The Committee was going to kill all of the U.S.‘s crops and replace them in the marketplace with genetically accelerated crops grown on the South American lands they now owned!
Just considering the prospects brought the chill of fear back to Dogan, and this time he couldn’t suppress it.
“Have the boy go on,” he told Marna.
“Ross, it’s true what he said, isn’t it? You’ve got to tell me what’s going on down here.”
“Later,” Dogan said firmly, sitting back down. “I’ve got to hear the rest of his story.”
The boy was trembling harder but still he went on. “Less than an acre of the crops was still standing when the trucks arrived.” His voice became frantic. Marna struggled to keep up with him. “Men climbed off, soldiers with heavy guns. They took them from their shoulders and spread out. The people inside the church were forced outside. I remember seeing them shield their eyes from the sunshine. I tried to pick out my parents but everyone was dressed almost the same. I tried and tried. It was so important to me but I couldn’t find them.
“More of the soldiers came down the street pushing the townspeople who had wandered off or tried to hide maybe. People were screaming and crying. It was horrible, horrible!
“The soldiers fired their guns over and over again. All I could hear were gunshots. The people kept screaming but the screaming made less and less noise as they fell dead and the blood ran everywhere. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. It felt like I was forgetting how to breathe. They left the bodies piled on top of each other. Some of the bodies fell off the top, and it was then that …”
The boy stopped suddenly. His eyes grew glazed and distant. When he continued, his voice had turned maddeningly calm.
“… I saw my parents. They were lying next to each other, their arms touching. Their eyes were open but they couldn’t see me. I made myself be brave like my father would have wanted and took the others far up the hillside, as more of the soldiers soaked the fields and the town. They were going to burn everything, I knew it, so I led us high up into the wind so the fire would stay away. It burned for three days, turning our skin red and hot. But then the rains stopped it and we built this shack farther down the hill so we could see the place where our town had been.” He took a deep breath, started shaking all at once. “Their eyes were open but they couldn‘t see me!”
The boy’s voice had turned hysterical and so loud that Dogan barely heard the gunshot fired through an opening in the shack. It splintered wood just above his head and he spun quickly toward Marna, thinking of his pistol still tucked in her belt.
She already had her own gun out and was firing from a crouch when three bullets pounded into her, shredding her chest and turning her face into pulp with a huge crater where the nose and eyes had been. She rocked backward to the floor, writhing in death throes.
Dogan felt a scream of rage rising in him as he dove across the room, reaching for Marna’s belt and his P-9. A bullet exploded in the area he had vacated and the boy screamed in agony. Dogan feared he was dead too. The other children were screeching now, drowning out the other shots that sent dirt and wood chips everywhere. Dogan gripped the P-9 hard and, still rolling, came up to his knees in firing position facing the area the shots were coming from.
A flurry of bullets punctured the wall, and a large figure smashed through behind them. Dogan pumped three bullets into him. Two more figures rushed forward. Dogan took the first out with a head shot and the second with a bull’s-eye to the heart. The two bodies toppled over backward, their blood splattering the walls.
Dogan held the P-9 steady, calculating how many bullets he had left. He stayed there for several long seconds, the exact number he didn’t know or care. The children were still screaming. The boy Juan was moaning softly on the floor, a neat red splotch widening on the rag he wore for a shirt, mixing with the dirt. Dogan started to move for him.
The woman crashed through the hole in the wall and fired before her aim was clear. The bullet whistled by Dogan’s hair. She was tumbling, spinning on the floor, a blur before his eyes. Dogan might have been able to take her out easily if he hadn’t chosen instead to move sideways to shield the boy’s body with his own. He got off one shot, a hit but a poor one, and before he could get off another the woman had grabbed the oldest girl and shrank down behind her, using her thin body as a shield.
Dogan raised his gun. The woman raised hers. A stalemate. He could see where she was wounded. Left shoulder, just a nick but she was losing lots of blood.
She backed up toward the hole in the wall, yanking the girl with her.
“You won’t get away,” she growled.
“You’re the last one who can stop me,” Dogan said, still trying to figure out who had sent her and the others. Was it the Committee or SAS-Ultra? “Tell me who sent you and I’ll let you live.”
The woman’s response was to squeeze her pistol against her hostage’s head. “You’re in no position to issue ultimatums.”
“The Committee or Masvidal?”
The woman just looked at him, breathing heavily.
“It was the Committee, wasn’t it? SAS-Ultra couldn’t possibly have known I was here and they wouldn’t have reason to—” And then Dogan realized. “Wait a minute, you didn’t come here to kill me, you came to kill the children! You fucking bastards!”
“More children than these will die,” the woman said with strange calm, blood and sweat staining her face. “All the world’s children if that’s what it takes.”
“The Committee wouldn’t have much of a world to own then.”
Her eyes flickered. “The Committee is changing and there is nothing you can do to stop it. It’s too late. You can’t fool me with your words. I know they sent you.”
Pistol hand trembling, the woman kept inching toward the window, lowering herself even further behind the girl, free hand draped over the child’s neck, obviously confident that if the man was going to chance a shot, he would have done so already.
“It’s as good as over,” she taunted.
“Absolutely,” Dogan muttered, and fired the P-9 from his hip.
The bullet ripped into the woman’s neck and tore most of it away, pitching her backward through the remnants of the wall. The child she’d been holding cowered screaming on the floor.
Dogan moved back for the boy but his eyes strayed to Marna’s corpse first and he felt the tears welling in his eyes.
He was Grendel, named for the monster who ate human flesh.
And he was crying, the rest of the world be damned….
The boy was whimpering now and Dogan hurried over, lifted him gently from the floor into his arms. There was a lot of blood but he judged that the wound had missed all vital organs. The boy might live.
“It hurts! Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!”
“I’m here,” Dogan soothed, cradling the boy close and wishing he could have been there for Marna as well. “I’m here.”
But only for now, he thought to himself. The words of the woman he had just killed fluttered through his consciousness. What did they mean? He was in no condition to figure it out now but there would be plenty of time later. Yes, plenty. Much traveling lay ahead of him. There were scores to be settled, a vent to be found for the anger and rage that swelled within him. Violence would be met with violence.
Death with death.
Part Seven:
Rome and London, Wednesday Morning
Chapter 23
Locke barely slept all night. The doctor set the cracked bones as best he could and used layers of adhesive tape and a pair of Ace bandages to hold his work in place. Without proper hospital treatment, which Chris refused, the doctor said he could not guarantee the fingers would ever work properly again. Locke shrugged him off. He did accept painkillers, but they made little dent in the constant ache that gave way to a blast of pain whenever he moved the hand wrong or put any pressure on it.