Firepower by John Cutter (ebook reader online .txt) 📕

But even then he’d been reluctant to leave. They’d helped him get clean from Oxy. He had a firm identity here in the militia. Something he’d never had before.

Then he found out the Brethren were planning an attack to kill hundreds of civilians.

No. He couldn’t live with that.

He’d made the mistake of telling Mac Colls about his doubts and his plans to leave. Stupid, so stupid to tell Mac. He should have just left the barracks in the dead of night and never come back. He did leave for a while, then he came back to talk to his friend Shaun Adler, trying to get him to leave with him…

A knock at the bars. He glanced over and saw Professor Gustafson himself, smiling sadly at him through the little barred window. “You don’t seem to be reading.”“I read everything through, sir.”

“I told you I wanted you to memorize the sixth chapter of my latest book and recite it back to me.”

“I’m… working on it.”

Gustafson shook his head. “I don’t think you’re serious about rehabilitating yourself, Bobby. I’d have to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are a believer before I let you out.”

“I am, General! I believe!” He said it as convincingly as he was able. He had to try to believe — or pretend to. He couldn’t stay here much longer without losing his mind. Going around and around in his head; pacing, exercising, talking to himself because there was no one else to talk to. “I totally believe, sir!”

“I am not convinced. And what are my options? It’s not practical to keep you here indefinitely. I can execute you — which is probably the smart move — or I can release you. Which would be foolish. But… there is a test I could put you through.”

Shaun swallowed. “What test, sir?”

“I just might give you a special assignment. With a chaperone, of course. You do it… I will give you a pardon.”

“What kind of assignment?”

“Oh, well, as to that…” Gustafson chuckled. “You’ll see. It’s all part of the bigger plan… But you’re also required to memorize that chapter I assigned. It’s a short one. You can do it, Bobby. You have to.”

“General—”

But then he was gone. Bobby could hear Gustafson’s bootsteps receding down the hallway…

*

“Hold it!” Rendell croaked, stopping on the trail with one hand raised. His jaw was cracked, swollen, and it was hard to talk. In his left hand was the heavy Desert Eagle, the biggest handgun he had and one of the most powerful on the market.

The other three stopped on the trail behind him. Hever almost bumped into him. Behind Rendell, Glenn Hever, Tutty Tutwallager and Scarecrow Hudson were waiting, AK47s in their hands, mouths open, looking scared and stoned. Both the husky Tutty and the skinny, raggedly dressed Scarecrow had gotten high before coming. Rendell had told them not to.

The fucking Three Stooges. Why didn’t he have better people?

“There’s a tripwire,” Rendell told them. His effort to whisper came out a rasp.

“Where?” asked Hever. He was a rail-thin man with a goatish beard and spiky, greasy black hair. “Oh — that fishing line in the brush?”

It was chilly out here in the woods in the early morning, and Hever’s breath showed as he talked.

Rendell could smell it, too. “Yes, and keep your voice down! He told me where to come — and I’m pretty sure it’s a trap. But I’ve been watching for shit like this fucking tripwire.”

He glanced around him, peering through the shadowy underbrush for a sign of the big man who’d jumped him at the bar. All Rendell had been able to find out, calling around later that night, was that the man had given his name as Vince. Was this “Vince” watching, somewhere near? To Rendell’s right was a slope crowded with pines and scrub grass. To his left the ground dropped sharply off, a steeper slope mostly covered by ivy and wild blackberry. About fifty feet below the trail, Chickasaw Creek wound through the bottom of the canyon, chuckling to itself as if amused by the four men.

Rendell looked back at the tripwire, bending over to see what it led to. Maybe a shotgun, set up to blast someone?

But then he saw what it was attached to. Grass. Just… grass, on both sides. Nothing else. That wouldn’t have even tripped him up; the grass would’ve just torn. Why bother with it?

Unless — he was meant to see it. To stall him in this spot…

Then he gasped and said, “Flatten—”

But the gunshots interrupted him, two rounds, from upslope in the trees, and Hever yelled once — sounded like he was saying “Yip!” — as the bullets knocked him down the steep slope. He fell back, still clutching the AK, and slid down the slope, over the brush, flattening it down as he went…

And into a fresh grave.

Rendell stared, trying to be sure of what he was seeing. Yes. An open grave, perpendicular to the trail, hidden by bushes till now, had just swallowed up Hever’s body.

“Holy fuck!” Tutty blurted.

Rendell turned spasmodically toward the direction the shots had come from, fired his Desert Eagle randomly upslope, the recoil from the heavy magnum round jerking his hand back. Then he ducked down, and the other two did the same, firing up the hill and then hunkering low.

The guy who’d killed Hever called mockingly down to them. “I really, really don’t like drug dealers!” came a maddeningly familiar voice, from somewhere up in the brush.

Rendell tried to figure out exactly where the voice had come from, but it sounded a fair distance off and there was some echo out here in the canyon.

“I’m willing to let you go with that one casualty!” the man continued. “You have to throw your weapons