Miguel reached over and gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. 'It is not a bad thing, Adam,' he said. 'To know your own mind and conscience, and to listen to it, that is the mark of a real man. Here, give me that.'
He took the sledgehammer from the boy and laid it against the wall of the shed. He could not carry any more himself, his hands being full with his own massive hammer and the Winchester rifle.
'Give it to me,' a deep voice rumbled. It was Benjamin Randall. He stood a good foot higher than Miguel and was twice as wide across the shoulders. He took up young Adam's abandoned hammer and hefted it to test the weight. Then he twirled both cudgels experimentally.
'Won't be a problem,' he grunted.
Miguel glanced back at the Hy Top to make sure nothing had changed.
'Good,' he said softly.
'Adam, you will come with me to get the women. I am most certain they are being held in a room at the back of the club. I observe bars on the window and a padlocked steel door, but we can deal with that. Do you think you will be able to fire a gun? If you have to?'
Miguel was glad to see the young man question himself before nodding, even if he still seemed uncertain.
'I trust you, Adam. And I will need you to trust me.'
He turned back to the wider circle of men.
'The boy and I will cut around the block and approach the club from the rear. Give us fifteen minutes to do that. Then move in and take down the men outside as we discussed. There are two women with them. Not yours. If they try to raise the alarm…'
He left the sentence unfinished.
'We understand,' said Willem D'Age. Miguel took the precaution of going an extra block when circling around behind the Hy Top, taking Adam up South Cedar Street, an unkerbed boggy stretch of dirt road where most of the small fibrocement cottages appeared to have survived intact. A red pickup had struck a power pole outside number 642, bringing it down on the front porch of the white clapboard house, and fat black power cables lay like giant snakes on the road top.
Maybe that had knocked the electrics out back in '03 and saved the suburb from burning like some others in Crockett, Miguel thought. Two more cars had collided a little farther down the road, and they had burned out, but the flames had not spread at the time. Miguel and his teen shadow skirted them and cut through a scrap of open ground into West Bell Avenue. A few more crashed vehicles and a couple of children's tricycles shrouded with stiff rags were all that remained of the original residents. Signaling to Adam to stay close and keep quiet, the vaquero ghosted another block back toward the center of town before swinging right and heading down a long straight road. South Sycamore, a bent and faded street sign declared it. The glow of the burning oil drums back at the Hy Top silhouetted the tree line between here and there, and he heard the snorting of a horse somewhere in between.
Miguel slowed down and pressed one finger to his lips.
The Mormon boy was wide-eyed but resolute.
The faintly glowing dial of Miguel's watch told him he had three minutes to get into position.
'I need you to carry this for me. Just carry it, okay?' he said, passing his sledgehammer to Adam. It was a model sometimes called a Canadian ax, with a traditional flat hammer on one side of the iron head tapering to a wedge point on the other. As the two intruders picked their way carefully through the small forest that had colonized at least three blocks behind the Hy Top, Miguel held his Winchester, ready to snap it up and fire.
He fervently hoped that would not be necessary. They needed to remain hidden from their quarry until the very last moment. Taking up position behind the trunk of a dead white maple, he nodded encouragement to Adam and ruffled his hair to show the lad he was impressed with his fortitude so far. The boy visibly swelled with confidence. It would have been hard for him, losing his family at such an age. In Miguel's judgment, he was very much a young man in need of a strong father.
They had to wait only another minute before the other members of the raiding party appeared without warning from the dark recesses of the woods that had crept up to the other side of South Cottoonwood. The first to materialize was Big Ben, carrying two hammers, one in each hand as though they were no heavier than children's toys. And then came his brothers, as the Mormons referred to each other, all of them hauling a heavy cudgel of sorts. Sledgehammers, axes, and one crowbar. Miguel grimaced at what was about to take place.
The Mormons did not break into a sprint. They did not announce themselves with a war cry to summon up the spirits. They almost floated across the street until they were in among the loose collection of lounge room furniture over which the drunken, debauched road agents were draped, passed out in the warm glow of the barrel fires.
'Come now, quickly,' Miguel whispered to Adam, stepping out from behind the tree and taking long, brisk, but careful strides toward the padlocked steel door that led into a small room attached to the back of the club. The stench of urine and cigarette butts slashed through the otherwise clear air.
When they reached the door, their view of the street in front of the building would be obscured, but Miguel was able to see the first moments of the attack as it unfolded. Big Ben swung his hammers like a gymnast twirling her ribbon at the Olympics and brought them down with a gruesome, sick-making crunch onto the heads of two road agents passed out under a blanket on an old brown couch. Miguel, who had seen many terrible things in his time, both before and after the Disappearance, was forced to blink away the sight, flinching involuntarily just before impact. There was no mistaking the wet organic cracking sound, however, as the men's heads split apart like overripe melons. Not half a second later he saw D'Age and Aronson repeat the awful stroke, each man swinging his weapon, another sledgehammer and an ax, respectively, even as Big Ben recovered his momentum and whirled away from his first victims to bash the life out of another two.
Miguel heard a strangled, gurgling sound and spun around to see Adam vomiting into a clump of grass. The boy waved him away as if to say it was nothing. The vaquero tried to keep track of the number of agents as they went down, counting out each dull, chopping thud he heard, but it was impossible.
And then one of the camp whores woke up and screamed.
Her ululating cry was cut off by another muffled blow, and Miguel had his signal.
'Get up, boy. Our time has arrived.'
The whey-faced youngster, still dry heaving, nodded and took up position behind Miguel, covering him with an M16 as he went to work on the padlock securing the heavy security door. The first blow rang out like a discordant cathedral bell over the huge graveyard that was the town of Crockett. Miguel's heart tried to leap out of his chest with the huge, jarring boom, but he ignored his galloping fears and swung again, striking the padlock squarely. It disintegrated with a shower of sparks and a metallic crash. He heard screams inside-women's screams-as he wrenched open the door.
'Get out, get out now,' he ordered as the door flew back with a wrenching screech of stiff, tortured steel in an ill-fitting door frame.
Adam moved up just behind his shoulder.
'Come on, it's us. Get out of there, you ladies; we have to go now.'
Other voices were shouting: deep male voices, angry and confused.
The first gunshot cracked open the night as a woman appeared from within the gloom of the prison at the back of the club. Miguel recognized her as the woman he had seen humiliated by the camp whores earlier in the evening. Her face was streaked with tears, her eyes dark sunken pits. She was shivering with fear and shock and seemed not to recognize Adam when she saw him.
'Come, Sister Jenny. This way, quickly.'
The boy took her by the arm and virtually dragged her from the room as the percussive trip-hammer of automatic weapons fire began around the front of the building. More screams followed and then the boom of a heavy single-shot weapon. Miguel almost stopped in midstride.
That couldn't be the Remington, he thought. He had told her to stay behind.
There was no time for that. Sofia would do as she was told.
'Ladies,' he said urgently. 'It really is time to go now. Quickly. With young Adam here. My name is Miguel, Miguel Pieraro, and I will be rescuing you tonight. But only if you step this way.' Sofia almost lost her meager dinner when Ben brought the sledge down on his first victim's skull. Choking it down, she brought out her Remington and waited for a target to present itself. In the excitement, she nearly opened fire on the first target that resolved in her scope, bracketed against the fires and torchlight of the camp. That would have meant shooting Orin and giving herself away. Sneakiness was the watchword of the evening, she reminded herself. Sneakiness and not shooting the
