Day of Wrath (12 page)

A talking head was on the screen, a local news anchor. Someone had thought to turn on closed captioning and she read the report:

“The Governor has just ordered that all of Interstate 95 has been shut down. Anyone attempting to get on the interstate will be stopped and arrested. If you are on the interstate now exit immediately. There are confirmed reports of a shooter or shooters in a dark blue sedan, a late model Ford or Chevy four-door now south of Falmouth, traveling southbound and shooting at vehicles on both sides of the road. There are reports of numerous injuries and fatalities. I repeat: the governor has ordered Interstate 95 from the New Hampshire border to Houlton, Maine, is closed to all but emergency traffic. If you are on the interstate, exit immediately."

Her phone beeped again, it was Mary, but this time she answered.

“My God, they are killing people on the highway now!” Mary cried.

“I know, I know,” Kathy replied absently, her attention focused on the television.

“I’m trying to get to Arthur’s school. Thank God it’s not his school being hit, but I just know they’ll go there next.”

“Mary, get off the road. They’re shutting the interstate here, I assume they will there. There are killers on the road in your area. Your boy is in a safe school, so go home, damn it!”

“How am I to know that? Trust that?” she cried.

“Mary, listen to me…"

The signal went dead.
 

Interstate 35, north of Austin, Texas

The cell phone networks across the entire United States were overloading, tens of millions of calls began to drop; the one to her friend Kathy in Maine was one of them. Mary tried to call again, but there was no signal. That sent an additional wave of fear through her. Were they somehow attacking or jamming communications as well?
 

The traffic was slowing to a crawl, bumper to bumper, more than a few cars swinging onto the shoulders and grass-covered berm. She could now see the exit that she wanted still a mile off, traffic was backed up around it. Undoubtedly nearly a thousand parents like her were heading to the same school to snatch their children out of harm’s way.

Local news had already announced the order that the interstates across all of Texas were being shut down, that every school in the state had gone to full lockdown and no parent would be permitted anywhere near any school for the rest of the afternoon. But, like millions of other parents, she did not trust all that she heard. Regarding the interstate, what were they going to do, arrest a million people? Regarding her son’s school, at least she and other parents would, if need be, form a human barrier and, this being Texas, it would be a heavily armed barrier, until such time as the authorities relented and let them take their children to safety.

She drifted at just twenty miles an hour beneath an overpass and as she cleared it she saw in her rear view mirror a police car come to a stop on the overpass, an officer leaping out of his vehicle.

A helicopter was visible in her rearview mirror as well, turning to circle the overpass that was now a hundred yards behind her. She turned her phone back on, went to her local news station's website and several seconds later she was looking at live video, transmitted from the circling helicopter, of a black sedan driving on the left shoulder a half mile or so behind her. She saw puffs of smoke and shattered glass flying from the vehicles the sedan was passing. The camera lens widened, a half mile or more farther back, to a place she had just passed several minutes ago: a tractor trailer was burning fiercely, blocking the road, and a half dozen police cars were trapped on the far side. The cops were out, trying to get drivers to move their cars off the road to clear a path for them to swing around the wreck and resume the chase.
 

The camera shifted to the overpass she had just cleared. The cop she had spotted was leaning over the railing, firing straight down at a vehicle racing along the left shoulder, scraping against the guard rail. His shots appeared to hit because steam suddenly blew out of the hood.

Traffic ahead of her came to a halt. She could see the woman driving beside her, holding up her phone, fixated on the screen, the same channel she was watching. Car doors were opening, drivers were abandoning their vehicles and running in panic.
 

Mary looked in her side mirror and saw the shot-up sedan approaching, slowing down…

A voice of caution within was screaming to her to get out, to run to the far side of the road and take cover as others were doing. But, mesmerized, she did not move, sinking into the mental trap of disbelief, that surely this could not be happening for real, to her.
 

The driver of the car in front of her, an elderly man, started to get out of his vehicle, moving slowly.
 

She had no place to go, her thoughts beginning to lock up. Pull onto the left shoulder and floor it? But I want the exit on the right! Duck down, they won’t see me? Get out and run? Do something!

Instead she just sat in frozen silence, not understanding even herself, not remembering the question that so many asked in history classes when seeing old footage of the Nazis lining up victims, Al-Qaeda lining up victims, ISIS lining up victims. As to why, in that final moment, hardly anyone ever fought back? It was like the rabbit gazing into the eyes of the rattlesnake, whose eyes were death.
 

The mind starts to blank at the terrible reality of it all, that this was truly death approaching at last. Not peaceful death slipping in like a shadowy fog, while one was reconciled with one's final moments and surrounded by loved ones. It was death in its most brutal, ugly, dark face of man’s inhumanity to man, unbelievable in its dreadful enormity. No matter what one might have wondered before this moment as to why those about to die so often knelt meekly, there was, when it came your turn to kneel, a strange detachment. Perhaps it was such disbelief that surely this was not happening and a miracle would occur, or just the mind shutting down entirely in the face of this final reality. One who did not believe in God would say it was a final chemical reaction within the brain, to still the struggling, while one who did believe in God might argue it was a gift, to blank out the horror of the final moment.

Steam was venting from the grill of the vehicle and out of the puncture holes blown into the hood. The sedan came to a stop on the shoulder two vehicles behind her. Doors popped open and three men, black clad, got out, weapons raised, one reaching back in to scoop up several black duffel bags. They paused for a few seconds looking about and then the eyes of the serpent gazed into hers looking back at them in the side view mirror of her car.

One ran the few feet to her car and leveled his rifle at her. She sat, just staring back, frozen. He shouted something, motioned with his rifle, shouted again.

“Get out, we won’t hurt you. Get out!”
 

She didn't move.

He grabbed the door handle; it was locked.

With his free hand he pointed the rifle straight at her.

“Out now or I shoot!”

She finally did as ordered, and unlatched the door. He pulled it open, reached in and grabbed her roughly by the shoulder.

“It’s yours,” she gasped. “Please, it’s yours! Just let me get out. The keys are still in it.”

Her seat belt was holding her in.
 

“Get out. I won’t shoot if you get out!”

She began to cry, fumbling with the release buckle, so terrified she was not even aware that in her fear she had just urinated, soaking the seat. He pulled her roughly out of the car.
 

“You bastard, let her go!”
 

This was met an instant later by the explosive roar of a gun going off behind her and she began to scream. One of the other two men approaching her car with his rifle shouldered had just put a round into the old man, who had come to a stop in front of her. He had drawn an old-style revolver to shoot her assailant, but the revolver flew from his grasp as he collapsed.
 

He had been part of a different world, of the mindset that a man protected a woman, and if the confrontation escalated to guns, you told the bastard to let the woman go or you were dead. It was the culture of a different world that even at that moment, you offered a final negotiation before someone died. But they were of a far different world and the old man was a fool. If he had moved silently he actually could have killed at least one of them before the other two riddled his body with bullets.

The two piled into the backseat of her BMW, tossing the duffel bags loaded with ammunition into the front passenger seat. One of the two was leaking blood from his right arm; he had been hit a few minutes back by the police that had been pursuing them.
 

The driver tossed his rifle onto the front passenger seat, then turned to look back. The cop up on the overpass was now firing toward them, but without effect. A news helicopter was overhead and he could see a camera man leaning out, pointing his camera straight down at him. The driver knew it was being broadcasted, locally perhaps, with luck even nationally. They had, of course, been monitoring the same channel on the pads that they carried.

He actually looked up and offered a friendly wave and then, knowing that it was being filmed and broadcasted, perhaps even across all of infidel America, the moment was too good to pass up. He drew his 9mm Beretta which already had a round chambered. Mary was kneeling, gazing up at him in shock. He stepped toward her, lowered his pistol so that the barrel was nearly touching her forehead.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” she gasped.

He laughed at her pathetic prayer and then squeezed the trigger three times.

As he returned to the car, his companion in the backseat slapped him on the shoulder in congratulations and held up the pad they had with them to monitor how their jihad was going in Austin. The camera was focused straight down on their car, a stream of blood pooling out from under the woman’s head, spreading an ugly red stain on the white concrete pavement. A reporter, the woman anchor for the local station, was visible in a side box. It was hard to hear, the rotors of the helicopter pounding the air, but it looked like she was screaming in horror.

He shifted the car, turned the wheel sharply, swinging it onto the shoulder. There was no reaction from any of them as they ran over Mary’s body and accelerated.

Near Portland, Maine

“Oh God, oh my God!”
 

The crowd assembled in the recreation room of St. Margaret Mary’s Church, of parents with children, husbands and wives under siege at nearby Chamberlain Middle School, had at first shouted protests when the local station in Portland, Maine, went back to the national feed for a moment, which was a live report from Austin, Texas. It appeared that one of the highway killers had been stopped.

Kathy heard the announcement of a feed from Austin, which caused her attention to focus on the television, blocking out the arguing erupting in the crowd. More than a few were actually holding up guns, demanding that they get organized and go in to save their kids. Others shouted back that the police were handling it. The priest climbed up on a table along with the elderly local cop, and barked for everyone to calm down, to have silence so the officer could explain what was happening.

“Live 'Eye In the Sky' Report From Austin, Texas: Murder on I-35," was bannered across the bottom of the screen and Kathy shoved her way through the crowd for a closer look. Her friend Mary was on that same road.

The camera focused in on the jihadists' car, steam pouring from a shattered radiator, coolant spraying onto the hot engine block.

They actually stopped them in at least one place, was Kathy’s first thought and at least for a few seconds, her terror regarding the ordeal of her husband and daughter was subsumed by the desire to see that somewhere, anywhere, the murderous bastards were being thwarted.

Three men leapt out of the car, one running up to the driver’s side of a white car.

Seconds later the door opened, the black-clad killer reached in and pulled a woman out.

“No,” Kathy gasped, “It can’t be her, no.”

The woman’s long blonde hair was just like Mary’s, which she had been so proud of as a young college girl and still sported nearly twenty years later. It was whipping in the downdraft of the hovering helicopter.
 

A man from the next car in front of the white sedan suddenly fell. The camera zoomed in on the man seizing the sedan and then he actually looked up, face clearly visible, and waved to the camera. The other two were already in the vehicle. The man then turned to the blonde woman who was looking up as if appealing to her killer, or was it to God? And in that instant Kathy did indeed recognize her. It was Mary, it had to be Mary.

She was recognizable for only another second as the man pressed the barrel of his semi auto to her forehead.

“I know her!” Kathy cried, but a second later her beloved college roommate, the friend who had been her bridesmaid, her lovely face disintegrated into an unrecognizable mask of death.
 

“Oh God, oh my God!” It was the local news anchor screaming, her cries joined by Kathy and others who had paused in their arguing to stand beside her to watch.