gwendolyngrace (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
gwendolyngrace) wrote2008-09-14 04:20 pm
gwendolyngrace) wrote2008-09-14 04:20 pm
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Fic Post: A Loaded God Complex (2/3)
Continued from Part One
Five minutes after Matt fainted, the music room smelled like a catbox. Sam figured maybe three-quarters of Mrs. Harris’s homeroom—and all of the fifth and sixth grade classes—had peed their pants and were too afraid or embarrassed to say anything. Not that the bastards holding them all would have let them go clean up, probably. But Sam thought they’d have to do something soon, because the smell was getting vomit-worthy. Way worse than him and Snyder’s dried up spatter. The music room had large windows, and even with the shades drawn, the sunlight came in bright and warm on the carpet. What’s more, the kids, both the ones in discomfort because they’d wet themselves, and the ones in discomfort having to smell it, were getting restless because of it.
The one Sam thought of as the sergeant, the one who’d threatened Matt to a faint, called his companion and the guard just outside the door over to the piano bench for a brief conference. Across the room, Sam saw Nate Delancy, Wally Linstrom, and another of Nate’s gang seize their opportunity. They got to their hands and knees and crawled from their homeroom cluster to the next group over. Then a few seconds later, they moved again. In between, they checked to make sure the guards were still distracted by their conversation. Sam frowned in anticipation. Nate was a penny ante crook and a schoolyard bully, but he was smart. Sam played a subconscious tennis match between the two factions, focusing on the guards and then swiveling to encourage Nate silently to “Move, move, move, NOW!” In his head he heard Squadron Leader Bartlett in Dean and Dad’s favorite movie, telling Danny and Billy to haul ass in the tunnels during the air raid: “We can get dozens out in this darkness!”
Unfortunately, it wasn’t dark, and they weren’t masked by the cover of a tunnel. And Sam wasn’t the only one watching. One of the fifth-graders saw, gasped, and pointed. Her classmates shushed her—loudly. The two guards looked up.
“You gave it away! I don’t believe you!” a ten-year-old said to his classmate.
Sam sighed through his nose, resignedly, disappointed. So did half the room—it made a collective noise like air being let out of a tire.
It didn’t take the guards long to discover Nate and his posse sitting in a group of much younger students.
“What are you little shitheads doing out of your spot?” the sergeant demanded to know.
Nate smirked. It reminded Sam of Dean that time he got pulled over for speeding and wound up getting busted for carrying a concealed weapon (and DUI, which he wasn’t). He just couldn’t resist twitting an authority figure (other than Dad), especially when he was scared. Even Dad, sometimes, when he was scared enough. And Nate was terrified.
“We’re student teachers,” Nate claimed. He couldn’t keep the “Fuck you” out of his voice, though (also just like Dean) and the sergeant hauled him up by his polo shirt to drag him over to the door.
“Well, Smitty, think we just found Chuck Norris,” Sarge announced.
He threw Nate toward the wall. Nate actually hung air for a second before stumbling and landing hard on his ass. There were a few nervous titters from the crowd, but mostly gasps of fear, when he hit. Smitty and the third guy picked Nate up. They held him while Sarge punched him once in the gut.
“We were going to take you in shifts down to your locker room,” the sergeant informed everyone else reproachfully while Nate moaned. He hung between the two guys holding up his arms. He looked really puny. He looked like they could snap him in half if they wanted.
Sam felt Chris’s hand again. He squeezed back. “Chris, just don’t look,” he suggested. “Look away.”
“I can’t,” Chris whispered.
“I know,” Sam agreed sadly. Even if he could make it easier for Chris, it wasn’t fair to Nate. Not that Nate had been fair to anyone, least of all Sam. And he knew for a fact that Nate stole Chris’s lunch money about twice a week. Still, in this weird prison, he was one of their own, standing against the enemy.
Dean would have laughed at Sam for putting it like that. You big girl, he would have said. It’s not poetry, dude. It’s not fucking Kipling or some shit. He was an asshole. He’s still an asshole, even if he doesn’t deserve to get creamed because he’s trying to escape.
The sergeant had continued, interfering with Dean’s voice in Sam’s thoughts. “We were going to let everyone change into clean clothes. Take a shower.” He lifted Nate’s head by his hair. “Chuck here fucked that up for you.”
If some of the kids had suppressed guffaws or gasps when he’d said, “shitheads,” they audibly reacted now. One fifth-grader turned to his neighbor and said, “He said the F-word again,” as if he couldn’t contain the commentary. As if someone were going to tell Sarge to watch his language, the way Dad still did occasionally when he felt like a round of, Do as I say, not as I do.
Dad would’ve also said that Nate was taking a fucking stupid risk. Dad would’ve told Sam his first priority was to look sharp, stay alive, keep everyone else alive if he could. Thinking about Dad helped. He and Dean had to be close. They might even already be here.
“Help’s coming,” he whispered to Chris, but it was for himself. “Help is on the way. It’s gonna be okay.”
Meanwhile, Sarge was telling everyone that it was Nate’s fault they had to sit in their own urine or smell everyone else’s and it was Nate’s fault that they weren’t going to get lunch, either. After a couple more sentences, one of the guards punched Nate in the gut again. They pulled off his t-shirt. Nate’s thin, flabby chest was already bruised and turning dark from the beating. Sam wanted one of the men—just one!—to realize that he was torturing a little kid—okay, so Nate was really a year older, maybe two, if the rumors of how often he’d been held back were true—but still. He was so young compared to his tormentors.
But they didn’t have an attack of conscience. Sarge grabbed a zip-tie from his pocket and used it to bind Nate’s hands at the wrist. Nate had started crying somewhere along the way, Sam wasn’t sure when, but he could hear him now clearly, blubbering and begging them to stop.
Finally, one of the guards hesitated, pulled Sarge aside. Nate slumped against his other assailant, either trying to catch his breath or just unable to stand anymore under his own power.
“If you don’t have the balls for this, Drake, you might as well be one of the chattel. That what you want?”
“No, I—”
“We’ll put you in the gym with the others if that’s how you feel, Drake. Don’t think I won’t do it—”
“I don’t have a problem with our mission, Martin, but would Dr. Fornham approve of…of despoiling a postulant?”
It was interesting, sort of, to watch the “Sergeant” (Martin, he now had a name) and his “troops” start to argue. Sam felt a little jolt of adrenaline surge through him; if Martin couldn’t maintain discipline in his ranks, he wasn’t so scary, after all. Maybe if the other two captors kept balking, Martin could be overruled…or overpowered.
Meanwhile, “Sergeant” Martin had pointed to Nate’s tear-streaked and snotty face. “That. Is not a postulant,” he pronounced. “And I think I know Fornham’s plan better than you, Drake.” He drew his knife from his belt. “In fact, it’s just as good a time as any to enhance the level of fear, the better to whet our Lord’s appetite.”
The second Sam saw the blade, he threw caution to the wind. He sat up straight and tapped Chris on the knee to get his attention. “Tell everyone to close their eyes,” he said to Chris.
He told Sarah Boyle on his other side, too, repeating a double-tap with his fingertips, the way Dad sometimes thumped him to pull his focus back to him. “Pass it on. Shut your eyes. Don’t watch. It’s like the end of Raiders—you don’t want to see.”
He didn’t follow his own advice, but watched while the round of Telephone took effect around the room. Some of the kids—little and not—had already figured it out on their own before his message got very far. Good thing, because Martin made his intention clear when he slashed the knife across Nate’s arm.
Sam wondered how long it’d be before they added vomit to the smells they had to endure, along with lingering gunsmoke, pee, and blood.
~*~
“You’re not one of them,” Lee said to the stranger, gun level. He was dressed mostly like all of Fornham’s men, minus a bulletproof vest, but not all of the kidnappers had those. He wore a green cotton work shirt over a dark grey tee, fatigue trousers and combat boots, but his hair was long and he had skipped a shave that morning. Maybe a couple mornings. The thing that really gave him away, though, wasn’t that he was a little older than even Martin, Fornham’s most staunch follower, and it wasn’t that he looked more comfortable with his weapon than most of Fornham’s people. It wasn’t even that Lee hadn’t seen him before, and Lee had been trained to remember faces. It was the look in the guy’s eyes: Intense, but at the same time, tired and half dead. Like he might not even know how to smile. Lee squinted at him to cover how discomfited the man’s expression made him.
“Neither are you,” the guy returned. “You’re too military for this bunch. Cop?”
Lee hesitated. The Mexican standoff wasn’t bothering this guy at all, but he wasn’t lowering his weapon, either. “Where the hell did you come from? You’re not a hostage.”
“And you’re not a kidnapper. What’s your point?”
“Lower your weapon is my point.”
He waited a second, but then clicked the safety on and dropped his arms.
“Thank you.” Lee did the same, took a step forward. “Now do me a favor and leave. You shouldn’t be here.”
The guy snorted. “Trust me, I know what’s going on here.”
“Oh, is that right? And what’s that?”
“Bunch of cultists figure they can raise a major demon and appease him with human sacrifice,” the man said, cold as last week’s sashimi, “And I’m gonna stop’em.”
“Sir, you’re a civilian. You need to get—”
“Save it,” he said dismissively. “Your men ain’t getting in. Too much risk to the children. I’d tell you to get to safety, but I need your firepower.” He scowled as if he could taste something ashy in his mouth. “Look, just go back in there and pretend I’m not here. Maybe you can help get the kids out.”
“Pretend you’re not…. I don’t even know who you are. I get a name?”
“John,” he said, not indicating whether this was his last or first name. “Posner’s your cover. Real name?”
“Scanlon.”
John nodded. “Now they think you’re in the club, right?”
“I’ve done everything but drink the KoolAid.”
“Good.” He checked his watch. “There’s not a lot of them. You’re gonna need to get to where they’re holding the kids—is it all one location, or what?”
“No. They’re in groups…some in the gym, some in larger classrooms.”
“Fuck. All right. Tell me everything you know about where the hostages are stationed.”
Lee shook his head. He was not about to get himself and a lot of other people killed because some paramilitary nut thought he could contain the situation. “Look, I know you think you can help—”
“Son, I’m the only chance you’ve got.” Suddenly, John’s gun was pointed straight at Lee’s heart, steady as Wyatt Earp. “And I’d hate to take you out, but you fight me on this, and I will put you down for the count.”
“You’re so worried about these kids you’d kill me to do it your way?” Lee asked incredulously. He needed a better handle on John’s mental state if he was going to negotiate him out of getting himself killed.
John snorted. “Never said I’d kill you, officer.”
Lee considered rushing John. He considered talking to him more, but the deadness in John’s eyes stopped him. He nodded acquiescence, figuring he could always double back and take John out later, if necessary.
“Okay,” John said approvingly, all business. “Now, I need to know how many hostiles, where they’re positioned, what ordinance they carry, and most importantly, how close-knit they are. What’s their chain of command?”
“Fornham. Then Martin—he’s fairly well in charge of the hostages.” He outlined the other major players.
“Thanks.” John backed away a step, then paused. “Listen. I’ve got…a man on the inside. Possibly helpful if we can get to him.”
“A hostage?” Lee asked.
“Yes,” John admitted after a beat. “But if we can get him away, he can turn sapper.”
Lee sighed. He had found a phone a little while ago, so he knew the cops were nearby, if not on scene already, but John had a point. They would take hours of standoff before they moved in, and Fornham intended to be done long before the police resorted to a full-on assault. It would be helpful to have three of them taking out the sentries and guards one-by-one, without raising an alarm. It wouldn’t work for Fornham’s inner circle, but it could at least even the odds a little. If John knew a maintenance man or even a teacher who was trained to fight, it might be worth asking that person to assume the risk. “Okay—describe him—tell me how to find him without giving myself away. Maybe I can help.”
John hesitated. “He’s about four-foot-ten, one-twenty, looks pudgy and clumsy but believe me, it’s muscle. Light brown hair, probably hanging in his eyes. He won’t be as scared as the others. He’s with homeroom 146, if that helps.”
“He’s a student?” Lee’s voice made a cracking noise he hadn’t heard since he’d been the right age to attend Crenshaw himself.
“Yeah, eighth grade, but don’t let that fool you. Just work the Beach Boys into the conversation and he’ll know you’re able to help.”
“What, like the lyrics?”
“No, the phrase: The Beach Boys. He’ll know it’s code.”
If he’d felt guilty about asking a civilian to risk himself in order to give other cops a way in, that was nothing compared to the indignation he felt at John’s suggestion. “You’re crazy if you think a teenager—”
“We do not have a lot of options and we do not have the time to argue about it. You either believe me or you don’t, but trust me, you don’t want this thing to go down. This is gonna make Oklahoma City look like child’s play if they succeed.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Right now, I’m your best chance. And you’re mine. Don’t fuck it up.”
~*~
Dean pressed himself flush between the wall and the outside of a classroom door. Next door to his left, a guard stood watch over a room filled with scared students younger than Sammy. He wanted the guard to walk by so that he could overpower him from behind, knock him out without any hint of an alarm.
He was on a second-level, outdoor walkway with four science labs. In the first one, Dean had temporarily stashed his duffel while he scoped out the hallway. Now he was crouched in the shelter of the second door, while the guard stood outside the third. Trouble was, the guy had come out, shut the door behind him, and now he was just standing there. Staring down the corridor in Dean’s direction, almost as if he expected to be jumped. Guard the other way, Dean thought at him. Go be vigilant with your back to me, you bastard.
After what seemed at least five minutes, during which Dean concentrated on holding perfectly still so that the door wouldn’t swing, keeping it as a shield between himself and the sentry, the asshole remembered to look the other way.
Dean ducked out and clipped his target solidly on the back of the head with his shotgun-butt. The guard dropped and Dean pumped his fist in the air in victory. He cast a nervous glance inside the room. Another cultist was inside, but wasn’t paying the door any attention. Score two for Dean.
Moving the unconscious body turned out not to be as easy as KO’ing him in the first place. The guy must have lined his pockets with lead. Dean tugged hard on his arms and legs, trying to pull him into the first empty science lab quietly and before anyone saw. The jerk’s fatigue jacket caught on the concrete walkway. He scraped his face up, too, and Dean froze when the man groaned in discomfort. He didn’t wake up, though.
“Shit,” Dean muttered. He bent down and hoisted the guy over one shoulder to fireman-carry him back to where Dean had left his stuff.
It only took a few seconds after that to dump him, tied to the legs of a heavy lab bench. But when Dean slipped back outside, he came face-to-face with a third kidnapper. He swore he’d checked both directions before leaving the classroom, yet here was one of the bad guys, just looking at him dumbly. He must have come up the stairs while Dean was inside the lab.
They stared at each other for a moment in silence. The new demon-worshipper looked about ten years older than Dean, with dirty blond hair and defined muscles under his bulletproof vest. Even with the element of surprise, he’d have been a lot harder to take down than anyone Dean had seen so far. He hoped that he looked at least as difficult to beat. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t attacked or raised the alarm right away.
“What are you doing here?” the guy asked, with emphasis on “you” like he’d already encountered someone who shouldn’t be there. Which meant…. No. Impossible.
Dean lashed out viciously with his shotgun stock. His opponent caught it, if a little awkwardly, and wrenched it away. Dean heard it clatter to the pavement.
Rookie mistake, Dean berated himself. He fired a quick kick at the man’s shins. He danced out of range; Dean followed, aware that he had to act fast or the guy could raise the alarm any second.
“Wait a second, kid!” the military-looking guy growled at him while returning Dean’s right hook with a swipe of his own.
“So you can cold-cock me?” Dean snarked. “Don’t think so.”
He threw a one-two punch combination. The guy blocked and ducked inside Dean’s arm length to close in. He grabbed Dean’s arm. Dean twisted away, but his opponent hung on and swept his leg. Dean tripped, fell forward, caught himself on one hand, and rolled away. His wrist smarted from the impact against the concrete, but he rolled up into a crouch and chopped out at the man’s knee.
“Jesus,” the guy hissed. “I said hang on. Any chance you’re a Beach Boy?”
It could have been a trick. They couldn’t have caught Dad so quickly, but if they had, they were hardcore enough to have tortured him into revealing he had a partner, made him tell the codes. But Dad wouldn’t have given him up that easily. Dean refused to accept that Dad would have been captured by these idiots at all. He pulled to a stand and leapt out with a high kick. Again the guy dodged. Then something happened. Dean wasn’t sure how, but his assailant doubled behind him and locked his already tender wrist behind his back. And twisted. Hard.
“Ow!” someone said. It couldn’t have been Dean, because it sounded really girly, and that just didn’t compute. He felt something in his wrist grind and it made his teeth rattle. Another little squeak of pain emitted from near his ears. But it wasn’t him. Okay: It hurt. But it wasn’t him.
“Shut up,” the guy said, shaking him. “Now don’t make me hog-tie you, kid. Answer the question: Are you here with that John dude?”
Dean set his jaw, chin jutting out. “Go to hell, you demon-worshipping freak.”
The guy laughed in his ear. “That’s Officer Scanlon to you, kiddo. So are you a Beach Boy, or do I have two separate vigilante whackjobs on my hands?”
“Fuck you, asshole,” Dean said defiantly.
“Nice, kid,” the guard observed. “Look, I’m on your side, okay?” he continued with a sigh, as if annoyed to have to reveal a secret. “I’m a cop.”
Dean laughed, despite the fact that his wrist felt like a three-alarm fire. “That means you’re on our side? Man, you don’t know anything.”
“Okay,” the cop replied, and it sounded like a decision. Sure enough, he slammed Dean against the wall. “Listen, these men? They’re for real, jack-off, so your little amateur hour Rambo act had better wise up fast. I want you to shake your skinny ass right back where it came from. Go back to your school, kid. Let the professionals handle this.”
“I am a profess—” Dean began to protest, but another voice interrupted them.
“Posner? What the hell is this?”
Posner, Dean’s captor, glanced in the direction of his comrade. The fourth guy, a ginger-haired twenty-something, had come around the corner, brought over, no doubt, by the sounds of struggle. “It’s nothing, Gilchrist. Just a piece of trash I was escorting to the dumpster.”
Dean struggled and Posner did that twist again and Dean’s wrist exploded in pain. “OW!” he heard himself shout. Damn. He had to work on his pain tolerance.
“Let’s take him to Fornham—he might not be alone,” Gilchrist suggested.
“Nah, he’s just a kid thinks he’s Schwarzenegger,” Posner said. “Took out Miller, but Corey’s okay down there,” he continued, jerking his head toward the third classroom, whose exterior guard Dean had already knocked out. “Already asked if he’s alone.”
“And you believed him?” Gilchrist scoffed.
Posner jerked up hard on Dean’s injured arm. “I was persistent,” he assured his companion.
But the funny thing was, although he made a huge motion against Dean’s sleeve, it didn’t actually jostle the wrist. Dean made a show of pain.
“I’m alone! I swear!” he squealed.
Gilchrist shrugged. “We should still take him to Fornham.”
“Fornham’s got more important things to do,” Posner pointed out. “How about I throw him in with the teachers?”
“How about right down there with Corey?” Gilchrist gestured to the third classroom.
“Sure,” Posner agreed. He pushed Dean ahead of him, Gilchrist on his right. “Hope you liked sixth grade, kid,” he told him. Dean felt a light squeeze on his arm, jiggling the flesh like Posner wanted him to fight. So he did. Posner whipped him around in an “attempt” to subdue him, which gave them the opportunity for eye contact. Posner’s eyes slid to the right a second before he feinted left. Dean ducked away.
“Shit!” Gilchrist cried, just as Dean reached him and punched out with his good hand. Gilchrist went down.
“Good work, kid,” Posner said, coming up to him.
Dean grinned. He drew a breath to make some smart-ass comment about how Posner had underestimated him when Posner’s eyes went wide in fear. Dean whipped around. He barely had time to register the face of the man coming out of the classroom, much less the pistol pointed at him, before his ears darn near exploded from the deafening shot. It was twice as loud as normal because of the covered balcony bouncing the sound back at him.
He didn’t know when the shooter had entered the corridor, or how much he’d seen. He just had a vague impression of stubble and piercing blue eyes, then his vision narrowed to the gun barrel and all he could think was, “I’m gonna die.”
Posner was quicker, though, and before Dean realized what had happened, the older man had pulled him down and landed on the ground in front of him. Bright red blood was staining the armhole of the vest where it met his shirt.
Dean didn’t think; he brought his backup weapon out in less than half a second and returned fire. The terrorist—Corey, Gilchrist had said his name was Corey—went down loudly, clutching his gut. In his haste, Dean had rushed the trigger; Corey was alive. Dean wasn’t sure whether he felt relieved or disappointed. He had no time to puzzle over it, though. He grabbed Posner under his arms, ignoring his groan of pain, and pulled him all the way down the corridor back to the lab where he’d stashed both his duffel and Miller, the first guard. Outside, he could hear the kids moving into the hallway.
“Shoulda…secured his weapons,” Posner croaked. “They’ll…radio.”
“Sorry, I was concentrating on getting us the fuck out of there,” Dean snapped. He threw the lock on the classroom door. Even though it opened out, into the hallway, he set about barricading it with the nearest heavy piece of furniture. It turned out to be a glass-doored cabinet full of lab equipment.
“I don’t think anyone’s coming,” he confirmed, peering out what remained of the lead-lined window. The students were venturing out and down in little groups. Much as he wanted to offer a place to hide, he didn’t want to be responsible for them if they got pinned down. Plus, children on the loose would present the kidnappers with conflicting priorities, and might even keep him and Posner alive a little longer. Eventually the kids moved away and only Gilchrist and Corey remained. Satisfied they were as safe as possible for the time being, he set about finding alcohol or something to clean Posner’s wound.
“Think it hit bone,” Posner commented when Dean approached with a bottle of peroxide and some cotton batting. “They’ll radio. Tell everyone they’ve got a rat.”
“Can’t be helped,” Dean grunted. “I’ll get scissors.” He also pulled out two containers of salt. Before returning to Posner, he poured lines on the windowsills and on the floor around his barricade.
“Expecting giant killer slugs?” Posner asked.
“Yeah,” Dean quipped back. “Really damn fast ones.” He knelt by Posner’s side and cut away his sleeve carefully.
Posner had a tattoo. The design was so familiar that it made Dean do a double-take, looking for the scars Dad had got last year when a kappa had raked its claws across his biceps. The stripes had broken the line of the anchor and made his eagle’s talons look deformed. But Posner’s tat was pristine, black, and proudly declaring “Semper Fi.”
“S’matter, kid? Never seen a Marine before?”
“No, just….” Dean couldn’t finish his thought. “Dude, you took a bullet for me.”
“Yeah, well. Not one of my best decisions. Still, they’d hardly let me stay on the force if I let some whackjob fanatic shoot a teenager in cold blood.”
Dean swallowed hard. “Let’s look at that shoulder,” he offered.
~*~
John had pressed Scanlon for passwords and intel, all the while inwardly cursing his luck. Yes, Scanlon might be useful; more likely, he’d turn John in as soon as the whole thing was over. If he survived—it was just as likely Scanlon would get himself eighty-six’d trying to control the situation, or countermanding John’s actions.
Still, running into Scanlon made getting close to the terrorists more feasible than ever. The ease with which he’d penetrated this far already surprised him; now with passwords and some names and posts, his chances of getting to Fornham approached less than a thousand to one. More to the point, Scanlon had a fair idea of which classrooms had eighth-graders, which meant John could get Sam out. He was already devising ways Sam could help from a position of relative safety.
Though a little older than most of Fornham’s men, the password earned him a funny look, but no challenges, from the guard outside the gym.
About a hundred kids sat in despondent groups all around the room. Some of the older kids were in the bleachers. Most of them were on the court, cross-legged or leaning on each other for support. They looked pretty ragged, but then, they’d been there for hours already.
The boy’s body in their midst didn’t improve their spirits, either.
The kid was hanging from one of the basketball hoops, neck at a sickening angle. His body was dripping blood from long slices down his legs that turned his gym socks and sneakers red. The room stank of blood, piss, and vomit.
“What the hell happened here?” John frowned, suppressing his outrage.
“One of Martin’s from up in the music room. Acted up. So Martin made an example of him.”
John grunted, unable to trust his voice. He remembered the first time he saw a child get murdered. He’d been a boy about this one’s age, back in Da Nang. He’d hung around base until some of the guys started giving him odd jobs. One day he’d stolen a grenade out of Deacon’s kit and threatened everyone in the barracks. John, barely eighteen, had tried to talk to the kid, but his Lieutenant had merely walked up behind John, aimed, and shot the boy between his eyes.
He hadn’t even pulled the pin.
There’d been others, of course, boys pressed into turning soldier too young, younger than Dean when Dean started shadowing John. But they’d all been combatants, even if they hadn’t been able to choose their fate. This? Was so not that.
He swallowed, trying not to choke on a tongue gone suddenly dry. It wasn’t Sam—he was sure of that, at least, and felt both relieved and guilty for feeling relieved.
A quick scan was enough to verify that Sam wasn’t even in the gym. There were four guards total; two in the bleachers that lined one side and two on the basketball courts, spaced roughly evenly between the hoops and the doors to the locker rooms. About a hundred and twenty kids were sitting in groups, perhaps two thirds of them younger than Sam, and of the remaining forty, fewer than half were male. Sam’s mop-top and his alert, judgmental eyes weren’t anywhere in the mix.
But he was stuck now. He couldn’t leave without a child, to support the story he’d told the sentry outside. “Fornham wants one of the brats now,” he said, repeating it to the nearest one inside. “Something about a test run.”
“Uh…sure,” the guard said, confused, but hiding it. “How about one of the little shitheads up in the bleachers?” He pointed to a group of boys with one of his two buddies standing near them. Several of the boys had their hands zip-tied, and one of them had duct tape across his mouth.
“That’ll work,” John muttered noncommittally and shuffled over. He climbed the bleachers with long steps, skipping the middle stair on each level. He was aware of a hundred pairs of once-innocent eyes watching him. He reached the knot of boys who’d been set aside as troublemakers and said, “Fall in, you brats. Eyes front.”
They made a ramshackle troop, but evidently they’d been cowed by their treatment—and that of their schoolmate.
“Mister, listen, Nate didn’t do anything—” one of the boys started to plead.
“Shut up!” the guard told the child. “Martin says he did plenty. You want to end up on the other side of the court, you maggot? There’s three other backboards to use.”
“Pipe down,” John said to both the guard and the kids, trying to sound more bored than disgusted. He sized up the boy to the left of Duct-Tape-Mouth. He was Sam’s age and looked familiar, with the blond rat-tail and his heart-shaped face. John couldn’t place him, but he thought he might know where Sam’s last class had been when the raid hit. “You. Come on.”
They headed down the steps toward the exit. Halfway between the bleachers and the door, John realized his mistake. The kid was familiar because he had latched on to Sam in Sam’s first week at Crenshaw. Name was Billy…something. He and Sam used the same bus stop. One day he’d followed Sam to the house they were renting, barged in over Sam’s protests, and roused John from a deep sleep on the couch.
John had been upright, gun retrieved from under his pillow, and ready to fire at the “intruder” inside of a second. He’d come back to himself only because of Sam’s hasty move to pull Billy out of the line of fire. It had taken Billy all of three more seconds to hear his mother calling; it had taken much longer for John to listen to Sam’s claim that Billy had not been invited.
What the hell, John reasoned. A little five-K run never hurt a growing boy.
But now, Billy was pressing close to his hip like John hadn’t scared the crap out of him the first time they’d ever seen each other. John hoped none of the four kidnappers thought it odd that Billy seemed willing to go with him. He kept a firm grip on Billy’s arm to keep him moving quickly out of the gym and to make it look like he was man-handling him a little.
They almost made it, too.
But just as they hit the foul line nearest the door, perhaps thirty feet from scot-free, Billy looked up at him reverently. “Mr. Winchester? Does this mean you’re taking me home with you and Sam now? Why can’t everyone else go home?”
John stopped dead. He heard the guards bring up their rifles. He looked behind him at the four of them, rolling his eyes as if he’d rather just pop the ankle-biter right there, but he had orders to bring Fornham a child. It gave him the chance to gauge their reactions. The situation wasn’t good. They were gullible, but not stupid. He turned back to Billy and spoke as coldly as he could, which Sam would have said was about sub-arctic.
“Don’t know what the fuck you’re thinking, you little brat. Must have me mixed up with someone else.” He shook Billy by the arm roughly and gripped the back of his. Squeezing the base of the boy’s head, he hustled him toward the door. “Now keep your trap shut and come on.”
He managed to get Billy outside before Billy failed his IQ test again.
They passed the exterior sentry and turned the corner. Then Billy, in what he obviously thought was a whisper, whined, “But…I’m not wrong. You’re Sam Winchester’s father. Don’t you remem—”
As soon as Billy opened his flap again, John grabbed him by the shirt and twisted it, pulling Billy onto his toes. “I told you to shut the fuck up,” he said, losing any forbearance he had left. Billy began to cry. Loudly.
John smacked his own forehead in exasperation. He scooped Billy up on his shoulder and drew his gun just in time for the sentry to round the corner to check out the commotion.
He didn’t give the guard a chance, but aimed low to take out a knee and ran for it. The guard’s shout of pain served as confirmation that John would improve his lead. But the noise was sure to alert the four men inside the gym. Would they radio Fornham and his seconds on the walkies, or would they try to handle it themselves? John wondered. Funny how the brain could launch into overdrive in a crisis. He was moving fast, but everything seemed to slow down. Damn it, he thought furiously. Need a closet so I can stash the kid. Billy. Billy the kid—hah, he added grimly. Hope they don’t take out their frustration on the students back there. Then an awful thought: They heard him. They know he knows Sam. They’ll find out which room Sam’s in. They’ll find him. Sammy….
He just had to find Sam first.
Concluded in Part Three....
Five minutes after Matt fainted, the music room smelled like a catbox. Sam figured maybe three-quarters of Mrs. Harris’s homeroom—and all of the fifth and sixth grade classes—had peed their pants and were too afraid or embarrassed to say anything. Not that the bastards holding them all would have let them go clean up, probably. But Sam thought they’d have to do something soon, because the smell was getting vomit-worthy. Way worse than him and Snyder’s dried up spatter. The music room had large windows, and even with the shades drawn, the sunlight came in bright and warm on the carpet. What’s more, the kids, both the ones in discomfort because they’d wet themselves, and the ones in discomfort having to smell it, were getting restless because of it.
The one Sam thought of as the sergeant, the one who’d threatened Matt to a faint, called his companion and the guard just outside the door over to the piano bench for a brief conference. Across the room, Sam saw Nate Delancy, Wally Linstrom, and another of Nate’s gang seize their opportunity. They got to their hands and knees and crawled from their homeroom cluster to the next group over. Then a few seconds later, they moved again. In between, they checked to make sure the guards were still distracted by their conversation. Sam frowned in anticipation. Nate was a penny ante crook and a schoolyard bully, but he was smart. Sam played a subconscious tennis match between the two factions, focusing on the guards and then swiveling to encourage Nate silently to “Move, move, move, NOW!” In his head he heard Squadron Leader Bartlett in Dean and Dad’s favorite movie, telling Danny and Billy to haul ass in the tunnels during the air raid: “We can get dozens out in this darkness!”
Unfortunately, it wasn’t dark, and they weren’t masked by the cover of a tunnel. And Sam wasn’t the only one watching. One of the fifth-graders saw, gasped, and pointed. Her classmates shushed her—loudly. The two guards looked up.
“You gave it away! I don’t believe you!” a ten-year-old said to his classmate.
Sam sighed through his nose, resignedly, disappointed. So did half the room—it made a collective noise like air being let out of a tire.
It didn’t take the guards long to discover Nate and his posse sitting in a group of much younger students.
“What are you little shitheads doing out of your spot?” the sergeant demanded to know.
Nate smirked. It reminded Sam of Dean that time he got pulled over for speeding and wound up getting busted for carrying a concealed weapon (and DUI, which he wasn’t). He just couldn’t resist twitting an authority figure (other than Dad), especially when he was scared. Even Dad, sometimes, when he was scared enough. And Nate was terrified.
“We’re student teachers,” Nate claimed. He couldn’t keep the “Fuck you” out of his voice, though (also just like Dean) and the sergeant hauled him up by his polo shirt to drag him over to the door.
“Well, Smitty, think we just found Chuck Norris,” Sarge announced.
He threw Nate toward the wall. Nate actually hung air for a second before stumbling and landing hard on his ass. There were a few nervous titters from the crowd, but mostly gasps of fear, when he hit. Smitty and the third guy picked Nate up. They held him while Sarge punched him once in the gut.
“We were going to take you in shifts down to your locker room,” the sergeant informed everyone else reproachfully while Nate moaned. He hung between the two guys holding up his arms. He looked really puny. He looked like they could snap him in half if they wanted.
Sam felt Chris’s hand again. He squeezed back. “Chris, just don’t look,” he suggested. “Look away.”
“I can’t,” Chris whispered.
“I know,” Sam agreed sadly. Even if he could make it easier for Chris, it wasn’t fair to Nate. Not that Nate had been fair to anyone, least of all Sam. And he knew for a fact that Nate stole Chris’s lunch money about twice a week. Still, in this weird prison, he was one of their own, standing against the enemy.
Dean would have laughed at Sam for putting it like that. You big girl, he would have said. It’s not poetry, dude. It’s not fucking Kipling or some shit. He was an asshole. He’s still an asshole, even if he doesn’t deserve to get creamed because he’s trying to escape.
The sergeant had continued, interfering with Dean’s voice in Sam’s thoughts. “We were going to let everyone change into clean clothes. Take a shower.” He lifted Nate’s head by his hair. “Chuck here fucked that up for you.”
If some of the kids had suppressed guffaws or gasps when he’d said, “shitheads,” they audibly reacted now. One fifth-grader turned to his neighbor and said, “He said the F-word again,” as if he couldn’t contain the commentary. As if someone were going to tell Sarge to watch his language, the way Dad still did occasionally when he felt like a round of, Do as I say, not as I do.
Dad would’ve also said that Nate was taking a fucking stupid risk. Dad would’ve told Sam his first priority was to look sharp, stay alive, keep everyone else alive if he could. Thinking about Dad helped. He and Dean had to be close. They might even already be here.
“Help’s coming,” he whispered to Chris, but it was for himself. “Help is on the way. It’s gonna be okay.”
Meanwhile, Sarge was telling everyone that it was Nate’s fault they had to sit in their own urine or smell everyone else’s and it was Nate’s fault that they weren’t going to get lunch, either. After a couple more sentences, one of the guards punched Nate in the gut again. They pulled off his t-shirt. Nate’s thin, flabby chest was already bruised and turning dark from the beating. Sam wanted one of the men—just one!—to realize that he was torturing a little kid—okay, so Nate was really a year older, maybe two, if the rumors of how often he’d been held back were true—but still. He was so young compared to his tormentors.
But they didn’t have an attack of conscience. Sarge grabbed a zip-tie from his pocket and used it to bind Nate’s hands at the wrist. Nate had started crying somewhere along the way, Sam wasn’t sure when, but he could hear him now clearly, blubbering and begging them to stop.
Finally, one of the guards hesitated, pulled Sarge aside. Nate slumped against his other assailant, either trying to catch his breath or just unable to stand anymore under his own power.
“If you don’t have the balls for this, Drake, you might as well be one of the chattel. That what you want?”
“No, I—”
“We’ll put you in the gym with the others if that’s how you feel, Drake. Don’t think I won’t do it—”
“I don’t have a problem with our mission, Martin, but would Dr. Fornham approve of…of despoiling a postulant?”
It was interesting, sort of, to watch the “Sergeant” (Martin, he now had a name) and his “troops” start to argue. Sam felt a little jolt of adrenaline surge through him; if Martin couldn’t maintain discipline in his ranks, he wasn’t so scary, after all. Maybe if the other two captors kept balking, Martin could be overruled…or overpowered.
Meanwhile, “Sergeant” Martin had pointed to Nate’s tear-streaked and snotty face. “That. Is not a postulant,” he pronounced. “And I think I know Fornham’s plan better than you, Drake.” He drew his knife from his belt. “In fact, it’s just as good a time as any to enhance the level of fear, the better to whet our Lord’s appetite.”
The second Sam saw the blade, he threw caution to the wind. He sat up straight and tapped Chris on the knee to get his attention. “Tell everyone to close their eyes,” he said to Chris.
He told Sarah Boyle on his other side, too, repeating a double-tap with his fingertips, the way Dad sometimes thumped him to pull his focus back to him. “Pass it on. Shut your eyes. Don’t watch. It’s like the end of Raiders—you don’t want to see.”
He didn’t follow his own advice, but watched while the round of Telephone took effect around the room. Some of the kids—little and not—had already figured it out on their own before his message got very far. Good thing, because Martin made his intention clear when he slashed the knife across Nate’s arm.
Sam wondered how long it’d be before they added vomit to the smells they had to endure, along with lingering gunsmoke, pee, and blood.
~*~
“You’re not one of them,” Lee said to the stranger, gun level. He was dressed mostly like all of Fornham’s men, minus a bulletproof vest, but not all of the kidnappers had those. He wore a green cotton work shirt over a dark grey tee, fatigue trousers and combat boots, but his hair was long and he had skipped a shave that morning. Maybe a couple mornings. The thing that really gave him away, though, wasn’t that he was a little older than even Martin, Fornham’s most staunch follower, and it wasn’t that he looked more comfortable with his weapon than most of Fornham’s people. It wasn’t even that Lee hadn’t seen him before, and Lee had been trained to remember faces. It was the look in the guy’s eyes: Intense, but at the same time, tired and half dead. Like he might not even know how to smile. Lee squinted at him to cover how discomfited the man’s expression made him.
“Neither are you,” the guy returned. “You’re too military for this bunch. Cop?”
Lee hesitated. The Mexican standoff wasn’t bothering this guy at all, but he wasn’t lowering his weapon, either. “Where the hell did you come from? You’re not a hostage.”
“And you’re not a kidnapper. What’s your point?”
“Lower your weapon is my point.”
He waited a second, but then clicked the safety on and dropped his arms.
“Thank you.” Lee did the same, took a step forward. “Now do me a favor and leave. You shouldn’t be here.”
The guy snorted. “Trust me, I know what’s going on here.”
“Oh, is that right? And what’s that?”
“Bunch of cultists figure they can raise a major demon and appease him with human sacrifice,” the man said, cold as last week’s sashimi, “And I’m gonna stop’em.”
“Sir, you’re a civilian. You need to get—”
“Save it,” he said dismissively. “Your men ain’t getting in. Too much risk to the children. I’d tell you to get to safety, but I need your firepower.” He scowled as if he could taste something ashy in his mouth. “Look, just go back in there and pretend I’m not here. Maybe you can help get the kids out.”
“Pretend you’re not…. I don’t even know who you are. I get a name?”
“John,” he said, not indicating whether this was his last or first name. “Posner’s your cover. Real name?”
“Scanlon.”
John nodded. “Now they think you’re in the club, right?”
“I’ve done everything but drink the KoolAid.”
“Good.” He checked his watch. “There’s not a lot of them. You’re gonna need to get to where they’re holding the kids—is it all one location, or what?”
“No. They’re in groups…some in the gym, some in larger classrooms.”
“Fuck. All right. Tell me everything you know about where the hostages are stationed.”
Lee shook his head. He was not about to get himself and a lot of other people killed because some paramilitary nut thought he could contain the situation. “Look, I know you think you can help—”
“Son, I’m the only chance you’ve got.” Suddenly, John’s gun was pointed straight at Lee’s heart, steady as Wyatt Earp. “And I’d hate to take you out, but you fight me on this, and I will put you down for the count.”
“You’re so worried about these kids you’d kill me to do it your way?” Lee asked incredulously. He needed a better handle on John’s mental state if he was going to negotiate him out of getting himself killed.
John snorted. “Never said I’d kill you, officer.”
Lee considered rushing John. He considered talking to him more, but the deadness in John’s eyes stopped him. He nodded acquiescence, figuring he could always double back and take John out later, if necessary.
“Okay,” John said approvingly, all business. “Now, I need to know how many hostiles, where they’re positioned, what ordinance they carry, and most importantly, how close-knit they are. What’s their chain of command?”
“Fornham. Then Martin—he’s fairly well in charge of the hostages.” He outlined the other major players.
“Thanks.” John backed away a step, then paused. “Listen. I’ve got…a man on the inside. Possibly helpful if we can get to him.”
“A hostage?” Lee asked.
“Yes,” John admitted after a beat. “But if we can get him away, he can turn sapper.”
Lee sighed. He had found a phone a little while ago, so he knew the cops were nearby, if not on scene already, but John had a point. They would take hours of standoff before they moved in, and Fornham intended to be done long before the police resorted to a full-on assault. It would be helpful to have three of them taking out the sentries and guards one-by-one, without raising an alarm. It wouldn’t work for Fornham’s inner circle, but it could at least even the odds a little. If John knew a maintenance man or even a teacher who was trained to fight, it might be worth asking that person to assume the risk. “Okay—describe him—tell me how to find him without giving myself away. Maybe I can help.”
John hesitated. “He’s about four-foot-ten, one-twenty, looks pudgy and clumsy but believe me, it’s muscle. Light brown hair, probably hanging in his eyes. He won’t be as scared as the others. He’s with homeroom 146, if that helps.”
“He’s a student?” Lee’s voice made a cracking noise he hadn’t heard since he’d been the right age to attend Crenshaw himself.
“Yeah, eighth grade, but don’t let that fool you. Just work the Beach Boys into the conversation and he’ll know you’re able to help.”
“What, like the lyrics?”
“No, the phrase: The Beach Boys. He’ll know it’s code.”
If he’d felt guilty about asking a civilian to risk himself in order to give other cops a way in, that was nothing compared to the indignation he felt at John’s suggestion. “You’re crazy if you think a teenager—”
“We do not have a lot of options and we do not have the time to argue about it. You either believe me or you don’t, but trust me, you don’t want this thing to go down. This is gonna make Oklahoma City look like child’s play if they succeed.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Right now, I’m your best chance. And you’re mine. Don’t fuck it up.”
~*~
Dean pressed himself flush between the wall and the outside of a classroom door. Next door to his left, a guard stood watch over a room filled with scared students younger than Sammy. He wanted the guard to walk by so that he could overpower him from behind, knock him out without any hint of an alarm.
He was on a second-level, outdoor walkway with four science labs. In the first one, Dean had temporarily stashed his duffel while he scoped out the hallway. Now he was crouched in the shelter of the second door, while the guard stood outside the third. Trouble was, the guy had come out, shut the door behind him, and now he was just standing there. Staring down the corridor in Dean’s direction, almost as if he expected to be jumped. Guard the other way, Dean thought at him. Go be vigilant with your back to me, you bastard.
After what seemed at least five minutes, during which Dean concentrated on holding perfectly still so that the door wouldn’t swing, keeping it as a shield between himself and the sentry, the asshole remembered to look the other way.
Dean ducked out and clipped his target solidly on the back of the head with his shotgun-butt. The guard dropped and Dean pumped his fist in the air in victory. He cast a nervous glance inside the room. Another cultist was inside, but wasn’t paying the door any attention. Score two for Dean.
Moving the unconscious body turned out not to be as easy as KO’ing him in the first place. The guy must have lined his pockets with lead. Dean tugged hard on his arms and legs, trying to pull him into the first empty science lab quietly and before anyone saw. The jerk’s fatigue jacket caught on the concrete walkway. He scraped his face up, too, and Dean froze when the man groaned in discomfort. He didn’t wake up, though.
“Shit,” Dean muttered. He bent down and hoisted the guy over one shoulder to fireman-carry him back to where Dean had left his stuff.
It only took a few seconds after that to dump him, tied to the legs of a heavy lab bench. But when Dean slipped back outside, he came face-to-face with a third kidnapper. He swore he’d checked both directions before leaving the classroom, yet here was one of the bad guys, just looking at him dumbly. He must have come up the stairs while Dean was inside the lab.
They stared at each other for a moment in silence. The new demon-worshipper looked about ten years older than Dean, with dirty blond hair and defined muscles under his bulletproof vest. Even with the element of surprise, he’d have been a lot harder to take down than anyone Dean had seen so far. He hoped that he looked at least as difficult to beat. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t attacked or raised the alarm right away.
“What are you doing here?” the guy asked, with emphasis on “you” like he’d already encountered someone who shouldn’t be there. Which meant…. No. Impossible.
Dean lashed out viciously with his shotgun stock. His opponent caught it, if a little awkwardly, and wrenched it away. Dean heard it clatter to the pavement.
Rookie mistake, Dean berated himself. He fired a quick kick at the man’s shins. He danced out of range; Dean followed, aware that he had to act fast or the guy could raise the alarm any second.
“Wait a second, kid!” the military-looking guy growled at him while returning Dean’s right hook with a swipe of his own.
“So you can cold-cock me?” Dean snarked. “Don’t think so.”
He threw a one-two punch combination. The guy blocked and ducked inside Dean’s arm length to close in. He grabbed Dean’s arm. Dean twisted away, but his opponent hung on and swept his leg. Dean tripped, fell forward, caught himself on one hand, and rolled away. His wrist smarted from the impact against the concrete, but he rolled up into a crouch and chopped out at the man’s knee.
“Jesus,” the guy hissed. “I said hang on. Any chance you’re a Beach Boy?”
It could have been a trick. They couldn’t have caught Dad so quickly, but if they had, they were hardcore enough to have tortured him into revealing he had a partner, made him tell the codes. But Dad wouldn’t have given him up that easily. Dean refused to accept that Dad would have been captured by these idiots at all. He pulled to a stand and leapt out with a high kick. Again the guy dodged. Then something happened. Dean wasn’t sure how, but his assailant doubled behind him and locked his already tender wrist behind his back. And twisted. Hard.
“Ow!” someone said. It couldn’t have been Dean, because it sounded really girly, and that just didn’t compute. He felt something in his wrist grind and it made his teeth rattle. Another little squeak of pain emitted from near his ears. But it wasn’t him. Okay: It hurt. But it wasn’t him.
“Shut up,” the guy said, shaking him. “Now don’t make me hog-tie you, kid. Answer the question: Are you here with that John dude?”
Dean set his jaw, chin jutting out. “Go to hell, you demon-worshipping freak.”
The guy laughed in his ear. “That’s Officer Scanlon to you, kiddo. So are you a Beach Boy, or do I have two separate vigilante whackjobs on my hands?”
“Fuck you, asshole,” Dean said defiantly.
“Nice, kid,” the guard observed. “Look, I’m on your side, okay?” he continued with a sigh, as if annoyed to have to reveal a secret. “I’m a cop.”
Dean laughed, despite the fact that his wrist felt like a three-alarm fire. “That means you’re on our side? Man, you don’t know anything.”
“Okay,” the cop replied, and it sounded like a decision. Sure enough, he slammed Dean against the wall. “Listen, these men? They’re for real, jack-off, so your little amateur hour Rambo act had better wise up fast. I want you to shake your skinny ass right back where it came from. Go back to your school, kid. Let the professionals handle this.”
“I am a profess—” Dean began to protest, but another voice interrupted them.
“Posner? What the hell is this?”
Posner, Dean’s captor, glanced in the direction of his comrade. The fourth guy, a ginger-haired twenty-something, had come around the corner, brought over, no doubt, by the sounds of struggle. “It’s nothing, Gilchrist. Just a piece of trash I was escorting to the dumpster.”
Dean struggled and Posner did that twist again and Dean’s wrist exploded in pain. “OW!” he heard himself shout. Damn. He had to work on his pain tolerance.
“Let’s take him to Fornham—he might not be alone,” Gilchrist suggested.
“Nah, he’s just a kid thinks he’s Schwarzenegger,” Posner said. “Took out Miller, but Corey’s okay down there,” he continued, jerking his head toward the third classroom, whose exterior guard Dean had already knocked out. “Already asked if he’s alone.”
“And you believed him?” Gilchrist scoffed.
Posner jerked up hard on Dean’s injured arm. “I was persistent,” he assured his companion.
But the funny thing was, although he made a huge motion against Dean’s sleeve, it didn’t actually jostle the wrist. Dean made a show of pain.
“I’m alone! I swear!” he squealed.
Gilchrist shrugged. “We should still take him to Fornham.”
“Fornham’s got more important things to do,” Posner pointed out. “How about I throw him in with the teachers?”
“How about right down there with Corey?” Gilchrist gestured to the third classroom.
“Sure,” Posner agreed. He pushed Dean ahead of him, Gilchrist on his right. “Hope you liked sixth grade, kid,” he told him. Dean felt a light squeeze on his arm, jiggling the flesh like Posner wanted him to fight. So he did. Posner whipped him around in an “attempt” to subdue him, which gave them the opportunity for eye contact. Posner’s eyes slid to the right a second before he feinted left. Dean ducked away.
“Shit!” Gilchrist cried, just as Dean reached him and punched out with his good hand. Gilchrist went down.
“Good work, kid,” Posner said, coming up to him.
Dean grinned. He drew a breath to make some smart-ass comment about how Posner had underestimated him when Posner’s eyes went wide in fear. Dean whipped around. He barely had time to register the face of the man coming out of the classroom, much less the pistol pointed at him, before his ears darn near exploded from the deafening shot. It was twice as loud as normal because of the covered balcony bouncing the sound back at him.
He didn’t know when the shooter had entered the corridor, or how much he’d seen. He just had a vague impression of stubble and piercing blue eyes, then his vision narrowed to the gun barrel and all he could think was, “I’m gonna die.”
Posner was quicker, though, and before Dean realized what had happened, the older man had pulled him down and landed on the ground in front of him. Bright red blood was staining the armhole of the vest where it met his shirt.
Dean didn’t think; he brought his backup weapon out in less than half a second and returned fire. The terrorist—Corey, Gilchrist had said his name was Corey—went down loudly, clutching his gut. In his haste, Dean had rushed the trigger; Corey was alive. Dean wasn’t sure whether he felt relieved or disappointed. He had no time to puzzle over it, though. He grabbed Posner under his arms, ignoring his groan of pain, and pulled him all the way down the corridor back to the lab where he’d stashed both his duffel and Miller, the first guard. Outside, he could hear the kids moving into the hallway.
“Shoulda…secured his weapons,” Posner croaked. “They’ll…radio.”
“Sorry, I was concentrating on getting us the fuck out of there,” Dean snapped. He threw the lock on the classroom door. Even though it opened out, into the hallway, he set about barricading it with the nearest heavy piece of furniture. It turned out to be a glass-doored cabinet full of lab equipment.
“I don’t think anyone’s coming,” he confirmed, peering out what remained of the lead-lined window. The students were venturing out and down in little groups. Much as he wanted to offer a place to hide, he didn’t want to be responsible for them if they got pinned down. Plus, children on the loose would present the kidnappers with conflicting priorities, and might even keep him and Posner alive a little longer. Eventually the kids moved away and only Gilchrist and Corey remained. Satisfied they were as safe as possible for the time being, he set about finding alcohol or something to clean Posner’s wound.
“Think it hit bone,” Posner commented when Dean approached with a bottle of peroxide and some cotton batting. “They’ll radio. Tell everyone they’ve got a rat.”
“Can’t be helped,” Dean grunted. “I’ll get scissors.” He also pulled out two containers of salt. Before returning to Posner, he poured lines on the windowsills and on the floor around his barricade.
“Expecting giant killer slugs?” Posner asked.
“Yeah,” Dean quipped back. “Really damn fast ones.” He knelt by Posner’s side and cut away his sleeve carefully.
Posner had a tattoo. The design was so familiar that it made Dean do a double-take, looking for the scars Dad had got last year when a kappa had raked its claws across his biceps. The stripes had broken the line of the anchor and made his eagle’s talons look deformed. But Posner’s tat was pristine, black, and proudly declaring “Semper Fi.”
“S’matter, kid? Never seen a Marine before?”
“No, just….” Dean couldn’t finish his thought. “Dude, you took a bullet for me.”
“Yeah, well. Not one of my best decisions. Still, they’d hardly let me stay on the force if I let some whackjob fanatic shoot a teenager in cold blood.”
Dean swallowed hard. “Let’s look at that shoulder,” he offered.
~*~
John had pressed Scanlon for passwords and intel, all the while inwardly cursing his luck. Yes, Scanlon might be useful; more likely, he’d turn John in as soon as the whole thing was over. If he survived—it was just as likely Scanlon would get himself eighty-six’d trying to control the situation, or countermanding John’s actions.
Still, running into Scanlon made getting close to the terrorists more feasible than ever. The ease with which he’d penetrated this far already surprised him; now with passwords and some names and posts, his chances of getting to Fornham approached less than a thousand to one. More to the point, Scanlon had a fair idea of which classrooms had eighth-graders, which meant John could get Sam out. He was already devising ways Sam could help from a position of relative safety.
Though a little older than most of Fornham’s men, the password earned him a funny look, but no challenges, from the guard outside the gym.
About a hundred kids sat in despondent groups all around the room. Some of the older kids were in the bleachers. Most of them were on the court, cross-legged or leaning on each other for support. They looked pretty ragged, but then, they’d been there for hours already.
The boy’s body in their midst didn’t improve their spirits, either.
The kid was hanging from one of the basketball hoops, neck at a sickening angle. His body was dripping blood from long slices down his legs that turned his gym socks and sneakers red. The room stank of blood, piss, and vomit.
“What the hell happened here?” John frowned, suppressing his outrage.
“One of Martin’s from up in the music room. Acted up. So Martin made an example of him.”
John grunted, unable to trust his voice. He remembered the first time he saw a child get murdered. He’d been a boy about this one’s age, back in Da Nang. He’d hung around base until some of the guys started giving him odd jobs. One day he’d stolen a grenade out of Deacon’s kit and threatened everyone in the barracks. John, barely eighteen, had tried to talk to the kid, but his Lieutenant had merely walked up behind John, aimed, and shot the boy between his eyes.
He hadn’t even pulled the pin.
There’d been others, of course, boys pressed into turning soldier too young, younger than Dean when Dean started shadowing John. But they’d all been combatants, even if they hadn’t been able to choose their fate. This? Was so not that.
He swallowed, trying not to choke on a tongue gone suddenly dry. It wasn’t Sam—he was sure of that, at least, and felt both relieved and guilty for feeling relieved.
A quick scan was enough to verify that Sam wasn’t even in the gym. There were four guards total; two in the bleachers that lined one side and two on the basketball courts, spaced roughly evenly between the hoops and the doors to the locker rooms. About a hundred and twenty kids were sitting in groups, perhaps two thirds of them younger than Sam, and of the remaining forty, fewer than half were male. Sam’s mop-top and his alert, judgmental eyes weren’t anywhere in the mix.
But he was stuck now. He couldn’t leave without a child, to support the story he’d told the sentry outside. “Fornham wants one of the brats now,” he said, repeating it to the nearest one inside. “Something about a test run.”
“Uh…sure,” the guard said, confused, but hiding it. “How about one of the little shitheads up in the bleachers?” He pointed to a group of boys with one of his two buddies standing near them. Several of the boys had their hands zip-tied, and one of them had duct tape across his mouth.
“That’ll work,” John muttered noncommittally and shuffled over. He climbed the bleachers with long steps, skipping the middle stair on each level. He was aware of a hundred pairs of once-innocent eyes watching him. He reached the knot of boys who’d been set aside as troublemakers and said, “Fall in, you brats. Eyes front.”
They made a ramshackle troop, but evidently they’d been cowed by their treatment—and that of their schoolmate.
“Mister, listen, Nate didn’t do anything—” one of the boys started to plead.
“Shut up!” the guard told the child. “Martin says he did plenty. You want to end up on the other side of the court, you maggot? There’s three other backboards to use.”
“Pipe down,” John said to both the guard and the kids, trying to sound more bored than disgusted. He sized up the boy to the left of Duct-Tape-Mouth. He was Sam’s age and looked familiar, with the blond rat-tail and his heart-shaped face. John couldn’t place him, but he thought he might know where Sam’s last class had been when the raid hit. “You. Come on.”
They headed down the steps toward the exit. Halfway between the bleachers and the door, John realized his mistake. The kid was familiar because he had latched on to Sam in Sam’s first week at Crenshaw. Name was Billy…something. He and Sam used the same bus stop. One day he’d followed Sam to the house they were renting, barged in over Sam’s protests, and roused John from a deep sleep on the couch.
John had been upright, gun retrieved from under his pillow, and ready to fire at the “intruder” inside of a second. He’d come back to himself only because of Sam’s hasty move to pull Billy out of the line of fire. It had taken Billy all of three more seconds to hear his mother calling; it had taken much longer for John to listen to Sam’s claim that Billy had not been invited.
What the hell, John reasoned. A little five-K run never hurt a growing boy.
But now, Billy was pressing close to his hip like John hadn’t scared the crap out of him the first time they’d ever seen each other. John hoped none of the four kidnappers thought it odd that Billy seemed willing to go with him. He kept a firm grip on Billy’s arm to keep him moving quickly out of the gym and to make it look like he was man-handling him a little.
They almost made it, too.
But just as they hit the foul line nearest the door, perhaps thirty feet from scot-free, Billy looked up at him reverently. “Mr. Winchester? Does this mean you’re taking me home with you and Sam now? Why can’t everyone else go home?”
John stopped dead. He heard the guards bring up their rifles. He looked behind him at the four of them, rolling his eyes as if he’d rather just pop the ankle-biter right there, but he had orders to bring Fornham a child. It gave him the chance to gauge their reactions. The situation wasn’t good. They were gullible, but not stupid. He turned back to Billy and spoke as coldly as he could, which Sam would have said was about sub-arctic.
“Don’t know what the fuck you’re thinking, you little brat. Must have me mixed up with someone else.” He shook Billy by the arm roughly and gripped the back of his. Squeezing the base of the boy’s head, he hustled him toward the door. “Now keep your trap shut and come on.”
He managed to get Billy outside before Billy failed his IQ test again.
They passed the exterior sentry and turned the corner. Then Billy, in what he obviously thought was a whisper, whined, “But…I’m not wrong. You’re Sam Winchester’s father. Don’t you remem—”
As soon as Billy opened his flap again, John grabbed him by the shirt and twisted it, pulling Billy onto his toes. “I told you to shut the fuck up,” he said, losing any forbearance he had left. Billy began to cry. Loudly.
John smacked his own forehead in exasperation. He scooped Billy up on his shoulder and drew his gun just in time for the sentry to round the corner to check out the commotion.
He didn’t give the guard a chance, but aimed low to take out a knee and ran for it. The guard’s shout of pain served as confirmation that John would improve his lead. But the noise was sure to alert the four men inside the gym. Would they radio Fornham and his seconds on the walkies, or would they try to handle it themselves? John wondered. Funny how the brain could launch into overdrive in a crisis. He was moving fast, but everything seemed to slow down. Damn it, he thought furiously. Need a closet so I can stash the kid. Billy. Billy the kid—hah, he added grimly. Hope they don’t take out their frustration on the students back there. Then an awful thought: They heard him. They know he knows Sam. They’ll find out which room Sam’s in. They’ll find him. Sammy….
He just had to find Sam first.
Concluded in Part Three....