Jack says, “Jesus!” and starts toward the car. He’s no more than six paces past the edge of the barn when there’s this deep growling sound. Jack freezes, but the growling doesn’t stop.
A bloody massive dog slinks out of the long grass, teeth bared as it sizes Jack up.
“Good doggie?” says Jack, even though the fucking thing clearly isn’t.
It tenses up, ready to spring and Jack raises his Glock nine mm. “Don’t even think about it.”
Too late. Suddenly it’s bounding through the grass, barking, teeth flashing like knives. And Jack puts a bullet in it. BANG!
The dog doesn’t stop. BANG! BANG!
BANG! Each one sending a little explosion of red bursting out of the animal’s body. The thing’s legs go out from underneath it and it slithers to a halt not four feet away from Jack. Damn thing still isn’t dead — it lies there whimpering, one paw twitching as it slowly bleeds out.
Jack turns to say something to us, but only gets as far as, “Did you — ”
BOOM!
The left side of Jack’s face disappears in a spray of blood and bone.
Suddenly everything has gone very badly wrong.
Chapter 16
Henry and I hit the ground as Jack’s body topples backwards. There’s muffled screaming coming from the cars. No one’s singing Onward Christian Soldiers any more. I give Henry the ‘What the fuck just happened?’ look and he shrugs, then gives me the signal. I don’t need to be told twice, just pick myself up and run round the back of the barn, keeping low — past the Winnebago with its blood-soaked carpet — coming out on the other side.
I can see Henry creeping towards the barn’s entrance, so I do the same. Him going in from one side, me from the other: your classic pincer movement.
Henry peers round the edge of the opening then yanks his head back as another shotgun blast rips through the air, sending chips of concrete flying. He holds a finger up to me. One — there’s only one of them.
I nod and drop to my belly, crawling along through the grass until I’m level with the entrance, keeping as quiet as I can as Henry shouts, “We’ve got the place surrounded! Get your ass out here, or we’ll come in there and blow it off.”
BOOM! More concrete explodes. At least he’s shooting at Henry’s side of the doorway, not mine. By now I’m close enough to see into the barn’s crumbling interior. There’s farming crap stacked against the walls, a couple of bales of straw and some weed-killer in the corner. But what catches my eye is the old wooden table in the middle of the barn. Someone’s chained to it. I can see their hands and feet hanging over the edges. There’s no sign of the son-of-a-bitch who killed Jack.
Blood drips off the lip of the table — slow, dark and sticky. Not fresh, but not old enough to congeal.
Holy shit. . There’s a big plastic bin-bag under the table with a couple of arms and legs poking out of it.
And then whoever it is on the table groans.
I glance at Henry and he tries the ‘come out, we’ve got you surrounded’ thing again. This time when the son-of-a-bitch shoots I’m ready for him. He’s got his back to me as he brings this huge shotgun up to his shoulder and pulls the trigger. And in the silence following the deafening BOOM! I put a bullet in the guy’s knee.
It goes in as a tiny hole, but when it rips out the other side it takes his kneecap with it — blood and bone bursting over the table legs.
He screams and falls. The shotgun clatters against the barn’s concrete floor, where it goes off again. BOOM! Buckshot whistles over my head as I bury my face in the grass.
I look up for long enough to shout, “He’s down!” then I’m on my feet, hurrying into the dark barn, my gun trained on the son-of-abitch’s head. Not that he’s any threat to us now, he’s too busy clutching the place where his knee used to be and screaming.
Henry says something, but I can’t hear him, I’m looking down at the woman chained to the wooden table. It’s Laura — stripped down to her underwear, rubber tubing tied around her upper arms and thighs, cutting off the blood before he cuts off the limbs. She’s covered in bruises, her face all puffy and swollen.
She looks at me with one wide, angry eye, her mouth working behind the gag, but all that comes out is this furious mumbling. I hurry over and undo the filthy rag he’s tied around her mouth.
“Agh! Jesus!” She turns her head and spits. “Fucking bastard!” I get to work on the chains holding her to the table while she swears. “What took you so long?”
“Are you OK?”
“Do I look fucking OK?” Laura tries to move, but nothing works — her limbs are slowly turning purple. “Bastard. .” Then she asks me, “Is he alive?”
I look down at the man — he’s gone all quiet, rocking back and forth, still holding his ruined knee. “Yeah,” I say, “he’s still alive.” Then I start untying the rubber tubing from her arms and legs.
She grits her teeth as the blood starts to flow again. That’s got to be one of the shittiest doses of pins and needles ever.
After a couple of minutes Laura swings her legs over the edge of the bloody table then drops to the floor, her legs give way and I have to catch her. There’s a chunk missing from her left leg, surrounded by teeth marks. She hisses in pain, holding onto the edge of the table to stay upright.
She’s shivering, so I offer her my jacket. Laura smiles as she puts it on, but it’s not a nice kind of smile.
“Henry, Mark,” she says, “get the Bastard on the table. And chain the fucker down.”
I shake my head. “Can’t do that, Laura, your dad wants him alive.”
She stares at me, and suddenly she don’t look like Laura no more — she looks like her old man when he tells Henry and me someone’s stepped outta line and we gotta go whack them. . “He say he had to be in one piece?”
“Laura — ”
“Look at that leg, Henry. We don’t get him some medical attention soon, he’s going to bleed to death.”
“But — ”
“Best thing for him,” she says, picking a big knife off the tabletop, “is ampu-fuckingtation.”
Chapter 17
We manage to talk her down to just the one leg. And when the screaming’s stopped and the guy’s passed out, we drag him and his amputated limb out to the car and bundle him in the trunk. He looks like shit, but he’ll survive the trip back to New Jersey. I ain’t saying how long he’ll live after that though. Let’s just say I wouldn’t want to be in his shoe when we get there.
I make sure Laura’s comfortable in the passenger seat, then go join Henry in the graveyard of dead cars.
“How long before we’re back home?” he says.
I shrug. “Thousand miles. . what’s that, about seventeen hours? I could do it in fourteen, but no way in hell I want some cop pulling us over for speeding with Long John Fucking Silver in the boot. Should be back in New Jersey about six tomorrow morning.”
Henry nods, then looks out at the cars and their terrified inhabitants. The one nearest to us is in an ancient Cadillac — she’s rocking back and forwards in her chains, the stumps where her arms and legs used to be moving in little circles, crawling with flies. Her eyes are tight closed and I swear to God if I’d known what Henry was about to do I’d have stopped him.
But I don’t know.
Not until he pulls his gun and puts a single bullet through her head.
BANG!
“Fucking hell, Henry! What you do that for?”
He watches as her torso twitches then hangs still against the chains. “Rule number one, never leave witnesses.” He bends down, picks up the brass casing from his bullet and puts it in his pocket — that’s rule number two, never leave any evidence. We’ve already picked up all our brass from outside the concrete barn. “Besides,” he says, “what kinda life she going to have, no arms and no fuckin’ legs?”
He turns his gun on the next one, chained to the seat of a rusty Volvo.