“Katie,” he said, “if you don’t comply, I will kill you. I’m sorry, but you have no choice.”
She nodded. In the distance, there was a faint
“Do you know how to shoot at all, Caroline?”
She shook her head. He didn’t need to ask David. The way he’d handled the pistol so far told him all he needed to know.
“I know how to shoot very well,” Katie said.
He gave her the pistol and produced his own.
David said, “Is that wise?”
“She’s what we have, Doc.”
“But she’ll—she’s liable to—”
Now came the chugging of a more primitive machine gun, but it was louder. There were screams, followed by a general outburst of firing.
“We need all the firepower we can get, David.” Then, to Katie, “Don’t even think about revenge right now.” He thrust his gun into the small of her back. “Don’t try me on.”
“I’ll be okay,” Katie said. “I’ll swallow it for now… what he did to me.”
Mack gestured with his own pistol. “Let’s get moving.”
David hesitated, started to talk—and Mack shoved him, but gently.
“Let me protect you,” he said. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Security!” David shouted.
“They’re busy, David. And we have to save this thing right now.”
“Let’s get it upstairs,” David said, which was not what Mack wanted to hear. He had to play this very, very carefully. They didn’t trust him, and that must not be forgotten for a moment.
“David, what if security fails?” he asked.
“They won’t fail! Glen will keep us safe.”
“IF, David!”
“He’s right, David,” Caroline said. “We can’t risk the portal.”
“We need to get it away from the clinic,” Mack said, allowing his very real sense of urgency to enter his voice.
“But—it has to be here. It has to be where the people are!”
“When it’s safe, we’ll bring it back.”
“But the class—you’re saying the class could be killed. That must not happen!”
“David, all we can protect is the portal. We just have to hope for the best.”
“Look, you know about firefights and such, I’m sure. Help me make my decision. Tell me what you think is happening out there?”
At last, a little trust. Mack moved to exploit it.
“Doc, I hate to tell you this, but it sounds to me like whoever’s out there is moving closer to the house, which means that your security men are being defeated. The whole town is probably out there, and they are going to rip this place to shreds, and if you want to live and you want that portal to stay intact, you need to come with me right now.”
“David, he’s right,” Caroline said.
“Cover us,” Mack told Katie, “then follow us out the back.” He had the portal. He had its designers. This operation was finally polishing up very nicely. The general was going to be pleased.
He gave David a reassuring pat on his shoulder. “Let’s roll, Doc.”
20. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE ACTON CLINIC
Just as Mack was ready to move them out, the gunfire rose to a chilling thunder. People began running downstairs, calling to David for leadership.
David went to the nearest one, Susan Denman.
“Get the class back upstairs.” He looked past her to Aaron Stein and the others. “We’re taking the portal to safety. We’ll be back as soon as possible.”
His words were swallowed by the cascading shatter of glass as rifle butts were used to smash the windows.
The sound caused the whole crowd to turn around and then to erupt into panic as men—strangers, not security personnel—began coming in through the debris. People ran everywhere, overturning tables and chairs, dashing for the doors, for the stairs.
“We need to move,” Mack urged.
Bill Osterman appeared, greasy and exhausted, from the machinery room. “I’m the plant supervisor,” he shouted to the armed men, women, and children. “I know what you want! I can show you everything.”
A man walked up to him, raised a pistol, and fired it into his face. He rocketed back across the room, a flailing shadow in the blue-pink flash.
“Drop to the floor,” Mack said to David and Caroline. “Katie, get that damn thing off the easel and bring it with us.”
Katie looked at it. “Is it… liftable?”
“Just do it!”
More shots filled the room and people slammed against walls, flying into pieces as they did so. Modern high- velocity expanding rounds don’t just injure people, they tear bodies apart.
Patients and staff scattered, running for the doors on both ends of the room. Mack noticed that the class—so very disciplined—had followed David’s instructions and returned in a group to the temporary safety of the upper floor.
“Go out the back,” he told Caroline and David. “It’s our only chance!”
He had them now, he sure as hell did.
But David hesitated, so Mack gave him a slap to the side of the head—not hard, but hard enough to startle him.
“Sorry, Doc, but get moving! Right now!”
They scrambled toward the back doors.
Once they were outside, Mack told them, “We need to find a vehicle that works, otherwise we die here, now.”
“We can’t leave. We can’t abandon the mission!”
“David, I’m on your side, so you listen to me. If you die, you abandon your mission. If you live, you still have a chance to come back here when it’s safe and complete it. So
That seemed to reach him, and he began to follow Mack, and Caroline followed him. In the rear, Katie did a sort of guard action, not that Mack thought for a moment that she would be particularly effective.
Out in the grounds, dawn was just breaking across a running firefight between the security guards in their camouflage and the townspeople. The locals had some decent weapons now, too, not just deer rifles and shotguns. He heard the rasping whisper of an Uzi and saw one of the security guys turn to red haze.
“There’s a lot of ordnance flying around,” Mack said, “heads down.”
Behind them, glass shattered upstairs and the body of Claire Michaels hit the ground, bounced once in a bed of blooming flowers, and was still.
“Claire!” David howled, rushing to her.
Mack grabbed him. “She’s past help, but you’re not. If I have to knock you cold and drag you, I’m saving you, Doc. You gotta understand that.”
Ahead, the parking lot was jammed with derelict security vehicles, their electronics long since killed.
“We can’t escape,” Caroline said. “It’s impossible.”
“We have to,” Mack replied, “because if we stay here, we are dead. No question. We get the hell out, lives are saved, and your thing that is so important to you—that is saved.”
