Gone (Michael Bennett 6)

“What are you doing?” Mary Catherine asked.

“If they find one of the ventilation shafts, they could do anything. Plug it up, smoke us out. Didn’t I see on the news that they’re using some sort of poison-gas chemical weapon? They’ll kill us in a heartbeat. I’m going outside to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

McMurphy started going toward the back of the bus complex.

“Isn’t the front door the other way?” Mary Catherine said.

“I can’t go out the front. Are you crazy? I need to go out through the tunnels.”

“The tunnels?”

“I forgot to tell you about them,” he said as he pulled up the handle of a door at the rear of the main corridor. On its other side was a dirt tunnel about four feet tall, strung with lightbulbs.

“I’ve been digging tunnels for years and years. Out the back of the complex, all through this hill. It’s actually what I did in Vietnam. Cleared the tunnels. They called us tunnel rats. The ones I built are just like the ones I saw in Cu Chi. Hell, better. Just shut the back door behind me. No, wait. Dammit, almost forgot.”

He suddenly ran back toward the gun room, where he began flipping through a CD-filled shoe box.

“Give me five,” he said, suddenly handing Mary Catherine a disk, “and then put this on the CD setup there and crank it!”

“What? Why?”

“I got speakers strung up in the trees all along the slope, strobe lights. We used to use it for parties, drop a couple of tabs and go on nature walks. We were really into mind expansion for a few years. Anyway, we can use it now. It’ll wake these murdering bastards right up! Ha, damn right this’ll teach them!

“Remember, lock the door behind me, now,” the merry prankster called as he ran off and disappeared around a corner of the tunnel.

Mary Catherine closed the bus door behind him before she looked at the CD case.

AC/DC.

Highway to Hell.

CHAPTER 102

IT TOOK THEM TWENTY minutes to find the clearing with the double-wide trailer. Looking down at it from the rim of a ridge, Vida found the pale, low structure, sitting there all by itself in the center of the flattened hillside clearing, strangely iconic. Like a temple. Like a tomb.

It’s a tomb, all right, she thought, going down the pitch-black slope on the rocky, narrow trail behind Eduardo, Estefan, and Jorge. The Bennett Tomb.

It was when they neared the bottom of the trail that she felt it. There was something subtle and subliminal, like a kind of ground hum in the air. Or is it me? she thought. Some kind of pressure change on her eardrum from the altitude?

When the sound came a moment later out of the dead silence, she fell immediately to her knees, thinking she’d literally been hit with something, a rocket or a bolt of lightning. Then, from all around her, the buzz-saw electric guitar chord repeated again, speeding faster as drums kicked in.

Living easy, living free, season ticket on a one-way ride, shrieked a rough, joyously unhinged voice.

Rock music? But from where? she wondered, trying to think. She scanned around. Were there speakers in the trees? In the ground?

The first “Highway to Hell” refrain had just started when the lights came on. Floodlighting from the trees beside the trailer suddenly bathed the entire slope they were standing on, completely exposing them. Then the lights started to strobe. It was like the whole desert hill had suddenly been moved to the middle of a dance-hall club. What the hell was this?

She was flipping up the now-useless night-vision goggles when the gunfire erupted. Estefan, in a crouch at the front of the line, suddenly dropped forward and slid down the trail face-first. Eduardo, behind him, starting to backpedal, suddenly sat down and began rolling after him.

“Back! Back!” Vida screamed, pushing Jorge behind her.

She could feel heavy slugs slam into the dirt at her heels and off the rocks beside where she’d just been standing as she retreated back up the hill. As gunfire popped up dust on the trail, she looked around for muzzle flashes to return fire at, but she couldn’t make out a damn thing because of the strobing lights.

She dove over some rocks at the top of the trail and lay flat, gasping, her heart trembling. The hard-rock music chomped on like a chain saw carving at the night. She knew it was just a tactic, but it put a chill through her just the same. This was no pushover they were going up against!

She cursed herself as she crawled through dirt toward the grass berm where her last man was hugging the ground. She’d gotten sloppy, and two of her best soldiers had paid for it with their lives. It was just her now, and Jorge, the young up-and-comer in the group. Just great.

She had to think. The trailer sitting there in the middle of the clearing with only one way down to it had obviously been a decoy, some kind of trap. There would be others.