Ever Onward (34 page)

Doc Gruber had gone out to talk to
them. Mrs Chan and Thelma had followed. Those still inside had
reached for weapons. When Doc asked them politely to be on their
way, tempers had flared. The three punks had drawn guns and Jim
Shell, Fred Perkins and Jenny Hill had opened fire. By the time he
and Willard had got there, the two of the three young men were
dead. Tom Leeson and Jenny Hiller were guarding the third one while
Doc patched up a bullet hole in his left arm. They’d sent him on
his way, still leaking blood. The other two had been buried out in
the forest.

“No, I don’t want that to happen
again,” Sadat said. “I just don’t want us to get killed
either.”

“Just stay low, little buddy, and do
what I say. We’ll have us a good tale to tell at the Big House
tonight!”

Willard wrapped the
Marlin’s sling around his arm for added stability and leaned
against a house-sized boulder. Shadows cast from the pines darkened
his face. He looked like a cross between an aging Lone Ranger and a
member of the Grand Ol’ Opre’s SWAT team. Looking through the large
scope, he squinted at the yacht. The X10 view made it look like the
boat was at the end of the barrel. The rifle was zeroed in for 200
yards. Willard calculated he should hold a couple of inches high to
hit at 400 hundred. He then winked at Sadat and spit into the wind.
All that was missing was a junkyard dog and Superman’s
cape.

On the upper deck One Arm put the
field glasses down and turned his attention back to more pleasant
things. The choices at hand were between Cindy-Lou or a can of
beer. Much to the girl’s secret satisfaction, the cold brew won
out.

“Any sign of that old bastard?”, Rambo
asked.

“Shit,” One Arm grinned over a
mouthful of foam. “That old fucker won’t stop running till he gets
back to his chicken coop and changes his shorts! Lighten up, man,
it’s Miller Time!”

Down below at the wheel, Deadly Doug
Snelling was easing in closer to a rocky headland less than a
quarter mile away. The town they had seen earlier was now lost from
view behind the narrow finger of land.

The map on the chart table showed a
series of 3’s, 4’s and 5’ all around the peninsula. Doug wondered
if the numbers meant feet or yards or fathoms. He had no idea what
the fuck a ‘fathom’ was, and right now he didn’t give a shit. The
two little red honies he’d swallowed half an hour ago were kicking
in and he himself was just about ready to blast off for the stars.
Shoving the twin throttles all the way forward, the speed leapt up
to 20 knots. He also had no idea what a ‘knot’ was either, except
that right about now it felt like Warp fucking III. Beam me up,
Snotty!

Just as the yaught surged forward, the
windscreen on the upper deck exploded, shattering One Arm, Rambo
and Cindy-Lou with hundreds of plexiglass chips.

“Whathefuck?!!”, One Arm bellowed.
Blood was streaming down his cheek from a cut from the space-age
windshield.

Cindy-Lou had started screaming. Rambo
drew his .45 and slammed it alongside her head, dropping the girl
like a stone. Three hundred yards away, Willard saw this through
his powerful scope. Cursing, he lined the cross-hairs on Rambo’s
muscular chest and began to gently squeeze the Marlin’s trigger. At
the last second he swung the barrel down. The 500 gram jacketed
Hollow Point streaked its way across the sunlit water, punching
into the wall under the shattered windscreen. Its momentum far from
spent, the expanding slug came out the other side, tumbled to the
left, ripped through the cooler filled with Miller Light and buried
itself in the exterior wheel seat One Arm had just
vacated.

“Jesus Christ Almighty!”, One Arm
gasped. “What was that? A fucking cannon?!”

Rambo ignored him. Squinting into the
distance, he was looking for a muzzle flash. The yacht’s diesel
drowned out any chance of locating the shooter by sound.

Down below another slug ripped through
the wheelhouse, shattering the large front and back windows. Deadly
Doug Snelling, oblivious to the sizzling death that all but parted
his hair, continued blissfully to pilot his own personal
starship.

Weasel Weasilski pushed open the head
door and was about to step out onto the deck when the door suddenly
banged back into his nose. Dropping the Playboy, his hand went up
and came away bloody. The flash of anger turned to amazement as he
looked up and saw a ragged porthole where none had been
before.

Willard’s fifth and last shot before
he had to reload slammed into one of several 45 gallon gasoline
drums lashed on the forward deck. Gas began pissing out one side
and pouring out the other.

One Arm, his .38 clutched uselessly in
his hand, turned to Rambo and screamed: “DO SOMETHING!”

The soldier-of-misfortune was already
on the stairs leading down to the wheelhouse. Seeing both windows
gone and gas pouring out on the lower deck, he yanked smiling Space
Cadet Douglas Snelling out of orbit and deposited him on his
butt.

“Hey, man, no need to ...” His voice
trailed off as the last batch of chemicals reached his brain.
Deadly Dave seemed to have momentarily lost his train of
thought.

Rambo, however, hadn’t. Yanking the
wheel around, he yelled at Pete Welter to haul his candy-ass up
there and take the wheel. Pete, sweat beading on his receding
forehead, scrambled to comply. Gas sloshed around his
feet.

By now Willard had reloaded. Through
the powerful scope, at a little over 200 yards he saw the sweat on
Pete’s forehead. Willard shifted slightly, searching for a
non-human target. His sixth bullet went directly into the
wheelhouse, tore the expensive sonar unit to rat-shit, then
ricocheted off a steel strut. The mangled piece of copper whizzed
around the room like a mini meteor, entered Deadly Dave’s open
mouth and exited out the back of his skull. Bits of bone and brain
splattered what was left of the white walls.

Pete’s eyes were wide with wonder.
“Hey! Somebody’s shooting at us!”, he managed to get out, proving
beyond the shadow of a doubt that there were certainly no flies on
Mrs. Welter’s little boy Pete. He turned to pass on this
information to Rambo, but that particular military mastermind was
once again already on the move.

Having caught a glimpse of Willard’s
muzzle flare, Rambo now knew exactly where this little problem was
coming from. He also thought he had a ready solution.

‘Must be the old fucker in the
pick-up!’, Rambo reasoned, his cold eyes straining for a sign of
the truck. “Head for that point up ahead!”, he yelled as he tore
down the passageway to his own room. “Zig-zag a bit to throw off
the old bastard’s aim, but GET ME CLOSE TO THAT FUCKING
POINT!”

Then he was inside his room. Pete had
only been in there once, but once was enough. It looked like a
fucking arsenal! Weapons of all kind filled the tiny space. Rifles,
shotguns, handguns. Pete had even caught a glimpse of something
that looked like a fucking bazooka! Glancing quickly at Dave’s body
on the floor, Pete began working the wheel. The headland was about
a 100 yards away and coming up fast.

Rambo reappeared a moment later and
Pete nearly shit his pants. The tall man was holding what looked to
Pete like something out of the tail gun of a B-52! Long, dark and
ugly, (which also described its owner!), with a half dozen rotating
barrels and a belt that was bigger than the World Federation
Wrestling Trophy and longer than his sainted mother’s sermons on
the many virtues of a good education!

Straw Hair appeared at the missing
front window, took one glance at this real-life movie idle striding
towards him and ducked for cover. The barrel of the Heckler &
Cotch Rotating Cannon lowered, centered on the finger of land now
no more than seventy-five yards away and began to speak. Over its
continuous, powerful bark, Rambo screamed unheard words of wisdom.
Laying on his stomach on the middle deck, Straw may not have been
able to follow the words, but he didn’t need the Gift of Tongues to
catch the drift. The bark of a H & K was universal, its meaning
crystal-fucking clear. ‘Move over Sony! God’s here and He’s pissed
off!’

The H & K spit out death in the
form of seven caseless rounds per second. Fire and brimstone
delivered to your door. Don’t forget to write!

Despite the recent ‘air conditioning’,
acid smoke and ear-splitting sound filled the wheelhouse before the
yacht had advanced another twenty yards. Through it all Rambo stood
with legs apart, a Primal Scream erupting from his curled lip as
death and bloody destruction vomited out of the rotating
barrels.

By the time the long belt was emptied,
both Straw and Pete thought Quasimodo had given up his bell-tower
condo in Notre Dame and taken up permanent residence in their
heads. The girls, Cindy-Lou the Second, Betty-Sue, and Big Bertha
Butt, were on their knees offering up unending devotion and
unlimited blowjobs to whoever or whatever would make the thunder
stop. Weasel Weasilski had dove back inside the head with a serious
case of the Hershey Squirts and One Arm was standing on the front
of the upper deck screaming at the top of his considerable lungs
to:

“KILL-THE-COCK-SUCKING-MOTHER-FUCKER!!”

His head still pounding, Pete pulled
back hard on the duel throttles and yanked the wheel to the left.
The yacht’s diesel dropped from a growl to a purr as the bow swung
to port. The wash from the wake caught up and rocked the large boat
like a babe in a cradle.

When the rocking passed, all eyes
strained towards the headland now just a little over a hundred feet
away. Where once a dense pine forest had stood, their now was only
shattered wood and large boulders. Severed tree limbs lay about.
Large trunks bled sap from dozens of holes. Rocks, both large and
small, had gouges and chips torn from their age-old surfaces. The
headland looked like a hurricane had passed over it --- Hurricane
Asskicker.

As the yacht slowly came parallel with
the killing ground, Straw gave a ragged cheer. Pete joined in,
followed by One Arm himself. Weasel Weasilski stuck his head out of
the can, blinked into the fading sunlight, and stepped out, fully
intending to join in the celebration. The next slug from Willard’s
444 blew yet another porthole in the head door, taking a good deal
of Weasel with it.

As the body crumpled to the deck, the
three women began wailing again. From the top deck, Cindy-Lou the
First heartily joined in.

“He’s still there!”, One Arm bellowed.
“The stupid old fuck is STILL THERE!”

“Not for long!”, Rambo hissed,
sprinting back towards his room.

One Arm turned and bellow at Pete to
put some distance between themselves and the old bastard who
somehow refused to die. As he bent over the rail, Willard’s Marlin
spoke again. With the engine idling softly, the thunder from the
long rifle could clearly be heard by everyone; the blinding pain it
caused, however, could only be felt by One Arm. A searing gout of
agony enveloped his head. The crown itself felt like someone had
laid a cherry-red poker on it. He fancied he even heard the hiss as
hair and skin sizzled. Already bleeding from the cheek, rivulets of
sticky wet crimson now poured down his entire face.

“I’m shot!”, One Arm squealed. The
words came out at such a high pitch that every dog in the area must
have uttered a sympathetic whine. “Shot in the fucking
head!”

Blinded now by his own blood, One Arm
raised his hitherto forgotten .38 and began firing. The first four
shots went winging off into the wild blue yonder. The fifth one
struck the large brass bell mounted on the upper deck to mark the
changing of the watch. The sixth gave Cindy-Lou the First a second
navel. Looking down at the neat little hole below her breasts, her
long legs gave way and she sat down on her often ill-used ass. A
look of surprise drifted over her once pretty features.
‘Free at
last. Free at last. Great God Almighty, I’m free at last!’
, her
somewhat whimsical expression seemed to say. The look soon drifted
away, her soul or spirit or life-force following
quietly.

Just above her, the brass
bell ceased its tolling.

“Willard! Willard!”, Sadat yelled.
“You’re bleeding! “

The grizzly old farmer turned and
looked down into the little man’s worried face. “I aint dead, you
dumb Turk! Just winged me is all!”

Willard looked a whole lot more than
‘winged’ to Sadat. In fact, if he wasn’t dead, he should be. His
face and hands were covered with scrapes and cuts and he was
leaking blood from three or four places. Most of it, however, came
from the rock-chips that had been flying around. There was one
nasty gouge in the old man’s left shoulder that might have been
caused by a bullet, but Sadat couldn’t be sure.

He himself wasn’t exactly feeling in
the pink of health. The house-sized boulder they had hid behind had
shielded them from Rambo’s own version of Armageddon, but the
‘fallout’ had been something else again! Besides the rock-chips,
there had been the bloody ricochets! Led had whizzed and wined all
around them like kernels of corn in a hot-air popper. Sadat had a
cut on his forehead, another on his left arm and a hole in his
right shoe. His toes still moved, but they hurt like
hell.

“We got to get out of here!”, Sadat
said.