John Gilstrap - Threat warning

Boxers’ fusillade ceased as quickly as it had started.

In the silence that followed, Jonathan bellowed, “Nobody move! Stay down or I will kill you.”

Instinctively, he supposed, two of the shooters raised up. Jonathan stitched the wood above their heads with a three-round burst, and they dropped again.

“Down means down, assholes!” His tone was equal parts madman and drill instructor, specially cultivated for moments just like this. “Flat on the ground, arms out, fingers splayed. That’s the only way you survive.”

He sensed movement to his right from the white-green corner, and a quick glance confirmed that Boxers has risen to give him better cover.

“Everybody over there good, Big Guy?”

“One of us is bruised up and scared shitless, but-” He cut off his words and shifted his aim toward the back wall. “Guns!”

Boxers opened up at the back wall, where a black-clad figure pivoted and fell.

Jonathan dropped to a knee and brought his own weapon to bear on the shadows.

“Goddamn idiots!” Boxers boomed.

Where there was one gunman, there almost always was another. Jonathan held his aim, scanning the altar for a target to shoot. In the enhanced artificial light, he looked for curves where there should be straight lines and straight lines where there should be curves. And he looked for movement.

He saw it on the right-hand side of the altar, someone emerging from the shadows, and he swung his aim on it to take it out. He was half a pound from trigger break when he realized that the emerging target was Gail.

“Hold your fire!” he yelled. “It’s Gunslinger.”

She moved awkwardly, sidestepping out just a few feet into the open. Her weapon was gone, and he thought he could see a smear of blood in her hair.

Then he saw the pistol pointed at her head from behind the curtains that framed the altar.

“Take them, brothers and sisters!” a voice yelled from behind the curtain. “They won’t shoot as long as-”

Boxers’ rifle shot severed the man’s hand at the wrist, and the pistol dropped harmlessly to the floor. It hadn’t yet bounced when Jonathan raked the man’s location with bullets. Gail dropped out of sight.

In those two seconds of bedlam, mass insanity was born.

It started with a single voice launching a guttural yell from the cowering fighters huddled among the line of pews. It was the sound of raw emotion, and in two seconds, it had metastasized to the entire room.

“This can’t be good,” Jonathan said.

It wasn’t.

As the chorus of voices rose from all corners, he shot a look to Boxers. The Big Guy seemed hopeful for a fight.

He got his wish.

As the ear-shattering eruption of noise crescendoed, robed gunmen seemed to materialize out of ether. One second, the church seemed mostly empty, and the next, it was filled with target silhouettes, each one standing, and each one brandishing a rifle of some sort.

Jonathan eliminated the most immediate threat by unleashing the remainder of his M4’s magazine-twenty-one steel-jacketed rounds-down the length of the gunmen to whom he’d tried to show mercy. The bullets left the muzzle of his rifle in seven three-round bursts, and the bad guys were so well aligned that individual bullets had to be taking out multiple targets as they passed through one person into the people standing behind him. He did it all from his knee, and in less than five seconds, the bodies were everywhere.

With that threat neutralized, he shifted his aim to the rest of the cavernous room. He saw one gunman in the far right-hand corner-the red-black corner-but even as his finger tightened on the trigger, he saw blood spray from his shoulders, and he dropped, dead on the spot from a burst delivered by Boxers.

As quickly as the sound had peaked, the room was now silent, save for the moans of the wounded. Jonathan yelled, “Big Guy?”

“Fully satisfied,” Boxers yelled back.

“And PC-Two?”

“Still scared, still okay.”

“Gunslinger?”

Gail sat up on the stage, her legs crossed, and pressed her hand against her bleeding head. “I’m fine,” she said.

Jonathan started his check of the room and the wounded. The issue at this point was not to provide them with medical assistance-they’d lost that courtesy when they opened fire en masse-but rather to disarm them to make sure that they could pose no further threat.

The numbers were astounding. Jonathan counted eighteen dead and seven wounded, all of whom would likely be dead before the sun rose. With the gift of marksmanship came the curse of accuracy. While he surveyed the carnage from the green-side aisle, Boxers shadowed him from the red side. When they were done, they’d collected an impressive arsenal of weapons.

They met in the middle, near the altar, where a Klansman lay with his head unzipped and his brain excised. Jonathan said, “I think we’re clear.” He walked a few steps to Gail, and stooped to assess her head wound. “Are you okay? Here, let me take a look.”

She pulled away. “I’m fine.”

“Let me see anyway,” he said. He pulled his NVGs out of the way for a better look. The candlelight wasn’t nearly bright enough, but he didn’t dare give the enemy outside a white-light target. He thought he saw a one-inch gash, maybe worthy of a couple of stitches, maybe not. “I think you’ll be fine,” he said.

“I already told you that,” Gail replied. She surveyed the carnage, really taking it in for the first time. “What’s with these people? That was like a mass suicide.”

“I write it off to zealotry,” Jonathan said.

Christyne Nasbe stood from behind the pew where Boxers had taken shelter. “Where’s Ryan?”

Boxers pointed his forefinger as if it were a gun. “You stay down.”

“Shut up!” she shouted. “Where’s my son?”

Kendig Neen found himself overwhelmed. As faithful soldiers of the Army swarmed him, looking for leadership and a plan, he was desperately looking for Brother Michael. Unbelievably, several soldiers had reported seeing him and Brother Franklin running away after Brother Franklin bolted from the stage using the Nasbe boy as his shield.

With Michael and Franklin both gone, Kendig was in charge, if only because of his position on the Board of Elders. He’d sidelined himself from the main event of the execution after Brother Michael berated him for showing cowardice.

Oh, the irony.

With a veritable war being fought inside the assembly hall, he needed to form a counterassault, and he needed to form it quickly. As the soldiers of the Army of God fled for their lives, he stood in the open, his arms extended, trying to stop them and bring order to chaos.

Some stopped, most didn’t. Of those who did, the majority were members of his security unit. Virtually everyone who had gathered for the execution was armed, so firepower would not be a problem.

He felt pleased that they’d only lost a few minutes to chaos. “Gather ’round me, brothers and sisters,” he shouted above the din. Those who heard-those who admitted that they’d heard-stopped and formed up around him.

“Everybody settle down!” he called. “Who has hard data?”

“Brother Zebediah is dead,” someone said.

“Brother Neil and Sister Sonia Mary,” someone else said.

Kendig waved off that information. “I don’t need a casualty report. I need to know how many people we’re facing and where they are.”

“There must be many in the assembly hall,” someone said. “Listen to the gunfire in there.”

“That’s speculation,” Kendig said. “I want fact. I want to hear from people who have seen things with their own eyes, and who can report fact. ”