Killer Instincts v5 (15 page)

"Fall back and circle to the left - we need to find those jerkweeds!" Richard shouted.

Richard began to walk with a crabbing, side-stepping motion that kept him facing the camper but moving to his left. I had practiced this sort of walk before on the range, but I was too disoriented. Instead I just held my pistol in my right hand pointed towards the camper and walked in a crouch as we circled around.

The first shots almost took me in the face. I heard the report of a pistol, and felt the snap-crack of the bullet as it passed an inch or two from my head. I saw the muzzle flash from more shots a moment later, coming from the right side of the camper. The shooter was obscured by the flames and smoke of the ruined trailer, and I sensed another pair of shots pass by the other side of my body. I swung about to face the shooter, pulling the Glock into a two-handed grip, and fired five times as fast as I could work the trigger. I didn't see the shooter go down, or if I hit him, but there was no return fire.

We continued to circle, slowly shifting back and to the left, the back of the camper and the dented white van coming into view. I was more terrified than I had ever been in my entire life, certain that, at any moment, a shot would ring out and I'd find myself tumbling into the dirt. I saw Richard out of the corner of my eye, calm and sure on the surface, but I could tell that underneath he was a tense as a drum skin. Beads of perspiration were running down his face, drawing channels in the coating of dust across his features. It struck me that despite his long, long history of service and slaughter, Richard was keenly aware of his own mortality at this moment.

"Could they have run off into the desert?" I hissed at Richard.

"Maybe, but we can't take the chance. Besides, they have to know it's just one or two men. Better to wait until we show ourselves and cut us down."

"So what do we do?" I asked.

"Make sure we shoot faster and straighter."

The moment was broken as the headlights of a pickup truck cut two paths of light out into the desert off to our left. The engine roared to life, and the tires spun in the loose desert dirt as the truck lurched forward, spraying a fantail of dust and pebbles. The driver must have slipped into the cab from the opposite side of the truck, and as he pulled away, an arm extended out of the cab and a two-foot jet of flame blazed at us. A line of bullet impacts raced towards Richard and me, and we threw our bodies to either side in an effort to get away from the barrage. Then the driver's gun ran dry, some sort of little submachine gun that ate through its ammunition in a second or two, and the driver raced the engine again, attempting to make his escape.

"Stop him!" Richard yelled as he came to his feet, moving so fast I could only marvel at how quickly he got his legs back under him.

Richard aimed the H&K and emptied it as fast as he could pull the trigger, running the pistol dry and beginning his reload before I had even fired my first shot. I brought up the Glock and fired off the remaining ten rounds, and halfway through Richard had finished reloading and started firing again.

The truck swerved once, twice, and finally skidded to a stop perhaps a hundred meters away. Richard broke into a run, reloading again as he ran, sprinting at a slight angle to the left of the truck. I stood and reloaded as fast as I could, then dashed after Richard, and as I ran I saw the driver’s door slam open. The driver stumbled free of the cab, silhouetted by the glow of the headlights in the dust cloud around the truck. The driver brought up his submachine gun and fired an erratic burst, ripping up the ground to my right.

Without slowing down, pistol out straight and level in front of him, Richard fired twice while at a dead run, and I saw the driver flop against the open door of the truck and drop to the ground. I couldn't believe the shot, at least thirty meters and in the dark, after running flat out for over twice that distance. By the time I caught up to Richard, I was already trembling with adrenaline and exertion, the pistol unsteady in my hands. Richard kept his pistol motionless, walking towards the driver at a quick combat crouch. I followed behind and to his right, my own pistol raised but certainly shaking.

We needn't have bothered. The driver had been shot at least five times; twice in his left arm, once through the back, then Richard's last two shots, one low in the throat, the other creasing the skull at the hairline. He was a young Hispanic man, probably around my age. He was propped up against the open door of the truck, short bubbling breaths coming through clenched teeth dark with blood. His right hand stirred listlessly through the dirt, hunting for the gun he had lost. His eyes were locked on mine, and I could see nothing but hate.

Richard covered him with his pistol, but didn't shoot. "You need to do one up close. Finish him. Put one in his head."

The young man's eyes flicked to Richard, and then back to me. He saw me hesitate for a moment.

"C'mon,
cabron
," he hissed between his clenched teeth, "do it, you little bitch."

I brought up the Glock in one hand and squeezed the trigger. The man's head snapped back against the truck door, then sagged until his chin rested on his chest, a neat dark hole in the bridge of his nose. The back of his head ran down the door in gobbets and streaks.

"We need to go back and account for the last man, the shooter near the camper," Richard said, reloading his pistol with another fresh magazine.

We didn't have to look for long. It took a few minutes to circle counter-clockwise back the way we had come and move to the right of the encampment. Approaching the camper, we immediately saw the body of a man lying by the corner, sprawled on his back. Up close, I could see I’d only hit him once, but the shot had torn open the side of his throat, and he had bled out thrashing in the dirt, gleaming sprays of drying crimson fanned across the corner of the camper.

"He didn't die easy, but at least he died quietly," Richard noted, staring down at the body.

I turned and looked at Richard. He was filthy from head to toe, night vision goggles askew on his forehead, sweat streaking the dust covering his face. Richard was back to looking calm and composed, no more concerned about the dead man lying in an enormous puddle of blood at his feet than if he was looking down at a broken lawn ornament.

"Small consolation, don't you think?" I asked.

Richard looked up and gave a small shrug, then turned and started walking towards where we had first begin the firefight, off to the side of the meth trailer. "Come on, let’s police our gear and get moving. It's going to be light soon, and someone's going to come looking when they see the smoke plume."

I let out a long, slow breath and moved to follow him, emotionally and physically exhausted. As I caught up to him, Richard turned his head my way just a bit.

"We'll go over the details after we get some shut-eye,” he said. “All in all though, not bad for your first time."

And then, incredibly, Richard winked at me.

TEN

I dreamed that night I stood outside the camp after the gun battle. I was looking at Richard, his face glowing in the firelight. Suddenly, he was no longer merely Richard, but a murderous, demonic warrior. The flickering light twisted Richard's features and made them savage and beastial. The twin lenses of the night-vision goggles on his forehead morphed into a pair of grotesque, barrel-like horns growing from his skull. Instead of black denim and wool, he was clothed in shadows and dried blood. Instead of the southern Texas desert, I was standing in a desolate expanse of Hell, the ground barren and featureless as far as I could see, dusted with fragments of bleached bone. I realized I had been tricked into descending into the underworld by a monster looking to corrupt another soul for his own devilish schemes.

Richard sensed by gaze and turned to me, his own pistol holstered but with captured weapons in both hands. I saw the fire wasn't actually reflected in his eyes; it burned from deep within two empty, smoking sockets.

Richard smiled, a hideous, rictus-like grin that stretched to impossible proportions, and he said to me, "Welcome to the brotherhood, William.”

Richard turned and walked away into the night.

I had no choice but to follow.

  I didn't wake up the next day until almost ten. The cabin was hot and stuffy by then, heated by the desert sun for almost four hours, and I was too uncomfortable to stay asleep. I awoke feeling utterly drained, my eyes crusted with sleep, my mouth gummy and dried out. My body ached all over, I was ravenously hungry, and I felt like I needed to drink a gallon of water, I was so parched.

But I was alive. Despite all my enervation and discomfort, that thought alone made it the best morning of my life.

I vaguely recalled that I had fallen asleep around five that morning. After Richard and I found our spent and discarded magazines, we dragged the bodies of the two men I had killed in the camp into the camper, along with the lone sentry. The driver who tried to get away, we tossed inside the cab of his truck. Richard had me collect any weapons we could find in serviceable condition; the long-barreled pump shotgun, the assault rifle, a stainless steel .45 caliber automatic that the throat-shot man had fired at me, and the Ingram machine pistol used by the driver. There was also a scoped .30-06 bolt-action hunting rifle in the camper, and a .357 magnum revolver lying in the passenger seat of the white van.

"We'll take the guns, cache them under the cabin. Never hurts to have a few disposable stolen guns on hand for a rainy day. If they have a criminal ballistics profile already, it might help throw an investigation off-track and onto someone else, even for a short while."

In addition to the guns, we found a lock-box in the camper. Richard blew the flimsy lock out with a single shot from his H&K. Inside, we found about ten grand in various denominations of used bills.

"Don't ever feel bad about taking a dead man's money, especially scumbags like these. They can't take it with them, it wouldn't go back to anyone who'd make better use of it, and you never know when a nice wad of untraceable cash can come in handy. Otherwise, it'd just end up in an evidence locker, or buried in some crooked cop’s backyard."

The last thing we did before leaving was to burn everything. Richard produced a number of small incendiaries from his gusset bag, tossing one into the camper and one into the cab of each vehicle. Each of the grenades burst with a soft "whump", and sprayed out burning fragments of what Richard called white phosphorous. It burned at an extremely high temperature, capable of melting through glass and steel. In a few moments, the three vehicles and the camper were completely engulfed in flames, the white-hot fires lighting up the desert night for a hundred meters all around us.

Once everything was well on its way to being completely incinerated, Richard and I hiked back to the Suburban. Before we drove away, Richard unlimbered a makeshift contraption from the trunk; a long, heavy wooden beam studded with a number of thick iron spikes, with a length of chain attached to either end. Richard fastened the middle of the chain to the trailer hitch.

"We'll drag this behind us as we drive out, and it'll obscure our tracks so no one can get an identification on the kind of vehicle we drove based on tire treads or the width and length of the chassis. This way, even if they track us back to this point with dogs, they'll have no idea which way we came or what kind of vehicle we used."

I assisted Richard in getting the makeshift "rake" back into the Suburban once we got to the road. When we hit the pavement, I slumped back in my seat, exhausted, and I dozed until we returned to the cabin. I took a few minutes to strip down, splash a little water on my face, and wipe my body down with a damp rag. I passed out the moment I hit my cot.

This morning, I dressed quickly, t-shirt and shorts and sneakers as usual, straw hat on my head. I picked up a lukewarm mug of tea Richard had left me on the table next to the stove, along with a tin plate of dried apricots, beef jerky, some salted table crackers, and a wedge of cheese. Caffeine, sugar, protein, carbohydrates, and some fat; the breakfast of champions. I also took a handful of vitamins left in a small plastic cup, dietary supplements provided by Richard to make sure that I wasn't missing out on anything important.

I stepped out onto the porch. Richard sat in his customary wooden rocker, faded jeans, check shirt, straw hat, cowboy boots, a wet bandana tied around his neck. He looked the picture-perfect grizzled cowboy resting in the shade of the covered porch, except for the brick of nine-millimeter cartridges balanced on one thigh, and a half-dozen long black magazines balanced on the other. He had one magazine in his hands, popping shiny brass cartridges into the end with such speed and efficiency he might as well be feeding quarters into a laundromat dryer. He looked up at me, peering from the side of his eye out from under the corner of his hat.

"Howdy," he said to me. "Sleep well?"

"Like the dead."

Richard gave me one of his trademark mirthless smiles. "The dead don't sleep, they rot. Best to keep that in mind."

"After last night, I won't forget that any time soon."

Richard turned away for a moment and went back to feeding cartridges into the magazine in his hand. "Do we need to talk about your feelings? Need a hug, perhaps?"

I sat in the other chair, propped my mug and my plate on the railing in front of me. I chewed a bit of jerky for a moment, swallowed.

"No need to be an asshole about it, Richard."

"You want to think I'm being an asshole about it, that's your prerogative. I just want to know how you feel about last night."

I thought for a minute, drank some tea, ate a couple of dried apricots. Despite the relatively early hour, it was already in the 80s. If it wasn't for the roof over the porch, I'm sure I'd already be sweating.

"Last night I had a dream. You were a demon covered in blood, and you tricked me into following you down into Hell, where I killed those men and gave up my soul so you could corrupt me for your own diabolical schemes."