Don Pendleton - Run to Ground

He wondered how his brother might be armed. Mack would have carried ample hardware for the strike, but much of it would be expended, other items left behind when he was wounded, forced to ditch the car. It never paid to underestimate his brother; he had seen him work miracles from scratch, but even Mack could only do so much. Unfortunately courage didn't make a soldier bulletproof. Audacity could carry you against the odds, but it could only carry you so far. Once you had dazzled your opponents with the fancy footwork, you had to deal with them in concrete terms. With bullet, blade and strangling wire. A wounded man, with only side arms to rely on, simply had no business taking on an army.

But you couldn't tell that to the Executioner. Hell, no.

Mack didn't see himself as a superman; it wasn't anything like that. He simply had not learned to run away from trouble, let the bad guys have their fun and count your blessings if they left you out of it. He lived by an entirely different code, demanding action in the face of savagery, resistance when the cannibals were in control. If he was well enough to run and absolutely empty-handed, Johnny knew his brother would have done his damnedest to defend the residents of Santa Rosa from the plague that he, unwittingly, had brought upon their heads.

It was a sense of duty that might get him killed this time. But not if Johnny Bolan had a thing to say about it. Not if he could reach the tiny town in time to stand beside his brother. They might die together, if it came to that, but he would have tried. And if he came too late to help, well then God help Luis Rivera and his jackals.

Johnny knew their numbers and the names that counted, knew where he could find them. And if he came too late to help his brother, they would have another opportunity to curse the Bolan name. Another opportunity to feel the cleansing fire.

The day was shaping up to be another scorcher, but Rick Stancell didn't mind the heat. Hot days meant warmer nights, and that was fine. He called it drive-in weather, when the desert breeze was soft and warm, the sky so vast and dark that you could count a million stars if you had time. It was the kind of night just made for drive-in movies, with your best girl at your side, and given time and a little luck, you wouldn't even care about the movie on the big old weathered screen.

Rick didn't feel like working, but he had already promised, and he had his father's pickup truck to use tonight, together with some spending money, if he kept his word. He had invited Amy Schultz to see a double feature with him at the Ajo drive-in, and she had agreed. The films were nothing special — D.C. Cab and Billy Jack Goes Hollywood, definitely B grade — but Rick was not devoted to the cinema. He was devoted to Amy Schultz, and he was certain that with time and the necessary patience, he could make her come around.

She wasn't prudish, not exactly, but she seemed to be the kind of girl who saved the heavy stuff for marriage. Stancell didn't mind. He knew she would be worth the wait, but when his mind coughed up a thought like that, it made him hesitate and wonder what was going on inside himself. He was a senior — would be, come September — and a lot of kids got married right away, as soon as they could shuck the cap and gown. But Rick was bound for college, something better than a dead-end job in Pima County, sweating out his days behind a gas pump or a check-out counter at the hardware store. He knew that Amy liked him — maybe "loved" would be a better word — and most times, Stancell felt the same. But marriage was a fair piece down the road, five years at least, and in the meantime... Well, a guy gets itchy.

There were other girls at Ajo High who would have given Stancell what he wanted. It would have been so easy, but something held him back.

He didn't like to call it "love," with all the trappings of commitment that that term implied, but what else could it be? He had been dating Amy, going steady for the better part of six months, and while he often got the urge, he seldom had it anymore for other girls. It disturbed Rick a little, when he thought about the bridges that he might be burning, but it made him feel grown-up, as well. It made him feel... well, like a man.

The other guys at school were always talking about how much they got, and all of that, but when they asked about his dates with Amy, Stancell shined them on or shut them up with glaring looks. He did all right with Amy, to a point, but what they did or didn't do was not up for discussion on the Ajo High School grapevine. A week before the summer break, that asshole Tommy Pendergast had started wisecracking about "Rick's virgin queen," and Stancell had been forced to rearrange his bridgework for him. That had been the end of idle chatter — in his presence, anyway — and after Amy heard about it, she rewarded him with one of their more memorable dates. But they were both still virgins, and Rick had come to wonder if there was some way to correct that, short of trooping down the aisle at seventeen.

The thought of marriage didn't faze him. He wasn't frightened by the thought of Amy Schultz becoming Amy Stancell somewhere down the road. But not just yet. They needed time to grow, to see a little of the world. Time to learn about each other, and decide precisely what they wanted out of life. But none of that precluded having fun along the way.

He reached the service station, found it open and with his dad nowhere in sight. The empty service island came as no surprise; a customer this early would have been unusual, and Santa Rosa was not known for deviations from routine. If they were lucky, half a dozen locals might stop by to fill up this afternoon, but it had been a week or more since anyone had needed engine work. He had suggested that his dad cut back on hours, trim his overhead by opening at noon instead of seven in the morning, but he might as well have offered his opinions to the wall. Bud Stancell was enamored of tradition. He believed in change and progress, but for others, never for himself. Rick sometimes wondered how his father stuck it out, how he could love this dusty little town enough to struggle by on a subsistence income, pumping gas for people who were so appreciative that they took their heavy business into Ajo or surrounding towns. His father should have pulled up stakes when his wife died... but, then again, if they had moved, Rick never would have had a shot at Amy Schultz.

He passed the silent pumps, the empty office, entering the main garage. Still no sign of his father, though he got a strange, uncomfortable feeling in the shop. Tools were disarranged along the workbench, as if his dad had skipped the nightly cleanup yesterday.

He saw the retreads now. They had been neatly stacked last night, around a wooden spindle, but the pile was toppled, and two of them had rolled across the shop floor to rest against the opposite wall. A cabinet full of hoses, belts and other gear was standing open, as if someone had been interrupted in the midst of taking inventory.

"Dad?"

No answer. He was on his way to check the lot in back when something like a muffled groan, no louder than a whimper, reached his ears. He froze, turned back to face the empty room and waited for a repetition of the sound.

It came again, and Rick took all of half a second to pin it down. There was a row of cabinets underneath his father's workbench, stocked with odds and ends of the mechanic's trade, and he would swear the weak, inhuman sound was emanating from those cabinets, like a whisper from the tomb.

He crossed the floor in three long strides and ripped the cabinets open, startled into jumping backward as his father's body rolled out at his feet. No, not a body — he was still alive. Still breathing. But for God's sake what had happened to him in the hour since he'd left the house to open up his station?