Armageddon Heights (a thriller) (21 page)

Someone was calling out his name, but it was muffled, as if they shouted through a gag from a great distance away. His head was swimming, his thoughts failing to come together in any rational way, and the pain – it was as if his brains had been put in a blender and the thing switched on high.

‘Wade! Wade!’

He was aware of hands moving over his upper body, fingers inspecting his temple. His face being lifted out of the dirt which caked his mouth and eyes. He coughed, and the action shot a fresh burst of pain through his head. When he opened his eyes he saw Martin Bolan staring concernedly into his face.

‘Christ, I thought you were dead!’ Bolan said, helping Wade sit upright. ‘You’ve been dealt a glancing blow on the side of the head by a piece of shrapnel. You were lucky it didn’t take out your brains. A couple of more centimetres and you’d have no head to speak of.’

Wade struggled to gather his mashed-up thoughts. Rose shakily to his feet with Bolan’s help. ‘He was shot…’ he said, suddenly remembering what had happened.

‘Quick, we’ve got to get you back to the coach…’ Bolan said, scanning the desert. ‘Our shooter’s still out there somewhere and I feel like a duck on a lake at hunting time.’

Leaning against Bolan, Wade hobbled towards the coach, glancing back at the crater and smoking mess that had once been a human being. But he drew to a halt, staring past the rear of the coach into the distance at a speck on the horizon throwing up a dust cloud.

‘We’ve got company…’ Wade said.

Bolan already had his gun at the ready. Wade did the same.

‘You hear a motorcycle?’ Bolan asked.

Wade nodded. ‘Headed our way. Go back to the bus, calm the others down. I’ll take care of this.’ He checked the clip of his gun.

‘You reckon that might be the shooter?’

‘No. The bullet came from the other direction. Get the bus’s engine cranked back up and prepare to get the hell out of here.’

As Bolan stepped inside the coach, Wade walked to the rear of the coach and went down onto one knee, holding the gun in two hands and taking careful aim at the approaching motorcycle. It was now about three hundred yards away and he could plainly see the rider clad in bulky military fatigues. The sun beat down on him, and he screwed his eyes up tight, trying to ignore the heat, trying to keep the gun steady, ignoring the steady dribble of blood from the wound in his forehead and the waves of pain that cleaved his head in two.

A bullet hit the side of the coach, a mere three inches from his head. It took him by surprise; it had come from his right. When he turned to look he saw three dark figures some distance away, running across the desert towards him. They fell to the earth, taking cover. He heard more cracks and two more bullets slammed into the coach. The glass in one of the windows shattered and someone inside screamed loudly. Wade flattened himself against the earth, letting off a shot at the three men and crawling back towards the front of the bus. He glanced back to see that the motorcycle was almost upon him, pausing long enough to raise his gun and get a bead on the rider, who at that moment slid the motorcycle to an unexpected halt and was slipping what looked to be an assault rifle off her shoulder. But instead of training the weapon on him, the rider opened fire on the three men. He saw spouts of dirt fly up as the bullets churned the earth before the attackers.

More bullets rippled along the side of the bus with the loud and distinct clang of metal against metal, and dirt spewed up near Wade. Rifle shots, he surmised. The bullets didn’t come from automatic weapons. But this time they came from the rough direction of the front of the coach. Sure enough, Wade saw more figures running towards him. Five more. Spreading out.

Where were they coming from? Had they been lying in wait for them, hidden by the desert?

The rider turned her gun on the five new assailants and they quickly fanned out and took cover, falling flat behind whatever mound was available. They were soon lost to the patches of dense scrub. The rider gunned the bike and roared up to where Wade was lying on the ground. He lifted his gun and took careful aim on the rider, who pulled up a dusty pair of goggles. Wade was astounded to see the dirty face of a woman under the camouflaged helmet. An attractive but decidedly serious face nonetheless.

‘Get up here on the pillion behind me, Wade!’ she demanded.

‘What?’

Had she just called him by his name? A woman he’d never even seen before?

‘You heard. Get up here behind me. Onto the bike – now!’

Bullets whined. Another window was shattered. More screams filled the air.

‘Wade! Get inside here!’ Bolan shouted from the bus doors. He fired his gun twice at the barely-glimpsed figures crawling on the ground to the front of them. ‘Jesus!’ he exclaimed. ‘There are more of them! They’re coming out of the bloody ground!’ He glanced querulously at the rider. ‘Who the hell is
she
?’      

‘We don’t have much time,’ she said, firing in a wide arc, enough to keep their attackers pinned down. ‘You have to come with me now. There’ll be more of them coming pretty soon and trust me, you don’t want to fall into the hands of Cain.’

‘Cain? Who is Cain?’

The crack of rifle shots caused him to duck down again. The woman, however, casually traded gunfire. ‘I won’t be able to keep them pinned down for long. You’ve stirred an ants’ nest and they’ll be swarming all over the place in minutes. You haven’t got time to argue – just get your arse up here and I’ll get you away from this place.’

‘Are you crazy? I haven’t the faintest clue who you are, lady, but I’m not leaving the rest of them.’ He edged his way along the side of the coach. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’

Bolan was trying to take cover just inside the door to the coach, but it was flimsy protection and he knew it. His face was drained of colour as bullets hit the metalwork beside him, forcing him deep inside. Everyone else was on the floor of the coach, hands covering heads, the sound of terrified voices filtering out to Wade.

‘There are more men coming at us from the other side of the coach!’ Bolan shouted as he spied the distant figures shimmering in the heat haze through the cab driver’s window. ‘They’re looking to surround us!’

‘You’ll never make it. You have to leave them, Wade,’ the woman cried. ‘The other passengers, they’re not like you. You don’t understand yet – you can’t – but you will soon. It’s you that’s important, not them. They don’t matter.’

‘Don’t matter?’ Wade burst angrily, reaching the door. ‘They matter to me!’

‘You have to believe me when I tell you that you shouldn’t waste your energy on them. They’re not what they seem. And neither are you.’

‘You’re talking bollocks, lady!’ he returned.

‘I can’t stay,’ she said.

‘Then give me the automatic,’ he demanded.

She looked out to the desert. More shots rang out and she almost felt the passage of the bullets as they whined close by her. ‘Sorry, no can do. I need it.’ She pulled hard on the throttle and the bike’s engine gave an ominous, throaty growl. ‘One last chance, Wade…’ she said, pulling down her goggles.

That instant she was knocked sideways from the bike, a bullet crashing into her chest. She collapsed onto the ground, the motorcycle narrowly missing her legs as it landed with a clatter in a cloud of dust. She yelped out in pain and Wade instinctively ran over to her at a crouch, picking up the fallen automatic and letting off a sharp burst in the direction of the latest fusillade. He could see she was still moving, her eyes screwed up in agony, her gloved hand clutching at her chest.

Grabbing hold of the straps to her weighty backpack he hauled her across the ground with one hand and fired the gun till the magazine clicked on empty. Bullets tore up the ground in front of him, and one or two more hit the metal of the coach near his head. He’d almost reached the door when he felt a thud on his arm, at first feeling the wound as little more than a bee sting. Blood soaked into his sleeve as the pain bit and he let go of the strap, unable to hold on. Resting on one elbow, he lay down the automatic and picked up his handgun again, noticing how bold his attackers were becoming, standing at a stoop but steadily advancing through the heat haze with seeming impunity. His gun soon emptied of the few remaining rounds. But his fear was held in abeyance by the sight of the men as they advanced ever closer.

They were dressed, not in some form of military fatigues as he’d expected, but, it appeared, in tanned leather and animal skins.

A shadow fell over him. Martin Bolan took hold of the woman and pulled her to the door. ‘Get your arse inside!’ he yelled to Wade. He lifted the woman up, who tried to shrug him off.

‘I’m fine,’ she said, coughing and grimacing at the pain it inflicted. She attempted to stand. ‘I’m wearing a vest…’ she explained.

Bolan pushed her up the step and inside the bus. She staggered and fell awkwardly beside the driver’s cab, and Bolan called for someone to help her. Jack Benedict crawled to the front of the bus. The floor was strewn with ice crystals of broken glass. The rest of the passengers huddled together at the rear of the coach on the floor between the seats. Hartshorn’s girlfriend Cheryl was in a convulsive state, experiencing an uncontrollable fit of near-hysterical screaming and tearing at her hair with clawed hands, her nose an inch from the floor. Amanda Tyler was doing her best to comfort her, but it appeared to be doing little. Hartshorn was sitting quietly and pale-faced on the floor, staring blankly into space. The Kennedy’s were on their knees praying furiously. There was a splash of blood on Phyllis Kennedy’s face.

Wade staggered to his feet, pushing Bolan ahead of him. But before they could seek the relative shelter of the bus Bolan fell forward, a red stain appearing immediately in his back. He gave a single sigh-like groan and slumped on the step, his right leg twitching. Wade pulled him up into the bus, leapt into the cab and hit the door button. It hissed shut.

‘Someone take care of Martin!’ he ordered. ‘He’s been hit in the back.’ He hit the accelerator, the bus lurching ahead. Through the front window he made out a line of men some twenty or thirty yards ahead, all of them armed with rifles and small arms.

And as one they took aim as the bus thundered towards them, the bus’s wheels hitting the charred and smoking mound that had once been a man tied to a chair.

Inside his head, Wade was screaming.

Jack Benedict looked horrified to see the sticky red patch on Martin Bolan’s back begin to spread. ‘He’s bleeding badly! What do I do? What do I do?’

The woman he was trying to help – the sewn name badge on her uniform said Lieutenant L. Keegan – pushed him away.

‘I’m fine!’ she told Benedict. She was inspecting the hole where the bullet had struck her chest. She opened the jacket to reveal a black bullet-proof vest in which was embedded a flattened lead slug. She casually plucked it out and tossed it away. ‘Shit, this is going to hurt for a long while,’ she said, wrinkling her nose and rubbing her chest.

‘Martin’s bleeding badly!’ Benedict repeated. ‘I don’t know what to do!’

They both lurched forward as the bus hit a deep pothole. The woman stripped Bolan of his sweat-sticky shirt, ripping it open. Bolan coughed up bright-red blood.

‘The bullet didn’t go through him. It’s still lodged inside him,’ she said.

‘You’ve got to help him,’ Benedict urged. ‘He’ll die.’

‘Sure he will,’ she said casually. ‘The bullet has passed through his spine and into his lung. He’s drowning in blood.’

‘In God’s name, quit jabbering and help the man!’ Wade yelled from the cab, looking down onto the pathetic form of Martin Bolan lying on his side, a pink froth bubbling from his lips, his face as white as snow-filled cloud.

‘I can’t,’ she returned. ‘There’s nothing I can do for him.’

‘Can’t do or won’t do?’ he said angrily.

‘Both,’ she said, her eyes hard and uncompromising. ‘He’s not who you think he is…’

‘Don’t give me that bullshit again. He tried to save me; he saved you! What have you got in that backpack of yours? You telling me you’ve not got a medic’s kit in there?’

‘He tried to save me?’ She laughed hollowly. ‘I hate to disappoint you, Wade, but that’s impossible. Altruism just isn’t in his makeup. Trust me, I know that for a fact.’

‘Yeah? Well you’ve got your facts all wrong…’

A storm of bullets sent the massive windscreen of the bus opaque, the glass falling like a heavy shower of hailstones. Wade covered his eyes with his arm, ducking down as bullets struck metal near him. The bus veered off the road and down a slight embankment, its nose hitting the soft sand and sending the occupants rolling forward. Wade shoved the bus into reverse, but the wheels couldn’t gain traction and the bus refused to move.

Keegan opened her backpack, took another thirty-round magazine and slipped it into the automatic rifle. She was cursing to herself; cursing
at
herself for getting into this mess. What had she been thinking? She should have never entered the fray in the first place. What good could she do now if she was taken by Cain’s men? But it was too late for personal remonstrations. She raised the gun and fired through the space where once there’d been a window. The men outside ducked and spread out as they’d done before, some lying down flat and peppering the bus with bullets, others racing towards the vehicle. She brought two of them down, then a third. A loud bang and the sudden dropping of the bus at the front told her one of the tyres had been punctured by a round. There was no getting out of this now.

‘Here!’ she said to Wade, who slipped out of the driver’s cab and slid across the floor to kneel beside her. ‘Take a grenade. At least we’ll give them something to think about.’

The grenades were ancient things, he noticed, but he lobbed two out in quick succession, the loud retorts quieting the gunfire for a few seconds. But it cranked back up again.

‘We’re going to die!’ Hartshorn shouted. ‘We’ve got to surrender!’

‘The hell we are,’ said Keegan. ‘If we surrender then we’re as good as dead. You don’t know who you’re dealing with out there. I told you to come with me, Wade, when we had the chance. Why the fuck didn’t you take it?’

His eyes were blazing. ‘You’d have left us to take care of ourselves. It was the bullet that stopped you.’

‘Too right I would have,’ she said, firing the automatic, the sound of the ripping bullets causing a fresh bout of screams from Cheryl. ‘And you’d have been better doing the same. These people – they’re not worth it, Wade. Jesus, it wasn’t supposed to be like this! I had a plan!’

Wade tossed out another grenade. Ducked as it went off, a few lumps of rock thrown up by the explosion striking the bus. ‘I don’t know who you are, or what the hell you’re talking about, lady, but if you have a plan to get us out right now I’d like to hear of it,’ he said.

It went unexpectedly quiet. She lowered the automatic and gave a heavy sigh of finality. ‘No plan that’s going to get us out of this mess, Wade. Your friend back there is right. Surrender seems to be the only option out of a bad set of them. We can’t hold them off for long. They have us surrounded and there are far more of them than there are of us. The longer we stay here the more the heat will cook us, and if that doesn’t drive us out and we make it to nightfall we’ll either freeze with all these open windows, or the bonesnappers will come out and have an easy time getting inside and making us look like a tin of sardines.’

‘Bonesnappers? You mean those creatures? So you know about them?’

She angled her head and chewed at her lower lip in thought. ‘Know about them? For my sins I’m sorry to say I’m largely responsible for them. They’re my babies.’

He eyed her. ‘That’s all I need - a woman that’s more screwed-up than we are. Jesus…’

She gave an icy grin. ‘If we ever get the chance I’ll come clean on a lot of things. But we have more immediate problems. My feeling is that those guys outside are more interested in the bus than taking us alive, which doesn’t bode well if we do surrender.’

‘Who are they?’ said Wade. ‘They’re dressed like something from Robinson Crusoe. What is this place? It’s madness, all of it. None of it makes sense.’

‘We’re in a lovely little sector called Cain’s Territory.’

‘A sector? A sector of what?’

‘Armageddon Heights.’

‘Never heard of it. So where exactly is Armageddon Heights and how come we’re here?’

‘Long story, Wade, and I haven’t time to tell you it right now. But I have to warn you, you’ve got to steel yourself if you want to hear the truth. You think what’s happened to you so far is crazy? Well you’ve got one hell of a surprise coming.’ She nodded outside. ‘They’re biding their time. All they have to do is wait it out.’

‘So who are they? Desert bandits of some kind, making their living from ambushing unwary and unlucky travellers?’ Wade said.

‘After a fashion, maybe,’ she said flatly.

‘And you are?’ He read the name badge. ‘Lieutenant Keegan – that who you are?’

‘For now, yes.’

‘British Army? That’s a standard British Army-issue automatic. But I don’t recognise the uniform. So which regiment?’

Her smile was thin and spectral. She shook her head. ‘No, I’m not with the British Army.’

‘But you’re British, right? Your accent…’

‘That much is right, and that’s all you need to know for now. Apart from the fact I’m here to get you out of this place. Or at least that was the plan…’

There was a groan and Wade’s attention went immediately to Martin Bolan, and he scampered across to him. Benedict was holding a piece of ripped-up shirt to the wound, but it was already soaked red with blood. He looked up helplessly.

‘He’s gone still and quiet,’ Benedict said as Wade took Bolan’s pulse.

‘He’s weak,’ Wade observed. ‘We’re losing him.’

‘He’s dead already,’ said Keegan, gun at the ready, lifting her head high enough to scan the desert around the bus. Many more figures had joined the battle, but were keeping a relatively safe distance, some of them crouching down onto their haunches and casually taking drinks from water bottles.

‘He’s not going to die. Not if I can help it,’ Wade said. ‘Your medic’s kit, now.’ He held out his hand.

‘It’s wasted on him, Wade,’ she said pointedly. ‘I gave you a damage report and it hasn’t suddenly got any better.’

He pushed her brusquely aside and emptied out her backpack, finding a small box with a red cross on it. He opened it and plucked out a syringe and a small bottle. ‘Morphine - this all you’ve got?’

‘He doesn’t really feel pain, not like you and me,’ she said.

‘You’re talking bollocks again,’ he retorted. ‘Keep your mouth shut. I’m tired of listening to you.’ He injected Bolan with the drug, but knew in his heart that the man was fast falling away. He didn’t know why he felt such an overwhelming attachment to him. A relative stranger, a policeman sent to arrest him. But the man had unflinchingly tried to save his life, putting himself in danger to do it. He couldn’t let him die without a fight…

‘We might need that stuff for ourselves,’ Keegan said matter-of-factly.

‘Tough. Make yourself useful and apply some kind of goddamn field dressing to his wound.’

‘I’ve better things to do,’ she said. ‘Like keeping us alive.’

‘You heartless bitch!’ Wade fired.

‘He’s dead, Wade, accept it!’ she returned, their faces but a foot away from each other.

Sensing the possibility of tempers exploding, Amanda Tyler crawled to the front of the bus. ‘Poor Martin,’ she said. ‘Is there anything I can do? I did a First Aid course once.’

With a sigh, Wade shook his head. ‘She’s right. We’ve done all we can for him.’

Her grave expression said it all. ‘Who are those people outside?’ Amanda whispered, as if to talk louder would stir their assailants back into life again.

Everyone stiffened as a voice came from outside. Deep and authoritative.

‘You in there,’ the man shouted. ‘You can’t go anywhere. You might as well give yourselves up. We won’t hurt you.’

‘You hear that?’ said Hartshorn’s plaintive voice from the rear of the coach. ‘He said they won’t hurt us.’

‘Hate to disappoint you, but this man is partly responsible for the death of thousands. That’s his main role in life,’ said Keegan.

‘Who is he?’ Wade asked.

‘Unfortunately that’s probably Cain’s second-in-command,’ explained Keegan, puffing out a slow, calming breath. ‘If the Devil had a toilet, Cain’s territory would be it; Cain would be the Devil’s arsehole and this guy the shit that passes through. Of all the sectors in Armageddon Heights to get stuck in – and there isn’t much to choose between any of them – this is not the one I would have chosen.’ She looked at Wade. ‘Surprisingly, though you’re hardly likely to believe it, it’s your entire fault we’re stuck here,’ she said to him. ‘Be that as it may, it won’t be long before Lindegaard’s bozos pick up on the fact that something strange is happening out here and put two and two together and come up with me. So that’s another problem to add to our growing list of them.’

‘Lindegaard?’ Wade said, his brows lowering. ‘Who the devil is Lindegaard?’

‘Later,’ she said. ‘Speaking aloud. Ignore me.’

He shook his head, groaned. ‘This shit just gets deeper,’ he murmured to himself. He turned to the rest of the bus’s occupants. ‘Don’t worry,’ Wade assured. ‘I’ll do all I can to get you out of this.’

Keegan shook her head at his obvious attachment to them. Totally wasted on them, she thought.

‘Like you helped Bolan there?’ said Hartshorn.

‘We trust you, Sam,’ said Amanda Tyler nervously, but her eyes were hot with anger as she trained them on Hartshorn.

Keegan stared at the pale-faced woman called Amanda who was crouching down, head moving fretfully. There was something in the woman’s heartfelt expression she found deeply disturbing.

A black canister rose in a gentle arc through the sky towards the bus’s front window leaving a grey-white trail of smoke behind it.

‘Tear gas!’ yelled Keegan just before the canister landed on the floor beside her. She immediately picked it up and threw it back outside. But two more canisters were lobbed through the broken windows at the back of the bus and people screamed out in terror, rushing as one to the front to escape the clouds of stinging smoke. In seconds the bus was filled with it, everyone feeling the effects at once, the screams being replaced by a fit of coughing and cries for help.

Wade was knocked to the ground by someone barging into him in the choking fog and the confusion, blundering by him and heading for the exit, banging helplessly on the closed door. He saw, through the burning tears, Keegan’s form, bent double and choking on the gas. He reached out to grab the automatic rifle, but couldn’t find it.

He heard more glass shattering as the doors were bludgeoned open by their attackers. Vague shadows of people flowed out through the opening like black smoke. At last he managed to lay his hand on the automatic rifle, which Keegan had dropped beside her as she attempted to shield her eyes and mouth from the dense choking clouds of gas.

‘Put the gun down!’ The voice was muffled, sounding far away.

Wade looked up through the billowing fog to see the vague figure of a man wearing a gas mask and pointing a rifle directly at him. ‘I won’t say it again.’

‘Do it, Wade…’ Keegan gasped. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’

For a fleeting second Wade thought about firing the automatic, but his eyes were too blurred, his breathing too laboured. He placed the gun on the floor of the bus and raised his arms in submission.