Fires of Midnight (21 page)

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Authors: Jon Land

BOOK: Fires of Midnight
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“Where in your room, young man?”
Josh swallowed hard. “She needs a doctor. I want you to get her a doctor first.”
Fuchs turned toward the giant. “Krill.”
Josh sprung from his chair. “Candy jar. One of the pieces near the top. Inside the wrapper.”
Fuchs smiled. “That’s better.”
“Now get her a doctor!”
Fuchs’s smile disappeared, a vile and toothless sneer taking its place. “No need. You must be taught a lesson. You must learn what happens from this point on if you disobey me.”
“No!”
“Raise the setting to ten,” Fuchs ordered Krill. “Then kill her.”
Josh stood there, suspended between thoughts, ready to give it all up.
“There’s another vial! Of CLAIR!”
“Did you say …”
Josh watched Krill steadying the shock gun, huge elongated finger going for the fire button, and threw himself into motion forward, intending to crash into Susan and take her from the deadly path of the prods.
He had just reached her when he heard a soft popping sound at the same time the Taser’s prods lodged against him. It was like grazing up against something hot and not being able to pull away. Everything seemed to lock up and stiffen as he was caught between breaths. Even his eyes locked open, watching the door when it exploded inward.
The force of the blast tumbled Susan’s chair over and took Josh with it. McCracken vaguely recorded that sight as he followed the remnants of the door into the room. The fall had separated Susan Lyle from the chair. He stripped the rope from her wrists and yanked her to her feet at the same time he recognized the still form of Joshua Wolfe lying spread across the tile floor. He shoved Susan behind him, covering her with his body as he opened fire on the pair of big men the explosion had hurled against a glass wall.
They had managed to free their guns when his bullets found them, slamming them back into the glass with enough force to crack it. Meanwhile, he turned his focus on a pair of figures forced to the floor by the exploding door and scampering for cover.
“Watch out!”
Susan Lyle’s scream alerted him to motion to his right just as he was angling to steady his gun on who could only be Fuchs and Haslanger. The monster he recognized all too well from the New York Public Library was steadying something with a barrel on him. He dove as the monster fired and felt a pair of sizzling electrodes shoot over his head. He opened fire on the monster with the rest of the SIG’s clip while still in his dive, his bullets off the mark but close enough to force the monster to lunge behind a toppled table. Blaine used the opportunity to jam a fresh clip into his pistol and open fire on the thick table to keep the monster pinned behind it, giving him time to hoist the limp form of Joshua Wolfe up in one arm.
“Go!
Now!”
Blaine ordered Susan, who, though unsteady on her feet, managed to stumble into the hallway.
Once he joined her, McCracken shifted Josh to his left shoulder, leaving his right hand totally free to use the SIG, just as a half-dozen security guards rushed forward with pistols drawn.
“Down!” Blaine screamed at Susan and drained the rest of his second clip.
The men dropped in eerie precision before him and McCracken hardly had to break stride to speed by their bodies, the boy he recognized from Harry’s picture bouncing upon his shoulder.
“Take a left here!” Blaine told Susan. “Second stairwell on the right. Then straight back to the garage.”
He sensed her stiffen at the mention of their destination and didn’t bother explaining his reasons for the instruction. They had just reached the stairwell in question when the emergency alarm began to wail throughout Group Six.
 
 
J
ohnny Wareagle was waiting for them in the garage next to a six-wheel RV-type vehicle made of solid black steel. The top hatch was open, the engine warming, and the nose angled straight for an open garage bay.
“Best I could find, Blainey,” Wareagle said, taking Joshua Wolfe from him.
“Get the boy inside! Her too!”
“You drive, Blainey.”
“We’ll have to get through those lasers, Indian.”
“That is why you must drive.”
“Hurry!” Susan pleaded desperately. “I don’t think he’s breathing!” Blaine noticed Joshua Wolfe’s lips were turning blue as Johnny lowered him into the RV. Spittle was running from the corners of his mouth and he seemed to be convulsing.
Susan had climbed into the armored RV cabin first and helped Johnny ease the boy across one of the seats. His body was utterly still now.
“No,” she moaned. “No …”
“Go, Blainey!” Johnny urged when McCracken was barely settled behind the wheel.
The RV’s huge tires spun and screamed as McCracken shoved it into gear. Wareagle ducked down and reached for a riflelike weapon with what appeared to be a shower head at the end of its barrel. He also shouldered a pair of packs containing what looked at first glance to be field radios but were something else altogether. Blaine recalled they were among the items Wareagle had recovered from the storage chamber and packed away. Clearly, he had figured out their purpose and operation.
Susan’s pumping adrenaline enabled her to shake off the tingly, numbing effects of her own shock and she began compressing Joshua Wolfe’s chest in the familiar motions of CPR. Then she tilted his head back and forced breath down his throat.
“Come on! Come on!
Don’t quit on me!”
Heaving for breath herself as she went back to chest compressions, pushing the blood through his body.
McCracken drove through the bay and up the steep ramp that led back to ground level.
“Uh-oh,” he muttered as the climb neared its end at a twin door Johnny had obviously not manage to get open. “Hold on!”
Blaine drove the RV straight into the door, accelerating all the while. It didn’t break or shatter but snapped off its hinges and flew to the side as McCracken tore off across the grassy field.
Susan held Josh steady through it but his body still bobbed limply, limbs spraying in all directions like a puppet with its strings cut. In the rearview mirror Blaine watched her alternate again between chest compressions and forced breaths, while Johnny prepared for the next stage of their escape.
 
 
“T
hey’re out!” Sinclair reported from the garage.
An out-of-breath Colonel Lester Fuchs had just reached the command center, handkerchief pressed against his head to stanch the flow of blood from a wound suffered from flying glass.
“Do not pursue!” he heaved. “Repeat, do not pursue! We’ll let the lasers disable them.”
“Security systems all functional,” Larsen reported from his station. “All lights are green.”
“Confirm automated mode.”
“Automated mode confirmed, sir.”
Fuchs steadied himself against the back of a chair and turned back to the security monitors before him as the first of the perimeter’s cameras picked up the RV speeding forward.
 
J
ohnny Wareagle had popped opened the RV’s top-mounted hatch and squeezed himself halfway through, his face and torso braced in the warm night air.
“Lasers, Indian,” Blaine called back to him. “Coming up!”
Wareagle flipped a switch on the first of his unidentified packs and hurled it outward, ahead of them to the left. He did the same with the second and tossed it far away and to the right. He ducked back down quickly into the RV and closed the hatch behind him.
No explosions followed, just a brief ear-rattling whine that chilled the spine like fingernails down a chalkboard. Blaine felt the RV buckle, waver, and nearly stall. The instruments on the dashboard were going crazy. The clock went out altogether.
“I’ll be damned,” he said as they surged farther into the night.
 
T
he monitor screens containing shots of Group Six’s front perimeter all died at once; at the same time the complex’s lights blinked once and then came back on, slightly dimmer.
“What happened?” Fuchs demanded of Larsen. “What’s wrong?”
“They must have used the NEPPs,” said Haslanger, who had just appeared in the command center. He leaned against the wall, his face a mass of small cuts and lacerations.
“The
what?
”
“Nonnuclear electromagnetic pulse packs. Setting them off has effectively shut down the motion and infrared sensors in the field, as well as our monitoring systems.”
“What about the lasers?”
“They’re powered from here,” Larsen answered. “Should still be functional.”
“Then use them!” he ordered, forgetting about the gash in his skull
and letting the blood trickle down his collar to the back of his uniform. “Switch to manual!”
“We’ll be firing blind, sir.”
“I don’t care! Just
fire
! Fire at anything, fire at
everything
! Now! Do you hear me?
Now
!
…”
S
usan had stopped her CPR long enough to lower an ear to Joshua Wolfe’s chest.
“He’s breathing! He’s breathing!”
Suddenly the boy began to convulse again, body twitching and writhing as if trying to tear from her determined grasp. Susan pulled Josh against her own body and held him tight as his damaged nerve endings tried to shake the life from him again.
In front of them Johnny Wareagle, his head and shoulders again squeezed through the RVs ceiling hatch, brought the strange-looking rifle up to his shoulder like any normal gun. It was equipped with an infrared zoom sight that functioned like the close-up lens of a camera. Group Six personnel would be firing the lasers on manual now without benefit of their sophisticated sensors. That evened the odds enough so that, along with the power and strength of the RV’s hull, this weapon of Johnny’s would hopefully safeguard their escape from the Group Six complex.
It delivered a powerful stream of aerosol through its showerheadlike muzzle, an aerosol that turned metal brittle on contact, rendering it useless. The laser firing devices that looked like underground sprinklers were made of metal.
The aerosol contents were held under pressure in a thick, canlike magazine just in front of the trigger guard. Johnny had wedged three additional clips in his belt for easy access. He swept the area with his naked eye, aerosol
gun ready, when a series of lasers to the RV’s right began firing wildly in all directions. A pair of beams sliced across the RV’s fender and rear quarter panel, leaving blackened metal in their wake. Johnny swung the gun toward the position of the mushrooms, sighted and fired.
A narrow stream of the instantly corrosive aerosol shot outward. It took only a short burst to render the lasers inoperative and Johnny quickly settled into a rhythm. Since the gun had no kick whatsoever, aiming it along the sight and then firing was really all he had to do. The stream went where he was looking.
“On the right, Indian!” Blaine called to him. “Lasers coming up!”
Wareagle swung that way, adjusting the firing nozzle in the process. As expected, he was able to widen the stream to cover more of the lasers with a single burst, at the sacrifice of distance. An unexpected bonus came when a glance through the sight showed him its field had widened to the same extent as the aerosol stream. He fired and the burst knocked out a whole nest of lasers that had barely missed the RV. As that unit of blue beams of deadly light ceased abruptly, Johnny turned his weapon on another grouping that had just popped up.
A single blind-fired laser managed to pierce a wheel well and tire. The RV bucked and rattled but kept going. Wareagle used the rest of the first can to disable the grouping that laser was a part of and quickly inserted a fresh canister.
“Front, Indian!” Blaine signaled. “Both sides!”
Lasers had begun firing in erratic, crisscrossing beams fifteen yards from them on both the left and right. McCracken braked hard to stop from crossing their path and give Wareagle more time. Johnny fired to the left first and gray smoke from the suddenly corroding, brittle metal replaced the flashes of blue light on that side. He swung the other way just as a trio of beams hit the RV dead on in the front. Another tire blew out and the engine sputtered.
“Come on!” Blaine urged. “Come on!”
The RV responded, but it was badly hampered now. A lesser vehicle with normally thin steel and rubber would never have made it this far. But the RV’s reinforced armor sheeting had kept the engine intact. The fence was in sight, and Blaine drove the RV on straight for one of the sections of steel link.
Another series of lasers opened fire directly before him and McCracken ducked an instant before a pair of slashing beams cut a neat slice right through the windshield. Fuses must have blown, because the RV’s cab went totally dark. But Johnny was up to the task yet again, calmly capturing the required grid through his sight and spraying the aerosol with calculated aim. Once again, the mushroomlike devices smoked, hissed and gave up.
McCracken pushed the RV on, picking up as much speed as possible en route to the fence. The remaining lasers were still firing, out of Johnny’s
range now. Blaine could only hope they wouldn’t pierce anything vital, such as the gas tank, and cause an instant explosion. Instead the beams that found them only damaged the rear of the vehicle, blowing out the back window and showering Josh and Susan with glass. Susan tried to shield him as best she could with her own body, and felt the shards pricking and digging into her back and arms.
“We’re out of their range, Blainey.”
“Then get yourself back inside, Indian, and hold on.”
 
T
he nonnuclear electromagnetic pulse packs Johnny had used had not affected the cameras mounted atop the fence. In the Group Six command and communications center, the three working screens showed their own updated RV bearing down on one of the sections of fence. Fuchs watched helplessly as the fence simply caved in and vanished under the RVs charge.
“Sinclair!” Fuchs called through the intercom system.
“Here, sir.”
“They’re out. All security systems disabled. Take up pursuit.”
“Yes, sir.”
With that, the four chase vehicles Sinclair had loaded with men hurtled toward the open garage bays. Suddenly their surges slowed to bucking skips. Then the engines died.
“What the fuck … Colonel Fuchs!” Sinclair called into his communicator.
“We can’t see you. Where are you?”
“We’re stalled, sir. They must have done something to the engines, sabotaged them. We’re not going anywhere in these.”
“Damn!” Fuchs blared, realizing McCracken’s cohort, whoever he was, must have also found and utilized the compounds Group Six had developed that turned diesel fuel and gasoline into jelly. But he was certain there weren’t enough samples stockpiled to cover all the vehicles in the motor pool. “Listen to me, Sinclair. Check all the cars. Some of them will still be functional.”
“Tires on the others are cut, sir.”
“Take eight men around to the rear visitors’ bay. There are two cars inside they couldn’t have gotten to. I’ll send down reinforcements to change those tires.”
“Acknowledged, sir.”
“Move!”
Fuchs punched up a fresh line on the phone next to him. “Brookhaven Security, come in.”
“Brookhaven Security.”
“This is Colonel Fuchs at Group Six. One of our vehicles has been stolen by intruders and is heading your way. Seal off the gate, but do not approach. Repeat,
do not approach!”
 
 
T
he RV thumped and hunkered its way toward the gate at Brookhaven’s main entrance.
“Here we go. Hang on!” Blaine called back to his passengers.
The RV slammed into the gate and shattered it, sending it swinging wildly sideways. McCracken managed to right the RV, even though it had taken on a leftward list. He bypassed the more heavily traveled William Floyd Parkway for a residential thoroughfare called Longwood Road.
“Two vehicles following, Blainey,” Johnny Wareagle called from the rear of the RV
“No way we can outrun them. This thing’s gonna die on us any second.” He stole a quick glance behind him at Susan, who was still working on the inert form of Joshua Wolfe. “Doesn’t look like getting away on foot is an option, either.”
The RV had begun to waver from side to side and he was powerless to keep it steady.
“That means we must make a stand, Blainey.”
“Tough odds to beat without—” McCracken stopped when he saw the sign on the side of the road. “What do you think, Indian?”
“We could hope for no more, under the circumstances.” McCracken managed to swing the RV to the right toward a long, rectangular building, shiny letters rising into the night from the front of its roof: LONGWOOD CENTRAL MIDDLE SCHOOL.
 
F
uchs stared at the image of a bearded man caught by the security cameras and then digitized for clarity by one of Group Six’s computers.
“His name is Blaine McCracken,” Haslanger said from behind him. “Krill had a run-in with him yesterday. I think you’ll find his file most interesting.”
It took a few seconds to bring up and Fuchs had just started reading when the call came from Sinclair.
“They did
what
?” he demanded.
“They’ve pulled around behind the school building out of sight,” Sinclair reported.
“The vehicle?”
“Disabled. I’m certain.”
Fuchs would have felt triumphant if not for the contents of the file running down the screen before him. “Sinclair, I’m ordering the bulk of our security force into the field to join you, to make sure there are no surprises this time. Forty men.”
“I hardly think I’ll need that many, sir.”
Fuchs was still reading. “You will. Believe me.”

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