John Gilstrap - Threat warning

A young lady-Kendig always had difficulty with names-stepped forward. “I saw a very large man take one of the prisoners inside the assembly hall.”

“I saw Brother Franklin running away with the boy. With Ryan,” someone else said.

The phrase running away triggered a disturbed murmur through the crowd.

“Where’s Brother Michael?” a soldier asked.

Kendig ignored the question. He needed to motivate these young men and women for action, and if they perceived that the top leadership had run for their lives, nothing good would follow. “What’s going on in the assembly hall?” he asked. “Who are the Users shooting at?”

“Brother Benjamin was in there preparing for services after the executions.”

“How many people did he have with him?”

“Twenty. Maybe twenty-five.”

“Did anyone see the assault force?” Kendig asked. With as many as twenty-five soldiers inside, maybe this whole incident could go away quickly.

“I saw that one big soldier,” someone said.

“Huge,” someone else corrected.

“I think I also saw someone running after Brother Franklin.”

Kendig turned his gaze toward the soldier who spoke of Brother Franklin. “So of course you hurried to help him.”

The soldier looked at his feet.

The crowd around him continued to grow, and as it did, a plan began to form in his mind. Two against many was impossible odds. If he could just “Brother Kendig!” someone yelled from the night. The tone was frantic.

As one, the gathering crowd turned toward the voice. A clot of soldiers emerged from the night, still dressed in their ceremonial robes. Two appeared to be spattered with blood. “She killed four of us,” one of them said hurriedly. Kendig thought he remembered the young soldier’s name to be Brother Kurt. “We tried to stop her, but she fought us.”

“A woman fought all of you?”

“We were in the process of disarming her when she got shots off.”

Kendig couldn’t believe this. “All of you are armed,” he said. “Why didn’t you shoot back?”

“We tried, Brother Kendig. We really tried. I think she got away into the assembly hall.”

As if to punctuate his point, the shooting in the assembly hall crescendoed.

“We did strip her of this, though,” Brother Kurt said. He handed Kendig a portable radio.

Ryan had never heard so much noise. It rolled on and on, individual gunshots combining to form a continuous pounding. As he pressed himself into the corner and tried his best to dissolve into the floor he jumped at the sound of what could only be bullets sailing through the wall that separated him from the shooting. In the oppressive darkness, where his only sensory input was the bedlam of shooting and the stench of gunpowder, he found himself screaming, as if adding a human element to the cacophony would take the edge off so much death.

And then it was over. Just like that, silence became more oppressive than the sound of battle. The silence came so abruptly that he wondered whether he’d gone deaf.

He heard movement out there beyond the door, but it didn’t sound violent. It didn’t even sound urgent. Just voices talking about things.

Suddenly the darkness of his room-and the loneliness of it-became unbearable. He’d been alone enough. He’d been scared and victimized enough. Now it was time for him to do something. He had no idea what that something might be, but by golly, he was going to do it. His hand tightened on the grip of his revolver.

“Where’s Ryan?”

Jesus, was that his mom?

“You stay down!” boomed a voice.

“Shut up! Where’s my son?”

Ryan coughed out a laugh before he could stop it. That was definitely his mom’s voice; but it was attached to an entirely different brain.

He decided that whether the good guys had won or lost, he was going to be with his mother. He stood and made his way to the door. He pushed it open.

“Oh, my God,” he heard as soon as he stepped clear of the jamb. “Ryan!”

He turned to his right, and there she was, dressed in the stupid white gown, her arms tied behind her. She ran toward him. She didn’t walk quickly, or jog; she ran.

As she closed the distance between them, he instinctively turned to present his left side, shielding his right.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, I thought you were dead,” she said.

She was still five yards away, when Scorpion stepped forward and held out his hand to stop her.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Scorpion said. He drew an ugly knife from somewhere over his left shoulder and made a swirling motion with his fingers for Christyne to turn around. The rope from her wrists fell away without resistance, and now she was ready to hug her son.

“The arm, Mom!” Ryan said, but he knew that she knew, and he knew that there’d be no stopping the assault of kisses.

She grabbed his face in both hands. “Oh, my sweet baby, I’ve been so scared. You’re so beautiful.” She kissed him again.

Embarrassed, Ryan shot a glance at the other men in the room, and he saw that they were embarrassed, too. “Mom.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “You’re alive. We’re both alive.”

She threw her arms around him, and somehow, it didn’t hurt.

Emotion bubbled out of nowhere. One second he was embarrassed by all the mommy shit, and the next, he was completely absorbed by it. He wrapped his good arm around her, gun still gripped in his fist, and he buried his face in the crook where her neck met her shoulder.

Wracking sobs came from a place in his gut that hadn’t been tapped since he was a kid. Shame and sadness and anger all flowed in an unnerving tsunami of emotion that startled him. And as his tears poured out of him, his mom rubbed his back, just as she’d done when he was a little boy.

“Shh,” she said in his ear. “We’re fine. We’ll be fine. Shh.”

He closed his eyes, and he tried to transport to a different time. A better time.

For two seconds-maybe three-it worked.

Then reality returned.

Jonathan was a sucker for a tearful reunion. That was, after all, why he did what he did. But while the Nasbe family enjoyed their moment, he still had a war to fight.

“Close those shutters!” he commanded. True to its role as the castle keep, heavy wooden shutters framed the assembly hall windows. To Jonathan’s eye, they were thick enough to stop all but the most powerful conventional firearms. Four-inch-wide slots had been cut vertically and horizontally to accommodate gun barrels in the event of a firefight. They ran from about four feet off the floor to six feet. When closed, they formed paired crosses over every window, as if to further blaspheme.

Father Dom would not approve, Jonathan thought.

His earpiece popped and a deep baritone voice said, “Whoever you are, we need to talk.”

Jonathan shot a glance to Boxers, who shrugged. A glance toward Gail told him how the bad guys had gotten a radio. He unplugged the earphone jack so Gail could hear, and he pressed his mike button. “You may call me Scorpion,” he said.

A derisive laugh. “Tough name,” the voice said. “Scary name.”

“That’s him!” Ryan yelled, pushing away from his mother. “That’s the sheriff, the guy that picked me up. I forget his name.”

Jonathan hadn’t. “Well, hello, Kendig,” he said.

Kendig recoiled at the sound of his name.

“How does he know you?” Brother Kurt asked.

“He doesn’t,” Kendig snapped. “That boy-that Ryan-is in there. He must have-”

“Are you in danger, sir?” Jonathan asked over the radio. “I’m sorry we let you down.”

Kendig felt himself going pale. To the group around him, he said, “He’s playing a bluff.” He fumbled the delivery, though. He sounded too defensive, even to himself.