The Sword of God - John Milton #5 (John Milton Thrillers) Read online

  Now he was going to go after them and hunt them down.

  The man with the dogs had dropped his shotgun, but it had fallen in the open, and Milton dared not risk trying to retrieve it. They might have doubled back, ready to pick him off. The two men behind the first shack had been carrying weapons, too, but the explosion had thrown them so far away that he might be looking for hours before he found them. He would have to rely on the bow.

  He stayed off the path, climbing the slope in the cover of the trees and brush. It slowed him down, but he couldn’t risk a more direct approach. They still had their rifles and, if he got close, their shotguns and pistols. There was a swathe of long grass between the trees and the lake, but he dared not stray into it for fear that he would leave a path that Lundquist would be able to see from farther up the slope. The trees grew sparser as he started to reach the top of the slope. He moved more carefully, lying flat in the mud, propelling himself farther by digging his toes into the muck and pushing.

  THE RAIN became a deluge. Larry Maddocks scrambled up the slope to the ridge, slipping and sliding through the slop and the mud, driven ever onward by the thought that Milton might be coming after them.

  What had just happened?

  Oh man. He was scared. Was he ever scared.

  Maybe the colonel would decide that the time was right to put a lid on things, at least for a while until things calmed right back down again. Maybe now wasn’t the right time for what they had been planning. Maybe God's word could wait. Too much heat. Getting out of this in one piece was a sign. Larry was a devout man, like they all were, and he knew an omen when he saw one. There was no point in pushing things further than they were ever meant to be pushed. God had given them a message.

  You need to be waiting.

  He decided, right there, that he would bring it up with Lundquist the next chance he had.

  They crashed and clattered through the trees. Larry gasped with the effort, hardly daring to look back, and then his leg snagged on an outstretched root and he fell into the mud.

  The impact jarred the rifle out of his hands.

  When he got up, he couldn’t see it.

  He couldn’t see the others.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Where were they?

  He looked up into the sky, the midnight black, and saw a seam of lightning as it spread out for miles on either side.

  He didn’t want to call out, but he didn’t want to stay silent, either, and have them carry on without him.

  “Hey?” he called tremulously. Then, louder, “Hey?”

  Dammit!

  He looked down at the long grasses and underbrush, scouring it for his gun. He needed his gun. He couldn’t just leave it here.

  He didn’t see Milton until it was too late. He came out of the darkness that had gathered beneath the canopy of branches, the light all gone, blanketed by the gloom from the storm. He had been hiding in the underbrush, and as he loomed up and took a quick step towards him, Larry noticed that his face and throat had been smothered with thick black mud. His whole head was daubed with it, just his pale blue eyes visible as he punched the serrated kitchen knife he carried in his right fist into Larry’s chest. He bent double, right over the knife, feeling the metal inside him as it probed and pressed in between the long slither of his intestines. The man pulled the knife out, and Larry felt his blood follow after it, a gush that splashed out onto the grass, red droplets that diluted and dispersed in the rain.

  He felt light-headed, only vaguely aware as strong hands took fistfuls of his jacket and hauled him off the path. He was dumped in the undergrowth, face up, and he was still awake when he saw those cruel blue eyes again and then the knife, sheathed in his blood, the jagged edge descending to his throat and swiping across and up.

  “LARRY?”

  Lundquist cursed him again. The man was a liability, always had been. He wasn’t taking this seriously. Maybe he would when he was locked up, or dead, but it would be too late by then.

  “Larry?”

  The rain hammered down, sliding off the brim of Lundquist’s hat and washing down to join the quagmire that had formed where the muddy path had been.

  They couldn’t wait for him.

  “Keep moving,” he called out.

  They climbed towards the ridge, their boots slipping on the wet muck underfoot.

  “Lundquist, come in… Lundquist, do you copy…”

  He had put the radio into his pocket when the rain started to fall again, and he heard it crackle into life. He reached inside, took it out, and put it to his ear.

  “This is Morris Finch. Are you there?”

  “I’m here, Morris,” he said between gasps.

  There was a blast of lightning and a hiss of static that obscured Finch’s next sentence.

  “What was that? Please repeat.”

  “Said that there’s someone… wants to talk to you.”

  “Who?” More static, more gasps for breath. “Jesus, Morris, I can’t hear shit.”

  The line cleared, and a different voice became audible. “Officer Lundquist, this is Lieutenant Colonel Alex Maguire from the Michigan National Guard. Can you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Lundquist said, gasping again.

  “I’m the commander of the troops assigned… help you find… fugitive.”

  “Glad to hear your voice, Colonel.”

  “You were lucky… at Fort Custer normally… up at Nicolet for manoeuvres… jumped onto a truck… over here.”

  “How many men?”

  “Five hundred, plus equipment… couple of Black Hawks… come in handy… reinforcing your cordon… advance and flush him out.”

  “Come now. We’ve got three men down, maybe four!”

  There was another squall of interference, and when it cleared away Morris was talking again.

  “… and it’s all going to be fine.”

  “Morris! Tell them to come now! He’s killing us up here!”

  Another flash of lightning; another fizz of static.

  Morris Finch didn’t respond.

  Lundquist had to fight the urge to fling the radio into the trees. He put it back into his pocket.

  He looked back.

  Still no sign of Larry Maddocks.

  Leland was running next to him.

  He heard the crack of the rifle over the sound of the falling rain. Leland ran on for another two steps before he fell forwards, ploughing a furrow through the mulch. He pressed up with his arms and looked down in dumb incomprehension at his belly. The bullet had burrowed through his back, sliced through his guts and exited through the front of his raincoat.

  Lundquist stopped running. For a moment, he stood there paralysed, his mouth hanging open.

  Lightning flashed like the sun.

  “Pops!” Michael screamed over the slamming of the water.

  Lundquist thought he saw something moving in the undergrowth.

  “Pops! He’s here!”

  LUNDQUIST SQUINTED into the murkiness, his hands shaking with the sudden torrent of adrenaline.

  Milton was behind them.

  Close.

  Walker Price was dead.

  Leland Mulligan was dead.

  Larry Maddocks.

  Harley Ward.

  Dylan Fox.

  Dead.

  Dead.

  Dead.

  There were only three of them left.

  “Get behind the trees!” he yelled out to his son and Chandler.

  Michael didn’t hear him. He brought up his rifle and loosed off a round into the bushes, then another, and another. His rifle cracked out against the sound of the rain.

  “Stop firing!” Lundquist shouted, not daring to take his eyes away from the bushes where he thought he had seen movement. “Get into cover!”

  Michael fired again, his eyes bugged out with fright. His finger pulled and pulled, spent shells ejecting and new ones chambering, the recoil juddering against his shoulder.

  “Stop firing! Save yo
ur ammo!”

  Michael heard him this time. He looked over in his direction, and Lundquist saw how terrified the boy was.

  “Come on,” he shouted, starting back up the slope. There was a stand of large hemlocks, and he pressed himself behind the trunk of the nearest. Michael arrived a moment later, the barrel of his rifle trembling. He squeezed next to his father, aiming out around the side of the tree. Thomas Chandler sheltered behind another tree.

  “Shit,” Michael said. “He shot Leland.”

  Lundquist nodded. “Probably got Larry, too.”

  “Oh fuck.” Michael’s larynx bobbed up and down in his throat as he tried to swallow the fear away.

  Think.

  Milton had changed tactics. He had stopped running.

  Think.

  Lundquist looked up at the sky. The thunderhead was low and as black as pitch. It could be midnight for all the difference that would make. The rain was coming down as hard as ever, and visibility was reduced to twenty or thirty feet. The rainwater fell to join the spate that was forming around his feet. Lundquist picked his shirt away from his chest, but it sucked back again, stuck to his skin, drenched through.

  “Listen to me,” he said to them both, his voice low and urgent. “We can’t stay here. He’ll just circle around and pick us off. We need to get moving.”

  “Where?”

  “Back home.”

  “We’ll never make—”

  “I know the terrain around here better than he does. We—”

  “Lundquist.”

  They both heard the shout over the clamour.

  Lundquist felt his heart jackhammer in his chest. He swallowed hard, feeling the anger starting to surge. He channelled that, instead, and the fear receded, if only a little.

  “What do you want?”

  “You know what I want.”

  The voice was coming from below them, down the slope.

  “The National Guard will be here soon,” he called back. “You know that, you son of a bitch? Five hundred soldiers. You’ve got no chance.”

  “We’ll have to disagree on that, won’t we?”

  Lundquist looked across to his son. Michael was gripping the rifle tightly in both hands.

  “You asked what I used to do. Do you still want to know?”

  “You were a soldier.”

  “An assassin, Lundquist. I killed people for my country. I killed one hundred and thirty-six men and women.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Milton didn’t answer. Lundquist looked around the edge of the tree, trying to see him. There was nothing.

  “And now you’re out of your depth,” Lundquist said, trying to get him to speak again.

  “Doesn’t look that way to me.”

  “How’s that arm of yours?”

  There was a short pause. “It’s been better. But I don’t need both arms for what I’m going to do to you.”

  “You think you can take us out with a bow and arrow?”

  “I’ve got a rifle now.”

  “You’re still outnumbered.”

  “I’ve done all right so far. Only three of you left, plus those two you left behind at the falls. Or maybe I already took those two out, who knows?”

  Lundquist tried to pinpoint the direction of Milton’s voice. He was a decent distance away and maybe off to the right, maybe moving between sentences, but it was difficult to be sure. The sound bounced around the tree trunks, and the rain deadened everything. He took his hand off the barrel of his rifle and scrubbed water from his eyes.

  “Milton!”

  Milton didn’t answer.

  “Want to know the way I see it?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “We outnumber you, and you have one arm. There are five hundred soldiers coming into these woods right now. They’ve got helicopters, too, probably already on their way. If I were you, I’d come out of there with my hands up right now and hope to God that I’m feeling disposed to bringing you in alive.”

  “Don’t think I’m going to be doing that.”

  He turned to Chandler and Michael and hissed, “We need to move. You ready?”

  Michael’s eyes were wide. Chandler’s face was bloodless. Lundquist glared at them both, nodded up the slope, and said, “You two go first, and I’ll cover you. Get up to those trees, see them?”

  They nodded.

  “Then you cover me when I come up. Okay?”

  “Yes.”

  Lundquist looked up into the sky, allowing the rain to wash off his face for a second.

  He took a deep breath and tightened his grip on the rifle.

  “Now!”

  Lundquist crouched and swung around the edge of the tree, the rifle aimed into the forest where he thought Milton’s voice had come from last. Michael and Chandler ran liked scalded deer, their feet slipping and sliding through the mud and the cataract of water that was coming down the slope from above. He thought he saw a shimmer of movement from within a stand of hardwoods. There was the sharp retort of a rifle. Lundquist swung the rifle up and aimed at the spot, firing two rounds in quick succession. He stared hard into the underbrush, straining his eyes and ears, but there was nothing. He glanced up the slope and saw Michael at the top, turning back to him and crouching down behind a fall of rocks, aiming back down into the woods. Chandler’s head appeared around the trunk of a large oak.

  Milton had missed.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, remembering his scripture.

  The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life.

  He opened his eyes and ran. He pulled his boots out of the quagmire, each step splashing in the torrent as he ran as hard as he could to his son. He stared fearfully at Michael’s face, terrified that it would register the sight of Milton below him, the preface to the bullet that would find him between the shoulder blades, but Michael’s face remained intent with concentration. The bullet didn’t come.

  “Did you get him?” the boy cried out as he slipped into cover behind him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

  Tom Chandler hurried over to them.

  “What do we do?”

  “We need to get as far away from here as we can. We need to keep running.”

  Chapter 38

  THEY HAD made it to the top of the ridge and then the uplands beyond when the radio crackled with static from the lightning.

  Lundquist put it to his ear and tried to press it there as he ran on.

  “We… helicopters… too… thunder.”

  “This is Lundquist. Say again. Repeat, say again.”

  “Dangerous… lightning… on foot.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  The radio buzzed and fizzed and popped, and when the static dissolved, the voice wasn’t one he recognised, and he couldn’t even be sure it was meant for him.

  “Dammit!” He was gasping from the hard running. “This is Lundquist. We are under attack. Men down, repeat, men down. We need help.”

  The lightning crackled again, lighting up the uplands, and then the thunder rolled over them, on top of them, so loud that it felt like his ears were ringing. Lightning flashed again, and Lundquist suddenly worried how wise it was to be out in the open when the storm was directly overhead. The whiteness stained a lattice against his retinas, and he blinked it away, squeezing the water out of his eyes, and then it was gone and the uplands were dark again.

  “They’re not coming,” Michael gasped out.

  “I don’t know… this weather…”

  “We’re on our own,” the boy said, his eyes still bulging.

  Lundquist knew that they had to hurry. The land around here was horribly open. Milton wouldn’t need to track them; he would be able to see them. He remembered the creek that they had followed earlier, cutting through the uplands, down the rise and then into the thicker forest. But where was it? He couldn’t remember. What about the falls that Milton had climbed to get away from them? If they could
find the river, maybe they could climb down there and get back to Truth. If they could keep Milton behind them, there was no reason why they wouldn’t be able to get to help in one piece.

  “Dad?” Michael called.

  “We’re going to be okay,” he shouted over the roar of the storm. “I know a way down.”

  “What about—”

  “He’s behind us, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “We keep him behind us. He’s been shot. We’re halfway home, boys, you hear? We just have to keep on going.”

  Rain pelted his face. He reached up to wipe his eyes when a gust of wind swept across them, snagging the brim of his hat and tearing it away. It jerked up into the sky, twenty feet high in an instant, and then spun away behind them.

  Lundquist was past caring.

  They started off, rushing out of the tree line and onto the wide-open space of the uplands. They covered the first hundred feet without incident but then Chandler turned and started to trot backwards so that he could look behind them, with his eye off the path ahead. His left leg plunged down into a rabbit hole, and he overbalanced, his leg buckling with a stomach-churning crack as he fell to the left, the leg still planted in the hole. Chandler screamed.

  MILTON DIDN’T think it would be possible for it to rain any harder, but he had been wrong.

  It was.

  He reached the top of the ridge and held himself still, listening hard. He heard nothing. His breath coming thick and heavy, he poked his head up and surveyed the terrain. The upland was as he remembered it: broad ridges with rounded summits and wide, shallow valleys. There were rough grasslands, scrub, and pockets of trees. Plantations of conifer came in geometric blocks and formed hard, angular lines across the rounded slopes of the ridges. Patches of scrubby woodland, pastures, and marsh added to the mosaic.

  He saw the three men in the near distance. Five hundred yards? They were running and, as he watched them, Chandler turned around to look for him, trotting backwards and tripping. He dropped down onto his side, and Milton heard the scream even above the thunder and the ululation of the rain. He watched as Callow stooped down to him. He heard another scream of pain. Chandler stayed on the ground as Lundquist turned and knelt, his rifle sweeping the ridge as he tried to find Milton.