The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (34 page)

More than enough.

Chapter 34

IN THE RANGER STATION,
Kimberlain, Hedda, and Chalmers finished strapping on their gear. Special harnesses made it possible to sling the bug sprayers turned flamethrowers around the Ferryman’s and Hedda’s backs like scuba tanks. The black iron three-foot water pipes, minibazookas in effect, were slung by straps from their shoulders. Kimberlain had two, Hedda and Chalmers one each. They shared the six pipe bombs equally, and all three wore their twelve-gauges loosely across the center of their backs to maximize accessibility. Each needed to keep a dry pocket for extra fuses, lighters, and cigarettes or risk the possibility that none of their makeshift weapons were going to work.

“We’ve got to find out where the boy is,” Hedda said suddenly when they were ready to venture back out into the storm.

“You’d head there first if you knew,” Kimberlain concluded.

“Damn right.”

“But we don’t know Tiny Tim will. Remember, he didn’t hit his primary targets first in any of the previous sites. It’s him we’ve got to stop, Hedda, him we’ve got to find.”

“We’re talking about my son, your nephew!”

“Do you really want to know him?”

Her mind wavered. “I want to … save him.”

“Then we stop Seckle.”

“Should we split … up?” Chalmers asked, his speaker emitting barely a whisper in the driving storm.

“We stay together until we figure out how late in the game we’re coming in.”

“You think he’s already started?” Hedda posed fearfully.

“It’s time to find out,” Kimberlain told her, and led the way back into the storm.

Tiny Tim had brought six claymore mines with him and used them all. Planting them took more time than he would have preferred to spend, but it would prove worth it.

Claymores were basically plastic explosives layered in a sheet with upward of seven hundred ball bearings. Seckle was using them as booby traps, with trip wires extended out in two directions. As soon as the guests fleeing for their cars jiggled the wire, detonation would result, forcing the survivors to swing back in terror.

Tiny Tim finished setting his final claymore in the soaked ground, careful to camouflage his handiwork with grass. He had set the mines along a perimeter those rushing from both clusters of cabins would have to cross to reach their cars. The thought of the tumultuous blasts and resulting shrieks of agony made him see clearly now how this visit was going to be quite different from his first three.

In the others chaos had been avoided in favor of a precise, orderly progression. Tonight was going to be just the opposite. Tonight he would use fear as an ally, as efficient as any bomb he could plant.

The change would be welcome, perhaps even preferred. Tiny Tim rose and moved on toward cabin 12½.

“Stop!” Kimberlain said suddenly, voice rising through the sounds of the storm.

“What?” Hedda started.

“Look down.”

She did. Her eyes had trouble picking up anything in the rain-slick darkness, and she was about to look back at the Ferryman when she saw the bulge. It looked like a small bubble in the wet ground, a portion torn up and then haphazardly replaced like a divot on a golf course.

“Claymore!” she realized. “But he never used mines before. What’s it mean?”

“It means this site is different. He must be expecting some of the families to run. That’s what the mines are for.”

“Can you deactivate them?”

Kimberlain’s wet gaze was noncommittal. “Never my specialty.”

“I can, but—”

“Mine,” came Chalmers’s voice through his speaker on its last reserves. “My … specialty. In Nam … Demolitions.”

Hedda exchanged glances with the Ferryman.

“I’ll need a … knife,” Chalmers said.

Hedda and Kimberlain yanked blades out and presented them, their motions mirroring each other.

“He must have placed them all in this area,” Kimberlain told him. “But we don’t know how many.”

“I’ll find them,” Chalmers assured in a voice that sounded almost normal.

He handed over the pipe bombs he had been allotted and crouched down to go to work on the first claymore they had found, while Hedda and Kimberlain started on toward the two clusters of dark brown cabins nestled beneath the soaked trees.

“We should split up now,” Kimberlain proposed. “I’ll take the north row of cabins. You take the south, closer to the lake.”

“He’s going to start with the boy, isn’t he?”

The Ferryman hesitated. “He hasn’t before.”

“I’m talking about tonight.”

“Yes. I think he will.”

“And if one of us finds him …”

“It won’t take long for the other to know.”

For an instant, just as he reached cabin 12½, Tiny Tim thought he heard something. Impossible to tell in a storm like this, with the trees shifting from side to side with each gust of the wind and the insistent hiss of the rain. Could even be the excitement that was beginning to fill him as he neared the completion of his revenge upon Kimberlain.

He gazed one last time in the direction he thought the sound had come from. The clear sight provided by his night-vision goggles revealed nothing. Satisfied the night was his, Garth Seckle stepped through the screen door onto the porch of cabin 12½.

Chalmers was working on the third of the claymores. Under ordinary circumstances, the task would not have been difficult. But tonight was hardly ordinary. Locating them proved the easiest chore of all, surprisingly. Garth Seckle had not been expecting anyone to be looking and must have been pressed for time, so he had not done a good job of camouflaging the mines’ positions.

Chalmers still had to crawl on his belly to play it safe. He stayed there while he worked his knife under the slight mound marking each mine, unsettling the dirt in search of the blasting cap. Cut the wire connecting it to the main body, and the claymore was deactivated.

Chalmers severed the wire, disarming the third of the claymores. He lifted his face to the sky and let the storm wipe the sweat from it. Then, pulling himself along with hands clawing the muddied grass, Chalmers’s eyes probed ahead for the next claymore.

Hedda palmed her pistol, afraid she was gripping it too tightly. Fear festered inside her, as she moved almost blindly about the cabins. What if Tiny Tim found the boy before she or Kimberlain found him? Would the first scream she heard on this night of terror come from the son she had learned of just hours before? Unseen, unknown, he was another part of her life scrapped and discarded forever.

I don’t even know his name… .

She pressed on, with the storm doing its utmost to slow her.

Where was he? Where was the nephew of Kimberlain?

Cabin 12½ was fronted by a screened-in porch, beyond which lay three doors to three separate sections of a triplex.

Tiny Tim moved toward the first door he came to and found it unlocked. Once inside a short hallway followed, then a living room complete with television and air conditioner. Above him the blades of a ceiling fan churned slightly from the force of the storm pounding the roof. Beyond the living room were the bedrooms, three by the look of it. The flow of a flashlight or lantern snuck out from one, daylight bright through his night-vision goggles. Someone reading probably, maybe a mother secure in the certainty her children were safely asleep. Tiny Tim started that way and almost missed seeing the suitcases stacked neatly against the wall. He crouched and inspected the name tags.

Ramsey.

The Bermans would be in one of the other two, then. Tiny Tim exited as quietly as he had entered and moved on to next door.

Hedda stopped suddenly, fighting the storm for a clear view. A shape had appeared upon a porch of a cabin well down the row. She saw it ever so briefly, silhouetted between a pair of screen doors; one had just been closed, the other was being eased open.

A person going from one cabin to another. But if each cabin was reserved for a separate family …

Hedda began to run. The night and storm bled away in her path. The wind pushed her along instead of restraining her.

She readied her pistol. Close in, it remained the best weapon she had.

And close in was the way it was going to be.

The name Berman had been on a magazine Tiny Tim found atop a table within the den of the second cabin in the triplex. This time there were no lights other than what the night gave him, which was plenty because of his goggles. He could hear heavy snoring as he slid down the corridor. It was coming from the lone bedroom on the right. A man’s snoring. Then the Berman children would be on the left, a single bedroom this time.

Tiny Tim reached the door and pushed it open, the huge killing knife struggling to shine in the darkness.

Hedda saw only a shape first, then the naked glint of steel in its hand.

“
Stop!
”

Her scream preceded her gunshots by milliseconds that proved enough to freeze Tiny Tim and make him turn. She fired the nine-millimeter Browning as fast as she could pull the trigger.

“Ahhhhh!” he screamed after her bullets had impacted with a series of thumps that blew him backward down the hallway.

But he never left his feet, and suddenly one of his submachine guns was coming round and flaring silenced orange from its barrel.

Pfffffft … pfffffft … pfffffft …

She dove, but her eyes never left the hall down which Tiny Tim darted. Suddenly a figure sprinted from the bedroom where Tiny Tim had just emerged. A boy in sweatpants and T-shirt. A fresh hail of fire sped toward him.

Pfffffft … pfffffft … pfffffft …

“Get down!” she screamed at the boy who must have been her son. “
Get down!
”

The boy dropped to the floor and crawled the rest of the way into his adoptive parents’ bedroom. Hedda glimpsed two pajama-clad figures in the doorway who clutched the boy and pulled him into their room. More gunfire peppered the walls around them. Hedda fired blindly in the direction the shots had come from. The next staccato burst found her, and hot pain seared through her shoulder. She screamed in agony and fired five more rounds in the direction the orange glow of the shots had come from. Another bullet grazed her thigh. She felt herself crumbling, but still had the sense to fire back.

Click.

Her gun was empty. She hit the floor as a huge figure emerged into the corridor, nearly as tall as the ceiling. He saw her but didn’t fire, moving for the bedroom door that had been slammed and locked just seconds before.

A window! If there was a window, maybe they’d escaped through it!

Tiny Tim raised a booted foot and kicked the door in with a single thrust.

“No!” she screamed, reaching to her belt for one of the pipe bombs.

“
Seckle!
” a fresh voice boomed and the monster twisted its way.

Kimberlain charged in from the living room area, one of his black iron water pipes leveled before him.

BOOM!

Hedda covered her head as the blast’s reverberation blew the Ferryman down the hall. She glimpsed the massive shape of Tiny Tim rocketing backward into the air, straight through a window at the end of the hallway. Kimberlain darted by her, bringing his flamethrower’s copper wand down from its upright position behind him. He approached the window Tiny Tim had crashed through with a lighter held to the nozzle, ready to ignite the pressurized kerosene as soon as he opened the flow. Hedda climbed to her feet and limped toward him.

“Shit,” she heard him mutter when he peered through the shattered glass. And then she saw why.

The monster was gone.

Chapter 35

TINY TIM WAS DAZED,
but he never lost consciousness. He cursed himself for not anticipating the presence of the Ferryman. Who else could it have been, after all? No one, no one! And the woman! She could only be …

How had they found him here? How could they have known?

Somehow they had joined up. Seckle had anticipated everything else but that. The damn woman! She had spoiled his work at the worst possible time. His knife had been about to begin its plunge when her bullets thumped into the Kevlar that enclosed every bit of his midsection up to his throat.

She had missed her kill shots, though, and he would have had her if not for the blast fired by the Ferryman. It was like getting hit head-on by a car, and whatever it contained shredded his body armor and broke at least one of his ribs. Seckle found himself coughing frothy blood as soon as he pushed himself up from the spot where he had landed outside. His insides felt rearranged. Splinters of window glass pricked his scalp and neck. It was all he could do to lumber away to find time to reorganize his thinking.

They’d pay for this. How they’d pay …

Kimberlain’s nephew wasn’t dead yet, but he would be. He would fall with the others, because Tiny Tim was going to kill them all, every last one. Just follow the screams, he told himself.

Follow the screams.

“I’m going after him,” Kimberlain said, kneeling over Hedda.

“What about … the family?”

The Ferryman’s gaze turned back toward the bedroom. “The window’s open. They must have got out that way.”

“Then they’re outside. With him.”

“I’ll get Seckle,” he promised.

“You can’t. Not by yourself anyway. You already shot him, damn it! You blew him away and he still walked off.”

“He’s playing my game now.”

She grasped for his arm. “Help me up.”

“Stay here.”

She didn’t let go. “You can’t do it without me, not against him.”

Kimberlain shrugged and relented, easing her to her feet.

“The boy,” she started hesitantly. “I … saw him. I—”

Her words were cut off by a thundering blast that shook sawdust from the cabin walls. Kimberlain had to grasp tighter to keep her from falling back down.

“Claymore,” she muttered. “Chalmers didn’t get it done, damn it!”

He pulled away from her. “I’m going after Seckle.”

The panic had spread through the resort in a domino effect from cabin to cabin. A swarm of fleeing guests was converging on the slope down to the parking lot, just as Chalmers was approaching what he estimated to be the last of the mines. He cursed the timing, cursed the extra precision he had employed with the previous five sites. A few seconds faster with each one was all it would have taken. Now it was all for naught. The first pounding footstep that struck within a yard of the last claymore would blast dozens of people to hell. Worse, the blast’s percussion might trigger the remaining claymores, even though he had deactivated their blasting caps.