Broken Heartland (29 page)

“Our security,” the nurse said, “those men are professionals.” It sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

“Yes,” the doctor agreed. “Maybe,” then he laughed. “Look what they brought me.” Mad Dog heard him open something. Plastic on plastic.

“My God,” the nurse said. “Are those…?”

“Autopsied organs,” the doctor agreed. “From our primary donor. The rest of him is upstairs in the trunk of a car.”

“Good thing we're in Kansas,” the nurse said. “You could never pull this off anywhere else.”

“I don't know,” the doctor replied. “When lives are at stake, most people are prepared to suspend disbelief.”

The two stopped talking after that, though they moved around a lot and Mad Dog could hear cases opening and closing, metal things, surgical tools, he suspected, being placed on cloth-draped trays. His gurney was moved, pushed nearer to where the reverend lay. The hiss of the breathing machine got closer and he could tell, even through closed lids, that he was under very bright lights now.

Mad Dog could hear gunfire from all over. And something big was moving, shaking the ground. He couldn't imagine what that might be. It must have felt like this when the great buffalo herds stampeded—like Maheo, the Cheyenne All-Father, was striding the earth.

Feet came rushing down a set of stairs. A door slammed. A bolt was thrown. A new voice spoke.

“Law just took down Bravo and Delta. At least three cops, up in the kitchen. My guess is they got your customers, too.”

“Good thing we collect a large down payment,” the nurse said.

The doctor was concerned about other things. “Are we safe down here?”

“Doubt it,” the new voice said. “I recommend a withdrawal.”

“No. You can't do that.” Yet another voice, but Mad Dog had heard this one before. It belonged to the rude little man with bad hair who'd evicted him from Christ Risen that morning.

“The Reverend Goodfellow needs a new heart and lungs. Isn't that right, doctor?”

“Well, yes. Kidneys and liver, too. But….”

“And you,” the guy with the bad hair said. “We hired you to get the reverend and this medical team in and out of here and to maintain security while the surgeries take place.”

“Yes, sir. You did.”

“Then I expect you to see that the doctor is undisturbed while the operation proceeds.”

“I can't operate under circumstances like this,” the doctor said.

“Why not? You're all set up. You have a donor.”

“Well, this man was suitable for the eyes and bone marrow for my other two patients. He is not a match for your good reverend.”

“Why's that?” The bad hair guy was getting hysterical. And it was increasingly hard to hear over a noise that sounded like metal striking stone. The house groaned and Mad Dog barely heard the doctor's reply.

“He's a kaffir.”

Bricks were falling nearby. The earth was shaking, literally. Mad Dog felt dust sifting onto his face.

“Kaffir?”

“He's not racially pure.”

Beams cracked. Ceiling plaster fell.

Someone screamed, “Run!”

An avalanche cascaded into the basement. Something massive and metallic and sharp sliced its way through the ceiling like a gigantic guillotine. It landed only a few feet away, then began inching toward the gurney where Mad Dog lay.

Run. That sounded like good advice. But Mad Dog was still paralyzed. He couldn't even open his eyes to see what was coming to kill him.

***

Hailey led Pam into a storage room. Its walls were lined with shelves, still empty, since Galen hadn't filled the rest of his oversized house. Pam slammed the metal door behind them and closed them in inky blackness. But this time, she'd noticed light switches on the wall beside her. And, this time, they worked. Bullets pinged off the door behind her but failed to penetrate. Still, with the floor under her feet beginning to vibrate as the Caterpillar drew closer, the room hardly felt safe.

Another door stood in the wall across the room. It should open onto the hall at the base of the stairs she had been brought down. She thought she remembered seeing it before they locked her in the blacked-out prison room.

Pam started for it, but Hailey blocked her path.

“Mad Dog's out there,” she told the wolf. “He needs us.”

Hailey didn't move, or she didn't move out of the way. Instead, she crowded against Pam's legs and forced her back toward the corner east of the door they'd entered.

“What are you doing?” Pam complained, but there was no getting around the hundred-pound timber wolf. Pam felt like a sheep being herded into a pen. Hailey pushed and Pam stumbled until her back rested against the shelves. “Hailey, stop it,” she demanded.

The shelves vibrated, jumped. She felt the bulldozer hit the building. The lights went out and they were back in darkness and things were collapsing around them. A huge beam slammed to the floor next to them, followed by all manner of debris—broken two-by-fours, plasterboard, carpeted flooring, even pieces of roof. And she could see all of it because sunlight was pouring in from where the ceiling used to be. Someone—she thought it looked like that Williams kid, but with all the dust she wasn't sure—walked through the hole where the south wall had been and clambered over the debris to the door she'd planned on using to search for Mad Dog.

It opened and two men in suits were just beyond.

Hailey grabbed Pam's arm in her mouth and pulled, hard enough to hurt. Pam went down, banging her head against the broken beam. She couldn't believe Hailey was doing this to her, but then the shelves above her head exploded as someone emptied a clip into the spot she'd just occupied. Another gun was speaking, too, in a different voice. Someone screamed in pain or terror and Pam was surprised it wasn't her.

The second gun, the one that hadn't been aimed toward her, spoke again, short and terse. And then the guns were quiet, but the bulldozer wasn't. It was still moving. Pam couldn't see it, but she could feel its treads clawing at the floor as its blade bit the same surface. That thing had to be stopped. It could bring the whole house down.

“Mad Dog's still in there,” she told Hailey, as she began trying to crawl out of the hole in which they'd nearly been buried. She scrambled up onto the beam and felt it give a little and turned back to help Hailey up the pile. The hole was empty. Hailey was already gone.

***

Deputy Heather lay on the staircase and tried to remember where she was and how she'd gotten there. She'd left her prisoners in the care of Greer and his buddy in the kitchen. She'd ducked back through the dining room and made for the staircase at the entrance to the hall, planning to go down and find Uncle Mad Dog and deal with the pair of armed men who'd taken the other stairs. And she'd intended to do all that before Englishman got there.

She was on the stairs—she remembered now—when the earth moved. And not the way Hemingway described it.

The bulldozer must have collided with the house, and closer than she'd expected. The lights flickered and died and things had begun falling. Including her, apparently.

Her head hurt. When she put her hand to her scalp she found a swollen place back near her crown that was leaking a little blood.

How long had she been out? Not long. At least not long enough for any of the people running around this farm with guns to find her. And not long enough for the dust to settle, or the bulldozer to finish making its way through the house. She could hear it, just the other side of a plaster wall that hadn't been open to the sky when she started down here.

She scrambled to her feet, felt her knees go wobbly, and braced herself against a banister. She didn't have time for this. She stepped over a pile of rubble and around the end of a wall and found herself next to the machine's blade.

Sunlight flooded the basement, but she couldn't see anyone. The big Cat had gouged a hole in the basement floor from which the rest of the blade protruded high enough to block her view of everything beyond.

A pair of guns erupted nearby and she remembered that she'd had one of her own when she started down here. She looked back and found it protruding from under a clump of bricks. She went back and bent to retrieve it and the woozy returned, but not as bad as before. Just as well. She had things to do down here.

Heather had to squeeze past the splintered dining room table at the bottom of the stairs. She could see things now. A bed…no, a bed and a gurney, with two pair of feet, one on each of them, just beyond the edge of the Caterpillar's blade. She slipped forward, gun ready. Someone else down here was armed. And then she heard voices. Clear, loud, in the sudden silence as the bulldozer's engine died.

“Throw your gun down or I'll slit the Reverend Goodfellow's throat.” The voice had a little bit of an accent. Not one she recognized.

The one that answered, though, belonged to Chucky Williams.

“You'll be doing me a favor. He's on my list.”

Two more steps and she could see the man with the accent. He was tall and aristocratic and surprised. Adaptable, though, because he shifted his scalpel to the neck of the figure on the gurney. “This man, then. Do you care if I kill him?”

It took her a moment to recognize that the man's second choice was Uncle Mad Dog. Too many tubes and wires, and she wasn't used to seeing him stretched out utterly still, naked but for some kind of glorified diaper.

“That's your decision. I plan to kill you either way.”

The man with the scalpel didn't get a chance to make good on his threat. Hailey exploded from the staircase behind Heather. The wolf dropped something from her mouth—an electrical relay and a clump of broken wires. Could that be why the bulldozer stopped? Hailey crossed the room and leaped onto Mad Dog's gurney. Her jaws closed around the wrist holding the blade. Heather heard bones snap. The man fell back onto the bed with his other patient, frantically kicking and trying to fend off the timber wolf. His scalpel rang as it hit the floor and bounced under the bed. Hailey was just as suddenly off him and tearing at the tubes and wires connected to Mad Dog. They fared even worse than the man's arm. She held one end of a tube in her mouth while it dribbled clear liquid onto the floor. Her hackles were raised and her eyes swung back and forth between the man she'd attacked and Chucky. And then her legs splayed out from under her and she sprawled on Mad Dog's chest.

“My God,” the man whose arm Hailey had broken said. “What was that?”

“A wolf,” Chucky said. “The man whose throat you were about to cut, Doctor—he's her person. She wasn't going to let you do that. It looks like whatever was in the IV may keep her from killing you if you try again. So I guess that's up to me.”

There was a panicky quality to the doctor's voice now. “Why kill me? I can make it worth your while to let me go.”

“What I want, you can't give me,” Chucky said. Heather edged farther into the room. She'd spotted the big man who'd run down the stairs from the kitchen. Someone, Chucky probably, had run a row of bullets across his chest and turned it to pulp. And, beside him, whimpering quietly, was the little man with the bad hair. He'd been shot, too, but just in the legs. Well, considering the way they twisted now, maybe “just” wasn't the right word. Both those men's guns lay on the floor, but well beyond their reach. Not that either of them was capable of the effort. The guns were a long way from the man who'd had the scalpel, too.

“I have access to great quantities of money, and I'm a surgeon. I can perform miracles.”

“Miracles?” Chucky seemed to consider that. “Can you raise the dead?” Heather had reached a spot where she could see Chucky now. He waved the muzzle of his automatic rifle over toward the big man with the holes in his chest. “Start with him. If you can bring him back, and all the others I've left behind me today, we may have something to discuss.”

Heather had the drop on him. It seemed like a good moment.

“Put the gun down, Chucky,” Heather said. “He isn't bringing anybody back and you aren't adding any more.”

“Hi, Heather.” He didn't seem surprised by her presence. He didn't seem inclined to obey her, either.

“I mean it. Drop your gun.”

“I'm sorry, Heather. I'd like to. But you won't shoot me if I don't. Even though you'd be doing me a favor. I've got nothing to live for once I take care of the doctor, here, and the Reverend Goodfellow. Except for maybe finishing off the little guy over there, and going to make sure of Galen.”

“Shoot him, officer.” The doctor had seen the badge on her lapel. “You heard him. Otherwise he'll kill me.”

Would he? Heather never would have believed it. But Chucky had left a trail of bodies behind him this morning.

“Shoot him now,” the doctor squealed.

Chucky was right. She couldn't do it. He was still the little boy she'd babysat for. The one who'd made her check his closet and under his bed for the demons he was sure were going to get him. After this morning, she wondered if they finally had. She tried to see the evil in his eyes. All she could find was the frightened little boy she remembered.

“See,” Chucky told her. “You can't.”

“Maybe she can't.” The voice came from just behind Heather's shoulder. “But I can.”

***

Sheriff English wormed his way out onto the precipice that used to be the living room floor. He hadn't noticed how alarmingly it creaked until the motor died on the Caterpillar. Then the conversation between Chucky and the doctor, and his daughter's intervention, overwhelmed any concerns he had about a cave-in.

He'd just gotten to a spot where he could peer down into the ruin below. He could see Mad Dog and Hailey on a gurney. He could see part of the doctor and the foot of a hospital bed. He could see Heather. He didn't need to see the guy who'd spoken, though. He knew his would-be replacement's voice all too well.