John Gilstrap - Threat warning

“What are we doing?” Gail asked. Her voice wasn’t as stressed as Venice’s, but it was close.

Jonathan opened his door. “We’re adapting. Gunslinger, take your shot from here. Whatever shot you can get. Then take the truck and drive around back of Building Alpha. We’ll meet you there.”

“We will?” Boxers said. “That’s a plan?”

“That, or you stay with Gunslinger.”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He was already on his way to the back of the crowd when Boxers got his door open.

Christyne was screaming. No words, just the guttural, animal sound of panic and pain and fury. She saw the panic in her baby’s eyes and the pain wracking his body. She lunged and kicked to get away, to help him, but whoever had her by her bound wrists held her fast. He was unyielding.

“Let go of me!” she shrieked. “Ryan!”

Her captor’s grip tightened, and new hands found her arms and her shoulders. She whipped her head around to the hand at her shoulder and she bit it. Hard. Her teeth pierced flesh, and the taste of blood filled her mouth. A new scream-this one of sheer agony-filled the night, and Christyne felt fulfilled.

Someone hit her in her left kidney, and the pain was exquisite. She bit harder, and she twisted her head, the way a dog would with a chew toy. If they were going to hurt her little boy, and they were going to hurt her, then by God she was going to hurt them back.

Across the stage, Ryan dropped from view. Had he gotten away?

That glimmer of hope made her falter, and at the same instant that another punch landed in the same kidney, and her legs buckled from the blow, the person whose arm she’d ruined let her fall.

Agony flowed as a wave through her back and abdomen, and when Christyne spit blood, she wasn’t sure that all of it belonged to the man she’d bitten.

Ryan shrieked.

It was remarkably like the sound he made as a three-year-old, when his Big Wheel dumped him onto the concrete outside their home in Fayetteville. There was blood that day, too, and a cut whose ghost was lost in the bristly fuzz that sprouted from his chin. It was a sound that no mother could ever forget, and her response to it was so hardwired that she felt sick to her stomach the instant she heard it.

Then she saw why.

As they lifted him by his arm, she saw the bones shift under the shredding bonds that held them to his splint. He howled.

“Stop it!” she shouted. “You’re hurting him!”

But the crowd loved it. They cheered as if it were a sporting event. “Kill them both! Kill them both!”

They brought him to the front of the stage and kicked the back of his knees. They hit hard against the concrete.

“Brother Zebediah!” the leader called. “Step forward.”

A different robed figure, one of the ones who had manhandled Ryan, stepped forward, and the leader handed him the ugly knife with the shiny edge.

Ryan tried to stand.

Jonathan strode into the crowd as if he belonged. He approached from the rear, and instantly he wished he were a taller man. From back here, even with the action on the stage, he could barely see over the hooded mob.

The sick bastards were yelling, “Kill them both! Kill them both!”

As a cheer rose, Jonathan snapped his head up and saw them lifting Ryan Nasbe by his broken arm. Even over the cacophony of the crowd, he could hear the boy’s shrieks of agony. But they were nothing compared to the animal howls of his restrained mother.

“Excuse us,” Jonathan said as he elbowed through the crowd.

Someone said, “Hey,” and pushed back, but Jonathan merely caromed off another spectator and kept focused on the action up front. Dressed as he was, more or less in the uniform of this zoo’s own security forces, he seemed to be of little concern. Besides, they all had something far more interesting to watch.

“Scorpion, Mother Hen,” Venice said on the radio. “Do you see this? If you’ve got a shot, now would be the time.”

But that was the problem. He didn’t have a shot.

Jonathan switched his radio selector from PTT-push-to-talk-to VOX, voice-activated transmission. From here on out, until he switched back, everything he said would be transmitted over the radio. “Big Guy?”

“No shot yet,” Boxers said.

“My angle’s bad, too,” Gail said. “With the M4 at this range, I’m fifty-fifty to hit the kid.”

“Then take out the goddamn generator then. Give me something.”

They kicked Ryan’s knees again. This had all become an exercise in pain.

Whatever they’d just done to his arm had screwed him up big-time. The pain enveloped his entire body, from his waist to his neck. When his knees slammed into the concrete, they screamed, too, but there comes a point where a little more pain stops mattering.

In front of him, the masked crowd cheered. He could feel their hatred, taste their desire to hurt him. This was it. This was the end.

And he was too wiped out to do anything about it.

The asshole leader in the black gown called, “Brother Zebediah!” and another asshole in a black gown stepped forward. The leader handed Brother Zebediah the knife. The crowd somehow grew even louder. “You do it,” the leader said.

Brother Zebediah said, “Thank you, Brother Michael.”

The executioner held the knife up for the crowd to cheer. Ryan felt a hand on his head, and suddenly it felt as if someone were using his hair to pull his scalp off his skull. He tried to stand against the strain, but someone planted his foot in the crook of his knee, effectively nailing him to the floor.

Brother Zebediah pulled back and down on his fistful of hair, and Ryan found himself staring at the sky.

His mother screamed.

The knife flashed against the blinding, artificial light. He saw it shift in the executioner’s hand and he saw it come down.

Blood sprayed everywhere.

And then it was dark.

“I’ve got him,” Jonathan said into his mike.

The shot materialized because some tall guy turned to say something to the shorter guy next to him, opening a V-shaped window that exposed the executioners. Jonathan was still seventy-five feet away, but once he saw them pull the kid’s head back, he knew that all options had expired.

He planted his feet, whipped his M4 to his shoulder, and snap-shot two rounds. The first one reduced the executioner’s head to a bloody mist, and he dropped out of sight. The second took out someone else on the stage who’d had the bad luck to stand directly behind a killer. The knife dropped out of view.

Immediately in front of him, the kid who’d turned his head to talk dropped like a stone, too, knocked senseless by the muzzle blast and the ballistic crack of the bullets passing within two inches of his ear.

Without hesitating, Jonathan shifted his aim two degrees to the right to take out the man who was standing on Ryan’s knees, but just as he felt the trigger break, Gail’s burst of gunfire found the generator and the world went dark. The status change startled him just enough to make him twitch, so he had no idea if he’d made the shot or not.

It takes a human being about a second to register a frightening incident with a physical twitch, and another two seconds to process its meaning. In a crowd, reactions are slower because of so many conflicting inputs. Against experienced warriors, you’ve got about six seconds to complete an assault without counterassault. With an inexperienced cadre that is caught completely off-guard, call it ten seconds. That’s the window of opportunity for true shock and awe.

After that, the calmer, more experienced troops will start gathering their wits and organizing their comrades. Ten or fifteen seconds after that, you’ve got a good old-fashioned firefight on your hands.