Seven Unholy Days (21 page)

38

12:50 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

EARTH, TEXAS

             
Short Man and Tall Man waited in the empty Civic Center, wondering where the townspeople were. Everything was ready; as soon as the right number of people were in both the Civic Center and City Hall, they’d hit the switches and immediately grab their gas masks from underneath the table. The switch would throw the magnetic locks they had installed on the door and simultaneously open valves on the three tanks of military-grade EZ-4 knockout gas in the Civic Center, along with the infinitely more evil canister—at least that was the plan as far as they knew—in the basement of City Hall. Within seconds the room would be filled with unconscious bodies and the grisly but necessary work would begin.

Suddenly a siren whooped a couple of cycles from the street outside the building. Both men bolted to the door and stepped outside to find themselves greeted by what looked a great deal like a Texas posse from an old western movie. Lots of blue jeans. At least a baker’s dozen of cowboy hats. And worst of all, a multitude of gun barrels pointed their way.

             
“Hello, gentlemen,” Mayor Charlie Raymond said as he stepped out of the group and walked up to the pair. “Get your hands in the air. If you so much as twitch a finger toward your guns you’ll be cut in half.” Short and Tall did as they were told. Charlie first drew a semi-automatic from a shoulder holster on each of them, then had them lean on the wall of the building for a more thorough search. That search produced what looked to be an electronic remote control with two toggle switches underneath a protective cover, two more handguns—both snub-nosed revolvers—and a total of three knives.

Charlie motioned for Bruce Thurman and whispered som
ething in his ear when he got there. Bruce scurried off in the direction of City Hall. “Now let’s ease back inside here and see if we can’t figure out what you boys had planned for us Earthlings,” Charlie said with a half-grin.

              The two men sat tied to chairs in the middle of the Civic Center, looking at a semi-circle of unhappy but well-armed Texans. Charlie snugged up the final knot on the back of Short Man’s chair and walked around to face them. “Who are you?”

“I told you we’re from FEMA, you lunatic. Have you any idea what kind of trouble you’re going to be in for assaulting federal officials like this?” Tall Man said.

Charlie Raymond extended his hand toward the man nearest him, and the man laid a 12-gauge Remington 870 riot style shotgun in the mayor’s big hand. He shucked the pump, chambering a 3” Magnum load of 00 buckshot. “One more time. Who are you?” he asked without raising his voice.

“How many times do we have to say it, heathen?” Short Man said, angry veins bulging from his stocky neck.

Charlie pulled the trigger. The roar inside the room was deafening, but it didn’t come close to covering up the animal shriek coming from Short Man as the buckshot took off the toes of his right foot. Some eyes grew wide in the posse but no one said a word.

“Wrong answer,” Charlie said. The man kept screaming, blood pouring from the mangled stump. Charlie turned to his men and said, “Would somebody shut this lady up, please?” A man stepped forward with a roll of duct tape and wound three good rounds around Short Man’s head, muffling the screams that were now turning into groans.

Tall Man’s eyes had gone wide at first, but quickly narrowed into a steely gaze of defiance. “Shoot me too if you like, but we won’t tell you anything. You’re wasting lead.”

Chief Thurman opened the door and walked lightly to the center of the room, holding the canister apparatus that Charlie had found in the basement of City Hall. Charlie took it from him in one hand, still wielding the Remington in the other. He casually set the device on the floor between the two and pulled the remote control from his pocket. He was turning back around to face Short and Tall when he felt Thurman pulling at his e
lbow.

“What?” Charlie said.

“Thurman leaned in close and whispered, “Somebody talked. There’s a slew of folks coming up Main, headed this way.”

“Chrissakes, why won’t people listen?” Charlie motioned to several men in the crowd and walked to the side of the room. The designated followed. “We got people coming. I want you boys to head them off. They’ll put up a fight if you tell them to go home, so put them in City Hall for now where they’ll be safe. Tell them they can look out the windows and they won’t miss anything.”

“But they can’t see in here from the windows—” one of the men said with a puzzled look on his face.

Charlie closed his eyes for a moment, rubbed his forehead, and prayed the Patience Prayer he had just invented. “Then lie to them.”

“Okay, can do.”

The men scurried out the door of the Civic Center, and Cha
rlie returned to his captives in the middle of the room.

Short had passed out from the pain. Tall’s eyes had lost any trace of defiance, now filled with terror as they darted back and forth between the canister and the remote in Charlie’s hand. “Please don’t touch that switch. You have no idea what that is,” he said, his voice trembling.

“I’m sure it’s something you planned to use on us,” Charlie said. “Didn’t work out that way, though. So in a few minutes, we’re all gonna take a little stroll outside and leave it right there with you FEMA boys while I start flipping switches. What do you think about that?”

“Please mister, I’m begging you! I’ll tell you what you want to know, I swear. Just get that thing away from me.” Tears streamed down the hard face.

“I have a better idea. You start talking. If I hear one thing that strikes me as a lie, so help me God I’ll walk right out that door and unleash this on you. I dealt with pieces of crap like you for years, so believe me, I know what a lie sounds like. Sing, Pedro.”

Tall Man drew a deep breath and started talking.

1:12 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

CITY HALL

EARTH, TEXAS

“It ain’t right! We got a right to see what’s going on over there. I heard a gunshot!”

“Yeah!”

“Damn straight!”

Bruce Thurman was among the makeshift containment crew sent by Charlie Raymond, and he took admirable charge of a situation that was quickly growing out of control. “I’m telling you right now that you’re not going over there and that’s that. You are to stay right here in City Hall and if you don’t, I will personally arrest you and see that you do some time in the lockup for interfering with an investigation. It’s not up for discussion. Shut your traps and look out the window if you want to, but that’s as close as you’re getting.”

The crowd of thirty to forty Earth citizens grumbled and groused but backed down. Charlie left the rest of his little team in place to maintain order, and locked both the front and rear doors of City Hall before leaving.

1:14 CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

CIVIC CENTER

EARTH, TEXAS

Tall Man explained to Charlie Raymond that, no, they weren’t really FEMA agents. And yes, they had intended to pull some shenanigans in Earth, Texas today. By using knockout gas to put a couple hundred of them to sleep, he and his accomplice would have been able to easily relieve the good townspeople of their valuables. Not a good thing to do for sure, but also not worthy of blowing a foot off if you asked him.

“Sounds like a crock of crap to me,” Charlie said. “When you saw that canister you freaked out. I think there’s more in them than knockout gas. But it’s easy enough to find out, isn’t it?” Charlie said with a one-sided smile.

Unlike before, Tall Man didn’t react. No fear in his eyes. Nothing. Maybe he was telling the truth, Charlie thought. Short had regained consciousness and was making a valiant effort to say something through the duct tape. Charlie sighed and ripped the tape off.

“What time is it?” Short Man said.

“One-fifteen. Why?” Charlie Raymond said.

“Shut up, you dumb-ass,” Tall said, glaring at Short.

“You have to tell him, man. Hurry up!”

“Tell me what?” Charlie’s eyes darted back and forth between the two.

“It’s too late,” Tall Man said. “Praise the Messiah.”

“There’s a timer that’ll go off at one-sixteen,” Short Man said. “I been trying to tell you, honest I have.”

Charlie glanced at his watch. One-seventeen. Nothing was happening in the Civic Center. That left City Hall. He broke in a run out the door and across the street, with several men follo
wing him.

Charlie and company heard the screams before they were halfway across the street. “Dear God, no ... ” he said as his run turned into a wide open sprint.

One of the younger men passed Charlie and had his hand on the door handle, thumb pressing the button down to open it when Charlie arrived. He looked in through the small pane of reinforced glass in the door and knocked the man back. Just as Tall Man had said, it was too late.

Of all the situations Charlie Raymond had faced over the years, the gunfights, investigating the scenes of hideous crimes, watching killers go free on technicalities, and a thousand other heartbreaking scenarios dealt with during his tenure as a Texas Ranger, not one incident came close to the horror of what he was forced to watch unfold through a pane of glass in a door that he had ordered locked. He may as well have lined up his fellow ci
tizens, his constituents he swore to protect, his friends—against a brick wall and shot them himself, for he had just as surely sent them all to this grotesque poison-gas death.

He turned and walked away from the building, away from the screams, back toward the Civic Center.

“Jesus, Charlie, aren’t we going to help them?” someone said.

Charlie kept walking, his eyes as lifeless as puddles of sta
gnant water in a field of mud. “There’s nothing we can do. They’re dead already and if we go in there we’ll be dead too.”

When he walked back into the Civic Center, one of the few men who had stayed behind was holding the shotgun on the men in the chairs. Without saying a word, Charlie Raymond took the shotgun from him, held it a foot from Tall Man’s face, and pulled the trigger, covering himself in a grisly spray of blood, brain, and bone.

He leveled the gun at Short Man. “Is there anything else you’d like to tell me, Hoss?”

“Please don’t shoot me, mister.” Tears rolled off his blockish face.

“More people coming?”

Short nodded.

“How many?”

“Not sure, a few.”

“When?”

“Two o’clock.”

“Somebody find something to bandage his foot with. And let’s get ready for the rest of our guests.”

39

1:58 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

CIVIC CENTER

EARTH, TEXAS

              Charlie and what remained of his crew—many lost family members in the carnage at City Hall and were hardly in a state of mind to do battle—were  positioned on both sides of Main Street. He had reached the state police by radio and they were en route, but they would not make it in time. Crouched behind a garbage truck on one side and a row of hedges on the other, they waited.

His radio squawked, “White Suburban just turned onto Main.”

“Roger that.” He stood and yelled, “Heads up! Showtime in sixty.”

As the Suburban drew near and slowed to a stop in the mi
ddle of the street, Charlie jutted his neck around the corner of the garbage truck. His view was at an angle, but predominantly from the passenger side. The windows were tinted to a deep charcoal and he couldn’t see how many men were inside. He clenched a chrome whistle in his teeth, drew a deep breath, and waited.

The passenger door opened and a black-booted foot touched down on the pavement. Then another, followed by a man so tall he unfolded more than he stepped from the vehicle. A dirt devil danced its way down the street, kicking a Pepsi can in circles of sand and grit and died out when it hit the front end of the Su
burban. The man was dressed in black assault coveralls, blond hair cut so close that he looked bald at first glance. He scanned toward City Hall on his right, then checked out the Civic Center to his left, looking across the top of the vehicle.

Charlie realized he was holding his breath and slowly e
xhaled. The man reached inside the truck with a “come on” gesture and then stepped away from the truck as the other three doors opened in near unison. Charlie appraised the situation as they exited; a four-man fire team, each of whom moved with a fluid style that screamed professional. They also outgunned the Texans from a firepower perspective, each holding Uzi 9mm assault weapons, most likely full auto. The two on the passenger side moved toward City Hall, the others toward the Civic Center. Charlie drew one more deep breath, closed his lips around the mouthpiece, and loosed a banshee shriek from the whistle. He was the first to fire. Charlie Raymond was a marksman, his aim true as the 30-30 round found purchase directly on the first man’s heart.

The impact drove the man back against the right front fender of the Suburban, where he slid to the ground like a cartoon character as Charlie levered another round into the chamber of his old Winchester. The man from the rear passenger side i
mmediately fell back behind the door he had exited and returned fire with the Uzi, a rapid-fire barrage of rounds hitting the garbage truck like a dozen sledgehammers.

Charlie’s men were now firing and all being fired upon as the three remaining attackers retreated into the Suburban. It lasted less than thirty seconds, claimed the lives of all four a
ttackers and two of the hometown boys, and left several more injured. He screamed for them to hold fire and stepped into the street. An acrid haze of burnt gunpowder hung in the air, the silence so abrupt it was deafening. Big Charlie Raymond cried.