St. Clair Ch. 04: The Angel

Luka slammed his hand into the side of the van. "Start the damn van!" Then limped around to the passenger side, noticing Filip was carefully firing down the street at whoever was off the front of the van. A bleeding Tarik was staring through the window at Dino. Dino, hadn't done a damn thing to start the van moving, and never would. Half his head was gone, although it hadn't traveled far; it was spattered across the windshield of the van.

Tarik looked like he was going to cry.

Luka caught his breath. "Get his fat ass out of the driver's seat and get this thing started. I'll cover the back, Filip cover the front."

###

Ramon stared at Levi. "Fuck." He glanced over where the cashiers and the farm kid were trying to help the black woman as best they could. They stared at him in wide-eyed terror. "We've got hostages. We cut a deal, get the hell out of here, then worry about everything."

"Yeah, that'll work out. Just like everything else." Levi, frustrated, swept a pile of bank calendars off the counter top. He waved the shotgun at the hostages. "Any of you gives me any fucking trouble, they'll be scraping you off the fucking ceilings."

###

Sick and helpless, Ellie felt worthless. Donny and Mel had managed to drag Don out of the street, and they were trying to help him, but all she could do was stand there in shock. It was so overwhelming, there was just nothing she could do. She didn't even know what to do with her hands.

Ellie watched as Donny and Mel tried to staunch the bleeding from Don's stomach. The round had gone in just under his vest, slamming in well below the heart and lungs. Donny was pulling out his truck keys and saying something about Doc's veterinary clinic being closer than the hospital, but she couldn't even get the meaning to register.

Gut shot. Ellie knew that word. She even knew that familiar smell. She knew that smell from hunting season. The smell of a gutted deer. It was the smell that spurred Ellie to action.

It was the smell that triggered the memories and the thoughts that cleared her mind and let her focus. She wasn't helpless, and she could do something after all.

Wordlessly, she stepped away, then sprinted to the parking lot behind the diner. Three blocks away to the North were the most precious things in her world. The most important things in Ellie's universe.

She yanked open the door to the truck and reached behind the seat to pull a camouflage case out. She slid it onto the seat and opened it, pulling the heavy Remington 700 .30-06 rifle out. She felt in the case and found the cardboard box of ammunition, pulling three rounds out of the box, then stuffing the box into the pocket of her apron.

She eyed the back door of the bank while she walked calmly and carefully over to the old chain link fence that separated the big gravel lot behind the bank from the city park.

Ellie opened the bolt and fed the three rounds into the hunting rifle, then slapped it shut. She glanced back over her shoulder across the park at the back of the school in the distance, then leveled the rifle across the top of the fence, thumbing the safety off. Five of her children were at that school. It didn't matter to Ellie what the gunmen really wanted. All that mattered to Ellie was that none of them would ever reach that school.

###

She was closing rapidly on the FOB when she heard the All Call on the scanner. Her Squad Leader's clipped, clear description of the tactical situation was, as usual, flawless. She heard the State Police response; a coldly mechanical explanation that the nearest units might take thirty or more minutes to reach the town if everything went right. Units had responded to a massive pile-up on the westbound I-44 and were tangled up in six miles of bumper to bumper traffic. Getting free was going to take time.

A single glance at the always-carefully-prepared map board firmly attached to her console gave Sergeant Marina Pruitt all the information she needed. The truck snarled with demonic elation and rocketed up the next off-ramp.

###

8:20 AM

###

Josip and Mustafa turned the beater car off the road and pulled up the driveway. They'd gotten lost three more goddamn times in the maze of county back roads, but they'd finally arrived. At least Josip thought they had. He'd started to wonder when they damn near got run over by a semi that flew through an intersection without so much as slowing down. An older woman, sitting in a chair near the front door of the small cabin stood up as they got out of the car. She eyed their clothes with almost haughty disdain.

"What kin' I do fer you?"

"We need to talk with Luther McCabe." Josip would've just shot her, but he wanted to make sure they had the right house. This had already been a goddam fiasco and he just wanted to get it done and get back to Saint Louis.

"He expectin' you?"

Before he could answer, an old man with an almost waist-long grey beard stepped out the front door. "S'alright Mae. Been expecting this fer a while."

Josip smiled and swept his jacket back to pull his gun out of his waistband while Mustafa grabbed the old woman's arm.

The old woman just smiled. Mustafa tightened his grip. "What are you smiling about?"

She cocked her head, looked him in the eye and whispered two bizarre words. "Guard Mamma."

Something exploded around the corner of the cabin, something dark and huge, something way too damn big to be as fast as it was moving. Mustafa didn't even have time to register what it was before he was wrenched away from the old woman and born to the ground, a giant red maw with great thumb-sized fangs closing over his face.

Josip stepped back in shock, trying to fumble the Glock out. When Mustafa's muffled screams of fear and pain suddenly cut off in an odd crunching sound, Josip suddenly remembered the old man with a sinking feeling. As he looked back, he saw the old man was inexplicably closer, an almost sleepy expression on his face. His arm was swinging toward Josip, the edge of the hatchet blade gleaming like bitter ice in the sun.

Josip's last thought was an odd, stray memory of his uncle talking about his great grandfather, a hard, cold veteran of World War Two. "Be cautious," his uncle had said "of the man who lives when everybody else dies."

His uncle had never referred to him as "grandfather." He had always called him "That Terrible Old Man."

###

Ellie shifted, then glanced at the scope on the rifle. Set for a hundred yards. She'd missed a deer once when she was fourteen. The deer walked right out in front her, only twenty-five yards away. She'd lined up carefully and fired, only to watch the deer trot off, after the bullet passed over its back.

She'd been upset, but her dad had comforted her, telling her to learn from it. She remembered his words.

"Hold low, Ellie. Just hold low."

###

While the two remaining bank robbers watched the firefight, and argued about how to reach the vans, Eric looked over at the three cashiers. Wide eyed and fighting panic, Peyton and Sara were trying hard not to look at Andrew's body. Kelsey was trying to help Jenny, but Jenny just pushed her hands away and whispered something. Kelsey was trying to argue, but whatever it was, Jenny was having none of it. Finally, Kelsey nodded, slow and sad.

While the gunmen continued to argue, Kelsey pushed Sara towards the back room, then Peyton. Eric slid as quietly as he could along the floor, until he and Kelsey slipped through the door and went as quietly as they could to the emergency door to the back parking. They all pushed out at once.

###

Levi felt the air shift and heard an odd buzzing sound. He looked towards the back wall at the hostages. Or rather at where the hostages were supposed to be. Only one body was left slumped against the bare marble wall.

"Ramon! Where the fuck did they go?"

"Who?" Even as he said it, Ramon turned to look at the hostages. Only the black girl he'd grabbed in the grocery store was left. She looked at him from under her short, tangled hair, and smiled, a wide, vicious, bloody rictus of a smile with demonic humor and no humanity at all.

"They gone, asshole." Her voice was different, slurred with an accent of some sort creeping through the formal tones the woman had been using. "You gon' die soon."

Suddenly, Ramon realized what the buzzer was. "Shit. That's probably a back door alarm. Who puts a fucking back door in a bank?"

"Goddammit. I'll shut you up..." Levi started for the black girl with the shotgun raised, rage written on his stark features.

"Leave her!" Ramon shifted his Glock 19 towards Levi. No way was he losing the one hostage he had left. He couldn't forget the dark rage on that big blonde guy's face. "Check the back."

Levi glared at him, then lurched for the back offices, and found the door just swinging shut, the sound of scrambling feet on gravel still close. He thrust through the door and turned to aim the shotgun at the gaggle of figures stumbling across the gravel lot.

"Hey! Jackass!" A woman's voice cut through the air like a glittering shard of glass.

Levi turned to look, spotting an absurd figure in a tight Pepto-Bismol pink skirt and white blouse, maybe fifty feet away. Strands of red hair had escaped her pink scrunchy and were blowing in the light breeze. For the merest fraction of a second, he wondered how she could even hold the large hunting rifle so steady. He never heard the rifle fire. The 180-grain .30-06 round, at just under three thousand feet per second, was moving well over twice the speed of the booming sound of the shot that rang off the walls of the buildings.

Ellie had remembered to hold low, but not quite as low as she thought - instead of slamming through Levi's heart, the round passed just through the hollow of his throat, destroying his spine, and nearly beheading him. He collapsed straight down, his body blocking the door open. Thinking only of her children, a mere three blocks behind her at the school, Ellie worked the long bolt of the rifle with the calm certainty of a hunter and leveled it at the open door again. Whatever happened she would be here.

Waiting.

###

Luka poked the AK around the corner of the van. He couldn't believe this damn town. It was like a bad movie; every damn person here seemed to have a goddamned gun. Tarik's clever plan had come apart at the seams. Hell, Tarik was huddled bleeding in the passenger seat floorboard, trying to figure out how to get Dino's huge body out of the damn driver's seat without being shot.

Luka was actually hoping the pair shooting at them were cops. The giant fucking blonde guy looked like he could bench a car, and the rage on his face promised a slow death to anyone he got his hands on alive. The pirate-looking bitch who'd dragged the first cop away was worse; he'd seen a bullet hit her leg and knock her down. She'd hopped right back up and moved on like nothing had happened. She hadn't even bothered to check to see if she was bleeding.

###

Marina managed to hold the machine on the road, almost by force of will alone, driving more by feel than by thought or vision. The truck was ecstatic, clawing along the asphalt and rock roads at unbelievable speeds. The truck's voice, so strangely like Jenkins and White talking together, urged her on. A predatory, almost ravenous smile that would have chilled a lion's heart lit her face darkly. She cautiously reached over and flicked the red rocker switch to turn on the call for battle.

###

The words "AAAAALLLLLLL ABOOOARD!" suddenly boomed off the walls; incredibly, deafeningly loud. The voice of an insane god.

Unhinged laughter erupted, seemingly echoing from everywhere at once; from the walls to the sky, overwhelming even the gunfire.

TJ grabbed Swede's sleeve. "Shit. Shit. Shit. Get back into the doorway. Now!"

Swede looked around wildly. "What the hell?! Was that...?"

"Ozzy Osbourne. 'Crazy Train.'"

The intense, driving call of an electric guitar filled the air all around them, underlined by the growing animal howl of a diesel engine being pushed to its absolute limit.

TJ pushed Swede into the alcove and wedged herself in next to him. "It's Marina. She's coming."

As the engine and guitar grew almost deafening, Swede could swear the ground was vibrating. "What do you mean?"

"That's the barricade song. She used it in Iraq. Just hold on for fuck's sake."

###

Cindy watched the bank employees race away, heading down the alley. For a moment she pondered where they might be headed. But that wasn't important. Not really. She'd watched Ellie shoot the man in the doorway, and she'd wondered why Ellie was getting involved; why and how Ellie had changed from the friendly waitress to some kind of fierce and fearless warrior. Before she could think it through, she noticed the gunman's head. Bald skin of that peculiar sallow color. She began to walk forward. Not, properly speaking, against her will, but certainly not of her own accord. Drawn hypnotically towards the back of the bank.

She stared at the body blocking the door, a shotgun on the ground next to an outstretched hand. Levi. It was almost impossible to believe. The bastard was finally dead, eyes glassily staring into nothingness, crooked yellow-brown teeth still bared in a scarecrow-grin. The head was at an odd angle to the body, most of the neck was just gone.

She could hear Ellie calling to her, but she didn't register words, or even sounds; just a vague distant feeling that, whatever it was, it wasn't important. Ellie could do what she needed to do. So could Cindy.

She could hear voices from the doorway. One was Ramon, though she couldn't really hear the other. Not that it mattered who else was in there. All the shooting. All the dying. This was her fault. The roaring in her ears along with the sound of her own heart beating blocked out everything. She reached over and gingerly picked up the shotgun and began to step over Levi's foul corpse with growing resolve.

###

Luka shivered, an unpleasant corpse-finger chill tracing up his spine as he tried desperately to make sense of the sudden tidal wave of sound. He turned but barely had time to register the huge mass of metal and fury bearing down on him at unbelievable speed. A part of his brain tried to convince him that he was seeing things, but the gleaming monster suddenly shifted as if it had seen him and he could sense a limitless hunger for blood. Fortunately for Luka's sanity, he couldn't see the twisted mix of anger, hate, and joy on Marina's face as she guided the semi towards the van, upshifting a final time. It was only for a fraction of a second, but that last fraction of a second of life was far more pleasant for Luka for not having seen her.

###

Humans often judge things largely by context. A teddy bear tucked in next to a sleeping child is innocuous, even heartwarming. A teddy bear floating alone in dark water evokes fear and unease. Likewise, a semi-trailer moving at 65 miles per hour on the highway barely registers to most people. It is normal, it belongs there. At 95 miles per hour it is cause for concern. But that same semi-trailer moving 95 miles per hour down the dusty main street of a small town is a monstrous and terrifying event. Almost incomprehensible. Especially when it slams through vehicles, flattening and shredding metal like papier-mâché.

###

The Hammer of God. Swede had heard that somewhere. It was hard to think, his ears were ringing, but in a muffled, murmuring, underwater way. The inane thought just wouldn't leave his mind. Church maybe? Something he'd learned in Sunday school. Macabe? No, it was Maccabeus. The Hammer. That was it, he was sure. The Hammer of God.

He looked at the wreckage-strewn street. The white van was scattered down the street in a string of torn metal and shattered glass. Lumps of what he hoped was upholstery sat in odd clusters here and there, oddly patternless. A huge white scrape mark on the massive limestone wall of the old icehouse showed where the van had been crushed along it for half a block's length by the semi. Darker smears of color along the wall grimly promised more horrifying finds. The other van had been strangely sheared, the front half crushed almost flat, leaning against the corner of the grocery store under the ancient hand-painted "American Coffee" mural that decorated the wall. The back half of that van was simply missing, probably pushed along in front of the metal monster.

Something tugged at his sleeve and he focused nearer him. TJ was yelling at him, but she almost immediately realized he could hear no better than she could. It was obvious what they had to do though; they carefully swept the wreckage, handguns leveled.

There were obviously no survivors, the fragments of bodies spread along the street weren't really recognizable as having ever been human. An old joke about "counting feet and dividing by two" rose in his mind, almost bringing his breakfast with it. From the greenish cast to TJ's face, even she was appalled by the carnage.

He could see the back of the semi off in the distance, more than a quarter of a mile, probably. His hearing was slowing returning and he could hear the music blasting from the truck. How the hell the driver had managed to keep it upright and on the road was beyond him. A twisted piece of the truck's dark red metal hood spinning slowly in the road testified that it hadn't escaped completely unscathed. A bit of movement caught his eye and he could see the thin figure of TJ's trucker friend jogging down the road towards them, carrying a club of some kind and small green pack.

Swede set his jaw and began to move towards the bank. And Jenny.

###

Ramon stared disbelievingly out the front window at the wreckage of the van. Hell, it wasn't even recognizable as ever having been a van. He looked back at the last hostage, the only one who hadn't escaped.

Jenny pulled herself up and back, dragging her legs. She pushed her shoulders higher up against the marble wall, a bubble of blood clinging to the corner of her mouth. There was a wheezing, gasping sound, then she began to chuckle. Almost soundless at first, it grew deep and chilling. Her body jerked a little with the effort.

Ramon stared at her, puzzled. "What the fuck is wrong with you, bitch?"

"All those cross tattoos. And you don't have a fucking clue."

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

"You don' know anything 'bout your own religion. All those crosses and you never really read your own Bible, did you?" The lilt of the bayou crept into her voice. Jenny knew she was almost done.

"What?"

"Angels. Motherfucker. Angels."

"What about them?"

"Angels. They're not little naked babies with wings or pretty girls in robes." She coughed a fine spray of blood. "Sometimes they're messengers. But most of the time..." her voice trailed off as her eyes closed.

Ramon couldn't figure out why, but he knew it was important. "Most of the time what?"

She must have heard him because her eyes opened. But they were unfocused, unseeing.

"Most of the time what, bitch?"

She coughed, more blood running down her chin. She whispered weakly. "They kill the firstborn. They destroy cities. Most of the time... they're weapons. They're vengeance."

The black girl gave a last soft, wet, rasping chuckle then shut her eyes against the pain and sagged as he watched.

A soft scraping sound came from the doorway behind him. When he looked up, Cindy stood in the back doorway of the room, Levi's shotgun leveled at him. She'd changed. She was unblinking, cold and implacable.