He started for it as something banged into it from the other side and he instinctively knew somebody was kicking it.
He pulled it open and found the two girls. Their hands were bound behind their backs with plastic handcuffs and they had grey duct tape covering their mouths, wrapped around their heads. Their eyes were wide open, so apparently Manny had lied about them being drugged.
“ I’ll get you out of here.” He worked his index fingers between the duct tape and Amy Eisenhower’s mouth and pulled it down over her chin, till it was wrapped around her neck, turning it into a grey necklace.
“ Ouch.”
“ Yeah, Amy I know that probably hurt,” Mouledoux said. “Sorry.”
“ Do Alicia,” Amy said.
“ Right.” Mouledoux repeated the process with Alicia, who immediately gasped in as much air as she could.
“ You okay?” Amy said.
“ Get me out of here and give me a gun,” Alicia said. “So I can kill that son of a bitch.”
“ She’s okay,” Mouledoux said.
Then another explosion ripped through the night.
Lila threw the grenade launcher over the cliff, pulled her Glock from her shoulder holster as Izzy unslung the riot gun.
“ You can use that?”
“ You betcha,” Izzy said.
“ You’ve got five rounds, make ’em count.”
“ Make ’em count, yeah, you can count on it.”
“ Then let’s rock and roll.”
“ Okay.” Izzy sucked in a deep breath, inhaling the eerie fog, which seemed to give her courage.
“ We’ll go in through the back, shooting anything that moves. Then we’ll bust out the front door and kill the rest of them.”
“ Got it.”
Like the first blast, the second blast knocked Manny Wayne on his ass. He didn’t hear it, but he felt it as the force of the explosion just outside the front facing window and it blew him across the room. No glass this time, the first explosion had seen to that, and the pain didn’t last long, because he smacked the side of his kauri wood desk with the side of his head and the world went dark.
Lila kicked open the back door with a force Izzy didn’t know a human could possess, ran through a laundry room with Izzy hard pressed to keep up. In the kitchen, Izzy was surprised to see it empty. Lila swept right through it and on into a dining room, then into a spacious living room that looked like it was straight out of a western movie. The front windows had been blown out. There was blood on the carpet.
“ This way,” Lila passed an entry way, went through an open door and into a large room that had been made into some kind of office. Animal heads on the wall. A hunter’s lair. An expensive desk, cowhide couch, hardwood floor with an oval carpet and a dead man in the center of it with half his head gone. A bloody mess.
“ That’s Manny Wayne,” Lila pointed to another man face down on the floor, by the foot of a dark wood desk. Blood covered his back. He looked dead.
“ Two down,” Izzy said.
“ Come on!” Lila spun around, headed out of the room, toward the front door. At it, she opened it, drew the forty-five from her leg holster and with a pistol in each hand, she stepped into the night with Izzy, riot gun at the ready, right behind.
Outside, the night around them was clear, but the mysterious fog ran right up to the side of the house on each side and it was moving in. The area to the fence, far away to the front of the house, was clear as well, but the fog blocked out anything beyond.
“ Your left,” Lila said as she faced right and started firing both guns, stitching up a big man’s chest, turning him into meat.
Izzy turned left, leading with the riot gun. Saw a man in black fatigues. He had a pistol in his right hand and a startled look on his face, but surprised or not, that didn’t stop him from bringing his gun to bear on Izzy, but he was a fraction of a second late. Izzy pulled the trigger and blew his head off as the riot gun kicked her in the gut and she pulled the trigger a second time, blasting away into the night and wasting a shot.
Fighting for air, she grabbed a breath as she tossed the riot gun aside. She pulled a Glock from her shoulder holster, pulled the other from the holster on her hip and now, like Lila, she had a gun in each hand.
“ Four down now,” Lila said.
“ How many more?”
“ Not sure, at least four, five with Tucker.” Lila said. “You alright?”
“ Yeah.” Izzy grabbed a second breath. “Sorry about the wasted shot. Don’t like the riot gun, prefer the pistols.”
“ No time to be sorry.” Lila pointed with the Glock in her left hand to the fence in the front of the house. Two men were running from it, toward them, each with a stubby looking machine gun like thing in their hands. They looked like quarterbacks running for a touch down. Izzy couldn’t tell if they were running toward them or from the fog that seemed to be chasing them.
“ Mac 10s,” Lila said, “very bad.”
They were bringing their weapons to bear even as they ran, but before they could fire they lost the race with the fog. It was as if it had swallowed them whole. It was moving faster than they had been and it was coming for Izzy and Lila.
“ Move, move, move,” Lila shouted.
Izzy went left. Lila went right as automatic fire tore up the front of the house, behind where they’d been standing an instant ago.
“ Now,” Lila said and they both started firing into the mist, where they’d imagined the bodyguards would be, where their fire seemed to be coming from. The girls kept firing till their pistols ran dry, twin Annie Oakley’s standing tall, dusters flapping in the wind that seemed to be driving the fog that was upon them now.
“ On the ground!” Lila shouted and Izzy dropped to the grass. “You okay.”
“ Yeah,” Izzy said. “I’m fine.”
“ You reloading?”
“ Yeah.” Izzy ejected her clips, tossed them aside, slapped in new, jacked rounds into the chambers. “I’m good to go. You?”
“ Yeah.” Lila said. “Stay where you are, I’ll crawl to the sound of your voice.”
“ This way,” Izzy said as she saw Lila belly crawling on the grass, coming toward her like a snake, a pair of guns in each hand, deadly as fangs.
Mouledoux had started for the master bath, to look for something to cut the girl’s plastic cuffs off, when all hell broke loose outside. It sounded like combat, like he was back in Kuwait, back in a firefight.
“ Holy shit!” Amy said, when the gunfire stopped. “What was that?”
“ That,” Mouledoux said, “was your grandmother.”
“ She sounds pissed,” Alicia said.
“ It’s never a good thing to get on Nana’s bad side,” Amy said.
“ Sounds like nothing’s changed,” Alicia said. Then to Mouledoux, “Can you get us out of these?”
“ I was just going to see if I could find something to cut them off.” In the bathroom he found a pair of barber’s scissors, which Manny Wayne probably used to trim his sideburns.
“ Can you hurry?” Amy Eisenhower said. “Because these are on too tight and I’m starting to lose sensation in my hands.”
“ Coming.” Back in the closet, he knelt to the floor, cut the cuffs that were binding Amy’s hands behind her back. Then he did her friend Alicia.
