Threat warning

CHAPTER THIRTY – FOUR

It felt good to be warm. Once inside the house, Jonathan asked for and was given the shotgun he’d encountered the previous day, and when he asked if there were any other weapons in the house, Sam willingly showed him the S amp;W. 357 magnum revolver and Winchester. 30-30, both of them unloaded with trigger locks installed. He allowed himself to relax. A little.

Jonathan sat at the kitchen table with Gail and Sam and Colleen, while Boxers stood in the archway, blocking any means of escape. Colleen sat awkwardly to keep the pressure off her wrists.

“Did the repo man ever show up?” Jonathan asked Sam. It was a friendly place to start the conversation.

Sam gave a wan smile. “No, not yet.”

Colleen looked shocked. “You know these people?” Her tone was one of utter betrayal.

“It’s not like that,” Sam said. “I had no idea-”

“There’s nothing to apologize for,” Jonathan said, moving quickly to control the conversation. “Sam and I don’t know each other any better than you and I do, Colleen.” He let those words hang. “Do you remember me?”

“You killed my friends.”

Sam recoiled at the words.

Jonathan placed a calming hand on her arm. “Not before you killed a lot of people yourself,” he said. He tempered his words so they wouldn’t sound accusatory.

More shock from Sam.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Colleen said, but the truth was written all over her denial.

“Don’t you remember me shooting at you on the bridge that night?” he asked.

Her eyes grew huge.

“Yeah,” he said. “That was me. And I was about half a trigger pull away from killing you when I got interrupted by that overzealous cop.”

“Are you talking about the shootings in Washington the other night?” Sam said. From the look on her face, it was all bigger than she could process.

“Those are the ones,” Jonathan said. He shifted his gaze and softened his voice. “Tell me why, Colleen.”

“I was supposed to kill myself,” she said, her voice barely audible. “I shouldn’t have run.”

Sam leaned in closer. “Your job was to kill yourself?”

Colleen nodded. “Yes.” Then she shook her head. “No. Only if I was about to get caught.”

Jonathan thought he understood. “I think she’s saying she should have killed herself here. This morning. Is that right, Colleen?”

She bobbed her head yes but looked away again.

“But why?” Sam asked. “Why would you kill yourself?”

“Because it’s the honorable way. It’s the holy way.”

Sam brought her hand to her mouth. “Oh, my God, what have they been teaching you?”

Jonathan looked to Sam. “Tell me about y’all’s relationship,” he said. “Why is she here tonight?”

“She came here terrified,” Sam explained. “I never found out why. It was still dark. She was only here for less than an hour when you showed up and she took off running.”

“But why here?” Gail asked. “You seem to know each other.”

“We do,” Sam said. “At least I thought we did. She came to visit me every week or so.”

Jonathan sat a little taller and adjusted his rifle so the magazine quit poking him in the thigh. “What does visit mean?”

Gail shot him an annoyed look, but he ignored it.

“She would just come by. You know, to talk. And to play with Jilly. We’d have coffee or hot chocolate in the winter, Cokes or iced tea in the summer.”

So this had been going on for a long time, Jonathan realized. “Colleen?”

She looked at her lap. “Why did you have to ruin everything?”

“Because you kidnapped my friend’s family,” he said.

Sam gasped again. “Oh, my God!”

“You forced my hand, Colleen. Why did you do it?”

She sighed and moaned. “What have I done?” she whispered.

“You killed a lot of people,” Jonathan said. “What’s done is done. Now tell me why you shot those people on the bridge.”

“They’re Users.” She said it as if it were really an explanation. “We’re at war with them.”

“And the mall shootings in Kansas City?”

She nodded.

“The school bombing in Detroit?”

“It’s war!” she yelled. “People die in war.”

“And more are coming, aren’t they?”

Colleen shut down and looked at the table.

“How many more, Colleen?”

“A lot,” she said. “Brother Michael didn’t trust me with all the details, but I know that there are many teams out there.”

“I don’t believe this!” Sam exclaimed.

Jonathan put his hand on her arm again. “Please,” he said. “Just let us talk.”

“I don’t want to say any more,” Colleen said.

“Why did you kidnap Ryan and Christyne Nasbe?” Jonathan pressed. “How did they figure in to your war?”

Colleen looked tired. “We needed symbols. We needed faces for the cameras.”

“But why them?”

“Because they were Users and they were there.” She clearly didn’t understand why people didn’t understand something so obvious. “I had orders to take prisoners and I followed them.”

Gail looked shocked. “Just anybody?” she asked. “Random selection?”

“Users are Users,” Colleen said. “This one or that one, it doesn’t matter.”

Sam stood, abruptly enough that Boxers moved to intervene. “I’m calling the police,” she said.

“They’re part of it,” Jonathan said. “Kendig Neen is a leader, isn’t he, Colleen?”

“ Sheriff Kendig Neen? Is a terrorist?”

“A soldier,” Colleen corrected reflexively.

Sam sat back down heavily. “Oh, my God. He comes by all the time, too. He’s a nice man.”

Jonathan turned his attention back to Colleen. “Where are the other attacks going to be?”

“I swear I don’t know. What’s going to happen to me?”

“This isn’t about you anymore, sweetheart,” Gail said. If anyone could pull off a nice tone under the circumstances, it was she. “This is about a lot of innocent people who are in danger.”

“They’re not innocent,” Colleen said, kicking the table. “They’re Users!”

Sam exploded, “That bomb at the school killed children, Colleen! Small, innocent children!”

“Children die in war all the time,” Colleen said.

Jonathan’s patience was thinning. “Tell me the end game, then,” he said. “What does all of this killing accomplish?”

She snorted a laugh. “Same as in any war. We win.”

“You win,” Jonathan repeated. “And then what? What happens in victory?”

“The Users stop using,” she said. “When people are afraid to leave their houses, when they can’t shop or go to school, the economy will collapse.”

“How?” Gail asked. “Tell me how one leads to the other.”

“Users are weak,” she said. “They frighten easily, and they’re anxious to blame whoever they want to be guilty. When they get angry, they go to war, and their precious stock market falls. The Users lose their precious money, and when that happens, the poor will rise and get an even chance.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Jonathan said, but then he stopped himself. This wasn’t the time for a civics lesson.

“You wait,” Colleen said. “You wait until the head is cut off of the snake. You wait to see what happens then.”

Gail scowled deeply. “Snake? What snake?”

A deep baritone voice rumbled from the living room, “Good morning everyone.”

Jonathan jumped to his feet and Boxers spun on his axis, unblocking the doorway to reveal a haggard, exhausted Kendig Neen standing just inside the front door. With his ample belly and his handlebar mustache, he might have been Santa in civvies. Jilly sat in the crook of his elbow, one arm casually over his shoulder. His free hand held a cocked pistol.

“Good thing little Jilly knows how to call the police, huh, Sam?” he said. “Poor little thing saw people with guns and was scared to death.”

“Nine-one-one is not for fun,” Jilly said, obviously pleased at her own rhyme.

“Hands away from weapons, please,” Kendig said. “I don’t-”

Jonathan moved with lightning speed, dropping to his knee and drawing his. 45 in the time it took the sheriff to bring his gun around. Jonathan fired two shots, hitting the sheriff in the ear and the eye as Neen fired off one of his own-by reflex, Jonathan imagined. Neen and Jilly fell together onto the floor of the foyer, where a river of gore instantly started to stain the wood.

Jilly screamed. And screamed.

Sam rushed to her and scooped her up in her arms. When she got a good look at the anatomical wreckage that was Kendig Neen’s head, she started screaming, too.

“Holy shit, Boss,” Boxers said, his admiration obvious to all. “I didn’t know-” He paused and nodded to a spot behind Jonathan. “Uh-oh.”

Colleen sat awkwardly in her chair, listing to the side. Bloody spittle formed at the corner of her mouth, then dripped like crimson thread onto the fabric of her coat.

“Ah, shit,” Jonathan spat. He rushed to her, but Gail beat him to it. She opened the coat and revealed the rapidly spreading stain on her shirt.

“Get her on the floor,” Boxers instructed from across the room.

In the hall, Jilly and Sam continued to wail.

Boxers whirled on them. “For God’s sake, woman, will you shut up? You’re safe now. Scream later.” Not many people in the world can deliver a message like that and have it obeyed. Boxers was one of them.

Jonathan pulled the table out of the way to make room on the floor to lay Colleen down. An instant later, Boxers was with them, and he lifted Jonathan out of the way by his collar so that he could take his place. Boxers’ combat medic skills had always been better than Jonathan’s.

With her coat already spread wide, he stripped her shirt open, and there was the bullet wound: center-right chest. The froth at her lips told them the bullet had pierced her lung, but the location probably meant liver, too. The rate of blood loss said that it was fatal.

“Well?” Gail said expectantly.

“We got nothing for this.”

Colleen reached out and grabbed Big Guy’s sleeve. “What does that mean?”

Boxers pulled his arm away as if he’d touched a spider. He stood abruptly and turned to Jonathan. “She’ll be dead in a couple of minutes,” he said, and he walked out to the hallway where Sam and her daughter stood stunned.

“What’s happening?” Sam asked. Her face showed desperation.

Boxers said, “Um, well, she’s not going to make it.”

“What have you brought to our house?” Sam shouted.

Boxers bent at the waist to look at her eye-to-eye. “A much better outcome for you and your little girl than if you’d been here alone with her when this asshole came by.”

“Michael Copley’s an asshole!” Jilly said.

In the kitchen, Jonathan and Gail kneeled next to the dying girl, Gail holding her hand. To Jonathan, she said, “There’s nothing?”

“She needs a surgeon, and there’s not enough time to get her one.” Jonathan leaned closer and raised his voice. “Did you hear that, Colleen?”

Her face had turned gray, on its way to that pale blue that always meant the end. She shifted her eyes. “I’m dying?”

“Yes,” Jonathan said. In his book, there weren’t many worse sins than telling a lie to someone who’s terminal. “And you’re dying with a lot of sins on your soul. You know that means Hell, don’t you?”

“Scorpion!” Gail hissed.

Jonathan shot her a glare that said, Shut up.

“It’s true, Colleen. You know that, don’t you?”

“Soldiers go to Heaven,” she said. Her voice had a fraction of the strength it used to. “That’s what Brother Michael said.”

“Brother Michael’s not here,” Jonathan said. “You’ve been left alone to take the bullets.”

“He had to leave us,” Colleen said. “The snake.”

Jonathan looked to Gail. “Did she say snake?”

“What snake?” Gail asked. She stroked the girl’s hair. “Stay with us, Colleen. What snake?”

“Head off the… sna…” Her features went slack and her eyes dilated.

For a long moment, neither of them moved. Friend or enemy, Jonathan had never grown used to watching people die. He found the vulnerability of those last seconds between this world and the next to be… unnerving. But it was done.

He stood. “She’s gone,” he said.

“Who are you people?” Sam yelled.

“We’re friends,” Jonathan said. “Although I understand that you probably don’t think so.”

“And what am I supposed to do with them?” She spread her arms at the carnage.

“We’ll take care of the bodies,” Jonathan said.

“Oh, no, you won’t,” Sam said.

“What, you want to keep them?” Boxers said.

“No, I don’t want to keep them. But when the police come-”

“The police are a bad idea,” Jonathan said.

“Says the home invader.”

“Says the home invader,” Jilly repeated.

Something about the absurdity of it all made Jonathan laugh.

“This is funny to you?” Sam accused.

“ No.”

“You’re still laughing.”

Gail said, “Not at you, Mrs. Shockley, and certainly not at these poor people. It’s just been a long night.”

Jonathan showed his palms as a gesture of peace. “Mrs. Shockley, I apologize for all of this. My big friend is right that you’re much better off for us being here when Sheriff Neen came around. He’d have killed you and your daughter because he’d have had to kill Colleen on the assumption that she’d shared secrets. But I don’t expect you to understand or believe any of that.”

“What the hell is going on?” Sam insisted.

“I’m afraid I can’t make you understand that, either,” Jonathan said. “I don’t know that I understand it all that well myself.”

“Who are you people?”

“Even more complicated, I’m afraid.” To Boxers, he said, “Let’s put the bodies into the trunk of the sheriff’s car.”

Clearly relieved to have something to do other than talking, Boxers went right to work. He effortlessly manhandled Neen’s corpse into a textbook fireman’s carry and headed out the door.

Jonathan reached out to touch Sam’s shoulder, but withdrew his hand when she flinched. “Would you like to sit down?”

“No. I want you out of my house.” As the shock drained from her features, fear invaded them.

“I understand,” Jonathan said. “In five minutes, we will be. But there are a couple of logistical issues I need to discuss with you.”

“I don’t want-”

“Hush, Mrs. Shockley.” Jonathan shot the command sharply, and it worked. “You need to listen to this. First of all, the quicker you wipe up the blood from the floor, the easier it will come up. In this case, it’s good you don’t have carpets.”

Sam’s jaw dropped. “Oh, my God. You’re so cold.”

“Whatever. It’s your call, one way or the other. And bleach will not only get out whatever stain is left, it will also kill any blood-borne pathogens.”

“Not to mention wipe away any DNA evidence,” she said. It was a gotcha.

Jonathan shrugged it away. “Actually, that’s not always true, but think what you want. Here’s the rest: As soon as we’re gone, you’re going to want to call the police. I understand that. Remember, though, that Kendig Neen was the police. Something to think about. That, and the fact that he and another person were killed here. You’re not going to like to hear this, but we’re not traceable, so any efforts to catch us or punish us will be futile. Plus, we’re the good guys.”

Sam hugged Jilly more tightly and took a step backward. Apparently, the “good guys” comment frightened her.

“If you do want to roll the dice that way do yourself a favor and call the FBI, not the local police. When they tell you that murders are a local matter, you tell them that the local policeman was one of the killers.”

“Except you’re taking his body away.”

Jonathan gave a commiserating wince. “Yes.” He stepped aside as Boxers reentered the front door to head to the kitchen for Colleen’s body. “Again, I’m sorry about all of this.”

Sam looked to Gail for something, and got more or less the same look of apology.

As Boxers passed behind again, this time with Colleen’s remains over his shoulder, Jonathan and Gail followed him out to the car. Both bodies fit easily into the trunk of the unmarked Ford.

The last they saw of Sam Shockley, she was standing in the doorway, with Jilly in her arms. The little girl waved good-bye.