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T
wo men armed with 12-gauge shotguns raced out the back door of the single-story clapboard house, leapt off the side of the porch, and then charged to the locked gate that led to the driveway. One of the men slowed to release a ninety-pound pit bull from his chain, freeing him to run with the humans towards the noise in the front of the property and the man who had caused it. At the gate, one man unhooked a large, loose padlock from the staple hasp on the wooden fence, then kicked the gate open, his shotgun at the high ready in case someone stood waiting for him there. The dog took off up the driveway, and when the man saw no one in front of him, he ran towards the Dodge pickup to douse the flames licking up the side panel of the truckbed.

The second man followed close behind the first, himself waving his 12-gauge in all directions as he did so. He saw the flaming rag in the gas tank of the Dodge Ram and he hesitated a moment, not knowing if it would explode at any second. But his colleague was either braver or more foolish, and he charged at the flames, desperate to save the vehicle.

—

C
ourt Gentry knelt in the bushes next to the gate and watched the pit bull bolt from the darkened backyard. The massive black form of muscle and gnashing teeth raced past Court’s position on his way to freedom. Behind the pit, two men, both rail-thin and pasty white, sprinted through the gate, down the driveway, and towards the Dodge Ram, wooden-stocked shotguns out in front of them. One man slowed for a moment, hesitating, but soon enough he headed on, catching up with his friend at the burning shop rag.

Court slipped into the backyard and closed the gate behind him, locking it by dropping the padlock’s shackle through the hasp.

There was no direct lighting back there at all, but the tiny bit of residual glow from the raining sky above gave him a dim view of his surroundings. The entire yard was surrounded by the ten-foot-high privacy fence. It was overgrown and filled with trash, and a broken-down and weed-covered Chevy Monte Carlo was on blocks alongside the fence near the back porch. The windows of the house back there were boarded, just as they were out front, and the back door was a metal and Plexiglas storm door.

As Court moved past the car he pulled an old, shredded tire out of the weeds. It was only a small-sized spare, but it must have weighed twenty pounds. His injured right forearm hurt when he held that much weight in his right hand, so he hefted it in his left and continued on towards the porch.

As he started up the stairs he stopped suddenly. Something about the scene triggered a sense of danger. He figured it out quickly—it was odd there were no bright lights back here; it would have made sense considering the other security measures on the property—unless, of course, the back entrance was booby-trapped.

Court still had the lighter, so he fired it up and held it out, and immediately he saw the glint of metal suspended two feet in front of his face. A dozen or more large metal fishhooks hung on fishing line five and a half feet off the ground, at eye level of the average man. The thin filament was attached to the columns on either side of the steps up to the back porch, and the hooks hung ready to dig into the face and rip out the eyes of anyone unaware of this security measure. Obviously those who lived or worked in the stash house also knew to avoid the stairs of the back porch and instead to come and go by stepping up onto the two-foot-high porch on either side of the stairs.

Court saw a milk crate positioned to his right to help with that, so he sidestepped the booby trap and climbed up the rest of the way to the door.

He heard shouting and barking in the driveway now, and the gate rattled off to his left. Court assumed the Aryan Brotherhood men and their Nazi dog had just figured out they’d been tricked.

As he made to reach for the handle of the heavy back door, light engulfed the porch and the door flew open. A man appeared in the doorway, backlit from a bulb in the room behind him, a Kalashnikov rifle held high. Court rushed forward, batted the weapon to the side with his right hand, and banged the twenty-pound rubber tire into the man’s face with
his left, striking him in the jaw, snapping the man’s head back, and knocking him to the floor.

Court entered the house by stepping over the dazed man, and he closed and locked the metal door behind him. He found himself in a poorly lit dark-paneled hallway floored with cheap linoleum. The thick smell of cigarette smoke, pot, and rotting garbage assaulted his nostrils and clawed at his eyes, and the incessant music, played at a volume that made Court think of a concert in hell, further disrupted his senses.

He started to kneel to pick up the AK, but before he could get his hand on the weapon another man raced in through a dim doorway ahead and to his left, on his way towards the back door. This man also wielded a Kalashnikov, but he had not expected to see a threat inside the house, so his weapon was not up and ready to fire.

Court identified this man as the young Aryan Brotherhood member with the 88 on his neck. As the man raised his gun towards the stranger, Court swung the car tire at him underhanded, and it slammed into his face with a thud audible over the hammering drumbeat of the heavy metal.

The young man’s head flew back, banged against the door casing. He slid down, unconscious and flat on his back on the hallway floor.

The Aryan Brotherhood man by the back door who had taken the tire to the jaw rolled slowly to his knees and reached for his weapon, but Court kicked him in his already bloody face and spun him into the air, dropping him against the locked back door.

Court lifted one of the AKs off the ground now, but as he did so a shrill scream caused him to look back over his shoulder. Down the full length of the paneled hallway, some twenty-five feet away, a woman held something over her head.

Court recognized the item immediately, although he could not help but recoil in surprise. It was a
katana
. A traditional Japanese sword.

Not good.

And it got worse. Court realized the sword was being brandished by a meth head. The woman might have been in her twenties or thirties, but her skin was dry and leathery and stretched across the bones of her pockmarked face, and every exposed inch of her arms and neck was covered in scabs and tats. Her white blond hair was oily and thin, and the black T-shirt and jeans she wore were torn and threadbare.

He was as afraid of the woman as he was of the deadly weapon in her grasp.

The meth head with the sword charged. She was no expert with this weapon of hers; Court determined this instantly. In the narrow hall she should have been advancing forward with the point of the katana, but instead she swung it from side to side, slamming the blade into both walls as she closed wildly.

Court did not see her any differently because she was a woman; any sense of chivalry or gender bias in a force-on-force encounter had been trained out of him years and years ago. He saw her only as a threat. A target. He brought the AK up to his shoulder, used his thumb to make sure the fire selector was set to semiautomatic, centered the blade sight on her chest, and moved his finger to the trigger.

But before he could press the trigger and drop the woman, fully automatic gunfire erupted somewhere in the house. Suddenly jagged perforations pocked the paneling of the hallway, waist-high, halfway between Court and the charging woman with the sword. Though the holes appeared in both sides of the hall, Court could tell the shooting was coming from his right, so he dropped down onto his left shoulder, landing on the cold linoleum, and he returned fire with his AK, sending rounds of lead back in the direction of the gunfire, shooting through the wall next to him.

The woman with the sword made it less than halfway to Court before she was cut down. One of the bullets fired by the unseen attacker ripped through the paneling and then sliced through both of her thighs, causing her to stumble and fall awkwardly to her knees. The sword flew from her hands and clanged along the floor, then it slid, hilt-first, all the way to Court.

Court ignored the sword and kept firing the Kalashnikov at the wall just inches in front of him. The crushing volume of the rifle’s reports in the long, narrow space made his ears squeal, but he continued raking the barrel of his weapon back and forth, shooting all the while, desperate to suppress the incoming gunfire. Red-hot ejected shell casings bounced around the floor all around him and ricocheted back into his face, while splinters of paneling pricked his eyes and covered his hair and clothing.

It was clear to him by the incredible amount of gunfire that he was up against more than one weapon, perhaps as many as three. He emptied his AK and crawled for the other lying nearby, scooping it up. He continued
firing, pushing himself along the floor with his feet and flattening himself even lower to the filthy linoleum as an incoming round punched a massive hole in the wall less than a foot above his head. Court jammed his Kalashnikov through the opening to return fire, again sweeping his muzzle back and forth. He had no idea who or what he was shooting at—his training and his years of experience commanded his actions now. He was in a fight for his life, and he did not pause to consider the consequences of each thumbnail-sized round he sent tearing through the wall at 2,350 feet per second.

Finally this second weapon clicked on an empty chamber and he took a moment to just lie there and listen. His ears were battered enough from all the shooting, and the heavy music coming from another part of the house droned on, but he was reasonably sure the incoming fire had stopped. The woman moaned on the floor ten feet away, but he ignored her as he climbed to one knee.

Court dropped the rifle on the floor there next to him and he heaved the sword. He stood back up and headed down the hall, hoping to make it to any more threats in the house before they had a chance to regroup and attack.

When he reached the woman he decided he needed to check her for any weapons. She had nothing on her other than a crack pipe, a thick roll of twenties, and a lighter. He saw her bloody thighs, and determined from the location of the wounds that the arteries in her legs remained intact, and she would probably survive.

He thought she was out of the fight completely, but before he could stand back up she looked up to him, bared her teeth, and tried to scratch at his eyes with her fingernails.

Court punched her in her left temple with the hilt of the sword, dazing her instantly. He then grabbed her by the waistband of her jeans in the small of her back, and he lifted her off the floor. He walked on, carrying her like a rag doll, holding the sword in his right hand as he dragged her along with his left.

He found the stereo in the main living room and turned it off, and as soon as he did so he heard the two men outside, frantically beating on the boarded windows next to the front door, trying to get back in.

He popped the disk out of the property’s security camera system, and
he snapped it in his hands and slipped it into his pocket, then he turned and moved down a hall, out of the main living area.

In a large back bedroom his eyes settled on a scene of carnage. An older man, covered in Aryan Brotherhood ink like the others, lay on his back in the middle of the floor. His arms and legs were splayed; his head was split open from a gunshot wound to the eye. Court determined one of the 7.62 rounds he’d fired into the wall had passed all the way through the man’s skull. The dead man’s gore had been splattered across a faux leather recliner behind him that had itself taken half a dozen rounds of hate from Court’s borrowed rifles. Next to the body lay an AK, and next to this Court saw the bald-headed man he’d spoken to through the front door just minutes earlier. The Aryan Brotherhood meth dealer sat on the floor, leaning against the foot of an unmade bed, his eyes glazed but pointing in Court’s direction.

The black polymer Kalashnikov lay in his lap, but his hands were resting on the floor. Court counted three gunshot wounds on the man. One in the right wrist, one in the left elbow, and another in his right hip.

The bald-headed man’s chest heaved up and down rapidly, and he was covered in blood.

Court used the tip of the katana to flick the AK-47 out of the man’s lap and beyond his reach. He then dragged the unconscious woman into the room and dropped her face-first on the bed behind the injured man. The bald-headed man lay there motionless as Court did this, blood pumping from his hip and arms. Court looked the wounds over and didn’t give the man much chance for survival unless the bleeding was controlled and paramedics made the scene in the next fifteen minutes.

Court looked around the room. All the walls, all the furniture—all the people, for that matter—were riddled with bullet holes.

Court pulled a blanket off the bed. It was soiled and stained and covered in cigarette burns. He tossed it to the drug dealer on the floor.

The man pressed it against his hip to stanch the bleeding, groaning with pain as he put pressure on the wound. He held it in place with his injured left arm. “What do you want?”

“What do you think?”

“Drugs?”

“Guess again.”

“Cash?”

“You’re brighter than you look.”

The white supremacist’s voice slurred a little. “You . . . ain’t . . . gettin’ shit.”

Court checked his watch. A stray round here and there might not garner too much interest in Ward Eight, but he knew the roar of a thirty-second full-auto firefight would draw out the police, and he sure as hell did not want to be hanging out in this meth den when the cops showed up. “I don’t have time to dick around. I see from all that ink that you are no stranger to superficial wounds from sharp objects, so I’ll have to go deep, won’t I?” Court raised the katana chest-high, holding the hilt with both hands.

“What the fuck are you going to—”

The man stopped speaking suddenly and his focus shifted to a point somewhere over Court’s left shoulder. Court knew the man was looking at the doorway behind him. Without hesitation Court flipped the sword around in his left hand and brought it underhanded back behind him, and he fired it back like a piston, launching it through the air blade-first without looking. Immediately he heard the steel strike flesh, and he turned around, saw a bearded man in the doorway ten feet away, armed with a massive Desert Eagle pistol. The katana had caught him in the solar plexus, driven through his lungs, and the tip now rested against the backside of the man’s rib cage.