John Gilstrap - No mercy

Rather than litter the street with a second susations through the very kind of diplomacy that he pretended to hate. He’d also seen him wreak a special kind of havoc after the other side failed to realize that the “negotiation” was in fact the terms of their surrender. Boxers was the wrong guy to point a gun at.

Glancing at his GPS locator, Jonathan pointed up the hill and they started walking.

“Suppose they don’t want to fight?” Boxers asked.

“Then we’re carrying way too much firepower.”

“No, I don’t mean now. I mean at all. Suppose they’re not up for this battle you’re planning?”

Jonathan had thought about that. “Everybody’ll fight if the stakes are high enough,” he said.

“But not everybody’s good at it.”

Jonathan shrugged. “If it falls that way, we’ll all share a righteously shitty day.” He could speak this bluntly because it was Boxers. Both of them had stopped worrying about death a long time ago. “We’ll have to train them, and hope they can shoot straight.”

Thomas Hughes was living a nightmare.

Over the course of a single week-no, less than a week, six days-he’d gone from getting his knob polished by Tiffany or Christine or whatever the hell her real name was, to getting kidnapped, shot at, and now living out here in the middle of nowhere. Just the three of them-like the happy family they’d never be.

And if that wasn’t a thick enough shit sandwich, the police thought they were murderers. Oh, yeah, and his dad was some kind of WMD trafficker.

They called this special corner of hell “the lodge,” but it was really a cabin. Built of hewn heavy timbers, and designed to look a hundred years older than it actually was, the place had a certain Abe Lincoln look to it. The lodge itself sat on a footprint of 20 by 30 feet, and was more or less an unadorned rectangle. A second floor had been raised somewhere along the way on the back half of the house, providing additional sleeping space. When Thomas was little, Mom and Dad took the upstairs for themselves while he was consigned to the sofa in the “living room,” which was separated only by an imaginary wall from the “dining room,” which in turn sat adjacent to the way-out-of-date kitchen in the back of the house. Without gas or electricity, cooking power came from the logs that they piled into the wood stove.

It was stiflingly hot in the summer, and freezing cold in the winter (kerosene heaters and fireplaces couldn’t touch the February chill). Thomas hated this place. Once he’d gotten his driver’s license and access to his own car, he’d stopped coming. Keep your primitive and your rustic; give him new and shiny any day of the week. At least give him running water. And a toilet that was more than a hole in the ground.

Presently, Mom and Dad were at it again, blaming each other for all the crap that was going wrong. They kept screaming at each other about a plan. They needed to have a plan.

Well, Thomas had mapped out a pretty nifty plan for himself: he was getting the hell out of here. He was done with Chef Boyardee and boredom. He was done with hiding. He didn’t have a dog in this fight. Even if he did, wasn’t it way harder to hit a moving target than a stationary one?

The barn full of synthetic smallpox complicated things for his parents, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that he didn’t care about what happened to everybody else-not even to the poor bastards that got spr’d been able to read a musical score the way most people read books. The dots and spaces on the page converted directly to music in his head. His parents and friends called it a blessing, but to him it was equal parts curse. By reading the music, he was blessed to hear a perfect performance every time. When he performed, however, there were always flaws, most never heard by the audience, but they resounded like errant cymbal crashes in Thomas’s mind.

The peace of the music couldn’t dislodge his anger, though. Not today. And the anger was the thing that could break him. Intuitively, he knew who the real evildoers were in all of this. He knew that the focus for his anger should be Christine Baker and Fabian What’s-his-name-the people who started it all-but he found himself reserving his ugliest thoughts for his own father. He was the conduit through which all of this awfulness had flowed. But for him, Thomas would still be blissfully stressed over academics. But for his involvement in this weapons bullshit, things would be normal. If those guys had just managed to kill his dad at the time of the ransom transfer He hated himself.

Movement.

He didn’t know if he’d heard it or seen it, but something happened in the tall grass over to his right. The music went away, and he was one hundred percent tuned into reality. Could it have been a snake? A cougar, maybe? They’d found evidence of a big cat up here, and The man launched himself with the speed of a lightning bolt, rising out of the grass-out of the ground itself, it seemed-and hitting Thomas hard in the middle, knocking him backward and driving the wind out of his lungs. He tried to yell, but before words could form, a gloved hand attached itself to his mouth, killing the words and threatening to extend the favor to the rest of him.

He arched his back and tried to defend himself when his attacker said, “Thomas, stop.”

The familiarity startled him. He stopped squirming as he tried to place it. No, it couldn’t be.

“It’s Scorpion,” the voice said. Right away, Thomas’s gaze shifted to the man’s eyes-the feature he remembered most from that night. Holy shit, it really was.

A new panic bloomed.

“I’m here to help,” Scorpion said, as if reading his thoughts. “I’m not here to hurt anyone. Well, not you, anyway. Not your family.”

Thomas stopped moving.

“I’m going to take my hand away now, okay?”

He nodded.

True to his promise, the hand lifted. Scorpion smiled. “So, how’ve you been?” he asked, his tone filled with irony.

Thomas’s head whirled. “What the hell,” he said. It was the best he could do.

“Turns out we’ve got more work to do,” Scorpion said. “I had-”

“GUN!” The voice boomed from nowhere-from everywhere. Scorpion prostrated himself on the ground and covered Thomas with his body.

In a horrible flash of realization, Thomas knew exactly what was happening. “No!” he yelled.

But his voice was drowned out by the gunshot.

A rifle discharged from the area of the cabin, launching a bullet that skimmed the grass within inches of Jonathan’s back. A millide to the wounded man. He let his M4 fall against its sling and he ripped open a large pocket on his combat vest. He pulled out two large white paper packets and put them on the step.

“Leave him alone!” Julie commanded.

Boxers ignored her.

“He’s going to dress the wound,” Jonathan explained. He recognized the packets as HemCon, a chemical-coated gauze that Jonathan believed was responsible for saving more lives in modern combat than any other technical advancement. You stuff the HemCon into a wound, and the bleeding stops. Just like that.

When Boxers unsheathed his K-Bar knife, Thomas jumped as if to intervene, but then he seemed to remember the last time he saw one of those blades. “They’re okay,” he reassured his mom. “They know what they’re doing.”

Julie shot a withering look to Jonathan. “Who are you?” she demanded.

“Call me Scorpion,” Jonathan said. “My friend is Big Guy.”

“Those aren’t names,” she growled.

Jonathan shrugged. What could he say?

Boxers slipped the blade of his K-Bar into the bloused leg of Stephenson’s trousers and sliced upward, ankle to crotch. The fabric fell away, exposing a perfectly round puncture in the flesh on the inner side of the man’s left leg.