Chapter 5 - An Offer Painted in Blood and Ash
I dropped silently from the oak branch into the soft mud behind the two deputies who had panicked.
The sound of their own gunfire and the roar of the pouring rain completely masked my descent.
Before the first deputy could reload his rifle, I stepped into his blind spot, hooked my arm around his neck in a sleeper hold, and drove my knee into the nerve cluster behind his thigh. He gasped, his rifle slipped from his fingers, and his body went limp within four seconds. I lowered him quietly into the tall grass.
The second deputy turned around, startled by the sudden silence beside him.
He brought his flashlight up, but I was already inside his guard. I slapped the flashlight from his grip, redirected his rifle barrel toward the ground, and delivered an open-palm strike to his chin. His head snapped back, his teeth clicked together, and he dropped unconscious next to his partner.
I stripped both of their rifle magazines, ejected the live rounds from their sidearms, and tossed the firing pins into the mud.
Two down. Twenty to go.
The key to psychological warfare against corrupt, undisciplined forces is fear. When men realize they are being systematically dismantled in the dark by an unseen adversary, their bravado dissolves into blind terror.
“Nolan! Report!” Sheriff Mercer’s voice echoed through the trees, laced with genuine panic now. “Where are Miller and Jenkins?!”
No answer. Only the sound of the wind whipping through the pine needles.
“Form a perimeter around the BearCat!” Mercer yelled. “Turn on the auxiliary spotlights! Use the generator!”
A small, gas-powered generator on the back of the armored vehicle sputtered to life, powering two halogen floodlights that cut a narrow path through the mist.
I circled around the perimeter, using the dense rows of apple trees as cover. My thermal optics showed six deputies clustered tightly around the rear of the farmhouse, attempting to breach the back door.
They were about to use an iron sledgehammer on the root cellar access.
I pulled the Remington 870 shotgun from my shoulder, racked the slide with a loud, unmistakable mechanical clack, and aimed directly at the generator’s fuel line thirty yards away.
BOOM!
The heavy double-aught buckshot pulverized the plastic fuel tank. A burst of orange flame erupted from the generator, followed by a thick cloud of black smoke as the floodlights died once more.
“Sniper!” a deputy screamed from the porch. “He’s got a long gun!”
“Spread out! Find him!”
Two deputies charged toward the source of the gunshot, their flashlights dancing wildly across the wet grass.
I waited behind the thick trunk of a century-old apple tree. As the first deputy sprinted past, I caught his shoulder, used his forward momentum to throw him violently into the mud, and delivered a swift, non-lethal kick to his solar plexus. He curled into a ball, gasping for air.
The second deputy raised his shotgun.
I lunged forward, grabbed the barrel, forced it upward as he pulled the trigger—the blast shredding the pine branches above us—and drove my forehead directly into the bridge of his nose. The cartilage cracked, blood sprayed across his lips, and he dropped to his knees, dropping his weapon.
“You’re Carter…” he wheezed, clutching his broken nose. “You’re… you’re not human…”
“I’m Emily’s husband,” I said cold as ice. “Tell Mercer his clock is at twenty minutes.”
I left him in the dirt and moved deeper into the fog.
Across the property, the deputies were beginning to break. Three of them threw down their tactical vests, scrambled into a surviving pickup truck, turned the key, and sped down the driveway toward the safety of the highway, abandoning their Sheriff completely.
“Cowards!” Mercer’s voice shrieked into the night. “I’ll revoke your pensions! I’ll put you in state prison myself!”
Mercer was standing beside the armored BearCat, his Colt .45 trembling in his hand. Travis was cowering inside the open passenger door of the vehicle, his face white, clutching his injured ribs.
Only Deputy Nolan and three hardcore loyalists remained at the Sheriff’s side.
“Sheriff, we gotta get out of here,” Nolan pleaded, his voice shaking. “He took out eight men in five minutes without firing a single shot at them. He’s ghosting us in our own backyard. He’s not a soldier, Daniel—he’s a spook! He’s special ops!”
“Shut up!” Mercer roared, backhanding Nolan across the face. “We have the armored truck! We have the fifty-caliber mount in the turret! Get in the vehicle and drive directly through the farmhouse! Level the whole damn building!”
Travis screamed from inside the cab, “Dad, no! Look at the road!”
Mercer turned his head toward the valley below.
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Through the rain, three pairs of heavy, high-intensity twin headlights were screaming up Route 9 at over ninety miles per hour. Behind them, the low, rhythmic, thunderous thumping of twin turbine engines began to rattle the very ground beneath their feet.
The cavalry had arrived.
