Threat Warning (28 page)

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Authors: John Gilstrap

Tags: #Fiction, #General

BOOK: Threat Warning
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Just as they finished dressing, the door to the house opened, and another eight of these masked nut jobs streamed into the room. Ryan felt panic swelling in his gut. They were here to kill him. All doubt that it was anything else evaporated. It’s what they promised from the very beginning, but now they had a reason because he’d killed Brother What’s-his-name.
Stephen. His name was Stephen, and you should always think well of the dead. Even when the dead guy was an asshole.
“Is the condemned prepared?” asked one of the masked guys in the front of the crowd.
“He is,” said Brother Zebediah.
The condemned?
Ryan’s mind shouted.
What the hell?
Knowing in your gut and hearing with your ears were two entirely different things.
A hand clasped the bare flesh of his biceps on his left side—his good side—and Ryan jerked it away. “Quit touching me!” he yelled, and he started to run. He didn’t know where he was going, but he by God knew where he
wasn’t
going, at least not without a fight, even if it just meant an extended game of tag through the living room.
The game stopped, though, when Sister Colleen punched him in his arm, right at the spot where it was broken—the spot where she’d worked so hard to help him mend. The bones inside moved against each other at the impact, igniting a sharp, mind-splitting, electrical pain that rocketed through his arm, and up into his neck and shoulders. The spike of agony made him see stars, and his knees sagged.
When Sister Colleen grabbed him under his armpit, she said very softly in his ear, “Don’t make us tie this arm behind your back, Ryan. Die with dignity.”
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-EIGHT
 
As they opened the doors to the church, the cold air hit Christyne like a wall. Fear and frigid temperatures combined to trigger a spasm of trembling. The bright lights blinded her. She drew to a stop just short of the doorjamb, but hands fell on her, squeezing her biceps and nearly lifting her off her feet.
“Keep going,” the female voice said quietly in her ear, the sound muffled by the veil that wrapped her face. “It will be over soon.”
Christyne looked at her. “What will be over soon?” Even though she knew, she wanted some kind of acknowledgment that she was about to die.
A crowd had gathered in the night. She could feel them as much as see them, a terrible malignant energy that sickened her as she watched their covered heads and robed bodies undulate in the artificially lit night. When they saw her, the crowd erupted with jeering. Fists pumped the air. Somewhere out there, a ripple of gunfire tore at the air. She saw the flashes of light. Women in the crowd ululated. It was as if by walking through the doors into the night, she’d passed into a different part of the world. It was as if someone had brought the Middle East to West Virginia.
“Killer!” someone yelled. Or was it “Kill her”?
Others picked up the chant, and as the noise grew, she realized that either interpretation meant the same for her.
The hands tightened around her arms as she was half guided, half pushed out the door. She found herself standing on a kind of stage in the front of the building. Maybe it was just the porch, but if that was the case, it was a big one. As she approached the front edge, the crowd surged forward, hands reaching for her. One hand grabbed her ankle and she kicked it away. Two of her robed guards hurried to take a position between her and the crowd, as if to provide personal security.
Off to her left, the generator that was responsible for half the noise and all of the light churned away, pumping exhaust fumes into the night.
Once her guards were positioned on either side, another commotion arose from the crowd on the far right, the other side of the stage. More gunshots filled the night. More ululating.
Christyne watched heads turn, and people stand on tiptoes. They craned their necks to see who or what was approaching, and as they did, she scanned the crowd and the night for some way to get away. Even if she were able to shake free of her captors, the crowd would tear her apart as soon as she entered it. This was a frenzied herd of animals, and she was the red meat that would soon be thrown out to keep them sated.
There had to be a way.
Boomer would find a way.
No, she thought, Boomer would never have allowed himself to be taken in the first place.
“Killer!” the crowd yelled. They started chanting it again, and as they did, she was surprised to see so many looking away from her.
She bent forward to see what they saw. It couldn’t be.
There was Ryan, dressed identically to her, looking small and bent as he was ushered up some stairs to the same platform as she, but separated by twenty feet.
“Ryan!” she cried.
His head snapped up. “Mom!”
“Kill them both!” someone yelled. “Avenge Brother Stephen!”
Now they had a new chant: “Avenge Brother Stephen! Avenge Brother Stephen . . . !”
“I love you!” Christyne yelled.
True to form, he looked embarrassed and cast his eyes downward.
 
 
These people are all crazy
, Ryan thought. It sounded like a friggin’ football game, with people shouting and chanting. Then the idiots with the machine guns, firing them into the air.
He’d picked up a couple of extra guards as soon as he stepped outside the house into the cold, and they formed a kind of flying wedge to escort him through the mob. There had to be two hundred people out here. At first, he moved as if he were invisible, with everyone’s attention distracted by something toward the front of the crowd. He didn’t look up to see, because he was too busy trying to keep track of where he placed his bare feet on the freezing ground. When everyone else in the world is wearing heavy boots, you become keenly aware of your feet.
Then they started to recognize him. He didn’t know how they even knew what he looked like, but he heard his name muttered nearby. Then the same voice shouted, “That’s Ryan!”
The focus of the crowd turned. They pushed and shoved, trying to get closer to him, their hands reaching out to grab him as if he were some kind of rock star in hell. Everyone wanted a piece of him, and every bit of jostling launched new pain through his arm. Through his whole upper body now.
As he approached a set of stairs, he tried to settle himself. As Sister Colleen had told him, he was going to die with dignity.
Someone yelled, “Killer!” and then all hell broke loose. More shouting and gunshots, and that weird warbling sound he’d heard on the news from Arab countries when they get all spun up.
“Keep walking,” Brother Zebediah said to him. “Don’t slow down.” There was fear in his voice, as if his reading of the crowd was as dire as Ryan’s.
He had no idea where they were going. For the longest time. All he could see were his own feet and the ass of the guard in front of him. There were occasional flashes of hooded faces, too, but they freaked him out so much that he didn’t want to look at them.
Finally, he was at the foot of some stairs, and hands were lifting him to help him climb. He yelled in pain, but no one seemed to care.
The stairs led him to a stage, and when he got there, the crowd really went wild.
He saw the man in black robes holding a knife. It was a long, ugly thing with a tarnished blade and an edge sharp enough to see from here. And somehow, Ryan knew it was for him. His body stiffened and he thought about running.
“Remember what I said,” Sister Colleen said.
“To hell with dignity,” Ryan spat. His words brought an agonizing squeeze that triggered the purple flashes again.
“Ryan!”
He recognized that voice. He looked up, and there she was, dressed to die, just like he was. The crowd yelled, “Avenge Brother Stephen! Avenge Brother Stephen!” over and over again, yet somehow over the din, he was able to hear his mom say, “I love you!”
His sense of shame overwhelmed him. He’d failed them both, and now they were going to die.
 
“Oh, Lord, Scorpion,” Venice moaned over the radio. “Both Ryan and Christyne are on the stage now. Can you see them?”
“Not yet, but we’re close,” Jonathan said.
“Hurry! A man with a hood covering his face is wielding a knife, and the crowd is cheering. He’s making a speech.”
“What’s he saying?”
“There’s no audio.”
Of course not,
Jonathan thought. They were trying to convince the world that whatever this was, was unfolding from the Middle East. An audio track would kill the illusion. This Brother Michael guy knew what he was doing.
One hundred yards ahead, the crowd, dressed all in black, moved less like humans than a swarm of bees on a tree branch. Too many to count, they surged and ebbed at random. Whatever was going on had them fired up big-time. Even with the windows up, Jonathan could hear the cheering plainly.
“What do you want me to do, boss?” Boxers asked. “I can ram the crowd, but the bodies’ll probably disable the vehicle. That’d suck.”
Yes, it would,
Jonathan thought. “We stick with the plan. Get Gunslinger in close enough to where she can make the shot on the generator. We need darkness.”
Which meant that they dare not draw attention to themselves too early.
“The angle’s gonna be a problem,” Boxers mused aloud. “All those people. Unless the generator is on a damn scaffold, it’s gonna be hard to get a shot.” While he spoke, his foot got heavier on the accelerator.
“Slow down,” Jonathan warned. “We get made too early, we’re screwed.”
“Scorpion, Scorpion. Mother Hen. Oh, my God, you have to hurry. Something awful is happening!”
 
Michael Copley stepped forward to the edge of the assembly hall’s massive porch, and he held aloft the knife that would change the future. How fitting that it was a butcher knife. The crowd—this flock that adored him, to whom he was more beloved than their own blood—cheered at the sight of it, because they thought they understood what it meant. They thought exactly what he’d intended them to think, and the response was a thunderous cheer.
With the blade raised high, he allowed the cheering to peak, and then he raised his other hand for silence. They obeyed.
Aware of the camera, he wished that he could remove this ridiculous mask and face the world who watched from afar so that they would know the identity of the man who would soon bring true justice. That was not possible, of course, because the world needed to continue to think that they were who they were not. The world needed to continue to believe that the Army of God was the Army of Allah—the Islamic enemy that they wanted so badly to hate. That was, after all, what the computer experts would determine when they saw that this signal was beaming from Pakistan.
As he addressed the crowd, his voice boomed. This was oratory of the old school, and his disciples would know exactly how to react. They had been in training, after all, for twenty years, the last decade made so much easier by the fortuitous disasters in New York, Washington, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Thus, when he released his own carnage in Kansas City, Washington, Detroit and now in Maddox County, West Virginia, the states of America would truly unite in their natural hatred of Islam, and with their attentions distracted, he could fulfill his ultimate goal.
“Brothers and sisters,” he yelled, “God bless us all.”
“God bless us all,” they answered in unison.
“We warned them, did we not? We gave our demands, and they did not listen. We made a promise, yet they did not believe. And here we are on this night to fulfill that promise.”
The crowd cheered louder, and he let them go for a while. The world didn’t need to know what they were saying. They didn’t need to know the reason for the executions; they needed only to watch a mother and her son die in each other’s presence.
Copley looked over his right shoulder to Brother Franklin. “Bring me the boy.”
 
 
Ryan saw the man coming for him, and he panicked. “Please don’t,” he said, and he dug his frozen bare heels into the unyielding concrete of the porch deck. He pushed back, trying to run, and someone squeezed his arm again. He yelled. He screamed. Like an animal caught in a trap.
“No! Please. I’m sorry! Please don’t hurt me any more!” He heard the words leaving his mouth, and he knew that he was giving the crowd exactly what they wanted to hear, but he couldn’t stop himself.
The big man’s hand extended from the sleeve of his robe like a snake emerging from its hole, and it grabbed Ryan by the back of his neck. The hand had a ring with a red stone on the finger.

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