Broken Heartland (27 page)

“Looks like you'll keep your heart and lungs. Liver and kidneys, too.” Mad Dog was glad to hear that. But not what came next.

“Having your eyes harvested, though,” the nurse said, “that will not be fun.”

***

The sheriff was at a moment of indecision. He had lots of them, every day, but most didn't come with quite such deadly consequences. Should he go back out that window into what could easily be a killing zone? Or should he waste some of the precious few bullets he had in his .38, blowing the locks off that door separating him from what could be an equally hazardous area inside the house?

His mind was made up for him when someone released the dead bolt and a voice he recognized spoke from the other side of the door. “Don't shoot, Sheriff, it's only us.”

He recognized their faces, too. Two old men in baseball caps, one pulled low to mask the hairlessness of advanced chemotherapy, the other, because that was the fashion for Kansas farmers these days. They were the blind man and the dying one, the pair Doc had rustled up for him when he desperately needed help covering exits so he could go into the high school after Chucky Williams. Lord, had that been just this morning? With all that had happened since, it seemed like years ago.

“What are you two doing here?” the sheriff asked.

“Come in that Ford you was following,” the blind one said. He must not be able to see worth a damn, because he was pointing his shotgun at the sheriff's belly. English tried to edge aside, but the old man and the shotgun swiveled right along with him.

“How? I mean, I thought there were more bad guys in that Ford, not help for me.”

“Bad guys depends which side you're on,” the cancer patient said. “And it troubles me to tell you this, Sheriff, but you've made a mistake.”

The sheriff didn't like the way this conversation was progressing. “But you two came the minute Doc found you. Risked your lives to help me stop Chucky. Why would you do that if…?” Hell, he didn't know what “if” was.

“It shames us, Sheriff, but there's this miracle worker here. A doctor who don't follow the rules. He's promised to give me my sight back.”

“And cure my cancer,” the other old-timer said. “We paid pretty near every cent we've got for this, then your crazy deputy ran that car off the road before he hit the bus this morning and spoiled everything.”

“We was over to Klausen's to recover the body,” the blind one said, “the one from the wreck. See if anything could still be salvaged. Doc come by there to get his gun. Told us you was looking for Chucky, so we come along 'cause….”

It was starting to make sense. “'Cause Chucky was the back up,” the sheriff said. “The donor who would stand in, just in case.”

The cancer patient raised his deer rifle until it was centered on the sheriff's chest. “I always said you're a lot sharper lawman than this county deserves. I told these folks we're working with not to underestimate you. Well, now we need to relieve you of that pistol. Take you downstairs for some tests. See if you maybe match up with his eyes or my bone marrow.”

A terrible metallic shriek penetrated the room. It was a distant noise, but so unnatural that they all reacted to it. The old man with the deer rifle started to swing toward the open window. The sheriff dropped his pistol and stepped in and got one hand on the rifle and the other on the shotgun and managed to put his body inside the reach of either weapon's muzzle.

“Drop your guns,” someone yelled.

The blind man discharged his shotgun, instead, tearing a hole in the plaster.

Another gun answered. Two shots.

The blind man's face exploded. He would need more than eyes, now. And the sheriff needed something to wipe the results off his face.

Both the shotgun and the rifle came free in the sheriff's hand. He swung toward the cancer patient only to discover the man had suffered similar damage. There was a hole leaking blood just in front of one ear. The other side of his face was splattered over the door they'd come through.

The sheriff turned toward the window, the only place the shots could have come from. He was still trying to grasp what had happened. How could two old farmers have turned so desperate that they were willing to kill for a chance at health? And how could their lives have ended so suddenly, just as he was about to disarm them?

A big man, back-lit, stood in the window, weapon still to his shoulder. The sheriff recognized him before he spoke.

“That's right, English. The next sheriff of Benteen County just saved your ass.”

“You didn't have to…,” the sheriff began. He'd planned to continue that with
kill them
.

“I owed you one from that fiasco over at the school,” Greer said, climbing in the window. He pulled a bandana out of a pocket and wiped the sheriff's face. “And for playing this whole campaign so nasty. But that's just politics. Come on. Let's clear this house. Chucky Williams is around here somewhere. As well as a bunch of hired killers.”

***

Someone had filled the casement window with dirt, replaced the glass with plywood, and plastered it over from the inside. How had Hailey managed to find it, let alone move all that earth and tear the wood away? All Pam had needed to do to help the wolf was shatter a little plaster, something Hailey could have quickly accomplished by herself.

It only took a couple of minutes to open the hole wide enough for Pam to crawl through, though it took a lot of twisting and wiggling to get out.

She hugged the wolf and thanked her and received a big sloppy kiss in return. But Hailey wasn't interested in being hugged. And that made sense. They were under a series of windows that looked out across the yard toward the bins and warehouses. Easily spotted if someone happened to look out and down.

Hailey whined and grabbed the sleeve of Pam's overalls, pulling her along the side of the building. Mad Dog's wolf seemed to have more of a plan than she did. Pam followed. After no more than a few feet, she understood why. Steps led down to another hole in the ground. This one had been dug by the people who built this house, an outside entrance to the basement.

Pam followed Hailey down concrete stairs to the thick steel door at the base. There were scratches around the handle and along the bottom. Hailey had been here before. The big silver-tipped wolf dug at the corner of the door for a moment. Then she put her mouth on the handle and twisted. The door didn't budge and Hailey turned and looked back at Pam and whined.

“I don't know if I can help you with this one,” Pam said. If the wonder wolf couldn't get in, what chance did a would-be Vegas lounge-act have? Still, she tried the handle. Locked, of course. She examined the door for weaknesses. She didn't see any.

Hailey scratched at the door again, impatient, as if to say, Why did I bother rescuing you if you can't be of more help than this?

Something shrieked in the yard behind them. Hailey continued to worry at the door, unconcerned. But Pam knew that sound wasn't caused by anything natural. She climbed back up enough steps to peer into the farm yard. A wall was missing from one of the metal warehouses, and a Caterpillar was slowly crawling across the yard toward the house, blade raised so she couldn't see who was driving. If that thing kept coming, she and Hailey would soon have another opportunity for getting inside.

Someone else must have realized that. The kitchen door slammed open, only a few feet to her right. A couple of muzzles emerged and she ducked just as several hundred rounds went singing off toward the metallic monster advancing on the house. She heard bullets ricochet off steel even over the racket of the weapons. Pam raised her head again, just far enough to see that the bulldozer was still coming. Its blade not only hid and protected whoever was driving it, but hid and protected the radiator and engine block as well. The only moving parts she could see were the tracks. Those weren't going to be troubled by anything smaller than an artillery round. Maybe not even that.

The shooting from the house stopped. The men inside must have realized the same thing. They were going to have to find a better way to stop that thing. And then she saw a flash of something just over the top of the bulldozer's blade. The driver had an automatic weapon of his own. Chips of brick, wood, glass and concrete exploded from around the kitchen door. A second batch tore up dirt in front of her face and convinced her to stop peeking and get back down and concentrate on that door with Hailey.

The guy on the bulldozer had seen her. Whatever chance she and Hailey might have had to make a run from this entry to the cellar was gone. And now, the guy on the bulldozer might come after them here. Or, when he got close enough, be able to shoot down into the stairwell and remove wonder wolf and friend from his list of problems.

Why wasn't there a mat down here? People always kept keys hidden under the mat, didn't they? Instead, the bottom of this stairwell was a steel grate over some kind of drainage so the first hard rain didn't turn the well into a miniature lap pool.

What about the grate? She got down on her hands and knees and examined it. No, it was solidly implanted in the concrete that surrounded it. But there was one peculiarity. A bent paper clip was hooked over one of the steel bars. She grabbed it and lifted and found exactly what was supposed to be under a mat.

“Voila,” she told Hailey, and inserted the key in the lock and turned it. Another round of gunfire erupted from the kitchen. Return fire from the bulldozer whined off the top of the door as Pam opened it and followed Hailey into the dark room beyond.

***

Heather Number Two had never imagined modern farming required the kinds of machinery she discovered in the warehouse. Not that she made those discoveries very quickly. She'd just slipped away from Xavier and his friends when a burst of machine-gun fire sent her diving under the nearest piece of equipment—a backhoe with a bucket that looked big enough to trench your way to China. Actually, she spent most of her first few minutes under it studying one of the tires up close, because that first burst of gunfire had been followed, moments later, by a second. It hadn't sounded close, though. Not as close as the first rounds. And there weren't any more immediately after.

She thought she heard some cars, but it could easily have been the wind trying to slip breezy fingers under the metal panels of the building. The place groaned and creaked and when she thought she heard footsteps on the other side of the backhoe, she didn't believe they were real. Not until she noticed the feet that accompanied them.

Heather scooted a little to the right and kept the tire between her and whoever those feet belonged to. It might be Xavier, though she thought he would be coming from the other direction if he'd been foolish enough to follow her out here.

More likely, it was Galen. But it could be the guy with the gun, too, so she took her time and risked a peek only after he was moving away from her.

It was Galen, sure enough, and headed toward a dusty window, likely as curious as she was about that gunfire. There was a tall metal cabinet up against the side of the window. He kept most of his body behind it while he craned his head around to see out toward the back of his house and the farm yard in between. She rolled over to the other side of the backhoe and moved behind another colossal tire that was closer to Galen. He had pulled a bandana out of his pocket and was using it to scrub at the window. He had a pistol in the other hand. Even if the gun had been temporarily out of play, she wasn't sure she could take him bare-handed. He was bigger than she was and, damn it, guys were just naturally stronger. She was probably better trained, though she hadn't ever been as good as her sister at martial arts. It had been more than a year since she'd taken a class or done anything but exchange a few playful kicks with One.

A shotgun would be nice, since she didn't like guns and wasn't much good with them. Englishman had made sure both his daughters could shoot, but he hadn't forced either of them to do more than understand the basics. One was better than she was with guns, too.

Of course, there weren't any shotguns lying around. A broom and a shovel lay nearby, however, just a few yards from the wall where Galen was peering into the yard. Someone might have planned to use them to clean out the clods of earth that still clung to the backhoe's bucket. The broom wouldn't do her much good, but the shovel might.

“Heather,” Galen said.

Oh shit, she thought, flattening herself back behind that tire. He'd seen her. Caught her reflection in the window somehow. But he didn't say anything else, like come out of there with your hands up. When she got her nerve back enough, she peeked around the tire. He was fumbling a cell phone out of his pocket, not looking in her direction.

Maybe he'd seen her sister out there somewhere. If so, he was planning to tell someone.

A starter turned over not far away. It froze both of them for a moment, and then Galen was moving along the wall, ducking past the cab of a semi truck parked on the other side of the backhoe. He folded the phone and put it back in a pocket. Heather darted to the wall, got the shovel and followed.

An engine fired up. Something big, but she'd expected that from the sound the starter made. Galen passed several more machines and then ducked around a dump truck big enough to handle ore instead of grain.

The big engine revved a couple of times. It wasn't as close as she'd thought. At the far end of the warehouse, most likely. She sprinted after Galen. He wasn't paying any attention to what was behind him, but he was sprinting now, too.

She followed him around the back of the first of a row of shiny new combines, just as the pitch of the engine changed yet again. Lower, throatier, it was taking on a load. She heard metal grate on concrete and then metal on metal, shrieking, as some of that metal tore.

Heather saw it then. Big and yellow and moving not much faster than she could trot. It was a Caterpillar, and someone had just decided to drive it through the wall of the warehouse.