else corrected.

“I think I also saw someone running after Brother Franklin.”

Kendig turned his gaze toward the soldier who spoke of Brother Franklin. “So of course you hurried to help him.”

The soldier looked at his feet.

The crowd around him continued to grow, and as it did, a plan began to form in his mind. Two against many was impossible odds. If he could just “Brother Kendig!” someone yelled from the night. The tone was frantic.

As one, the gathering crowd turned toward the voice. A clot of soldiers emerged from the night, still dressed in their ceremonial robes. Two appeared to be spattered with blood. “She killed four of us,” one of them said hurriedly. Kendig thought he remembered the young soldier’s name to be Brother Kurt. “We tried to stop her, but she fought us.”

“A woman fought all of you?”

“We were in the process of disarming her when she got shots off.”

Kendig couldn’t believe this. “All of you are armed,” he said. “Why didn’t you shoot back?”

“We tried, Brother Kendig. We really tried. I think she got away into the assembly hall.”

As if to punctuate his point, the shooting in the assembly hall crescendoed.

“We did strip her of this, though,” Brother Kurt said. He handed Kendig a portable radio.

Ryan had never heard so much noise. It rolled on and on, individual gunshots combining to form a continuous pounding. As he pressed himself into the corner and tried his best to dissolve into the floor he jumped at the sound of what could only be bullets sailing through the wall that separated him from the shooting. In the oppressive darkness, where his only sensory input was the bedlam of shooting and the stench of gunpowder, he found himself screaming, as if adding a human element to the cacophony would take the edge off so much death.

And then it was over. Just like that, silence became more oppressive than the sound of battle. The silence came so abruptly that he wondered whether he’d gone deaf.

He heard movement out there beyond the door, but it didn’t sound violent. It didn’t even sound urgent. Just voices talking about things.

Suddenly the darkness of his room-and the loneliness of it-became unbearable. He’d been alone enough. He’d been scared and victimized enough. Now it was time for him to do something. He had no idea what that something might be, but by golly, he was going to do it. His hand tightened on the grip of his revolver.

“Where’s Ryan?”

Jesus, was that his mom?

“You stay down!” boomed a voice.

“Shut up! Where’s my son?”

Ryan coughed out a laugh before he could stop it. That was definitely his mom’s voice; but it was attached to an entirely different brain.

He decided that whether the good guys had won or lost, he was going to be with his mother. He stood and made his way to the door. He pushed it open.

“Oh, my God,” he heard as soon as he stepped clear of the jamb. “Ryan!”

He turned to his right, and there she was, dressed in the stupid white gown, her arms tied behind her. She ran toward him. She didn’t walk quickly, or jog; she ran.

As she closed the distance between them, he instinctively turned to present his left side, shielding his right.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, I thought you were dead,” she said.

She was still five yards away, when Scorpion stepped forward and held out his hand to stop her.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Scorpion said. He drew an ugly knife from somewhere over his left shoulder and made a swirling motion with his fingers for Christyne to turn around. The rope from her wrists fell away without resistance, and now she was ready to hug her son.

“The arm, Mom!” Ryan said, but he knew that she knew, and he knew that there’d be no stopping the assault of kisses.

She grabbed his face in both hands. “Oh, my sweet baby, I’ve been so scared. You’re so beautiful.” She kissed him again.

Embarrassed, Ryan shot a glance at the other men in the room, and he saw that they were embarrassed, too. “Mom.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “You’re alive. We’re both alive.”

She threw her arms around him, and somehow, it didn’t hurt.

Emotion bubbled out of nowhere. One second he was embarrassed by all the mommy shit, and the next, he was completely absorbed by it. He wrapped his good arm around her, gun still gripped in his fist, and he buried his face in the crook where her neck met her shoulder.

Wracking sobs came from a place in his gut that hadn’t been tapped since he was a kid. Shame and sadness and anger all flowed in an unnerving tsunami of emotion that startled him. And as his tears poured out of him, his mom rubbed his back, just as she’d done when he was a little boy.

“Shh,” she said in his ear. “We’re fine. We’ll be fine. Shh.”

He closed his eyes, and he tried to transport to a different time. A better time.

For two seconds-maybe three-it worked.

Then reality returned.

Jonathan was a sucker for a tearful reunion. That was, after all, why he did what he did. But while the Nasbe family enjoyed their moment, he still had a war to fight.

“Close those shutters!” he commanded. True to its role as the castle keep, heavy wooden shutters framed the assembly hall windows. To Jonathan’s eye, they were thick enough to stop all but the most powerful conventional firearms. Four-inch-wide slots had been cut vertically and horizontally to accommodate gun barrels in the event of a firefight. They ran from about four feet off the floor to six feet. When closed, they formed paired crosses over every window, as if to further blaspheme.

Father Dom would not approve, Jonathan thought.

His earpiece popped and a deep baritone voice said, “Whoever you are, we need to talk.”

Jonathan shot a glance to Boxers, who shrugged. A glance toward Gail told him how the bad guys had gotten a radio. He unplugged the earphone jack so Gail could hear, and he pressed his mike button. “You may call me Scorpion,” he said.

A derisive laugh. “Tough name,” the voice said. “Scary name.”

“That’s him!” Ryan yelled, pushing away from his mother. “That’s the sheriff, the guy that picked me up. I forget his name.”

Jonathan hadn’t. “Well, hello, Kendig,” he said.

Kendig recoiled at the sound of his name.

“How does he know you?” Brother Kurt asked.

“He doesn’t,” Kendig snapped. “That boy-that Ryan-is in there. He must have-”

“Are you in danger, sir?” Jonathan asked over the radio. “I’m sorry we let you down.”

Kendig felt himself going pale. To the group around him, he said, “He’s playing a bluff.” He fumbled the delivery, though. He sounded too defensive, even to himself.

“Try to run, Kendig,” Jonathan said. “Signal that you’re out of the line of fire and we’ll open up to keep their heads down.”

He keyed his mike. “Nice try, Scorpion. Nobody out here is buying it.”

“Oh, my God!” Jonathan exclaimed. “I didn’t know people could hear you. I, uh… I’m sorry.”

Kendig looked to his assembled troops. Some of them were in fact buying it. “He’s trying to undermine my authority,” he said. “Brother Kurt, Brother Absalom, assemble your soldiers. Prepare them to assault the assembly hall.” Into the radio, he said, “Whoever you are, this is your one opportunity to surrender. In ten minutes, that opportunity expires.”

When he lifted his thumb from the transmit button, he saw that neither of his commanders had moved. “Assemble your soldiers,” he said again.

Brother Kurt shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “Where did these invaders come from, Brother Kendig?” As he asked the question, his hand shifted on the grip of his rifle.

Kendig made himself swell larger and took a step closer to the young man. “Assemble your soldiers,” he growled. That deep baritone was a tool he’d perfected over the years. “Or I will shoot you right here and right now for mutiny.”

“What the hell kind of gambit was that?” Boxers yelled from across the giant room as he slammed another set of shutters and slid their blocking bar into place.

“Son of a bitch wanted to chat,” Jonathan explained, working on his own set of shutters. “So I chatted. I figured he had people nearby, and it wouldn’t hurt to throw some psy-ops into the mix.” He pointed to Gail. “Gunslinger, check the back of the altar. Make sure every door is locked and blocked. We may be here for a while.”

As his ears recovered from the firefight, the moans of the wounded became more distinct.

He eased by the Nasbes to block the windows of the vestry. As he reentered the sanctuary-what else do you call a big room with an altar?-he saw Christyne Nasbe approaching the cluster of Klansmen he’d shot behind the pews.

“Whoa,” he said. “Stay away from them.”

“My God, there are so many,” she gasped. “They’re suffering.”

“They’re dangerous,” Jonathan countered. “All wounded animals are dangerous. Wounded animals who know how to shoot even more so. Stay away from them.”

“But they’re bleeding. Can’t you help them?”

Boxers said, “Let ’em bleed long enough and they won’t need help.”

Leave it to Big Guy to take it one step too far.

“What happens next?” Ryan asked.

Jonathan answered by walking to the stacked firearms and ammunition, and coming back with two M16s and two belts of spare magazines. “What happens next is, it gets interesting,” he said. “How about giving me back that peashooter and taking this instead? Give that left arm of yours a workout.”

The kid took it, but he wasn’t happy about it.

“You want to shoot it out with them?” Christyne gasped. The horror was evident in both her tone and her body language. “They’ll kill us.”

“Bet you thought you were dead ten minutes ago, didn’t you?” Boxer said. His voice rolled through the rafters of the sanctuary.

“But there must be a hundred people out there.”

Jonathan held out a rifle for her. “But there’s five of us.” He said it with his most charming smile.

“That means we have to shoot twenty apiece,” Ryan said.

“Well,” Jonathan said, “some of them will run away.” He was trying to keep it as light as he could, because the reality of their situation was at best dire.

“Generally speaking, we prefer to plan a little more carefully,” Gail said from up at the altar. “But the whole execution thing put us on a fast track.” To Jonathan, she said, “Everything’s battened down back there.”

“Are you really a friend of my dad’s?” Ryan asked.

Christyne brightened. “You know Boomer?”

“We worked together for a while,” Jonathan said.

“So you’re in the Army?”

Jonathan gave a coy smile. “We worked together for a while.”

“Hey, Boss,” Boxers said from the red side wall. “I think you, me, and Gunslinger need to powwow.”

Gail heard for herself and walked that way.

To the Nasbes, Jonathan said, “You guys go on with your reunion. Stay away from the wounded, and if you see anything scary, yell out right away.”

With that, he walked across the sanctuary to join his colleagues. “What’s up?” As if he didn’t know.

“You realize our position is untenable, right?” Boxers asked, getting right to it.

Jonathan inhaled loudly. These sorts of standoffs never worked out well for the people behind the barricade. Even with the reinforced walls, the good guys were still only one RPG round or even a bonfire away from dying in place or being overrun. “I’m open to any and all ideas,” he said.

“Well, let’s take surrender off the table first,” Boxers said. “It’s not in my nature.”

“Nor in mine,” Jonathan agreed. “Besides, their judicial system here sucks.”

“We have the wounded,” Gail said. “They should give us at least a little leverage, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Jonathan said. “They’re taught to kill themselves rather than submit. If that’s their worldview, the wounded are just collateral damage.”

“I agree,” Boxers said. “So they’re coming. What do you think? Good old-fashioned frontal assault?”

Jonathan shrugged. “If I were them, I’d run a feint attack on one side to buy time to set charges on the doors. Blow them, they’re inside and we’re dead.”

Gail looked horrified. “You know, playing with you guys is nowhere near as fun as I had hoped.”

Boxers said, “So, we each take a side and stick to our posts no matter what. Is that it?”

Jonathan shrugged. “The best I can come up with. We’ll keep the Nasbes together on the green side. I’ll take white. Big Guy, you’re red. Gunslinger-”

“Black,” she said. “I got it. And when we get home, I’m getting a new handle.”

“All right,” Boxers said, heading to his post. “We’ll have us a good old-fashioned gunfight.” He’d never sounded more self-actualized.

Jonathan headed off to give the Nasbes their assignments. He gave them a crash course in how to work their weapons, and then took them into the vestry and planted them in front of their assigned windows.

“Keep your selector on single fire,” he told them for the second time. “If you see someone with a gun, shoot. If they fall down, move to the next target. If they don’t, shoot them again. Questions?”

Each of their faces was like a giant blank oval.

“Okay, good. I’ll be in the front. If you need anything, just shout out.” The muzzle of Christyne’s rifle had started to drift in toward Jonathan, so he reached out and gently pushed it to the side. “And try to remember to keep your weapon pointed outside.”

“But the windows on the other side of the shutters are closed,” Ryan said.

“They’re glass,” Jonathan said. “They’ll go away once the shooting starts.”

This wasn’t the way an 0300 mission was supposed to go. If they came out the back end of this thing alive, he was going to owe Boomer one hell of an explanation.