Go Kill Crazy! (29 page)

Two more mercenaries peeled away from the group at the back of the house and started chugging across the field toward them. The one in the lead abruptly stopped and put his rifle’s stock against his shoulder, aiming the weapon at them.

Casey turned his head toward the line of trees.

It was less than twenty yards away.

An explosion from the direction of the house made him flinch at just the wrong moment. His right foot twisted beneath him the next time it came down and then he was falling, powerless in any way to impede his descent. He hit the ground with a heavy thud, a side of his face smacking against a patch of dry dirt. Someone was screaming at him. The sound was right in his ear. Echo. He felt her hands on his shoulders, pulling at him, urging him back to his feet. And though he knew there was now no chance at all of escape thanks to his ill-timed tumble, he braced his hands on the ground and pushed himself upright, still determined not to surrender so long as he had breath left in him.

Though he knew he should immediately resume the doomed escape attempt, he couldn’t help another glance back at the house.

He did a double-take as he noted some curious things.

The man who had been primed to toss a grenade through the back window was dead on the ground, parts of his corpse scattered about in bloody pieces. And the men who had been pursuing them across the field had stopped in their tracks and had turned back toward the house, staring at it in evident confusion.

What the fuck?

A small cloud of black smoke was rising from somewhere inside the house, which wasn’t surprising. It was an old house with a lot of old, dry wood inside it, the kind of place just looking for an excuse to go up in flames.

Casey stared at the back of the man who had been leading the charge across the field. His rifle was at his side now, pointed at the ground. There was no conscious decision to do what happened next. It was just animal instinct, a reflexive urge to take down a predator while his guard was down. Echo screamed at him as he took off running again, this time straight toward the unsuspecting mercenary. Casey gritted his teeth and willed her to shut up lest she alert his prey too soon.

But this concern soon proved irrelevant.

Casey realized the sound of constant gunfire had ceased an instant before another sound displaced it—the roar of a diesel engine. He came to an abrupt halt and stared in open-mouthed disbelief as the black box truck—now riddled with gaping holes courtesy of the high caliber bullets spewed by the M2 heavy machine gun—appeared around a side of the house and came charging across the field.

Casey couldn’t help it—he laughed.

These chicks are just not to be fucked with, period.

Lana leaned out the passenger side window and sprayed bullets at the remaining mercenaries with a Mac-10 machine gun pistol. Two of them were cut down immediately, while the last one—the guy who’d taken aim at them moments earlier—turned tail and made a run for the woods. Unfortunately for him, Casey was right in his path. He tackled the man and drove him to the ground before he could react.

Casey ripped the rifle from the man’s hands and jammed its barrel up under his chin. He responded with whimpers and barely intelligible pleas for his life. The truck came to a stop about ten feet away. Doors popped open. Lana and Dez approached with savage sneers twisting their pretty faces.

Dez put her hands on her hips and glared at Casey. “The fuck you waiting for? Shoot that piece of shit.”

“I need to know something first.” He pushed the rifle’s barrel against the man’s chin, eliciting another mewling whimper. “Did de Rais send you? Was all this to get me?”

More whimpering.

Dez rolled her eyes. “This is a waste of time. If you’re not gonna kill him, I will.”

Echo joined the group arrayed around the prone mercenary. “Casey’s right. We need to know who sent these fuckers.”

Dez snorted. “Like it fucking matters.”

Casey ignored this exchange, focusing on the whimpering mercenary. “Listen up. I’m making a one-time offer. Tell me what I want to know and I’ll let you live. Word of honor. Tell me straight-up. Did John Wayne de Rais send you here?”

The man got his mewling under control and pushed up his visor. He looked Casey in the eye and said, “John Wayne sent us. He’ll send a backup team if he doesn’t hear from us within the hour.”

Casey squeezed the rifle’s trigger.

There was a moment of silence.

Then Dez laughed. “You lying son of a bitch. Word of honor, my ass.”

Casey grunted. “There’s no room for honor in a thing like this.”

Dez gave him an appraising look. “There may be hope for you, after all.”

Echo cleared her throat. “We should probably figure out our next move before that backup team shows up.”

Dez looked at Lana. “What do you think? Time to get Big Ted in on this?”

Lana stared off into a middle distance for a moment. Then she sighed and shrugged. “Yeah. Even if he doesn’t give a shit about this de Rais motherfucker, he’s not gonna be happy about having his distribution point compromised. I’ll call him soon as we get clear of this place.”

Dez nodded. “True that. The fuck are we waiting for? Let’s hit the road.”

No one voiced opposition to this idea.

In another few minutes they were speeding away from the backwoods conflagration.

Chapter Twenty-One

The Runaways

Things were falling apart at the de Rais compound. John Wayne’s mental confusion was accelerating by the hour, rendering the entire organization essentially rudderless much of the time. The situation was verging on chaos less than a day after Keely’s impulsive decision to murder Susan Wagner.

A peek outside her door the next afternoon revealed an empty hallway. The guard who had replaced the supposed police informant was nowhere in sight. Keely stood in the open doorway and listened to people yelling at each other somewhere else in the house. Though she couldn’t make out what was being said, she detected an unmistakable sense of panic. Moments later, she heard the sound of glass shattering, followed by footsteps pounding up the stairs. Keely cringed backward a step and peeked around the doorjamb.

A heavyset woman came stomping down the hallway. Her eyes flicked toward Keely’s partially hidden face for an instant. The woman’s gaze slid away from her a millisecond later as she entered a room about halfway down the hallway and slammed the door shut. Keely didn’t recognize the woman, but her relatively stylish attire—as well as her mere presence in the big house—indicated she was someone in the inner circle.

A fat man appeared at the end of the hallway a few seconds later. He was wearing cargo shorts and a garish Hawaiian shirt. The goofy bastard looked like he should be at a Jimmy Buffett concert. Keely had seen him before. She was pretty sure he was the bloated-looking dude she’d seen fiddling with an iPad on the back deck the day Boyd had taken her to meet John Wayne.

He tried to open the door to the room the heavyset woman had entered. The knob wouldn’t turn when he tried it so he banged on the door with the base of a fist. “Laura! Goddammit, let me in! We’ve gotta figure this shit out before it’s too late.”

There was a brief, tense silence.

Then the door to the room quietly snicked open and the big man slipped inside, easing the door shut again once he had disappeared from view.

Keely let out a breath and stepped out into the hallway. She did this without any forethought or even the vaguest inkling what she had in mind. She was several steps down the hallway before she realized she meant to get out of the house and somehow escape the compound.

It was a significant moment in the brief history of her membership in the Order of Wandering Souls. Even as recently as a day ago she had wrestled with ways of rationalizing a continued devotion to the Order. That need to believe in something remained strong within her and making that final call to break completely with something she had invested so much hope in wasn’t easy. But at this stage further attempts at denial of the obvious were impossible.

John Wayne told her some truly disturbing things after fucking her the previous day. The man was nothing less than a madman. What he had in mind for his followers was deranged enough to earn him a place in the top ranks of the world’s most infamous maniacs. How much of this was a product of his deteriorating condition was an open question. According to him, it had been part of his endgame all along, but his declining health was forcing him to implement it sooner than originally planned. Keely wasn’t so sure about that. This “endgame” could be a new thing dreamed up by his fractured mind. At this point even John Wayne himself was too far gone to know the whole truth.

The winding staircase down to the first floor was empty, as was what she could see of the wide foyer beyond. She started down the stairs, listening intently for other voices or approaching footsteps. She knew John Wayne still wanted her confined to her room, thus the presence of the new guard who had been stationed outside her door overnight. His fixation on her remained strong. She was one of his chosen, or so he said, but being one of the chosen apparently didn’t mean he trusted her to stay put left to her own devices. And yet her personal guard—and seemingly everyone else—had disappeared. She was grateful for the lack of human presence, but she couldn’t help seeing it as ominous.

She reached the bottom of the staircase and took a look around the big foyer. The architecture was expensive, with lots of ornate touches and marble tiles on the floor. A sculpted bust of John Wayne sat on a pedestal in a corner. The sculpture was a fine, nearly lifelike piece of work. You could almost believe the real John had been turned to stone and cut in half. It was pretty fucking eerie.

Keely eased the front door open and stepped out onto the long front porch. Her heart lurched at the sight of two armed men lounging against the side of a black Hummer. The men wore black sunglasses and had semi-automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. They were smoking and talking quietly as Keely came outside. Her appearance caused a brief pause in their conversation. They glanced at her with curious expressions and for one supremely terrifying moment she was sure she was about to be marched back to her room.

But they appeared to take no interest in her and soon resumed their conversation. Keely remained where she was another few moments. This was largely because she had difficulty trusting this apparent new freedom to move about the property without an escort. She kept expecting someone to come rushing out of the house and drag her back inside. During those moments, she studied the men lounging against the Hummer while trying to appear uninterested in them. She suspected she wasn’t entirely convincing, but they went right on ignoring her anyway.

She moved to the edge of the porch in an effort to better eavesdrop on their conversation. It still wasn’t easy to pick up on what they were saying, but Keely sensed a pronounced tenseness. And though the clipped snippets she heard made it hard to know for certain, she got the general drift. They were planning to bail on John Wayne and his organization at the earliest opportunity. For Keely, it was additional confirmation that fleeing was absolutely the right move to make.

She started down the steps, taking care not to go too fast lest she rattle the already uptight security or draw the attention of someone who might still be loyal to John. At first blush, this seemed a non-issue. A couple more black Hummers were parked down by the access road that led away from the compound. No one was lounging around outside those vehicles and their tinted windows made it impossible to glimpse any occupants. Keely suspected there were more security personnel inside them, but, for the moment at least, she doubted they were at all concerned with her.

When she reached the ground, she started walking at an unhurried pace, still trying her best not to look like someone trying to escape. She turned right at the side of the house and kept going, the Hummers and the security guys disappearing from view within seconds. A nervous glance over her shoulder confirmed she wasn’t being followed and she picked up the pace. A flat-out run was still probably a bad idea, but being overly cautious might doom her attempt to get away just as certainly. The situation at the big house was in a serious state of flux and people were running around like chickens with their heads cut off, completely clueless about what to do next, but sooner or later someone who mattered would note her absence and raise the alarm. Her only hope lay in getting clear of this place before that could happen.

She spotted her destination some one hundred yards up ahead. The big red barn no longer housed horses or bales of hay. Instead it had been pressed into service for another kind of storage. Keely recalled the day she had pledged herself to John Wayne and the Order in a hazy way. She had been high as fuck at the time. No surprise, as she had been high as fuck almost all the time for most of the last several years. One of the requirements of Order membership was surrender of all material possessions. And she remembered seeing one of the ranch hands drive her maroon Toyota into the barn as Susan Wagner led her away from the big house to her assigned cabin.

Giving the car up had been easy. It was symbolic of the end of her old life.

The life she now hoped to reclaim.

She sighed.

Boy, have I been fucking stupid.