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

  He pressed himself down into the wet ground and watched.

  Callow slipped his hand beneath Chandler’s shoulders and hauled him upright. Another scream as his left leg was freed from the hole into which it had jammed. They started towards the south again. Chandler was hopping on his right leg, Callow was trying to support him on his right hand side, Lundquist was jogging ahead then turning back to cover them.

  Knee ligaments?

  A broken ankle?

  A broken leg?

  Milton calculated.

  The odds had swung further in his direction, but he was still outnumbered and outgunned. The magazine of the rifle that he had taken from the dead man had been almost empty, with just the two rounds left in the chamber. They were gone now. The young cop had fallen in a spot where he wouldn’t have been able to get to him without getting shot himself. He wondered whether he should go back now and look for his weapon. He decided against it. He didn’t want to give them any more of a head start. The bow would have to do.

  He squinted out into the rain. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to take them if he followed them out into the upland. They had long guns, and as soon as he came out of cover, they would be able to start taking potshots at him. He could make himself difficult to hit, and the weather would mean that they would need luck to make the shot, but, at the very least they would be able to keep him out of range. It would be a stalemate, apart from the fact that he didn’t know how long he would be able to survive out in the open in the middle of the storm. They were better equipped than he was. Better dressed. They would be able to last out the weather. He didn’t know if he could.

  He stopped beneath the shelter of a pin oak and tried to remember the map.

  He needed a way to get ahead of them.

  LUNDQUIST STOPPED, turned, and raised his rifle. He was looking back into the wind, a constant gust that seemed impossibly freighted with rain. He narrowed his eyes to slits, then scooped the water away, squinting so hard that the muscles in his brow started to ache.

  No sign of Milton.

  Where was he?

  A wounded deer must feel like this. Injured, helpless, the hunter stalking it, sighting it, waiting for the proper time to finish it off.

  “Come on! Too slow! We need to go faster!”

  “This is as quick as I can manage,” Michael yelled out over the noise. “His leg, Pops… Jesus.”

  Chandler moaned. The boy had snapped the tibia in his left leg. Lundquist had heard the crack, loud as a gunshot. His leg had been wedged up to the knee, and the sudden shift had torqued the bone too much. A compound fracture. The bone had sheared in two, one sharp half slicing through the skin at his shin. The colour in his face had disappeared completely now. He looked like he was about to faint.

  “We’re going to have to leave him.”

  “We can’t.”

  “He’s going to get us killed.”

  “No,” Michael shouted at him, suddenly angry. “No man left behind. You know that as well as I do.”

  Dammit.

  Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be men of courage; be strong.

  Lundquist turned back to the south. He could leave them, he thought. He should leave them. He had God’s word to consider. He had been chosen by God to do His will. Michael and Chandler would give Milton something to think about, buy him enough time to get all the way clear. There was backup ahead, Randy Watts and Archie McClennan, the two men he had left at the falls. He could run back to Truth and leave this whole sorry mess to the National Guard.

  He could.

  But…

  Michael was right. No man left behind.

  Dammit.

  He raised his rifle again. The wind blasted him and the rain soaked him to the skin, but there was still no sign of John Milton.

  Come on, you bastard. Show yourself.

  MILTON HEADED across the upland, following a path through a shallow depression that would shield him from Lundquist. He ran as hard as he could, tripping and falling three times, but, after each fall, he scrambled back to his feet and kept going. He ran for a full hour and, by the time he arrived at the creek, he was dizzy from the pain.

  The river was in full spate now, swollen by the cloudburst, and the water had flowed over its banks. A great torrent swept down from the hills, sweeping over the goat track and surging around the trunks of the trees that had sprouted in the rich soil.

  Ahead of him, the water reached the fall that he had climbed earlier and piled over the edge, the cacophonous barrage competing with the sound of the rain and the thunder.

  Milton lowered himself down a slope of scree and onto the gently cambered wall of the creek, and then he saw them.

  Fifty feet behind him, laboriously clambering down the side of the creek, the rushing water springing at their feet.

  He dropped low, scuttering down the scree, pebbles clattering around him as a tiny avalanche was pouring down into the water. There were slabs of rock stacked up along the edge of the river. Milton slid between them and lowered himself into the water. My God, it was cold. The fierce current tugged at his legs, jerking him downstream. There were straggles of thick root from the bald cypress tree that grew on the bank, and Milton knotted them in his right fist, the fingers of his left hand pressed into a rocky cleft.

  The water was freezing. He wouldn’t be able to stay in it for more than a minute or two.

  He heard them approach, bickering, their footsteps clattering across the loose rocks, and he lowered his head beneath the surface. The water was so cold that it seemed to sting his brain, and he gasped, sucking a mouthful into his nose and the back of his throat. His eyes bulged, and his every instinct was to drag himself to the surface, but he squeezed his eyes shut and counted to five, then pulled up against the roots and took a deep, hungry breath.

  He heard their footsteps and muffled voices right overhead, and he ducked down again, praying that they would keep walking, praying that they didn’t stop, praying the bow across his shoulder wasn’t poking out of the water.

  He prayed they didn’t see him, helpless, below them.

  The water closed over his head, and time became a concept impossible to quantify.

  One minute?

  Thirty seconds?

  Ten seconds?

  He surfaced, gasping for breath again, and saw the back of Michael Callow’s head as it disappeared beneath the line of the bank ten yards downstream.

  Milton reached out with his right hand, fastened it around a rock, and used it as an anchor, tugging up and slithering out of the water and onto the bank. He pressed himself to his feet, took the bow, notched his second-to-last arrow, and pulled back on the string. He knew before it happened that he was going to fall. Blood rushed away from his head, and he quickly became dizzy, his balance awry, and he stumbled across the flooded path until he tripped and went down to his knees. The water splashed around him, and he must have groaned, because Chandler, who was being dragged sideways by Callow, now turned his head and saw him.

  Chandler had his pistol aimed down and to the side, into the river, and he was swinging it around when Milton let go of the string.

  The arrow hit the boy in the gut. He fell backwards, breaking free of Callow’s supporting grip, slumped against the rocky wall, and slid down onto his backside.

  Now Callow turned.

  Lundquist heard the commotion, and he, too, turned.

  There was no time to notch another arrow, so Milton clambered up and charged them. He crashed into them both, all three men pitching onto the rocks. Callow tripped and slammed down backwards onto a large boulder, gasping as the wind was punched out of his lungs. His rifle was jarred out of his hands, and it spun away into the river and disappeared.

  Lundquist felt solid and muscular, and he knew that Milton couldn’t use his left arm. He rolled on top of him, concentrating his weight on Milton’s right arm, squaring his forearm and striking down with the elbow. It drew a glancing impact against Milton’s forehead, e
nough to dim his vision for a moment.

  “I’m going to kill you,” he snarled.

  He tried to use his elbow again, but Milton jerked his head aside.

  “Michael! Help!”

  He tried to strike down again, but Milton pressed his feet flat and pushed up, bucking Lundquist away from him.

  Callow was still on the ground.

  Lundquist and Milton staggered up and stumbled farther down the path. It bulged upwards for a short stretch, lifting it above the swollen river, a drop of a few feet on the right hand side with spume spraying up from where the water clashed against the rock. The falls were close now.

  They closed again and Lundquist threw a punch that Milton blocked. He reached in with his right hand and grappled the older man closer to him. Lundquist forced his rifle up, pushing until the gun was held vertically between their bodies, pointing at the thunderclouds. Lundquist’s right hand was pressed against Milton’s chest, his fingers still looped through the trigger guard. It was just at the right height for Milton to reach across with his left hand. He grimaced from the blast of pain as he grabbed Lundquist’s fingers and started to bend them backwards, one by one. The hand came away from the trigger, but he still had his left fastened around the barrel.

  Milton butted him in the nose.

  Lundquist relinquished the long gun and stumbled backwards.

  Milton had the rifle now. He swung it at him, one handed, the stock slamming into Lundquist’s left shoulder.

  The older man reached the end of the path overlooking the falls as the water rolled over the edge and crashed down sixty feet to the plunge pool below. He tottered on the edge, his arms windmilling comically, before he took another backward step, his foot pawing the air, finding nothing.

  He overbalanced and fell into space.

  Milton dropped to his knees and crawled to the edge. Lundquist hit the water on his back and disappeared underneath the surface.

  “Pops!”

  Callow shoved Milton out of the way and leapt straight out from the lip of the cliff, turning in the air and hitting the water in an untidy dive.

  He was swept beneath the surface, too.

  Milton reversed the rifle and aimed down at the river, watching the frothy torrent, but there was no sign of either of them. He remembered the two men, who he guessed must have been left here, but there was no sign of them, either. The water roared, loud and angry and hungry, and still there was nothing. The current must have been strong, an underwater riptide that might have kept them below the surface or dashed them onto the rocks.

  Milton waited for another ten seconds, staring down onto the roiling surface, tons of water crashing down every second, and finally, he saw them.

  The river had carried them fifty feet away. Lundquist was on his back, Callow with his arm wrapped beneath his father’s shoulders. Both of them were kicking against the pull of the water, slowly sliding across to the opposite bank.

  Milton raised the rifle. He tried to sight it, but he could barely raise his left arm to brace it, and the barrel twitched to the left and right. He fired anyway, the round drilling into the rocks on the side of the bank.

  He fired again.

  The shot landed short, throwing a jet of spray into the air.

  He fired again.

  Wide to the right.

  Callow must have noticed that they were being fired upon, for instead of fighting the current, he submitted to it. They were drawn back into the centre of the river, the water picking up speed. The two men, treading water to try to keep their heads above the surface, were spun backwards, sucked downstream, and borne out of sight.

  Milton closed his eyes and rolled over onto his back.

  He drifted into unconsciousness, woken by a boom of thunder like the sky being ripped asunder. He raised his head. He couldn’t stay here.

  He had to get down.

  Had to follow them.

  He went back to Chandler’s body. He had died, his hands grasped uselessly around the shaft of the arrow that was still planted in his gut. He searched his body, found a packet of trail mix and three energy bars, and stuffed them into his pockets. There was nothing else of use.

  He went back to the lip of the cliff and tossed the bow down. He slung the rifle over his shoulder, and then slithered over the edge. He remembered the first few handholds from before, but he was weaker now, much weaker, and his feet slid off the ledges and out of the niches that should have offered an easy start to the descent. He almost fell twice, both times saving himself with his right hand, and, as he swung out from the rock, his fingers burned as they clawed the roots and handholds as if they were functioning independently of the fuzz in his brain.

  He made it to thirty feet down, halfway, and then somehow slid and scraped down another fifteen feet. He had neglected to plot a route, and now he found himself above a particularly sheer stretch of the face. He knew that there was no way that he would be able to find the strength to go back up again, or even to shimmy across so that he could get to the easier part of the face.

  Nothing else for it.

  He closed his eyes and pushed himself off, a fifteen-foot drop with an impact strong enough that his legs buckled, and he slammed back down onto his chest.

  The crash and boom of the falling water was like white noise, and before he could fight it, he lost consciousness again.

  Chapter 39

  MILTON TRIED not to close his eyes, but they were intolerably heavy, and he couldn’t resist.

  His tiredness engulfed him like floodwater overwhelming a levee.

  HE COULD hear the thunder of the waterfall and voices and the sound of a car and then the long boom of a jet’s engine. The sound of a door opening softly. The sound a magazine makes when it clicks home, the sound of a bullet being pressed into the chamber. He heard the sound of children’s voices and a plastic ball bouncing against the ground, but it was faint and peaceful, and it did not disturb him. He was on a motorbike. He was wearing the uniform of a motorcycle courier. He was in a favela, but he couldn’t remember where, and then he wasn’t, he was somewhere else, and he heard a doorbell. A finger pressed the doorbell, his finger, and then he heard the sound of the door being unlocked and opening on hinges that needed oil. He saw a face, a man who didn’t know him, but a man that he knew.

  SOMEONE FAMILIAR laid her hand on his shoulder and pointed to the dark square of a grave and said, “We need to dig a little deeper,” and she lifted a shovel and sank it into the soft earth. She had a tattoo on the side of her torso, eight bars of black. He was holding a pistol. Now he was on a wide road next to a river he recognised. A car crashed into a tree ahead of him, a man ran from the car, and Milton knew that he was supposed to follow the man. Someone familiar was holding another pistol. He saw blood: splatters of blood on the walls, blood on his shirt, blood on the floor. He was Death, come to drink his fill. He saw a group of children in the favela playing with their ball. He saw more blood. He saw a woman. She was young and pretty and scared. He saw the pistols, both of them, and saw them turn to the woman, and then there was the sound of a click and then an explosion and then—

  MILTON AWOKE to the sound of crashing water. He was lying on the ground, on a hard rocky floor, sharp edges pressing into his back. He opened his eyes into complete darkness. He closed them and then opened them again. Still dark. He reached out with his left hand, tried to put pressure on it, and felt the now familiar throb from the bullet wound in his arm.

  He remembered being shot.

  He remembered the men he had hunted down.

  Six men.

  Six more dead men on his ledger.

  He remembered Morten Lundquist and Michael Callow going over the edge of the falls, disappearing into the pool and then being borne away on the swollen current.

  He had been wrong, though, about the dark. It wasn’t complete. He rolled over onto his right side and saw how it lightened, just a little, in the direction that the sound of the falling water was coming from. He made ou
t the irregular, jagged mouth of a cave.

  He saw a fire, an arm’s length away, damp wood spitting and fizzing.

  A small pile of firewood sat next to it.

  Who had made the fire?

  Had he made it?

  He tried to keep his eyes open, but he couldn’t. Sleep swept up at him from behind, and despite his attempts to keep ahead of it, it was faster than he could ever hope to be.

  He closed his eyes.

  WHEN HE awoke again, the storm had passed. He could still hear the crash of the water from the fall, but there was no thunder and, as he listened to the quality of the noise, he couldn’t hear the beat of the rain. He opened his eyes, and the cave was brighter, too, faint sunlight entering the chamber and reaching halfway inside, where it was eventually consumed. Milton was lying on a bed of springy ferns. They were damp, but not wet, and more comfortable than the naked stone of the floor. He was close to a small fire, a lattice of branches that had burnt about halfway through.

  He had no idea how long he had been asleep.

  He had no idea where he was.

  He had been feverish, he knew that, but it seemed to have passed. His head felt clearer than it had for a long time.

  He gingerly brought his left arm around so that he could look at the injury. He felt pressure in the wound, and when he touched his fingers to the dressing, he felt the soft, gentle motion beneath. He carefully peeled it back. He looked at the maggots, white and fat, twisting and turning as they finished the work that they had started. The wound was clean and beginning to heal. They had done an excellent job. The dead, necrotic flesh had been eaten, and the blood that gathered at the edges as he abraded them was fresh crimson. He poked the new, pink flesh and felt a prickle of discomfort. Another good sign. It was healing.