Renewal 5 - an Untimely Fall (3 page)

John should not have been surprised by the flailing old men who burst through the door he was about to open, and he should not have been surprised when it got him shot. He fell to the grimy concrete, and was trampled by booted feet racing for the vehicles outside. The Grand Dragon, himself, donated a free kick to John’s head as he made his escape. It was a mistake. The leadership of the white robe group piled into the driver’s side doors of the state SUV closest to the door. The driver cranked the engine, and they grinned in triumph as it roared to life.

Seth’s rifle rounds penetrated the radiator, bending the aluminum cooling fan, which promptly wedged against the alternator bracket, creating a horrible squeal from the serpentine drive belt. The driver jammed the car into gear and jumped on the gas pedal, lifting the squealing sound to a pitch that might actually kill a dog. The slashed tires on the right slipped on the rims, and flopped against the gravel. They made it almost ten feet before Seth hit something critical in the engine compartment and the insane squealing stopped. The old bastards were thinking hard about the next vehicle in line when Seth raised his aim to the windshield, and pinned them in the SUV.

If that were all, they might have made it, but they didn’t count on John, who holding his side against the blood loss with his left hand, walked up to the side window and shot the three men in the back seat. The driver had a neat hole punched into his neck by Seth’s rifle, which left the one. John held up his hand to Seth who stopped firing. John limped around to the fat Grand Dragon in the shotgun seat and held the gun on the old man as he waved Seth in to help.

Bill was down. Terry felt his mind trying to disengage when he saw Bill drop, but then something else happened. Terry pulled his new handgun across his body in a cross draw that felt like someone else was in control. He shot the six remaining men from the building in exactly six shots. His mind was ignoring the fire from the boats on his right, but his body wasn’t. It moved in ways that Terry didn’t even notice. He saw targets. He shot targets. When those men were down, he turned slowly to face the remaining men from the boat, and with unreal accuracy, shot them all. When he was done, his weapon still held one round in the chamber, and the world seemed to go silent like an awkward break in conversation. To Terry, the whole process had been a leisurely matter of aiming and pulling the trigger. To the state police watching the whole fight, Terry had moved in a blur, 13 targets acquired and eliminated in less than five seconds. They talked about it for years afterwards.

Back in normal time, Terry ran to Bill, who was flat on his back. He had been shot twice; once in the left leg, and once in the right shoulder. The leg wound was a remarkable match for the one Arturo had taken in Bill’s story.

In his spacy post-combat state of mind, Terry started with that. “Hey, just like Arturo...” he said, looking at Bill’s bleeding leg.

Bill was understandably grumpy. “Hey! Snap out of it and put some pressure on the damn thing!”

Terry almost seemed to wake up. “Oh, yeah. Sorry, Bill.” He dropped to his knees and pulled out a bandana, folding it into a square and pressing it to Bill’s flowing wound. “What happened?”

“I’m old and slow! That’s what happened,” Bill declared. “Anyway, don’t worry. These are just scratches.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Anyway, what happened with you? I thought you only shot squirrels.”

“I do. I just imagined those jerks holding squirrels to their chests, and shot the squirrels.”

Bill laughed for a full minute, until his giddy celebration was broken by the sound of another big engine roaring to life. It was the cabin cruiser, which was being cast loose while Terry was attending to Bill. No warning shots from Rob, which was explained when he came running up with the first aid kit. Whatever god of war had possessed Terry earlier was gone. He fired a round at the man freeing the last tie on the cabin cruiser, missed by a mile, and then pulled the trigger three more times before he noticed the slide was locked back and the trigger was disengaged.

“Oh, crap!” Terry yelled and starting running for the boat. Whoever was piloting the big cruiser slammed the throttles to the stops, and the yacht surged away from the dock. Terry staggered to a stop and watched it go. Jeffry’s rifle boomed again and again, but the cruiser was unharmed and rapidly disappeared down the river to the northwest.

Terry saw a bleeding John Hall come around the building, and ran back to the yard to check on him. John was followed by his prisoner, who was under the barrel of Seth’s rifle. Rob tossed John a packet of coagulant powder, and continued to patch Bill’s wounds.

Nick joined the rest of the crew in the salvage yard and joined Seth in watching the Grand Dragon. As he looked around, he made the obvious connection. “Hey, somebody should do something about the tugboat.” It was a case of jinxing the whole thing. Two seconds later, the half-cut line snapped and the barge began to spin in a slow circle around the one remaining line.

Chapter 5 - 4

Terry felt like he spent his whole day running after boats, but he sprinted off in the direction of the river once again. He jumped from the concrete pier across the eight foot span of water, and landed easily on the corner of the steel deck. He worked his way across the barge towards the running tug on the far end. By this time some of the more lively police formed Terry’s personal cheering section, pushing him along the spinning deck. Just as he dropped onto the tugboat, the whole floating assembly completed its pivot and the short end of the barge collided with the pier. Like a giant lever, the barge loaded the remaining line with an incredible strain, the cleat pulled up, warping the heavy steel underneath, and the line snapped with enough force to cut a man in half. Luckily, no one was in range of the supersonic rope, but that didn’t prevent the running tug from bouncing hard off the river bank. Terry fell face first on the tug’s metal deck, and by the time he regained his feet, the boat had slid down the bank, rotated the barge and was heading out into the channel in a slow but relentless uncontrolled spin.

Terry was a bit stunned by his fall, but he managed to reach the wheelhouse, and pulled the throttle back to idle. Momentum kept the barge and its two tugs spinning for quite some time, but that was secondary to the fact that Terry was now drifting downstream with a barge full of State Police. Because the tug was attached at a right angle to the axis of the barge, Terry understood that there was no way to use the running tug to control it, much less move back upstream. The other tug was on the long side of the barge, and offered the possibility of control, if he could get it started. For the moment, he ignored the other problem, which was how to actually drive the beast.

Terry climbed down, from the wheelhouse, crossed the barge to the second tugboat, and climbed into the new wheelhouse. No keys. He looked around for any potential hiding places, and found no keys.

“Great,” he said to himself.

He crossed the barge once more, noticing that the wayward vessel was passing under the Shelby Street Bridge. He pulled the keys from the original tug, and stuffed them into his pocket. Without any experience, he thought that any tugboat key would work, but ended up pounding his fist in frustration on the control console of the second.  His next idea was to bypass the ignition switch, which should have been easy with the simple wiring under the open console, but if he was worried about his boat handling experience, his experience with wire amounted to the kind that was wrapped around hay bales. All he saw was a confusing tangle of wire.

Meanwhile, Nick was giving the play by play to the rest of the crew, and was beginning to panic when the barge disappeared around the river bend two miles downstream. He chattered about chasing the boat down, and the options were few. Their best bet would involve running to the truck at the stadium, and trying to follow the boat to an unknown bridge downstream, where, according to Nick, they could drop a rope as the barge passed underneath, and use the truck to pull it to shore.

Bill’s response was simple. “Terry will figure it out.”

Terry had no such faith. He wasted time stringing foul language together before it occurred to him that the tug did not need to be attached to the barge to move it. He could push the barge back to the dock, in theory at least. With the new idea, he dropped out of the keyless tug’s wheelhouse, climbed onto the barge for the fiftieth time, and cast the tug loose. It took a minute of random currents to separate the tug from the barge, but as soon as he saw it begin, he ran back to the original tug, jumped onboard and cut it free from the dock. The police were gesturing and chattering wildly from the cages, trying to help, but Terry couldn’t get any clear advice from the noise.

Back in the wheel house, he turned the key with a hopeful click, gave it some throttle, and punched the starter. The diesel rumbled to life immediately, and Terry gave silent thanks for something that actually worked. He engaged the transmission, and pushed the throttle forward. His departure imparted a new spin to the barge, but he needed time to get control of the tug. By the time he had learned a little about the boat’s handling and gained enough separation to aim for the barge, it was drifting steadily in the channel. Terry brought the boat to a stop in the river and learned that it took a little power to keep from drifting away from the barge. He watched the river bank and used that to tell when he was offsetting the current.

Unfortunately, the barge was moving faster than he expected, and he had not yet discovered reverse. The two vessels collided with massive force. Only the tires strapped to the tug prevented disaster. Terry instinctively pulled back on the lever, and found reverse completely by accident. The tug separated again, and Terry groaned. It was a blessing in disguise, since he was way off center, and would have found himself going in circles again.

On his second approach he ignored everything except the relative speed of the boats and managed to make gentle contact near the center of the barge’s bow. He gently added power until the rig stopped floating downstream and began to make headway. His next lesson was in how much steering it took to keep the barge under control. Too little and they spun. Too much and they spun faster and lost contact. Terry kept trying, picking up the knack for tugboat driving on the fly. He eventually pushed the barge back around the bend in the river and caught sight of the salvage yard docks.

Nick announced this fact with the excitement of a baseball announcer faced with a grand slam. Bill looked at John, and said, “Told you.”

Terry had picked up some finesse in his short time as a tugboat captain, and managed, in a series of tedious maneuvers, to nudge the barge back up against the pier. Nick jumped aboard and tied the barge off with some loose line on the deck. Terry backed away one last time and wedged the bow of the tug between the bank and the end of the concrete pier. He shut down the engine, and with a giant whoosh of breath, relaxed tension he hadn’t even noticed. He left the key in the ignition and hoped he was done with boats for the day. Nick leaned down to help him up onto the pier and gave him a painfully enthusiastic slap on the back. Terry wanted to sit down somewhere.

Rob completed a hasty  bandage job on John, and went back to put a few stiches into Bill’s carefully cleaned wounds. John picked up the job of watching the Grand Dragon, who was beginning to sound a lot like the blustering Judge back in Coffee County. He did not seem to understand that he was surrounded by men who would not follow his orders and scramble to meet the old man’s every whim. Terry was interested in what kind of excuses he was going to hear, but John put an end to that.

“Terry, take Seth and go get Bertha,” he said, tossing the keys to Terry in an underhanded arc. “We’ll keep the old bastard talking until you get back,” John added with a sly wink.

Terry lunged to his feet, gathering for another run. He picked up his rifle and set out for the western fence. Seth called him back and gestured for Terry to follow him through the front gate. “Faster this way,” Seth told him between breaths.

John was nursing a burning pain in his side, but he wanted to free the police as soon as possible. He walked up to face the Grand Dragon, and said, “Give me the keys to the cages.”

“I don’t have the keys, Defiler. The sergeant-at-arms keeps the keys.”

John ignored the name, since he knew it wouldn’t mean anything to him, but still had to stifle the urge to kick the old man in the nuts. “Alright, Your Holiness, which one of these corpses is the sergeant-at-arms?”

The old man lifted his double chin, and pulled his shoulders back, stretching his white shirt tightly over an impressive set of man boobs. “The correct address is Grand Dragon of the Knights of the White God.” The name was delivered to impress, but failed miserably. The man pretended not to notice.

“Well then, King Flying Lizard, if you could point me to the corpse with the keys, I promise to remain as white as your god,” John replied with a straight face. “Oh, and since your little show last night was witnessed by all those police officers,” John swept his arm towards the cages, “I don’t know if they’ll be happy if I ask nicely again. Ever been shot in the foot?”

The Grand Dragon took an involuntary glance at his feet, and John waited, stone still, until the old man sagged and gave up. “In the car... back seat. You shot him yourself.”

“He got off easy.” John said simply. He gave Nick a sideways nod, a tacit order to go check it out, and turned back to the Dragon. “You cooperation is noted. You may want to stay in that frame of mind, since you were unfortunate enough to survive the day.”

Nick came around the corner of the building in less than thirty seconds, dangling a massive ring of keys in his upraised hand. John smiled with relief, since he was not feeling up to cutting his way into the heavy steel cages. Nick trotted onto the barge and began the tedious process of trying keys until he found one that opened the first cage. It was made harder by the half dozen police trying to give him advice all at once, but he turned a tarnished brass key on the heavy padlock and laughed with relief when it popped open. The second lock went faster, since it was twin to the first one, and he could limit his attempts to the same type of key.