Rough Men (18 page)

They left the tree line, Jason running low and Will mimicking him. The snow before them was speckled with blood again, and Will could see a mess on the door where a great deal of blood had been spilled. He ignored the sickening feeling in his stomach and kept running just behind Jason.

They made the door without seeing any of the MS-13 members, but the storm’s racket would have smothered the approach of an armored division on their heels. Hail the size of golf balls had swept after them from the trees, pummeling their backs and the building before them. The metal near the door was warped in spots, as though the building itself had been bent.

Jason turned the knob, and it shocked them both when it turned over. Jason held his finger over his lips. “Shhh.”

Will rolled his eyes—like any amount of noise they might make could possibly be heard over the Armageddon coming down on the world—and followed Jason inside, the AR-15 stuck to his shoulder, his right eye looking through the sight and past the reticule, toward possible targets that could appear from nowhere.

T
he door from outside led into what was basically a kill room.
A buffer space meant to stop an attack or raid before it even got started. Bars on the doors, slick walls, a perfect spot to slow an attack, like the spot in a castle before the portcullis but after the moat. Will figured there might be cameras trained on it, but also figured it didn’t matter.

Jason moved to the second door. This was the building Chris said he’d been brought to with the hood over his face. It was just as he’d described it: the two doors divided by a short, defensible position so that two doormen could operate separately and help render the normal techniques of a SWAT team useless. Will couldn’t see from where he was—the room they were in was lit by just a single lightbulb—but he had a good feeling that there were holes cut high above them to shoot guns and drop grenades into the fishbowl.

Jason turned the second knob, and it was unlocked, just like the first. First Will and then Jason slid into the room, as quietly as they were able.

This room was just as Chris had said as well, though much messier. Blood was all over the room. Across the floor there was a great smear of it, as well as several crimson handprints on the floor, ahead of the smear. Looking at the mess, Will felt a little sick, as though following and chasing death just led to more of the same.

Jason knelt next to the smear, pulled off one glove, and swirled a finger in the mess. “Still warm,” he murmured to Will.
“And do you smell the gas? That’s why they still have lights, must be running a genny the size of my fucking house to keep a goddamn warehouse lit up.”

Jason walked to the next door, looking like he was getting some of his swagger back. Will felt better too. There was pain in his fingers and feet that was almost comforting—pain meant they couldn’t have been too damaged, or at least that’s what he was hoping. Jason opened the door, even more slowly than he had the last two, and Will followed him through it.

They were in the real warehouse now, though there wasn’t much being stored in it. There were a few pallets of boxed high-end electronics—computers, mainly, but also stereo equipment and televisions. Stolen merchandise, Will imagined. He and Jason hugged close to the stacks and peeked around the last one.

There were at least four men inside the warehouse with them.

Three of them looked to be MS-13 members. Two of those were wearing suits, and Will assumed that one of them was the number one man Chris had spoken to earlier. There was a fourth banger lying on his side on the cement floor by the others, and there was blood pooled around him. Will imagined he was probably the one whose draining life had inadvertently led them there. The last man was Chris. He was sitting on a folding chair, and even though Will couldn’t see the cocky expression on his face, he felt quite sure that it was there.

Chris was facing away from Will and Jason; the three bangers were facing their way, but cocked away. The man Will assumed was dead was staring at the floor.

Jason slid back and began to move around the row of pallets, farther out of the bangers’ line of sight and closer to Chris’s. Will followed, listening to the men talking—the bangers in dense Latin accents, Chris repeating something that sounded like, “How long?”

They’d reached the end of the row of pallets and, unless one of the bangers turned, out of the bangers’ periphery.

The noise of the hail let up for a moment, and though the wind was still shrieking and making the walls shudder, Will distinctly heard Chris say, “Yeah, but how much longer? No one else can see this shit. I have to give it to him.” The hail started again, drowning out whatever response Chris might have gotten.

Will had heard enough, though. The guy who had hired Chris in the first place—the dude who’d ordered the very specific robbery and who may as well have pulled the trigger on Alex himself—wasn’t there yet.

Will tapped Wixom’s shoulder, and he jumped, whipping around to glare at Will. “Did you hear that?” Will whispered.

“Yeah, big shot ain’t here. Storm probably either held him up or killed him.”

“So what should we do?”

“Kill them all, then figure out what the fuck is going on. And figure it out somewhere else. This building sounds like it’s going to come down around our goddamn ears.”

“OK, so let’s do it. Try not to hit Chris, the backpack is by his feet, and I still want to see to him myself. Plus, I highly doubt that he’s armed.”

“All right, I’m in. You take the guy on the left; I’ll get the right and then the middle. Before you start moving, lean your rifle against these boxes. They’re pretty solid. Shoot through the torso; don’t try for the head.” Jason took a last look, then turned back to him. “One more thing, there’s only the one door, so don’t let anyone get to it. Ready?”

Will placed the dot at the center of the circle over the center of the back of the banger on the left. It would be an easy shot, less than a hundred feet and indoors, so there would be no need to compensate for wind or distance. He just had to leave the dot
where it was, let out the air from his lungs, and slowly squeeze the trigger.

It wasn’t like aiming at paper, and it wasn’t even like shooting Rob had been earlier, when he’d made his dive for his pants. That had been a direct threat; this was quite literally shooting a man in the back.

Will was easing his finger back on the trigger, letting pressure build, on a gun he had never fired before, when, at the exact second that the hammer on his rifle punched the primer on the cartridge, the door they’d entered through opened.

The two men coming in through the door hit the floor and were out of Will’s view almost instantly. Jason had dropped his man, and Chris lay on the floor with the backpack next to him. The third banger, the one who Jason had planned to attack second, was firing back at them with a pistol. Will was able to fire at him, but not accurately—it turns out that aiming a gun is quite a bit harder when your target is firing back.

One of the men near the door tried to open it to leave, and Jason volleyed a pair of shots his way, dropping him to the floor, though not from injury. Will tried to get the other banger back in his sights, but the man was running toward the door, making Chris the only living thing still in the middle of the warehouse.

“Chris! Come here!” Will screamed as Jason kept the men by the door honest about keeping their heads and guns down. Chris stood, hesitating for just a moment, and then began to sprint across the warehouse. Neither side was likely much good for him at this point, but there must have been something he saw in Will and Jason that wasn’t there in the other three.

Pistol fire bucked from the door, and Jason fired toward the position again, two more quick shots. More pistol fire. Chris was almost to them when blood blossomed on his shirt. He was still moving when he was hit again and slid in a pile next to Will, backpack still in hand.

The blood drained from Chris, his heart pumping away in his chest waiting for the memo that it could take the rest of the day off. He was trying to say something, but the gunfire was too loud and the blood on his lips too thick for Will to make any of it out. A crash of lightning met the occasion of his death, thunder rumbling like cannon fire, and then came a noise unlike anything Will had ever heard before.

The explosion began behind them, Will only realizing that he should move as the lights went out and Jason was grabbing him. They were moving across the building, buffeted by wind and noise as the top of the warehouse was torn off from the ground up and a burst of flame roared across the floor, shooting up in great blasts of blue fire from cracks and holes in the cement floor.

What was left of the door was covered in flames, the door frame itself collapsing. Jason kept driving toward the door, ignoring the flames and dragging Will with him.
He’s going to kill us
, Will thought in a flash of hallucinatory clarity as the flames engulfed the world around them, and then it was Will who was pulling Jason, away from the door and the fire, to the wall opposite of their shooting position.

“Wrong way, Will!” Jason screamed, but the voice was small in Will’s head, and he ignored the words, continuing to haul Jason like an ornery calf toward a wall while the fire built around them, burning hotter by the second and stealing the oxygen from his lungs.

There was a smell within the flames—an odor of burning chemicals and something almost euphoric Will had a hard time figuring out—but he didn’t hate the smell, it was just overpowering. Jason shoved him around a blast of purple flame that appeared from the concrete to Will’s left, and then there was nothing in front of them but a wall. Will put his left hand on Jason’s shoulder, the AR still clutched in his right, and shoved him into the wall, directly into a square of aluminum divided
by two steel beams. Jason flew into it without resistance, Will jumping behind him into it.

Jason landed in the snow, and Will fell next to him. An aluminum panel from the warehouse wall was smoldering underneath them, and Will rolled away from the heat to the surprising comfort of the wet snow.

The flames had scorched his coat, taken the hair from his head. His eyebrows and scalp felt raw and sticky and chafed in the wind.

As noise from the collapsing building continued, Jason stood, looking to Will like some Viking warrior. Smoke poured off his smoldering friend, the wind and ruins of the building adding to the picture, as Jason shouldered the AK-47 and fired four shots into the retreating black Cadillac SUV. Then the magazine was empty, the last round left the barrel, and the bolt locked back, ready for a new magazine. Jason dropped the gun and grabbed Will by what remained of the back of his coat, forcing him to stand.

“OK, OK,” Jason said, grabbing his knees. “Time to get our shit togeth—”

An explosion from behind them sent both men staggering forward. Chunks of the building were going everywhere, and the storm was still exploding around them.

When things had settled down, at least as far as the disintegrating building was concerned, Jason turned to him. “Will, this is going to suck, but we need to get back to your brother and that gas station. Can you help me?”