A Guardian Angel (21 page)

The unnamed agent
looked over at his smiling counterpart and waited while the gears
ground inside Douglas' head. Without dropping his full blown smirk,
he said, “We'll be coming for the angel within the week, Mr.
Simacean.”

The rancher stepped
back. His wrinkles were sharp and deep as his face was carved with
malevolence. He gestured to one of the new signs. “Like it
says,” he seethed through his lips, “trespassers will be
shot on sight.”

Barney pulled up to
the Simacean Ranch after picking up the other three of the crew. As
he slowed to a stop, his brow furrowed in confusion. He watched Tim
as the rancher was carrying bags of sand one after the other from his
truck and dropping them in a pile in front of the entrance. Sweat
poured down the side of his reddening face. He worked fast and with
purpose.

“Hey boss,”
Barney said in a tone that attempted to convey his curiosity to Tim,
who ignored it. “What are you doing?”

“Barney!”
Tim gasped, stopping his routine for just a second to acknowledge the
man as if it was the first time he noticed his presence. Perhaps it
was. The rancher wheezed with exhaustion through his words. “I
need your help.”

Barney nodded and
turned to the guys who were getting their things from the car. “Hey!
Come help carry these sandbags!” he hollered.

“No, listen,”
Tim said with just the right tone of fear to shock Barney. “People
are coming here and they want to kill me and take the angel,”
he said. Whispered.

Color drained from
his face as Barney struggled with dialogue. “Who's coming? Who
is? The guys from last night?”

Tim nodded.

Barney wiped the
mist of sweat off of his upper lip. “You know this for sure?”
he asked.

Tim nodded.

“And they've
got firepower?”

Tim didn't even
nod. He just stared past Barney's ear in distracted horror.

Barney clapped his
hands over his mouth in a brief moment of panic. “Oh God,”
he moaned. He snapped to. “How can we help?”

The rancher
quivered from the tears of fear that accumulated in the corners of
his eyes. “Barney, please,” Tim pleaded. “I need
you to help me protect this house.”

A moment passed in
which Barney said nothing but just stared off like Tim had. His color
depleted.

“Barney!”
Tim begged through tears.

“Okay,”
Barney answered in the smallest voice he had ever spoken in. “We'll
help with the fortifications and then I'll go back into town and, uh,
get some guns.”

Tim nodded
graciously. “Thank you.”

“What do you
mean, 'closed?'” the woman that had approached the booth
whined.

“The EPA
deemed the angel dangerous,” Tim explained as sympathetically
as he could to the crowd.

There were about
twenty of them. There were four councilors, the round blond woman,
who lectured Tim about how he needed to test these things before he
let people be exposed to them and to advertise changes like this,
included among them. The rest were a diverse and assorted group of
young adults who had been court ordered to a rehabilitation class.
This was one of their key field trips.

“You don't
understand how rough these kids have it and how much getting to see
something like this means to them!” the woman continued to
complain.

His expression
stilled like a man who didn't have a word for concern in his
language. “I'm sorry,” he said. “There's nothing I
can do.”

A younger girl
peeled up through the crowd and addressed the complaining woman.
“Trevor's crying, Miss B,” she said. “He's acting
weird.”

Ms. B turned
around, leaning this way and that. She peered through the faces for
the man. “Trevor?”

Everyone turned
until they saw Trevor, his torso heaving as he breathed in terror.
His lips trembled and he perspired around his light facial hair.
Something about the dilation of his pupils and the discoloration of
his skin conveyed that he was under horrible panic. He stared up past
the heads of his peers, past the walls of the facility and into the
brown, rusted face of the angel. Lax lipped, he started to catch up
with his breathing and his face started to show relief. His eyes
darted away for just a moment as if he couldn't help it and he folded
over himself. He buried his face into his knees which he hugged with
his arms. He started breathing rapidly again.

“What the
hell is going on with him?” Ms. B asked to the people adjacent
to Trevor.

“Dude, he's
tripping fourteen hits of acid,” a guy in a hoodie inputted.
“He told me so on the bus.”

“Jesus,”
Ms. B sighed, relaxing.

Suddenly, Trevor
jolted upright into a full sprint.

“JEEEEEEEEEESUSSSSSSSS!”
he screamed at the top of his lungs, jumping up and around the
sandbags that stood between the world and the angel.

Tim chased after
him. He ran as fast as he could. He could hear a babbling of voices
and a storm of feet following behind him. As they all ran into the
clearing with the angel, Tim slowed and drew the Taurus revolver
Barney had brought him earlier. Barney himself had dropped the
wheelbarrow he used and sprinted after Trevor.

“Dear God,
what are you doing?!” the woman cried at Tim as she turned the
corner and saw him with the gun.

Ignoring her, Tim
squeezed one eye shut and peered along the sights. Barney ran in
front of his line of sight after the tripper, however, and the
rancher lowered his gun in fidgety frustration.

Neither Barney nor
he could do anything as Trevor dove headfirst into the angel and
exploded in a shower of blood. Popped like a balloon. All Tim managed
to do was extend his arms to either side to stop the people behind
him from running past.

Everyone froze in
shock. Ms. B's face expanded so that it could contain the expression
of horror that was stamped upon it. Seeming to run into an invisible
wall of astonishment, no one moved.

All that was left
of Trevor was a puddle.

“What –
” one of the male councilors said, struggling to breathe as he
did so, “What just happened?!”

Tim raised the
revolver as he turned around to the crowd. In a sweeping motion, he
pointed it at all of them. “Leave,” he demanded.

With haste, they
obliged.

-Chapter Twenty-One-

Heaven's
Crusade

“Today marks
the first day of what is being unofficially referred to as the
Standstill. Local police in over two hundred American cities have
begun department-wide strikes, refusing to work against the
privatized police forces that have been springing up in their home
towns,” the broadcaster said.

“They are
mercenaries and thugs,” a different voice spoke. “In no
way do they recognize or enforce the laws of the United States
government, federal or otherwise. In fact, there seems to be no
record of what they
are
enforcing, which means that no one is
safe from harassment.”

The original voice.
“The Standstill was largely motivated by an incident in
Philadelphia yesterday in which the private police arrested and
detained three officers of the Philadelphia Police Department. All
three were on active duty when – ”

The radio cut
short. The batteries had died.

Night was being
introduced to the region by the sun as it tried to make a hasty exit
behind the mountains. The sky tinted from orange to pink as the bugs
seemed to wake up and start making a racket. The beauty unnerved Tim.
To him, it seemed to signal something final. He checked his gun
again. He held a pitch black AK of some sort. He confirmed that he
had a full magazine for the fourth time in the last ten minutes.

“You look
like you can see them coming,” Barney commented, picking up his
own rifle from the floor.

Tim nodded. “They
didn't seem patient,” he explained.

They stood above
the entrance, which had been replaced by a brick wall instead of an
opening, on the ramparts. Tim brought anything and everything he
could find to line the edges of the wall for cover. All of his
building material was used to build two fences, one within the other,
that cut off the far side of the facility from the road. They wanted
to bottleneck Heaven's Crusade.

“What do you
think the authorities are going to say about all this?” Barney
asked. “I mean, who's side would they pick?”

“I don't know
if it would matter, Barney,” Tim replied. “I'm not like
these cultists but it's not hard to tell that change is coming. We
have cops arresting cops and people rioting.” He stopped to
watch the sun sink and leave the sky in a warm purple blanket. “One
way or another, the world as we know it isn't going to be here.”

Barney thought
about this. “Damn,” he concluded.

A gunshot ripped
through the night. Both Barney and the rancher slammed themselves to
the floor and brought their firearms up to their eyes.

“It sounded
close,” Tim whispered.

Barney hissed back,
“How did we not see them?”

The rancher shushed
him and listened. His breathing almost stopped as he absorbed every
noise around him and evaluated each.

Then a voice broke
the silence. “That was me, guys!” Chance called out from
the wall on the other side of the compound. “Sorry!”

“Jesus Christ
man!” Barney yelled back. “What the hell are you shooting
at?”

“Nothing!”
Chance replied. “I was just nervous! Really thought I saw
something!”

Tim stood up and
started marching along the wall toward Chance, passing Gus. Frank hid
down in the opening of the compound, somewhere opposite of the angel.

“Pay
attention to what I say,” Tim began with a voice so firm that
it inspired shame. “If you find yourself dying in this fight,
you can look to any side you want but you will not see me dying along
with you. If your problems start being more than just
your
problems, then I might have to handle you myself.”

Chance nodded and
remained silent.

“Yeah?”
Tim asked for confirmation

“Yes, sir.”

Tim turned back
around. “Keep watching the horizon,” he ordered as he
started walking back to his post. Barney followed him.

An explosion tore a
hole in the brick wall just under his post before he could get there.
Gus got thrown to the floor, dropping his gun and getting showered in
debris. Brick bits soared high into the air and dashed themselves all
over the ground, rattling and shaking the stillness of the air with
their movement. Everyone clasped onto their ears. The bang rang in
Tim's like the screeching of car tires. He noticed slowly that
everyone else had hit the deck and that only he remained standing.
Laying down, he watched as Chance opened fire into the smoke. Someone
ran out of the smoke and into the clearing, opening fire with what
looked like an automatic handgun. One of Chance's bullets went right
through the intruder's left eye. He continued shooting for a few
extra seconds as he dropped to the ground. Chance stopped firing and
all of them waited in silence.

Moments passed into
minutes when Tim noticed that the smoke wasn't clearing up at all.
The more he watched, the more convinced he became that the wall was
on fire. He swore under his breath and sat up into a crouched
position.

“What're you
doing?” Barney hissed from the floor.

“Frank!”
the rancher yelled out into the clearing, making everyone along the
wall jolt. “I know this sounds scary but you need to grab the
fire extinguisher from the stairs next to the entrance.”

Barney's face
turned to him in confusion.

“I'm covering
you buddy, you got this. Put out the fire,” Tim called out. His
eyes darted all over the clearing to see where Frank hid. It seemed
like a long time passed, so he yelled out the man's name again. Then
he appeared, running out from behind some scaffolding and to the
indicated fire extinguisher. He sprayed its contents all over the
entrance until the cloud of stuff was so thick that Tim couldn't see
into it.

Then there were
three gunshots. Everyone heard something drop to the ground. Tim's
heart sank as he yelled out anyway, “Cover!”