Tread Fearless: Survival & Awakening (The Gatekeeper Book 4) (2 page)

He feared an assault, so he moved quickly, abruptly, to complete the tourniquet. Lisa screamed in agony, and her screams were met with laughter and jeers from across the street. Then, either from shock or loss of blood, Lisa, his girlfriend of three years, and soon to be wife, slipped into unconsciousness.

With a lull in the gunfire, Mark quickly dragged her to the farthest corner of the house, the bathroom, and gently laid her in the tub. After resting her head on a folded towel, and covering her torso with a blanket, Mark returned to the living room ready to repel the enemy.

For some reason, they didn’t charge, and he was glad for their stupidity. He grabbed a fresh magazine from his range bag, and from the shadows at the back of his living room, he let loose with another thirty-round burst of automatic gunfire. This time his fire was met with immediate return fire. Mark made himself low and waited for the fire to stop.

For Mark, the battle wasn’t unlike the training he received in the Special Forces back in the nineties. He knew he could handle the untrained gangbangers despite their numbers. Still, even an armed monkey could score a lucky hit with a loaded weapon when it was pointed directly at you, and that’s what happened to Lisa. One of the gangbangers got lucky, and they would all pay for it.

Mark stayed low and began to plan for the next phase of the battle. He wasn’t worried about his life, only how many gangbangers he could kill to avenge Lisa’s fading life. She didn’t deserve to die like this. She was a nurse. She saved lives. The work she did at Brooks Army Medical Center was helping people live, not killing them. The injustice of it all stung Mark like a thousand bees.

For Mark, it was full-on warfare now - survival of the fittest. And he knew exactly where he stood on the food-chain. When it came to combat, Mark considered himself an apex predator, and to be an apex predator was to be smarter than your enemy. That meant he wouldn’t do anything stupid, no matter how angry he was. But vengeance filled his mind, and gave him purpose.

With Lisa lying unconscious in the tub, he couldn’t help but feel her slipping away. He sat with his back to the far wall and watched, and listened to the activity across the street. Every once in a while someone would shoot into the house, but the displays were little more than macho posturing. He completely tuned out the curses and taunts and waited. It was all he could do until darkness and timing favored his plan.

It wasn’t like he had many options anyway. Though he didn’t have night optics, he longed for the darkness. And it would come, as it always did. As a soldier, he worked best at night. It was his combat comfort zone. He thought that if Lisa could hold on a little longer, then he might just manage to get her to a hospital. She would probably lose her leg, but at least she’d live.

More harsh curses and taunts, mostly in Spanish, but also a few in accented English, drifted in through the broken front windows of Mark’s home as the light finally began to fade. He never bothered to learn Spanish, but he knew enough to recognize their anger and frustration.

He laughed out loud at their use of the word “gringo,” and he yelled in reply, “Remember the Alamo!” That earned him a hail of gunfire, and he wondered how much ammo they were willing to expend before they realized they were in for a long fight. Mark hadn’t fired a single round since the volley after moving Lisa to the bathroom, but his time
would come. Yes, it most certainly would. And he would make every shot count. No more automatic gunfire. Everything from here on out would be deliberate and carefully aimed.

He didn’t know what type of weapons the gang had, but at least two of them had military caliber rifles similar to his, and also in the 5.56 range. The rest of the weapons sounded more like pistols and shotguns, which weren’t too much of a problem for Mark if he stayed inside. As for being shot at, it was a familiar experience for him, as it was to all combat veterans. The only problem, other than Lisa dying, was that he didn’t like the fight being in his house.

Thoughts of Lisa filled his mind, and he struggled to contain his anger. A reckless desire for swift vengeance lay about him like a dark cloak, but he allowed his mind to drift onto safer paths. He had to be patient, to wear them down with time – even if it was time he really couldn’t afford.

In the near darkness, Mark put a finger to several neat little black holes in the wall behind him. Someone was shooting green-tipped ammo, the type with the steel penetrators. Those rounds could punch through quarter-inch plate steel at a hundred meters. Passing through several walls of a home wasn’t a challenge for such ammo. Mark knew this because he had some of his own, and his magazines were ready to use when the time was right.

It angered him to think that he could have been long gone by now, but he let his pride and passion for his guns get the better of him. Well, that and Lisa. She didn’t want to leave either. The hospital was swamped and very busy with disaster patients. It was only an odd twist of fate that had her home for a brief rest before she was planning to return to the hospital. Now it was the want for a hospital that would likely kill her.

Mark snacked on a protein bar and sipped water from a bottle as the hours began to drag on. The gang was getting antsy, and clearly not
happy with the turn of events. They also seemed to be waiting for someone, at least that’s what he sensed from the activity across the street.

He reflected on his life, turning first to his leaving the army in 2000, which was about three years before the war in Iraq really started heating up. Having participated in team deployments to “train foreign nationals,” Mark missed all the heavy fighting in the Iraqi theater of operations. He even missed duty in the Balkans, which irked him to no end.

The Army spent well over a million dollars training him to be an elite warrior, and the most he returned for the favor was showing a few villagers in the Philippines how to shoot their new AK-47s, and then adequately defend themselves from the rising tide of Islamic extremism in the region.

A back injury during a training exercise, one that involved a HALO, or High-Altitude Low-Opening insertion, ended Mark’s Special Forces career. During landing, he slammed into a tree and injured his spine in three places. He knew the risks of night jumping: with or without night-vision goggles, and with or without rain, and high winds. Still, Mark wasn’t bitter, it came with the job. It was like his team commander said, “Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you.”

Though he completed the intense training exercise with his team, later, during the extraction phase of the operation, his legs began to go numb. It was then that he realized his injury was much more serious than he thought. After an extensive physical evaluation, Mark was told by a doctor that he would, “No longer eat snakes.” As if he ate the nasty creatures every day, or something.

The doctor’s stupid comment almost earned him a broken nose, but Mark reminded himself that no one knew what it was like to lose your career while performing your career. It would be like telling the doctor he could, “No longer perform an appendectomy,” after cutting off his own finger with a scalpel. The comment was absurd and unnecessary.

So, since he couldn’t do what he loved, he left the army all together and decided to test his fate as a civilian. Essentially, he resigned himself
to the fact that he wasted fifteen years of his life in the army. That wasn’t a bitter testament, but it was a realistic one. He loved the army, and struggled to contain his contempt for life.

Sitting around, collecting disability wasn’t his thing, so he began looking for meaningful work close at hand. After having experienced rehabilitation through the army medical separation process, Mark found work through the Veterans Administration. Helping disabled vets transition into civilian life was something he soon came to enjoy, and it’s what brought him to San Antonio.

Then, in 2003, when Operation Iraqi Freedom kicked off, several large government contracting firms began hiring people to fill their many employment positions in support of U.S. military operations in the region. Firms needed everyone from laundry service personnel and truck drivers, to electricians and carpenters. Mark was certain he had something to offer, so he looked for and found a job as a safety officer.

His military experience, coupled with his veteran’s disability status, landed him the job. He finally made it to Iraq, though not in the capacity he once imagined. Still, he was in Iraq, carrying an M4, and working with soldiers in and around the Baghdad area of operations. And that’s when he met and became friends with John and Pete.

As a team, they were tasked with conducting special investigations into detainee handling operations. The three men came together under unique circumstances, and their friendship evolved into an unbreakable bond that carried over into their civilian lives.

A rock sailed through the front window and crashed against the bookshelf. Mark snorted and reached for the rock. After testing its heft, he chucked it back out the window with force. He wanted to let the gang know he was awake and ready to fight. He took a moment to look around the living room. The house was all but destroyed, and he worked to separate himself from the physical reality of it.

He owned it, and made expensive improvements to protect and conceal his gun collection, but when the disaster began, he worked frantically to package and prepare his guns for concealment in the backyard.
That effort proved futile given the nearly unyielding conditions of the clay-like soil under the topsoil. Not to mention the intensifying activity as the disaster continued to progress.

After struggling to dig the first and only weapons pit, Mark realized there was no way he could dig more, or even adequately camouflage the site once it was complete. He abandoned the effort to bury his surplus weapons and returned them to the two gun safes in his bedroom. Burying them was a good idea, but unrealistic given the time and conditions. In other words, he waited too long.

As for driving away, that too was denied when the gang boldly slashed the tires of his Ford F150 pickup. That happened shortly after their first verbal confrontation of the day, hours ago - back in the middle of the day and long before the opening shots were fired.

Mark hated leaving his truck in the driveway, but he committed the garage to storage and work space. The latter being a modest gunsmithing business he ran on the side.

Leaving the truck exposed to the enemy hurt, but he never imagined he’d have to deal with such anger and violence in his own neighborhood. Leaving the truck outside was the cost of doing business, a trade off in security, perhaps, but his guns were way more important to him than his truck.

Mark reflected on how much he enjoyed the mixed Latino and White composition of his neighborhood. He also liked the location, that being on the outskirts of San Antonio’s lower East Side. It was a quiet, friendly, and discrete neighborhood when he first moved in, and Mark believed it would always be that way. Like probably everyone else in the neighborhood, he was reluctant to accept the possibility that change would ever come, even after reading John’s warning email more than a week ago.

Very little ash actually fell on San Antonio, less than a few inches even, but it was enough to drive everyone completely crazy. When the power went out, and food and water became scarce, full blown chaos ensued. Despite his best wishes, change came to Mark and everyone else
in the state, and it did so with a vengeance. Now life was a matter of hardcore survival, and he hated himself for not listening to John.

The handful of young Hispanic men, kids mostly, and apparently affiliated with some big time local Latino gangbangers from the city, came to Mark for a protection payment in the form of his spare weapons. He didn’t see anyone he knew in the group of five, but a pistol in hand, and a terse reply, communicated Mark’s disinterest to complying. That didn’t go over too well with the gang, and they retaliated by slashing Mark’s truck tires.

The five youths crossed the street, and sat on the hood of a car to smoke and watch for Mark’s reaction to their vandalism. He knew better than to respond to their bait. The act angered him, but mostly because Lisa needed it to get to work. Her car was long since abandoned, sitting empty in the hospital parking lot, and she planned to use it to reach the hospital before it too ran dry.

Again, Mark regretted not picking off the gangbangers right then and there. It might have changed the game dramatically. But he wasn’t a cold-blooded killer, not for slashing his tires anyway. An hour later, three more carloads of gangbangers arrived. They demanded Mark leave the house or die. He gave the new gang leader, an older man, the verbal finger, and that’s when the shooting started.

Mark high-crawled to the bathroom to check on Lisa. Her pulse was weak and she was very pale, but the wound was no longer bleeding heavily. The blanket over her damaged leg was completely soaked with blood, and he didn’t know what else to do but kiss her forehead tenderly and return to his post in the living room.

He heard one of the boys shout something and recognized it as Thomas, one of the boys who routinely cared for Mark’s lawn. He also heard Angel, the boy who detailed his truck for a quick forty bucks. In fact, all the local boys were well-paid for their hard work by Mark. But of all the kids shooting at Mark, it was Carlos that hurt him the most. He trusted Carlos enough to let him watch his house when he was away.