We untangled and found our feet. She pulled me away from the stairs, backward, into darkness. I banged into a table topped with storage boxes. She knocked over a gas grille we kept in the basement during the winter. The sound of clattering junk joined the sound of glass breaking, wood chipping, and walls being hammered above us.

  We found each other in the dark. Andy pulled me into a crouch.

  “Christ!” I uttered. “What the fuck!”

  “Stay down,” she ordered. “Are you okay? Are you hit?”

  “Hit?” In the dark, her hands flew all over me, patting and feeling for damage. “What the hell? What do you mean hit?”

  “Someone’s shooting at us!”

  Until that moment, the idea that the hailstones were bullets simply did not connect.

  The rapping continued, transmitted down to us via the walls and the wooden structure of the house. It came in bursts, fits and starts. Something large toppled over upstairs. More glass broke.

  “Stay here,” Andy ordered.

  Before I could protest, she darted away in the darkness.

  The farmhouse basement is black as pitch at night. The few windows at the tops of the stone walls are tiny and below the outside ground. The window wells have plastic covers. By now the covers wore a layer of snow. We keep a battery-powered radio on a shelf along with a box of kitchen matches and several candles. The radio and candles saw service twice during storms when the county sirens sounded a tornado warning.

  This was different.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m right here,” she said.

  I followed the sound of her voice. Andy had moved across the floor to where a set of steps climbed to exterior storm cellar doors.

  “You’re not going out there!”

  “No. But I can hear better over here.”

  She crouched by the steps. I dropped down beside her.

  Scores of bullets penetrated the farmhouse walls and windows above us. The chorus of destruction seemed never ending.

  “I don’t hear gunshots.”

  “They’re using suppressors. They’re not at the back of the house. It’s all coming from the front. From the road.”

  “We can’t get out this way,” I reminded her. The Bilco doors to the cellar were padlocked from the outside. We talked about changing the lock numerous times. Andy told me that we should be able to get out of the cellar from the inside. I had agreed and now felt guilty for not getting around to the task.

  The hammering and shattering stopped briefly, then started up again, but with less enthusiasm. I wondered if they still had a single square inch of the building to shoot at that hadn’t already been shot.

  When it finally ceased, the silence felt like a trap. We found each other in the dark and held hands, squeezing tightly. I prepared to tackle my wife if she gave any indication of jumping up and running after our attackers. Nothing in her armory matched up to the rifles that had been carried by the Company W warriors parading on our road. To my relief, she remained with me on the stone steps, waiting.

  A new sound caught us by surprise. Popping. One. Two. Then six in rapid succession. Then more. Gunshots. They sounded close but muted. I did not detect strikes on the house.

  “That was a handgun,” she whispered. The popping stopped as quickly as it started.

  “What…for good measure?”

  We waited. Seconds ticked into a minute. Then two.

  “We should look, but not so we can be seen. Can you get us up the stairs?” Andy asked.

  “Don’t you think we should stay down here, like until next week?”

  “C’mon.”

  She led me by the hand back to the steep wooden steps to the kitchen. At the foot of the stairs, we both stopped. She hooked her right arm into my left and closed her hand in a fist with mine. I flashed on a memory of square dancing in grade school gym class. Circle left! or some such call from a cheap speaker on the gymnasium floor.

  Fwooomp!

  We vanished. Andy tugged us up the stair by grasping the railing. We bumped through the open door. The light over the sink had been blown out. The big security light on a pole over the farmyard had been shot out. Only the ambient city light reflecting on the low clouds dumping snow on Essex gave the kitchen definition.

  A layer of chipped glass, wood and plaster covered the floor. Kitchen cabinet doors bore big holes. Two of them dangled from a single remaining hinge. The ceramic kitchen sink was shattered. I felt a flash of relief that none of the pipes had been struck, adding flood waters to the disaster. One of the counter-height chairs at the kitchen table lay on the floor with a leg missing.

  Andy heaved us away from the cellar doorway. At least we didn’t have to step on the broken glass. We made no sound floating across the kitchen. On the other side, we stopped at Andy’s satchel. The flap flew open. Her Glock 26 lifted out. It floated close to us, then disappeared when she slipped it either under her sweater or covered it with her hands.

  “Just don’t shoot that thing,” I warned her, too recently reminded of the effect of gunfire from within the other thing.

  “Affirmative,” she said. “Mudroom.”

  She pushed off the counter with a creditable move that sent us over the debris to the mudroom doorway. We passed through and bumped up against the back door.

  Every window in the mudroom was broken. Wrapped in the cool sensation generated by the other thing, I could not feel the cold seeping into the house, but I felt the pressure of a light breeze. Snowflakes drifted through the broken windows and landed on the mudroom floor, quicky melting while the room retained its warmth.

  That won’t last. These were not the only windows blown out. In short order, the house would fall below freezing while the furnace ran non-stop in a vain battle to keep out the cold. At least the furnace remained undamaged.

  Andy flipped the back door deadbolt. I braced us against the wall to give her leverage. She pulled the door open.

  “Wait,” I said. “I’m not going out there without power.”

  I pushed us away from the door and rotated.

  The cabinet door had been damaged, but the contents inside were intact. My power units with rechargeable batteries sat plugged in at the ready. The green LED on the charger told me the house still had power. Small favors. I pocketed one unit and grabbed the other. Rotating again, I pushed off. Andy opened the latch on the storm door. I fired up the BLASTER. Thrust pulled us from the house into the falling snow which muted sound all around us.

  Looking left and right, I saw no running figures or fleeing vehicles in the yard.

  “There!” Andy instinctively pointed, which I felt but could not see. I followed her body shift.

  Low yellow light on the road painted a curtain of falling snow ahead of a parked vehicle. Crouching near the end of our driveway, a black figure struck a familiar pose, hands joined around a weapon. The figure swung the weapon back and forth.

  I didn’t wait for Andy’s orders. I shoved the BLASTER control to high power. A twist of the wrist aligned us with the driveway. We shot forward and swept down on the crouching attacker.

  Hitting someone within the other thing is like throwing Styrofoam at a brick wall. Without mass or inertia, it’s more likely to do damage to myself than my target.

  “Be ready!” I warned Andy. I angled to one side to take the brunt of the collision while she dropped away free.

  “Will wai—”

  FWOOOMP!

  I jammed the levers in my head into full reverse. Andy and I reappeared in stride, inches above the ground. Andy broke away to one side, trotting fast to catch up with her body, slipping wildly in the snow. She threw her arms out to fight for balance.

  I hit the figure full-bodied. We went down on the snow-covered pavement and crashed onto the road. The weapon our attacker clutched in both hands clattered to the pavement. I dropped the BLASTER and threw my arms around narrow shoulders. The hard surface bit into my knees. The collision brought a startled outcry from my victim, my first clue that something was not right.

  A woman.

  I bear-hugged her thin figure and locked her arms against her torso, rolling backward to pull her away from her gun.

  “Will! Stop!” Andy’s voice froze me. “Stop! Let her go!”

  Andy stooped to pick up the weapon that dropped in the snow. I released my grip and rolled away. The dark figure raised a hand, which Andy took. She lifted the figure upright and the two women looked down at me as snowflakes fell in my face and eyes.

  “Hi Will.”

  “Hi Leslie.” I flopped flat against the pavement and sucked in air. “Sorry about that.”

  51

  FBI Special Agent Leslie Carson-Pelham maneuvered her car into the driveway. Andy ran to the house and returned with her coat and my flight jacket.

  “Goddammit! They shot a hole in my jacket!” I held the garment up and poked my finger into a hole in the leather. Andy stared at me blankly. “What?”

  She lifted a finger and pointed at the house which had broken bits of siding hanging from the walls and not one window intact.

  “I know,” I said, “But this is my flight jacket.”

  “I dropped my phone somewhere,” Andy said. “I’m going back in to find it.”

  “Grab mine, too.”

  I slipped on the leather jacket. The damned hole was right above my spleen. Bastards. Leslie joined me. Black jeans. Black turtleneck. Black overcoat over a black jacket. It hadn’t been difficult to mistake her for an attacker. We walked across the front lawn and examined the front of the house.

  “Assholes even shot up the gutters. See that?” Leslie pointed. One of the roof gutters dangled. Others had holes.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “What do you think? I told you I was working on domestic extremism groups. Spellman and his pinhead pals in Utah were Company W. I’ve been keeping tabs on them. They showed up at your little rally here. If I know your wife, she already knows that. And I will bet this whole farm—what’s left of it—that they were here tonight.”

  “You knew they were coming?”

  “I wish. After we picked up chatter about Essex, I drove up. I was going to call you, but…” She shrugged. “Guess I was trying to give you two a little space after…you know...”

  Leslie’s effort to get Andy reinstated at the FBI Academy had gone all the way to the top. I was a little surprised she wasn’t reassigned to Anchorage for her efforts.

  “Hey, don’t worry about it. We know you tried.”

  “Doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  This was awkward. I changed the subject.

  “How did you end up here tonight?”

  “Last couple nights, I tagged them hanging out in a sports bar. One of them closed the joint about an hour ago, then drove around in this snowstorm like some amateur trying not to be followed—except he’s an idiot and I followed him. I wanted to find out where they’re camping. Maybe get a line on who brought them to the party. Anyway, he rendezvoused with a couple other pickups, and they caravanned their way to your front door. The next thing I knew there were muzzle flashes all up and down your road. As soon as I figured out that they were firing, I tried to call to warn you.”

  “By that time we were on the kitchen floor.”

  “You saw them coming?”

  “No, but we were up. It’s—we got a call about something else—I’ll explain later. When the fireworks started, Andy and I crawled down into the basement.”

  “Thank God for that,” Leslie said. “I wasn’t much use to you. I had to hang about a half mile back or they would have seen me following them, and once the action started, I gotta be honest, charging in against automatic weapons would not have been too bright. When they finished and loaded up, I let them get rolling before I popped off a magazine in their direction. Maybe put a bullet hole in a tailgate for ID. I didn’t have a prayer of hitting anyone, but I figured it would goose them a little bit. Make sure they kept going. Guys like that are brave as hell when no one is shooting back.”

  Andy returned. She handed me my phone. A spider’s web of cracks filled the screen, radiating out from a hole the size of my pinky finger. A perfect bullseye.

  “Nice.” I pocketed the wreckage. “First my jacket. Now this.”

  “I should call this in,” Leslie said, lifting her own phone. “I should have called your people when the shooting started. Andrea, you call your team, I’ll call mine. We need a task force up here. Yesterday.”

  “Wait,” Andy said. “Just…let me think for a second.”

  “What’s to think about?” I asked.

  “Andrea, this was meant to kill you. Both of you. This was raw meat for extremist social media sites. The justified execution of the woman who tried to kill their glorious leader.”

  “These fools will want credit either way—for the job done or for the brave effort. Let’s not give them their day in the limelight. I don’t want to turn this into a media circus. I’ll call the Chief. Quietly. Let’s get him out here and the four of us will sit down and figure out the best next step, okay?”

  Leslie spread a devilish look on her face. “Set them up to expose themselves?”

  Headlights appeared on the horizon, faint in the heavy snowfall, approaching the turn onto our road.

  “We should go inside,” I suggested, thinking we might not want to be standing out in the open if one of the shooters came by for a strike assessment or some selfies.

  Nobody moved.

  The headlights turned onto our road. Beams of light created a curtain of falling snow ahead of the vehicle. Both women produced their weapons, checked the magazines, and snapped the slides to chamber a round.

  “That’s not a pickup truck,” I said. The vehicle drew closer. “That’s…oh, shit.”

  Lillian’s Prius slowed as it approached our driveway. The driver turned the wheel, but the snow rendered the steering useless. The anti-lock brakes chattered. The vehicle slewed across the on-coming lane and bumped across the driveway.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Even slower than the first time, the Prius bumped into my mailbox. The car stopped. The fresh new post that I recently installed snapped. The mailbox leaned over and dropped into the snow.

  Andy hurried past me.

  “Not bad,” Leslie said. “Good aim. That’s the only mailbox on this entire road, right?”

  I marched past her.

  Andy pulled open the driver’s door. Boyd sat behind the wheel contemplating his collection of paper squares. I contemplated murder.

  Andy touched the child’s shoulder. I expected a repeat of his violent performance, but the boy turned his head. He did not look up or make eye contact with either Andy or me.

  He spoke.

  “We have to go.”

  The statement, without tone of any kind, nevertheless carried an unmistakable urgency.

  “Boyd, are you okay?” Andy asked. She knelt beside him.

  “I’m fine. We have to go. We have to go now.”

  “Honey, I don’t understand,” Andy said.

  “Get in the car, Will. We have to go. We have to go now.”

  “Who’s this?” Leslie asked, stepping beside me.

  “Long story.”

  “Boyd, why do you need Will to go now?” Andy asked.

  “Get in the car, Will. We have to go. We have to go now. Danzig is coming. Get in the car, Will.”

  52

  “This is insane. I’m not getting in that car and letting an eight-year-old drive me through a snowstorm in the middle of the night.”

  We stood a few yards away from the Prius, which continued to run. Boyd remained behind the wheel. He stared down at his lap, shuffling his precious paper squares.

  Andy landed a hand on my chest. “Will, if you try to move him out of that seat, chances are excellent that he will shut down. Right now, whatever he thinks is so urgent has him communicating with us. He sees the world from a place and in a way none of us can fathom, and he’s reaching out to us from that place.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That I don’t think you have a choice.”

  “What? I’m supposed to run off? Look at this place. It’s a crime scene. I’d like to hang around and find the people that just shot the shit out of my house and tried to kill us both. We haven’t even gone inside to find out what’s broken.”

  Andy shifted her gaze to the house. “Do you really want to know? I’m not sure I do.”

  “Don’t you think this, right here, right now, is more important?”

  “Yes. It’s important—but I just—something triggered that child. A window has opened and it will not stay open for long. Look, Leslie and I will handle this. We have already identified most of them. We’ll find them. Nothing more is going to happen here tonight.”

  “Andrea, I know I’m late to the party, but this is some pretty weird shit. Are you sure about this?” Leslie asked.

  Andy answered by lifting an index finger, begging Leslie to hold her thought. “Will, you heard him. He said, ‘Danzig is coming.’ That’s the guy, right? The one you ran into? The guy you think has that young man?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, think about it. How does that child know about Danzig?”

  My head spun. I groped for words.

  “We have to go,” Boyd said flatly from the car.

  “I think you have to go,” Andy said.

  I sent Leslie a look that pleaded for moral support.

  “Don’t look at me, bud. With you two, it’s always nuts.”

  Andy circled the Prius and opened the door. I followed her. I glanced down at Boyd.

  “At the very least, I should drive.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36