opportunity expires.”
When he lifted his thumb from the transmit button, he saw that neither of his commanders had moved. “Assemble your soldiers,” he said again.
Brother Kurt shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “Where did these invaders come from, Brother Kendig?” As he asked the question, his hand shifted on the grip of his rifle.
Kendig made himself swell larger and took a step closer to the young man. “Assemble your soldiers,” he growled. That deep baritone was a tool he’d perfected over the years. “Or I will shoot you right here and right now for mutiny.”
“What the hell kind of gambit was that?” Boxers yelled from across the giant room as he slammed another set of shutters and slid their blocking bar into place.
“Son of a bitch wanted to chat,” Jonathan explained, working on his own set of shutters. “So I chatted. I figured he had people nearby, and it wouldn’t hurt to throw some psy-ops into the mix.” He pointed to Gail. “Gunslinger, check the back of the altar. Make sure every door is locked and blocked. We may be here for a while.”
As his ears recovered from the firefight, the moans of the wounded became more distinct.
He eased by the Nasbes to block the windows of the vestry. As he reentered the sanctuary-what else do you call a big room with an altar?-he saw Christyne Nasbe approaching the cluster of Klansmen he’d shot behind the pews.
“Whoa,” he said. “Stay away from them.”
“My God, there are so many,” she gasped. “They’re suffering.”
“They’re dangerous,” Jonathan countered. “All wounded animals are dangerous. Wounded animals who know how to shoot even more so. Stay away from them.”
“But they’re bleeding. Can’t you help them?”
Boxers said, “Let ’em bleed long enough and they won’t need help.”
Leave it to Big Guy to take it one step too far.
“What happens next?” Ryan asked.
Jonathan answered by walking to the stacked firearms and ammunition, and coming back with two M16s and two belts of spare magazines. “What happens next is, it gets interesting,” he said. “How about giving me back that peashooter and taking this instead? Give that left arm of yours a workout.”
The kid took it, but he wasn’t happy about it.
“You want to shoot it out with them?” Christyne gasped. The horror was evident in both her tone and her body language. “They’ll kill us.”
“Bet you thought you were dead ten minutes ago, didn’t you?” Boxer said. His voice rolled through the rafters of the sanctuary.
“But there must be a hundred people out there.”
Jonathan held out a rifle for her. “But there’s five of us.” He said it with his most charming smile.
“That means we have to shoot twenty apiece,” Ryan said.
“Well,” Jonathan said, “some of them will run away.” He was trying to keep it as light as he could, because the reality of their situation was at best dire.
“Generally speaking, we prefer to plan a little more carefully,” Gail said from up at the altar. “But the whole execution thing put us on a fast track.” To Jonathan, she said, “Everything’s battened down back there.”
“Are you really a friend of my dad’s?” Ryan asked.
Christyne brightened. “You know Boomer?”
“We worked together for a while,” Jonathan said.
“So you’re in the Army?”
Jonathan gave a coy smile. “We worked together for a while.”
“Hey, Boss,” Boxers said from the red side wall. “I think you, me, and Gunslinger need to powwow.”
Gail heard for herself and walked that way.
To the Nasbes, Jonathan said, “You guys go on with your reunion. Stay away from the wounded, and if you see anything scary, yell out right away.”
With that, he walked across the sanctuary to join his colleagues. “What’s up?” As if he didn’t know.
“You realize our position is untenable, right?” Boxers asked, getting right to it.
Jonathan inhaled loudly. These sorts of standoffs never worked out well for the people behind the barricade. Even with the reinforced walls, the good guys were still only one RPG round or even a bonfire away from dying in place or being overrun. “I’m open to any and all ideas,” he said.
“Well, let’s take surrender off the table first,” Boxers said. “It’s not in my nature.”
“Nor in mine,” Jonathan agreed. “Besides, their judicial system here sucks.”
“We have the wounded,” Gail said. “They should give us at least a little leverage, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Jonathan said. “They’re taught to kill themselves rather than submit. If that’s their worldview, the wounded are just collateral damage.”
“I agree,” Boxers said. “So they’re coming. What do you think? Good old-fashioned frontal assault?”
Jonathan shrugged. “If I were them, I’d run a feint attack on one side to buy time to set charges on the doors. Blow them, they’re inside and we’re dead.”
Gail looked horrified. “You know, playing with you guys is nowhere near as fun as I had hoped.”
Boxers said, “So, we each take a side and stick to our posts no matter what. Is that it?”
Jonathan shrugged. “The best I can come up with. We’ll keep the Nasbes together on the green side. I’ll take white. Big Guy, you’re red. Gunslinger-”
“Black,” she said. “I got it. And when we get home, I’m getting a new handle.”
“All right,” Boxers said, heading to his post. “We’ll have us a good old-fashioned gunfight.” He’d never sounded more self-actualized.
Jonathan headed off to give the Nasbes their assignments. He gave them a crash course in how to work their weapons, and then took them into the vestry and planted them in front of their assigned windows.
“Keep your selector on single fire,” he told them for the second time. “If you see someone with a gun, shoot. If they fall down, move to the next target. If they don’t, shoot them again. Questions?”
Each of their faces was like a giant blank oval.
“Okay, good. I’ll be in the front. If you need anything, just shout out.” The muzzle of Christyne’s rifle had started to drift in toward Jonathan, so he reached out and gently pushed it to the side. “And try to remember to keep your weapon pointed outside.”
“But the windows on the other side of the shutters are closed,” Ryan said.
“They’re glass,” Jonathan said. “They’ll go away once the shooting starts.”
This wasn’t the way an 0300 mission was supposed to go. If they came out the back end of this thing alive, he was going to owe Boomer one hell of an explanation.
CHAPTER THIRTY – TWO
Kendig’s ten-minute deadline was overly ambitious, but he’d known that when he’d first issued it. It would take longer than that to get the Army fully outfitted and ready to fight. Ultimately, as the deadline came and went, that would further unnerve the Users who had commandeered the assembly hall.
The silence from inside the building seemed to have unsettled the soldiers in his Army as they moved farther and farther back from the building. There’d been no more suggestion of mutiny since Brother Kurt’s outburst, but the invader’s radio ruse had had some impact. Outside the Army’s security force, Kendig hadn’t had a lot of contact with the rank and file because there’d been no need. He was on the Board of Elders, and as such served an executive role; but living off the compound as he did, he didn’t get much opportunity to interact in routine matters.
All of that translated to not a lot of personal loyalty.
The ranks had thinned considerably. Some of his soldiers had been martyred, but he suspected that even more had fled. Those who remained-he figured it to be a force of eighty, maybe eighty-five-were terrified.
The assault that lay ahead fell far outside any training that the cadre of soldiers had received. Their training
