Wait a minute now.
Wait a fucking minute.
In the distance he could see something. And not just one thing but many. Vehicles. They weren’t wrecks. They were heading in his direction at full steam. He popped the clutch and decelerated, slowing until he came to a stop. He dug in his saddlebag and pulled out the Minox binoculars, held them to his eyes and tightened the field… shit and shit. Those were Hummers. Military Humvees.
He had a sudden bad feeling about things, which became even worse when he heard the thunk-thunk-thunk of the chopper as it came over the tree line in the distance, sweeping through the sky above him.
He had to get off the I.
He throttled up, cutting across fields of yellow grass and stunted corn, over humps and down into little vales, pushing along, giving the hog some speed but not so much that he’d lose her on the uneven terrain. Any thought he’d had that it was all purely coincidental vanished when the chopper passed overhead again, and behind him the Hummers entered the field as well, pushing forward in a solid line, chewing through the corn like harvesters.
Fuck.
They had his number.
He gunned up a hill, came out on a gravel road and opened the bike up, wary of a skid, but knowing he had to get some real estate between him and the Hummers. That chopper kept circling overhead. It was eyeing him and unless he could get to some cover, some trees, it was all over with. He kept riding, throwing a contrail of dust behind him.
The gravel road wound out through open country and that was bad. In the distance it entered a pine thicket. If he could just make it into the trees he might have a chance. He throttled up a bit, gaining speed and momentum. In the rearview he could see that the Hummers were on the road, too, coming fast.
He cut onto a side road that circled through some heavier brush and then onto a footpath. Up a hill, down another, over a footbridge and then off the path into the grass again, finding what looked like a dry ravine bedded by flat sandstone. He followed it, nearing the pine thicket and knowing he just wasn’t going to make it. Overhead, the helicopter came veering down in a strafing run. He heard the crack! crack! of a high-powered rifle. Bullets thudded into the stones around him, splitting some in two with little puffs of rock dust. The rifle kept firing and the rounds landed in front of him, behind him, to either side.
They could have pegged you if they wanted, Slaughter thought as he pulled up out of the ravine and cut onto the gravel road again. They’re herding you. They want you alive.
He decided he would not make it easy on them, whoever in the hell they were. His scoot could go places they couldn’t and once he got into the trees the helicopter would be useless. First, he had to get into the trees, though. And once he was there, if it came down to it… he would fight to the end.
Okay. Not far now.
Maybe five minutes.
The Hummers were closing and he couldn’t throttle the hog any more or he was going to spill her. The road was rough and potholed, the gravel was loose. Things like that meant nothing to the Hummers, of course. They poured it on even more. And here came that fucking chopper again, the gunner firing off rounds, throwing lead like rice at a wedding: crack! crack! ca-rack!
But there was the thicket beyond… cool, shadowy depths where he could fade.
It was going to work.
He was almost there.
And that was the point at which everything went right straight to hell because out of the thicket came another Hummer straight at him and there was a gunner with a mounted recoilless rifle just waiting for the order. Slaughter knew the weapon well. Back in the days before he earned his Disciples patch when he was a grunt he had shot one. 106mm. It would make scrap metal of the hog and turn Slaughter himself into a greasy smear of gore.
They had him bottled.
He didn’t have a chance to decelerate. He swung the bike to the left and the culvert he hadn’t noticed in the heavy growth came up at him and the bike thumped into it, went up in the air like a rocket and Slaughter was thrown twenty feet, rolling through the grass.
When he came to his senses, soldiers with M16A2s were bearing down on him and he stood up slowly, hands over his head.
“DOWN! DOWN! DOWN!” one of them screamed at him. “EAT THAT GROUND, MOTHERFUCKER!”
“Slow down, man, you got me,” Slaughter said, cool and easy.
Then they came up behind him and knocked him to the ground with their rifle butts and then they were kicking him. Sometime during the process, he rolled over cold as canned fish, thoughts rolling through his mind of the big bad west, the Deadlands, the Rockies, and the Pacific Ocean on the other side.
He fell into a dream where he was swimming in the night sea.
Chapter Ten
Who they were and what they wanted, he did not learn. When Slaughter woke up, he was in a hole. It took some time to come around and make sense of his surroundings because he kept slipping in and out of consciousness. They’d given him a good beating and everything hurt. Everything ached. But when his head finally cleared, he saw that he was indeed in a hole. A perfectly round shaft like a sewer with earthen walls and a rough woolen blanket beneath him. It smelled like piss and blood because he’d been pissing himself and bleeding, maybe pissing blood, too.
About eight feet up there was a grate. The whole thing looked like a pit they kept POWs in from one of those Chuck Norris movies where they free the MIAs in Vietnam or something. Crazy ass shit, but that was the reality of it.
He was in a pit.
Naked.
Bruised and bloodied.
Thirsty.
Hungry.
That first day and into the second he kept calling up to the soldiers he saw peeking through the grating but they ignored him. Only when he started calling their mothers names did he get a short, Fuck off! But that was it. At night it got cold and he shivered in his blanket. During the day the sun streamed down on him and he sweated. There were bugs, too. Black beetles that nipped. They kept him in the hole for a week. He lived in there. Pissed in there. Shit in there. Slept in his own waste like an animal. Twice a day they’d lower down food—a tin cup of water, some bread, a few scraps of meat—and on the third day, he grabbed the rope and nearly pulled the soldier down in there with him, which would have been fun, because he would have killed that fucking G.I. Joe, snapped his neck and gouged out his eyes, taken his weapon and blown away anyone that looked down into the pit. Of course, these were soldiers or cops or both, and they would have tossed tear gas down at him, or maybe a grenade.
Problem solved.
After that little play he got no food or water for two days. That’s when he stopped acting like a cunning animal and starting acting like a thinking man. If they had wanted him dead, he would be dead. That’s not what they wanted at all. This was psychological bullshit and he recognized it as such. They were pushing him to the limits of human endurance the way sadistic guards did with captured soldiers. They were trying to break him. They wanted him to beg for mercy.
That just showed how stupid they were, how they did not know him.
But it was a game and he would play. He honestly did not know if this was about those killings in New Castle, but he knew that in time they would show their hand. But he had to make them do it. And to do that he had to sit silent and take whatever they gave him but never, ever show weakness or beg for mercy.
Let them make the first overture.
Let them show their hand.
The longer he thought about it, the more it began to make sense to him. They had brought him here for a reason. It was not some accidental or coincidental thing where they just happened to grab him on a raid. They came down on him, rode herd on him, spent a lot of time and resources trying to bring him in. If he was just another thug, why waste the time? They would have killed him and left his corpse bleeding out in the sun.