John Gilstrap - Threat warning

“NVGs,” Jonathan commanded as he flipped his night-vision goggles back over his eyes. The world turned the luminescent green that was natural to him as a sunny day.

Panic swirled around him. People yelled and pushed, stumbling over themselves and each other to get to safety. They buffeted Jonathan, but they were nowhere on his radar. He had his sights on the people on the stage, where the panic was every bit as alive as it was on the ground.

“How you doin’, Big Guy?” he asked.

“I’m right behind you, but I think the crowd is catching on.”

Just as the words left his mouth, someone yelled, “That’s them! Gun!”

This was bad news of the first order.

Jonathan ignored the provocative words and kept his eyes on the stage. That was his mission. PC-One and PC-Two were both still in his field of vision.

“Big Guy, how much trouble are we in?”

“Too much. They see us. They’re pointing.”

“Take care of it,” he said. Up on the stage, PC-Two-Christyne-lunged for her son, but her guards restrained her. One of them produced a pistol from under his garment, and Jonathan shot him. Then, for good measure, he shot the other guard, too.

The yelling got louder.

Someone blindsided him from the left, throwing a punch that landed mostly on Jonathan’s ear. The blow knocked him off balance and skewed his NVGs. The follow-up punch knocked him to the ground. He fell on his ruck, and as he switched his grip on his rifle to repel the threat, three three-round bursts of automatic weapons fire split the night. The attacker and several revelers near him dropped instantly, and the crowd stampeded. Jonathan cast a glance to his left and was entirely unsurprised to Boxers standing there in a shooter’s crouch, rifle still pressed to his shoulder.

Jonathan found his feet and refocused on the stage.

He figured they were fifteen seconds into their assault, and the enemy had already figured out the plan and calculated the stakes. The man whom Jonathan had tried to shoot when the lights went out was in fact still alive, and he’d grabbed Ryan Nasbe over one shoulder and under the other, and was using him as a shield as he hurried toward the end of the stage. The guy’s situational awareness was perfect, keeping the boy at exactly the right angle to prevent him from being shot.

“Big Guy, PC-Two is yours.” Jonathan hated people who hurt children.

When Christyne saw the sheet of blood down the front of Ryan’s shroud, she knew beyond doubt that he was dead. Her scream froze in her throat as her heart froze in her chest. This was too much. It was too horrible, too The last thing she saw as the world went dark was a look of utter confusion on her son’s face.

She lunged to help him as he disappeared into the darkness, but her captors held strong. To her right, a captor yelled, “Weapons out!” and then he made a sound that was half cough, half bark, and he fell heavily on the floor. The instant she heard a gunshot, something hot and wet splashed her, and the guard on her left dropped to the ground. She was free.

In the silver unreality of the starlight, she could make out the developing pandemonium as people on the stage scrambled for cover. Ryan was in the melee somewhere, but she didn’t know where. He yelled again in pain. Such a recognizable sound, it rose above everything else. Everyone else.

Guns materialized out of nowhere, and people waved them about. More shots rang out, and the two people closest to her fell dead. Across the stage, she saw others fall as well.

She needed to get to Ryan. Once a center of attention, she now seemed irrelevant to the crowd, as they swarmed in panic. Everyone wanted off the porch now. Some raced inside the assembly hall, but most scattered into the night.

Where was her son? Where was her boy? Just seconds ago, he’d been right there, and now, there was no sign of him. She started that direction, but then her way was blocked by the most enormous person she’d ever seen. Tall and wide and dressed in black, his body dripped with weaponry, and his face was covered with a night-vision array.

“Christyne Nasbe,” he said. “I’m a friend of Boomer’s and we’re here to take you home. Stay with me.”

With that, he hooked her neck with his arm, pushed her to the floor, and opened fire on the crowd nearest them. People screamed and bodies dropped.

“Ryan!” she yelled-grunted, really, under the weight of what felt like the man’s knee in her back. “I have to get-”

“He’s being taken care of,” the big man said. “He’s in good hands. So are you.”

He rose to a crouch and wrapped his left arm under her shoulder. The hardware around his chest scraped her frozen flesh and she yelped against the pain, but there would be no wriggling from this man’s grasp. When he stood, her feet left the floor.

Wherever he was going, she was going, too.

Jonathan killed anyone he saw brandishing a weapon. Running was fine, cowering was fine. Standing like a deer in the headlights was fine, too, and he saw a lot of all three strategies amid the panic he had created.

The others made their choices and paid the price. He liked to think that their example showed others what not to do. The fewer the guns, the greater his advantage.

He’d lost track of his precious cargo in all the confusion. He saw the man carrying Ryan step down off the left-hand side of the stage, but then the crowd swallowed them. Burdened as he was with a human shield, though, the bad guy couldn’t have gotten far. With a compass point to head for, Jonathan pressed forward.

When he heard Boxers telling Christyne through his open mike that Ryan was in good hands, he resisted the urge to correct him. He would be, soon enough.

“Ryan Nasbe!” Jonathan bellowed to the night. “Ryan Nasbe, shout out! I’m here to take you home!”

The people nearest him jumped at the sound of his voice and two of them made threatening gestures, planting their feet for a fight. Jonathan assessed the hazard as low. “Take off, boys,” he said. “You don’t want to die tonight.”

They backed away.

“Ryan!”

Jonathan continued striding into the crowd. With enough weapons, and a certain bearing, people readily get out of your way. They comply with your commands. It’s the reason why SWAT teams wear scary-looking clothes. Dispelling violence-or creating it-is as much a psychological exercise as it is a physical one, and Jonathan had The Walk down to a science. People parted from his path as if he were equipped with a railroad cowcatcher.

“Ryan Nasbe! Shout out, son!”

In his mind, Jonathan tried to calculate how many targets were out here. If someone told him the crowd numbered two hundred, he would not have been shocked. He was just gratified that they were mostly in retreat. That couldn’t last, though. Sooner or later, someone in charge was going to rally them.

“Ryan! I’m here to help you! I’m here to take you home!”

Then, from Building Alpha’s green side, ahead and to the left, he heard the words he’d been waiting for: “I’m over here!”

At about a hundred fifty-five pounds, Ryan wasn’t the heaviest kid on the planet, but from the way this guy picked him up and used him as a shield, you’d’ve thought he weighed nothing at all. Ryan tried yelling and he tried kicking, but nothing he did loosened the man’s grip, and everything he did made his broken arm scream.

The whole world was screaming, in fact, literally and figuratively. Through the blast of noise, above the din of the shouting and the gunfire, he heard his mother crying out for him. He cried out to answer her, but he didn’t think that his voice cut through enough to be heard.

“This isn’t my fault!” Ryan yelled, begging his captor for mercy. “I didn’t do this.”