Read At All Costs Online

Authors: John Gilstrap

At All Costs (32 page)

Nick was the one who found what they came looking for. Six feet, at the most, beyond the furthest moon-suit-shrouded corpse lay a scattered pile of smaller bones—the bones of a child, it appeared. The meat was long gone off this body, and without any protective covering, it was barely identifiable for what it was. But there was no mistaking the vertebral structures of the spine or the looping shape of the few remaining ribs.
Nick’s wild gesticulations with his flashlight drew Jake over toward him, and as soon as he saw the bones, he knew that their journey had ended. Before he could motion for Carolyn, she was there, body bag in hand.
Not a religious man by nature, Jake offered up a quick prayer of apology, begging forgiveness for the desecration he was about to perform. Blessing himself with the sign of the cross—something he hadn’t done in more years than he could remember—he set about the grisly business of loading a small child into a rubber bag.
C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-TWO
The man stalking them was definitely a cop. Travis got a glimpse of the hat and the badge as he stepped out into a clearing. From the way the cop was moving, he hadn’t seen them yet, but he sure seemed to know where he was going.
As panic grew in his belly, Travis looked over his shoulder to see if the grown-ups were on their way back yet. It had been a lot longer than five minutes.
Shit! What do I do?
His father’s last words burned in his brain: “Your job is to wait out here and watch for anything unusual.” He realized now that it was just a bullshit job, because he was up to his eyeballs in unusual, but he had no way to warn anybody.
Dammit!
The cop was getting closer with every step, and Travis’s sitting there with his forehead scrunched in confusion wasn’t helping anything. He had to get word to them. Maybe he could shout.
Good idea, idiot,
Travis chastised himself.
Why don’t you just stand up and wave a flag, too?
Okay, shouting was a stupid idea. At least from here. Maybe if he got closer . . . close enough to see what was going on, anyway.
He rolled out of his current spot, staying low to keep from being seen on the ridgeline, and then he slid on his butt down the other side of the embankment. On the far side, he found himself on another road, just like the one where they were parked, and facing another magazine, identical to the one he’d just climbed. Running now, he dashed around the next mound, rather than over it, and he found himself suddenly in the midst of the moonscape. Nothing lived here. No grass grew; no plants. Even the dirt seemed dead. Across another road, maybe fifty yards away, stood the open maw of the burned-out magazine. If he used his imagination, he thought he could see movement inside, but no people.
He considered yelling again, but it was still too far away.
C’mon, Trav, think
. . .
He needed to move closer. He could think all day, and he’d still be too far away to yell without being heard by the cop. But what about the dust? Jesus, how many times did they have to say it? The dust here would kill him if he breathed it. At least that’s what they
thought.
But he was breathing it now, wasn’t he? And he was still okay. Maybe the stuff had all worn off or blown away, like Nick said might be the case. In any event, he could always hold his breath.
He glanced nervously over his shoulder again, thinking he heard the squawk of the radio. Okay, he’d hold his breath. If he got in and got out quickly, it wouldn’t be a problem. What other choice did he have?
Pausing there at the margin where green and red and orange turned to flat black, he took in five or six deep breaths, hyperventilating himself the way he saw swimmers do it on television before a big race. He could do this.
On your mark . . . get set . . .
Who the hell would bring a car out here? As Sherman Quill drew closer, he saw not only the car—a Cadillac, no less—but a bunch of boxes and equipment strewn all about. It still made no sense to him, but one thing was clear: whatever was going on, and whoever had done this, they were still here, unless they’d left on foot.
Maybe that FBI lady had been right. Maybe the Donovan gang had returned to finish what they’d started. In an era where crooks were stupid enough to rob banks using notes written on the backs of their own deposit slips, as had happened in Little Rock just a few weeks before, Sherman had come to put no limits on the extent of stupidity he could expect from a lawbreaker. No matter how clever their crime, sooner or later, it seemed, it was always something truly stupid that ultimately brought the perpetrator down. Like returning to the scene of the crime.
Resting his hand on the grip of his .38 Police Special, Sherman approached the Cadillac cautiously, peering in the windows and scanning the trees for any sign of movement. “Well, I
will
be damned,” he muttered, lifting his portable radio out of his belt.
“Unit One to Control,” he said. He listened carefully for a response but got nothing. Somebody broke squelch, but if there was a message, he couldn’t hear it.
“Unit One to Control,” he tried again. “Nan? Are you there?”
Again, nothing. Not surprising, really. These low-band radios were a pain in the ass once you got them into the woods. If he had his patrol car down here, with its five-watt mobile unit, there’d be no problem. He briefly considered the option of going back for it, just to call in a report, but decided that would be silly. He was here, and the bad guys were here. He might as well take a look at what they were doing.
The conscious realization of where he was hit him like a smack in the face. Sweet Jesus, he was in the middle of the most hazardous spot on earth!
“You are out of your cotton-pickin’ mind,” he mumbled. He looked back again, and he considered the mobile radio one more time.
Make this collar and they’ll be calling you a hero,
he told himself. He drew the .38 from its holster, then started his long walk toward the exclusion zone.
Travis’s big breath took him as far as the doorway and then about ten feet farther. If his folks had been closer to the front, he’d have been able to dash in, grab one of them, and then dash out again. As it was, there was no way for him to make it. His lungs screamed for relief, and as he turned to head back toward the door, the breath just popped out of him in a giant rush. Then, before he could stop himself, his diaphragm rebounded and sucked in a huge lungful of air.
Travis winced, closing his eyes tightly in anticipation of death, but nothing happened. There was a lot of dust, and it tasted like shit, but he felt fine, other than the urge to sneeze. Even the sneeze tasted awful.
Carolyn didn’t hear anything, actually; she sensed a noise she didn’t recognize through the layers of protective clothing. She pivoted her body to get a reassuring glance at sunlight, and there was Travis, silhouetted against the brilliant white background.
She screamed, “Oh, my God, Travis, no!”
She dropped her flashlight and Jake’s pry bar onto the concrete floor, the noise reverberating forever in the concrete canyon, and ran to her son.
“Get out of here!” she yelled. “Oh, my God, get out of here!” She ran to her baby, scooping him up on the fly and dragging him out toward fresh air. In the rush of adrenaline, he weighed nothing. “Hold your breath, honey!” she yelled. “Hold your breath!”
But Travis couldn’t hear any of it. “Hey!” he yelled indignantly. “Put me down! There’s a cop outside!”
Jesus, she’s strong!
Jake saw the commotion and put it together in an instant. He followed his family out into the open, running as best he could in the bulk of his protective suit to catch up.
What the hell was he doing inside?
Carolyn had the boy over her shoulder in a kind of fireman’s carry that was as awkward as it was effective. With him wriggling to break free the whole time, she carried him out of the hideous stain of the exclusion zone and into the world of living underbrush. From there, it was another twenty-five or thirty yards down a small decline to a stream they’d seen on the aerial photo. She heaved Travis like a sack of potatoes off her shoulder and into the swollen, quick-running stream.
Good idea,
Jake thought. She was going to try and decon him. But it’d be tough going in her moon suit. Pulling his arm out of his sleeve, Jake fished around his pants pocket for his knife.
“Hey!” Travis yelled. “Listen to me! There’s a—”
Suddenly, he found himself immersed in frigid water, with his own mother holding him under the surface. As he struggled to rise to the top, she stepped into the stream with him, straddling him with her legs and crushing his rib cage with her knees. He could breathe, but not without taking a mouthful of water.
“Mom! Jesus! What the—”
She pulled at his soaked clothing, and suddenly he found himself shirtless. He tried to fight her, but there was nothing he could do. She was a crazy woman. Every time he thought he had a grip on something, it would slip out of his hands. “Mom! Stop! Ow, you’re hurt—”
Now he was upside down in the water, face submerged, and she was yanking on his pants. As he felt them slip down past his butt and on toward his knees, he tried to kick and squirm, but it was useless. His choice was to cooperate or drown.
A new pair of hands appeared out of nowhere and grabbed him under his arms. It was his dad, and he was in regular clothes again, but with the air pack still in place. “Hold still,” he yelled, his voice muffled by the mask. “We’ve got to get your clothes off! You’re contaminated.”
With two against one, there was little choice but to cooperate. One last hard yank ripped the pant legs clear of his feet while nearly yanking his legs clear of his hips. Once his pants were off, the struggling stopped, and Travis realized to his horror that they’d stripped him of
all
his clothes. He was naked!
As Jake struggled out of his air pack, Travis scrambled to cover himself up.
“Stay away from those clothes!” Jake commanded.
“But Dad, there’s a cop—”
The sound of a gunshot killed the words before they could form in the boy’s throat.
C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-THREE
Sherman was getting too old for this crap: walking through the woods, trying to sneak up on people. If he were halfway as smart as he pretended to be, he’d have waited for the backup that had to be on the way by now. Nan wouldn’t have wasted even a second getting the call in to the state boys. So why did he keep on going forward? Another damn good question. Personal glory, he supposed. Because this was
his
town, and if the Donovans were down there like he’d been led to believe, he stood in a position to get payback—to punish those bastards for sucking the life out of the place he’d always known as home.
His heart fluttered like a butterfly as each step brought him closer to death; if not at the hands of the Donovans, then at the whim of his own body as he inhaled the unknown dangers floating in the air. He heard noises ahead; man-made ones this time. The realization made his heart pound even harder.
Why the hell would anyone . . .
He heard a yell. The sound of a child in distress. Sherman quickened his pace—something else he hadn’t done in a very long time—and he hurried across the last roadway separating him from the foul-smelling desolation of the exclusion zone. The best speed he could muster was a moderate jog, and the out-of-sync swinging of the equipment in his Sam Browne belt slowed him down even more.
He chose to scale the final mound rather than go around it, in hopes that the elevation would grant him an element of surprise. Sherman expended enormous effort scrambling up the steep slope, using his left hand to pull himself up while gripping his revolver in his right. It was tough going until he cleared the top of the giant doors, and then the slope eased a bit, allowing him to scramble the rest of the way more or less on his feet.
The view from the top took his breath away. The world here had changed; an entirely different place than what he knew Arkansas to look like. Everything was monochrome, like an ancient daguerreotype photo.
“Holy Mother of God,” he muttered to himself. He heard more yelling, again sounding like a child, but it was from somewhere off to his left. He moved to head in that direction, welcoming the opportunity to break his gaze from the desolation before him, but movement in the doorway to the magazine itself made him freeze. As he watched, a man dressed in one of the green suits with which he’d become so familiar, courtesy of media obsessiveness, slowly crossed the threshold, carrying a bag in his arms. He transported the bag with care, as if there was something fragile inside. The spaceman look-alike moved carefully but deliberately as he walked to the perimeter of the dead vegetation and placed the bag on the ground. Then out of the grass he lifted another body bag—this one having a fluorescent orange color, which contrasted sharply with the olive drab of the first—and proceeded to flap it open. That done, he placed the green bag inside the orange one, then zipped it up.
Sherman’s mind reeled at the impossibility of what he was watching. When the spaceman stood and headed back inside, Sherman knew it was time for him to act. He stood among the bushes that lined the crest of the mound and assumed a shooter’s stance.
“Police officer!” he yelled. “Don’t move!” But the man didn’t even slow his deliberate gait.
Shit. He can’t hear me.
He tried it again. “Police officer! Don’t move!” Still no response. The man just kept striding back inside to continue whatever his mission was.
That really left Sherman with no choice. He took aim and pulled the trigger.
Five minutes earlier Nick had suddenly realized that he was alone inside the magazine. One second the three of them were inspecting the bones they’d found, and the next, Jake and Carolyn had dropped their hand lights and disappeared, leaving him there by himself. He figured one of the two had developed a problem and that they’d headed out together. He was a bit miffed—it was
their
butts, after all, that he was helping pull out of the fire—but that part of himself that was task-oriented swung into gear and he focused on what needed to be done.
As he loaded the skeletal remains into the green body bag, he marveled at how small the bones were and at what kind of madman it would take to kill such a small child in the first place, only to wreak all of this destruction to cover it up. One fragment in particular grabbed his attention, and for a moment, he wasn’t even sure it was a bone. He spent a moment examining it, then tossed it in with the others. Better safe than sorry.
He desperately hoped that Jake’s hunch was right—that by identifying the remains, they might have a shot at bringing the real perpetrators to justice. If ever there was a person who needed to suffer the wrath of the law, it was the monster who did this.
After he’d picked up every bone he could find and placed them inside the bag, he found the zipper in the dark and pulled it closed. The feather lightness of the package made his eyes moist as he carried it toward the door, and as he stepped over the remains of one of his colleagues from so many years ago, he realized that in another two minutes or so, he’d be done with the announced reason for reentering the magazine.
Then it would be time to pursue his own agenda.
The second body bag in the grass outside was Nick’s addition to the plan. He’d anticipated the acute dust hazard inside the magazine and the enormously high levels of contamination the bodies were likely to carry. By bagging the bag, as it were, the hazard posed by their package to whoever was going to do the pathology work would be greatly reduced. When the doctor finally opened the package, he’d need to practice the same precautions as he would if he were dealing with the victim of a viral infection.
The absence of plant life spooked Nick. He’d hoped that enough time had passed for Mother Nature to begin to mitigate damages in her own way. Not that there weren’t a few hopeful signs. He noticed, for example, the absence of dead animals. If the dirt and the vegetation were toxic, then any creature who walked in here should become incapacitated and die. Such was not the case. In fact, as he donned his protective clothing, he’d noticed several squirrels scampering about, busily preparing themselves for the fast-approaching winter.
As he neared the blast doors again, he thought he heard something. Shouting maybe? He glanced around the horizon quickly, then dismissed whatever it was as something he didn’t need to worry about. Probably Jake and Carolyn.
When a chunk of concrete exploded out of the doorjamb, however, and he felt the concussion of a gunshot through the rubberized fabric of his suit, he jumped a foot and whirled around in a crouch. There at the perimeter of the exclusion zone, maybe twenty yards away, he saw a man in a cop’s uniform aiming a gun straight at him. He saw the cop’s mouth moving, but he couldn’t hear any of the words. Not that words were important. The business end of a firearm came as close to universally understood communication as anything he could think of.
Nick froze where he stood, and slowly raised his hands.
Jake reacted instinctively to the sound of the gunshot, ripping the mask off his face with one hand while drawing the Glock with the other, bringing it to bear as he dropped to one knee. In the same motion, he threw a forearm into Travis’s chest, knocking him to the ground and out of harm’s way. Even as he hit him, he knew he’d done it too hard, driving a blast of air out of the boy’s mouth. No time to worry about that now.
“Ow, Dad!” Travis gasped, bringing an angry glare from his father.
“Quiet!” Jake commanded. “Here.” He fished through his pockets again for his knife, then tossed it to the boy. “Help your mother out of her suit.”
“But my clothes—”
“Screw your clothes,” Jake hissed. “Just do what I told you.”
Jake’s eyes had taken on that same look that Travis had seen in the school and in the car when they were stopped. It scared him. He remembered again that his father could be a very dangerous man when he was threatened. Dangerous to everyone.
While Travis struggled with the folding blade, Jake wriggled out of his air pack harness and started inching his way up the incline, back toward the source of the shot. Maybe sixty yards separated him from the action, and it looked bad. He watched as a clearly agitated cop shouted commands to Nick, who just stood there, his hands in the air, doubtless unable to hear a thing the cop said to him.
“Shit!” Jake hissed.
What do we do now?
If push came to shove, he was a good enough shot to drop the cop at this distance, but that didn’t seem like much of an option. Killing a police officer would render the rest of this exercise moot. If he murdered a cop, no one would give a damn that he hadn’t killed the others.
By all appearances, the encounter had played itself to a standoff, as each player tried to figure out how to communicate with the other. For a shamefully long moment, Jake considered just leaving Nick there.
Family first, everything else second.
If Jake just guided Carolyn and Travis around the near side of the mound closest to them, they’d be able to make it all the way back to the Cadillac without the cop seeing or hearing a thing. Once at the car, they’d have a decent shot at getting out alive.
And forever after, he’d have to live with the burden of having sold out a friend. Suddenly, this had all become too complicated. He pushed himself up from the ground and moved to circle around the mound when the characteristic sound of ripping fabric momentarily diverted his attention back toward the creek bed. Carolyn was cutting herself out of her suit, with Travis’s able, if somewhat hesitant, assistance. The boy was having a hard time getting much done with one hand covering his genitalia.
Jake had work to do. He darted out of sight as quietly as possible, hoping to double back and come in behind the cop. “Just don’t shoot yet,” he mumbled, an indirect prayer for Nick’s safety.
Once around to the front of the magazine opposite the exclusion zone, Jake ran full speed down the road to get to the other side of the mound. Last time he saw the cop, he was halfway down the other side of the berm, carefully avoiding the line where life stopped and contamination began. Jake’s best approach, then, would be directly over the top. Judging from the displaced leaves and broken branches, it was the same route the cop had followed just moments before.
Jake scaled the hill easily, holstering the Glock until his footing was secure. Once near the top, he drew the weapon again and peeked over the crest, trying his best to stay hidden in the undergrowth. As he rose up to look, he realized with a rush that this was the exact spot where the sniper had made his perch fourteen years before. For the millionth time since that awful day, Jake’s mind replayed the image of the man in camouflage, blasting at them randomly as they struggled to get out of the way of the giant smoke plume.
Without standing all the way up and exposing himself fully, all he could see of the cop at this angle was the back of the deputy’s head and his shoulders. An easy kill shot, but he still didn’t want to go there.
Honest, Judge, I had to blast him while he wasn’t looking.
Not likely.
If he tried to rush the cop, he’d no doubt hear the approach, and even though they were separated by only twenty feet, that was plenty of time for the cop to turn and fire. Similarly, if Jake just yelled for him to drop his weapon, he’d probably turn and draw down anyway, sparking a lethal exchange of gunfire, which, under the circumstances, Jake would probably win, but the result would once again be a dead cop. Back to square one.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Then he got an idea.
“Federal officers!” Jake yelled, invoking the words and tone he’d heard in the body shop just three days before. “Don’t move!”
The cop jumped at the sound of the voice and started to turn.
Jake fired a shot in the air. “I said don’t move, goddammit! Now, drop your weapon!”
“But I’m a cop!” Sherman protested, once again starting to turn.
“And I’m the fucking tooth fairy!” Jake screamed. “Now, drop that weapon or I’ll blow your head off!”
“But I’m—”
“Now!!”
Sherman’s shoulders sagged, and he shook his head as he opened his hand and let the pistol fall to the ground.
“That’s a good boy,” Jake coaxed, hoping he wasn’t laying it on too thick. “Okay, now put your hands behind your head and interlace your fingers.”
Sherman complied but bitched like an old rooster. “I’m a cop, goddammit! The bad guy’s down there—”
“Shut up and listen,” Jake interrupted. “I want you to step away from the weapon, back up the hill toward me.” Again, the cop did as he was told, at which point, Jake was lost. He had no idea what he was going to do next. He truly didn’t want to hurt the guy, but he didn’t know what else . . .
“I’ve got him, Jake. You go ahead and cuff him.” Carolyn’s voice came from behind him and to his left, and she had her .380 in her trembling hand.
Sherman cocked his head at the sound of the new voice. “Jake?” he gasped. His shoulders sagged even further. “Jesus Christ.”

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