The prisoners charged through the gap, yelling “Now! Now!” into the snowy mouth of the wind and trampling several of their number underfoot.Cambry also lunged, got one of the compact assault rifles, then had it snatched out of his hands. “That’s mine, muhfuh,” Ted Trezewski snarled.There was less than twenty yards between the shattered barn doors and the back of the store. The mob swept across the gap, shouting NOW! NOW! NOW!
The poker-table went over with a crash, spilling crap everywhere. The perimeter alarm went off as the first internees struck the double-strung fence and were either fried or hooked like fish on the oversized bundles of barbs. Moments later the alarm’s honking, pulsing bray was joined by a whooping siren, the General Quarters alert which was sometimes referred to as Situation Triple Six, the end of the world. In the plastic Porta-Potty sentry huts, surprised and frightened faces peered out dazedly.
“The barn!” someone shouted. “Collapse in on the barn! It’s an escape!”
The sentries trotted out into the snow, many of them bootless, moving along the outside of the fence, unaware that it had been shorted out by the weight of more than eighty kamikaze deer-hunters, all screaming NOW at the top of their lungs, even as they jittered and fried and died.
No one noticed the single man-tall, skinny, wearing a pair of old-fashioned horn-rim specs-who left from the back of the barn and set out diagonally across the drifts filling the paddock. Although Henry could neither see nor sense anyone paying attention to him, he began to run. He felt horribly exposed under the brilliant lights, and the cacophony of the siren and the perimeter alarm made him feel panicky and half-crazy… made him feel the way Duddits’s crying had, that day behind Tracker Brothers.
He hoped to God Underhill was waiting for him. He couldn’t tell, the snow was too thick to see the far end of the paddock, but he would be there soon enough and then he would know.
9
Kurtz had everything on but one boot when the alarm went off and the emergency lights went on, flooding this godforsaken piece of ground with even more glare. He felt no surprise, no dismay, only a mixture of relief and chagrin. Relief that whatever had been chewing on his nerve-endings was now out in the open. Chagrin that this fucking mess hadn’t held off for another two hours. Another two hours and he could have balanced the books on the whole deal.
He jerked open the door of the Winnebago with his right hand, still holding his other boot in his left. A savage roaring came from the barn, the sort of warrior’s cry to which his heart responded in spite of everything. The gale-force wind thinned it a little, but not much; they were all in it together, it seemed. From somewhere in their well-fed, timorous, it-can’t-happen-here ranks, a Spartacus had arisen-who would have thunk it?
It’s the goddam telepathy, he thought. His instincts, always superb, told him this was serious trouble, that he was watching an operation go tits-up on a truly grand scale, but he was smiling in spite of that. Got to be the goddam telepathy. They smelled out what was coming…and someone decided to do something about it.
As he watched, a motley mob of men, most in parkas and orange hats, came moiling through the sagging, shattered barn doors. One fell on a splintered board and was impaled like a vampire. Some stumbled in the snow and were trampled under. AR the lights were on now. Kurtz felt like a man with a ringside seat at a prizefight. He could see everything.
Wings of escapees, fifty or sixty in each complement, peeled off as neatly as squads in a drill-team and charged at the fence on either side of the ratty little store. Either they didn’t know there was a lethal dose of electricity coursing through the smoothwire or they didn’t care. The rest of them, the main body, charged directly at the back of the store. That was the weakest point in the perimeter, but it didn’t matter. Kurtz thought it was all going to go.
Never in any of his contingency plans had he so much as considered this scenario: two or three hundred overweight November warriors mounting a no-guts-no-glory banzai charge. He had never expected them to do anything but stay put, clamoring for due process right up to the point where they were barbecued.
“Not bad, boys,” Kurtz said. He smelled something else starting to burn-probably his goddam career-but the end had been coming anyway, and he’d picked one hell of an operation to go out on, hadn’t he? As far as Kurtz was concerned, the little gray men from space were strictly secondary. If he ran the news, the headline above the fold would read: SURPRISE! NEW-AGE AMERICANS SHOW SOME BACKBONE! Outstanding. It was almost a shame to cut them down.
The General Quarters siren rose and fell in the snowy night. The first wave of men hit the back of the store. Kurtz could almost see the whole place shudder.
“That goddam telepathy,” Kurtz said, grinning. He could see his guys responding, the first wave from the sentry huts, more coming from the motor-pool, the commissary, and the semi trailer-boxes that were serving as makeshift barracks. Then the smile on Kurtz’s face began to fade, replaced by an expression of puzzlement. “Shoot them,” he said. “Why don’t you shoot them?”
Some were firing, but not enough-nowhere near enough. Kurtz thought he smelled panic. His men weren’t shooting because they had gone chickenshit. Or because they knew they were next.
“The goddam telepathy,” he said again, and suddenly automatic rifle fire began inside the store. The windows of the office where he and Owen Underhill had had their original conference lit up in brilliant stutterflashes of light. Two of them blew out. A man attempted to exit the second of these, and Kurtz had time to recognize George Udall before George was seized by the legs and jerked back inside.
The guys in the office were fighting, at least, but of course they would; in there they were fighting for their lives. The laddie-bucks who had come running were, for the most part, still running. Kurtz thought about dropping his boot and grabbing his nine-millimeter. Shooting a few skedaddlers. Bagging his limit, in fact. It was falling down all around him, why not?
Underhill, that was why not. Owen Underhill had played a part in this snafu. Kurtz knew that as well as he knew his own name. This stank of line-crossing, and crossing the line was an Owen Underhill specialty.
More shooting fi7om Gosselin’s office screams of pain… then triumphant howls. The computer-savvy, Evian-drinking, salad-eating Goths had taken their objective. Kurtz slammed the Winnebago’s door on the scene and hurried back to the bedroom to call Freddy Johnson. He was still carrying his boot.
10
Cambry was on his knees behind Old Man Gosselin’s desk when the first wave of prisoners smashed its way in. He was opening drawers, looking frantically for a gun. The fact that he didn’t find one very likely saved his life.
“NOW! NOW! NOW!” the oncoming prisoners screamed.
There was a monstrous thud against the back of the store, as if a truck had driven into it. From outside, Cambry could hear a juicy crackling sound as the first detainees hit the fence. The lights in the office began to flicker.
“Stand together, men!” Danny O’Brian cried. “For the love of Christ, stand toge-”
The rear door came off its hinges with so much force that it actually skittered backward across the room, shielding the first of the screaming men who clogged the doorway. Cambry ducked, hands laced over the back of his head, as the door fell on the desk at an angle with him beneath it, in the kneehole.
The sound of rifles on full auto was deafening in the tiny room, drowning out even the screams of the wounded, but Cambry understood that not all of them were firing. Trezewski, Udall, and O’Brian were, but Coleman, Everett, and Ray Parsons were only standing there with their weapons held to their chests and dazed expressions on their faces.
From his accidental shelter, Gene Cambry saw the prisoners charge across the room, saw the first of them caught by the bullets and thrown like scarecrows; saw their blood splash across the walls and the bean-supper posters and the OSHA notices. He saw George Udall throw his gun at two beefy young men in orange, then whirl and lunge at one of the windows. George got halfway out and was then yanked back; a man with Ripley growing on his cheek like a birthmark sank his teeth into George’s calf as if it were a turkey drumstick while another man silenced the screaming head at the other end of George’s body by jerking it briskly to the left. The room was blue with powdersmoke, but he saw Al Coleman throw his gun down and pick up the chant-“Now! Now! Now!” And he saw Ray Parsons, normally the most pacific of men, turn his rifle on Danny O’Brian and blow his brains out.