Reapers (43 page)

"Mom?" Dee said.

She hitched her rifle up her shoulder and reversed course for the boathouse. "Better warn Nora."

"What is it?"

"My guess? That war we keep hearing about."

Shots popped a couple times a minute. Locals emerged from their cabins and gazed at the smoke rolling from the other side of the park. Whenever they caught sight of Ellie, they stiffened, heads swiveling to watch her go.

Ellie emerged from a stand of trees and jogged across the grass to the boathouse. The door opened before she got there. Nora beckoned them inside and locked the door behind them.

"What's happening out there?"

"I don't know," Ellie said. "I just wanted to make sure you were aware. We'll leave if you want."

"You can stay." Nora smiled wryly. "Won't hurt to have another couple of guns around."

They gathered at the windows of the back porch to watch the land across the lake. Nora had sent her kids downstairs with strict orders to stay put. She cracked one of the windows to better hear whatever was happening.

"There can't be
that
many," Dee said. "They're hardly doing any shooting."

Ellie nodded. "Maybe the other side isn't shooting back. Or there
is
no other side."

Nora took half a step back from the window. "You think they're attacking the farmers? That's crazy. The whole island depends on them."

"Which makes them an especially fat target."

Without warning, the gunfire increased tenfold. Shots rang back and forth, concentrated bursts followed by snipers' measured fire.

Ellie got a bad feeling low in her stomach. "If this keeps up, do you have somewhere you can go?"

Nora shook her head slowly. "All my friends live right here."

"Our apartment is right across the street," Ellie said. "No heat or running water, but at least it's out of the park."

The firefight roared on.

"This is ridiculous," Dee said. "Why doesn't the government stop it?"

Ellie stared at the flat gray water. "For all we know, that is the government."

Movement across the lake. Ellie pushed her nose close to the window. Along the top of the red terrace, a line of people walked eastward. She raised her binoculars. Most of the people carried weapons, but some of the young men appeared to be unarmed. They walked steadily, but without extreme haste.

A heavy hand knocked on the door. The three women whirled. Silently, Nora moved inside the kitchen and grabbed a rifle from a rack inside the door.

The knock repeated. "Open the door! For your own safety!"

"If you want to open it, we'll cover you," Ellie whispered.

Nora nodded. They crept into the front dining room. Ellie and Dee knelt behind one of the sheets hanging from the ceiling to partition the sprawling eatery. Ellie got out her 9mm and switched off the safety.

The man knocked a third time. Nora moved behind the door. "Excuse me if I'm not eager to open up."

"Ma'am, my name is Brian Devereaux," the man said. "I'm with the Kono. Distro gangsters have attacked the park. We're moving everyone to a safe place until we can secure the grounds."

"What happens if I want to stay?"

"Then we can't be responsible for your safety."

"I've done all right for myself up till now," Nora said. "But thanks for your concern."

The man went silent. After a moment, his footsteps crunched away from the house.

Nora laughed nervously. "Was that the right move? Maybe it's time to head to the apartment."

Ellie pushed aside the hanging sheet. "You're welcome to it. We'll take you there, but Dee and I won't be staying."

"Huh?" Dee said. "Where are
we
going?"

Ellie raised her eyebrows in mock surprise. "Where do you think? To find Quinn and the sheriff."

27

Ash yanked off his hat and slung it across the street like a frisbee. "Shit and shit some more. We went to the trouble of putting this fort together and now they refuse to play along? They'll be hearing about
this
at the next UN meeting."

"They were shooting people," the scout said. "Civilians. It's like they've gone crazy."

"When you cut off someone's head, their body tends to spazz out." Ash sighed and climbed onto the hood of a flat-tired Range Rover. "Listen up! Distro just made a big breakthrough: they realized they're a bunch of pussies who can't face us in a fair fight."

Some of the fifty-odd men and women listening laughed. He swept his hair back from his forehead, took a quick look at the sky, and went on in his high and cutting voice.

"Problem is, they know we can't sit back and wait while they execute this completely batshit plan of theirs. Third division, we're keeping you here in reserve and to hold down the fort. Fifth division, your job is to evacuate the park. Save all the farmers you like, but we've got property there that would be a real pain to replace. I want you to escort it to the safehouse. You got me?"

Heads nodded.

"Everyone else? Your job is to shoot Distro's asses like they ran off with your daughter. Let's go!"

He leapt from the hood and landed with a blast of snow. Troops whooped and rushed behind him. Lucy thought about pretending to be part of third division, but the organization was split up by area of residence, and Lucy's division—first—were those who lived directly above the bar. The real members of third would know she was faking. So she fell in with the others, in body if not spirit, jogging east in the snowy gray morning.

Anyway, being in the thick of things wouldn't be all bad. Maybe she would get a shot at Nerve.

The group ran down the street in loose columns. Scouts reported in every few blocks, but Lucy didn't see what information they were in such a hurry to deliver. Distro's gunshots told well enough where they were. And the arms of smoke reaching into the sky told exactly where they'd been.

Ash took them parallel to the park until 81st, where he stopped in the road and sent two men ahead. They came back with the all-clear.

"This is so obviously a lure," Ash said. "That means it's our job to not get hooked. Don't overcommit. We're here to save our land and workers. If you can kill a few Distro, please bring me the heads, but we'll worry about exterminating those rats once we've retaken the high ground. Got it?"

He was met with nods. Didn't sound like a real intricate plan to Lucy. She had the idea Ash was good at two things: the overarching strategy, and small raids. Not so cunning a figure when it came to battlefield tactics involving more than a handful of people on either side. She filed that intel away.

But she had to give him credit for one thing: he was bold. He jogged at the head of the columns, leading the way down the snowy, twisting paths. Shots filtered from the south at irregular intervals. Lucy hung toward the back third of the group. Pigeons fluttered in the trees. People used to jog down these paths for healthier lives and now Ash was using them to go end a whole bunch. Under different circumstances, she would have gotten a kick out of that.

Once they came within a few hundred yards of the gunfire, the fifth division split off to go door to door and get the locals evacuated. Ash stopped beside a road and spread his people out along the treeline, ready to stop any Distro advance from messing with the retreat of the farmers. The troops waited in the trees for some time. The hot, choking smell of smoke drifted across the park. Distro kept shooting. Nothing too crazy, but a fresh shot or two sounded off every minute. Either the farmers were fighting back, or Distro was cowing them—or executing them.

After five minutes of relative silence, with the fifth division away to the north, Ash stood and gestured his people onward. Their feet soughed through the snow. Smoke hazed the air, speared by the sun's faint rays; between the smoke, the clouds, the early hour, and the overhanging branches, it was hard to tell where the daylight came from. The sound of the crackling fires had both an immediate and a hushed quality, as if it might be burning from five miles away or from behind the next tree. The path curved, stretching the divisions' lines across from a series of low hills.

A shot boomed from the other side of the road.

"Contact!" a woman yelled.

Gunfire exploded from both sides. Muzzles flashed from behind trees. The Kono troops clung tight to trunks and fell prone to the snow. Lucy knelt beside a maple. Stray shots shredded the branches, dusting her with splinters of twigs. Up on the hill crosswise to her right, a man stood six feet behind a tree, hidden from those directly across from him, but exposed to Lucy. She took aim with the unfamiliar rifle and pulled the trigger. The stock jarred into her shoulder. Snow plumed and glittered behind her target. She fired again, hitting nothing. Her third pull staggered the man into the snow.

Facing limited return fire, it soon became clear they had the Distro probe outnumbered. Ash ran down the left side of the line. When he reached the end, he screamed a battle cry and his people followed him across the road into the trees at the base of the hills. Lucy joined those who stayed behind in taking potshots at the Distro soldiers as they shifted to fire on Ash's advance.

The outnumbered enemy dropped back, covering each other as they retreated through the trees. Ash turned and waved his hands at his people on the other side of the road. They broke cover and sprinted to join the others. Lucy lagged at the rear. The burnt-fireworks smell of gunpowder mingled with the smoke. One of the Kono had been knocked down in the initial charge and his body lay in the road, arms stretched out before him.

Lucy slowed to gaze at the body. Shots ripped into the snow beside her, ricocheting from the asphalt beneath. To the right, a wave of Distro soldiers poured in to reinforce the beleaguered front line. A machine gun rattled, whacking into the trees in front of Lucy. She threw herself beside the body and propped her rifle over its back. Her shots were wild and defensive. Distro soldiers ducked behind trees and fired back. The body thumped heavily. Blood fanned across Lucy's face.

Her heart thundered. She was pinned down. Separated. She fired at any man who broke cover, but otherwise conserved her ammo. Uphill, Distro and the Kono hammered away at each other in ferocious exchanges that went dead quiet for seconds at a time.

A thrumming force rushed past Lucy's cheek. It was gone before she understood it was a bullet. If she ran, she'd catch one in the back. If she stayed, a couple soldiers could keep her pinned while others circled around to hit her from behind. With the shouts and bangs of the main battle continuing to push south, no one would come to save her. The only people who knew where she was were the people trying to kill her.

Melted snow soaked her elbows. Her gun clicked, dry. She huddled behind the body and swapped out the magazine. She popped up for a glimpse of their movements. Rifles blared, spraying the air with bullets. Her knee slipped and she fell to her side.

And she stayed there.

Playing possum. Real American hero. But her fall had been real and in perfect sync with the shots. She lay perfectly still, snow stinging her face. A couple more rounds whisked past. Footsteps crunched, fading south to join the gunshots and screams.

She held there for several minutes. The clamor of battle grew more distant. Sounded like the Kono were doing just fine without her. With her cheek gone numb and her left leg dampened from ankle to hip, she eased her head up above the still-warm body. The trees stood by themselves. The snow was stirred with fresh footprints, but the grounds were motionless, abandoned to the dead.

She got up and stamped her feet to get her blood flowing. She had half a mind to exit the park and return to the makeshift fortress at Sicily with an explanation she'd been cut off from the group, but her next move depended on how this battle swung. She didn't want to rely on secondhand accounts. Not when she was so close.

On the other side of the road, blood stood from the snow like paint on a fresh canvas. Bodies dotted the hillside, but fewer than she would have guessed—maybe four or five from each side. Weird. The more people who showed up to kill each other, the less efficient they became at it.

Past the crest of the hills, she hunkered down for a look at the situation. The battle had broken apart into several small skirmishes. The first centered around three cabins, one of which was on fire. At another site, men sniped at each other across a no-man's-land of bare snow, covering in the trees that fringed it. At a third, Kono troops had backed a somewhat larger Distro force against a pond.

Something like 150 men in total. Looking down on them was sobering. This was once the biggest city in the country. Now, the two mightiest armies contending for its soil couldn't field a baseball league.

After a minute, she thought she spied Nerve retreating from the firefight around the cabins. She headed that way, circling through the trees to keep her out of the line of fire until she rejoined the Kono.

As she ran up, a woman swung around on her, rifle trained on her chest. "Wilson!"

Lucy's mind froze. She slid to a stop.

"
Wilson!
"

"Mookie," Lucy spat out. "Good lord, you want my help, or you want to stand here yelling nonsense back and forth?"

She joined the others at the corner of a cabin. Acrid smoke flumed across the gap between it and the neighboring home. A couple of geezers lay facedown in the snow, blood puddled around their heads. Distro was holed up in the trees behind a wooden fence at the other end of the dead couple's farm. Kono soldiers shot at anything that moved. The two sides traded shots for several minutes without scoring a casualty.

After nearly getting tagged in the head by two different shooters, Lucy swung behind the cabin and pressed her back to the wall. This was some World War I shit. Nobody could enter the open field without getting mown in half. If he'd had more troops to work with, Ash could loop them around to hammer the Distro men from the side, but all his available men were already committed to the field. Didn't help that a fifth of them were off ushering civilians to safety. Smart move by Distro, hitting the park. They had nothing to defend. Meanwhile, the Kono had to commit resources to protect the farmers they extorted all that food from.