CHAPTER 26

“She’s in the bathroom,” Bell said, tossing the black man his penknife.

The man, catching the closed knife, looked at the thing dismissively. “Keep it, Lieutenant. They want you downstairs. Are you in or out?” the man said.

“Count me in,” Bell said and smiled.

“Good,” the black man said. He turned around. Bell saw he was holding an automatic in his right hand, the hammer down, but “hot” and ready to fire, he guessed.

“She was about to piss herself,” Bell said. “She’s in the can. I freed her hands. I couldn’t say no.”

The black man walked toward the closed bathroom door, turning his back on Bell. Raising his pistol slightly, he opened the door with his free hand. Bell could see Patty was sitting on the toilet, her pants down at her ankles. She looked up at the man, obviously terrified. Bell could hear her piss hitting the water in the toilet.

“Get the fuck up! You’re to be tattooed. You’re going to be a CG, like the other girl,” the man said, looking at her.

Bell walked toward the bathroom. He sprang on the man from behind. The man turned, but was too late to stop Bell from getting his left arm wrapped around his neck. Bell, taller, got his right arm—clamped at the man’s throat—locked into the crook of his left arm, then wrapped his left hand up and behind the black man’s head, forcing his head down, and against the arm at his throat. Once Bell felt his two arms lock, the way he’d been taught in Survival School, it would be almost impossible to break his hold. The man would stop breathing very soon, his trachea crushed. But it was like riding a bull; the black man, very strong, tried to buck Bell off his back, swinging Bell’s legs first left, then right.

Bell, managing to keep his arms locked, watched as the man brought his pistol over his left shoulder, intending to shoot Bell in the head. He fired over his shoulder, aiming his shot where he thought Bell’s head should be. The sound of the gunshot exploded through the tiled bathroom. But Bell, anticipating the shot, had dropped his own head behind the man’s, and the shot missed him, hitting the shower-stall glass door. Bell managed to force the man’s head down and toward the floor, making it impossible for him to fire at him again effectively.

The man managed to lift Bell completely off the floor, hitting out at the lieutenant with his elbow repeatedly after the shot failed. All the while the black man’s free left hand continued to try and pry Bell’s death-lock loose. He aimed his pistol at the girl, but Bell jerked the man to his left just as he fired at her and the shot went wild.

Missing her, the bullet hit the toilet’s tank and smashed it. Water leaked out of the cracked porcelain now. Bell heard the man’s pistol clatter to the tile floor. The man’s legs gave out, weakened from the lack of air.

Bell, his feet back on the floor, cranked down on the man’s neck with every ounce of strength his hundred-and-seventy pounds could muster. his whole body contracted with the effort as he tried to break the man’s neck. Airless and frantic, the man brought both hands up to the arms around his throat in a lame attempt to break Bell’s grip, but it was too late.

Bell felt the man’s windpipe collapse, finally crushed. The man’s strength left him completely. His two hands dropped away from Bell’s arms. He fell forward with Bell on top of him, still choking him for all he was worth. Bell, on his knees, heard himself grunt as he continued to try and snap the man’s neck, twisting it violently one way, and then another.

Patty had sprung up from the toilet, a toothbrush she’d picked up from the floor in her right hand. She rammed the green plastic handle straight into the man’s right eyeball, driving it into his brain, pushing it with her palm until it stopped moving. She’d sent the entire length into his head.

The man, in agony, managed to buck crazily from the pain, not dead yet. Bell rode him toward the wall by the toilet. Despite the toothbrush shoved into his brain and a crushed trachea, the man managed to struggle again. But Bell locked up with all his might a second time. The man finally slumped dead, his chest rammed up against the rim of the toilet.

The lieutenant stood on the man’s back and cranked his head back, feeling the neck snap. Patty grabbed the dead man by the back of his head and slammed his face down as hard as she could onto of the edge of the toilet bowl, splitting his skull open.

Bell, exhausted, rolled off and watched Patty drag the body up and put the man’s face into the piss-filled toilet bowl, holding it under water with her knee. She walked her knees up on the man’s neck, holding him down until she realized he was dead. She watched the last few bubbles of air from the dead man’s lungs came up out of the piss water. Bell could see the white of Patty’s naked thighs, her pants still around her ankles, as she knelt on the man’s submerged head, toilet water leaking onto the floor.

“Dead,” Bell whispered.

She finally climbed off the man’s back and away from the body. She bent down and pulled up her wet pants. Bell put his index finger up to his lips in a signal for quiet. He picked up the pistol from the wet floor, sure one of the guards would come in after hearing the shots.

   Patty finished buckling her belt. It was quiet, with only the sound of the water leaking from the toilet. Bell walked out to the room, planning to step outside and shoot it out with the guard.

Patty came to his side and grabbed his shoulder, stopping him. “No. Wait.”

“We can’t wait,” Bell said. “We’ve got to get out of here. Someone must have heard those shots.”

“Let me go first. They’ve seen me. They won’t react to me, maybe.”

Bell looked at her. “Okay,” he said.

“I’ll walk out. If more than one is out there, I’ll tell them they’d better come and check on their friend.”

They heard howling outside the hotel, coming from the pool area. Bell walked to the window overlooking the pool and saw several Howlers standing around the verge of the pool. Their ugly faces were lit by the pool’s underwater light.

The group was cut down in a hail of automatic-weapons fire. The guards in the hall had left to deal with the Howler attack, he realized.

“I have to find Ryder,” Bell said. “We need to find out where that helicopter is.”

“What about the girl—Rebecca?” Patty said.

“Okay,” Bell said. “We find her first.”

“She’s just down the hall,” Patty said. “We were kept together.” Bell nodded.

Patty walked out of the room. She ducked back inside almost immediately and motioned for him to follow her. The hallway was empty, but he felt sure they wouldn’t make it more than a few yards before being cut down.

Patty stopped in front of a room several doors down. She tried to open the door, but it was locked. She knocked softly but got no answer. She turned to look at Bell. He leaned against the wall, motioning her aside, and kicked the door in.

*   *   *

Senator Prince looked up from an Apple tablet computer where he was poring over military grade maps of the Sierra Nevada, using Google’s special top-secret web site reserved for Government contractors and NSA. Two of his guards escorted the blond girl he’d asked for, in just her underwear, into his tidy hotel suite. The senator dropped an electronic pin, with gusto, into the spot where Chuck Phelps’s cabin had been finally located.

The NSA had been especially interested in the place because it was considered one of the best doomsday forts in the Sierra. It had been the NSA’s idea to fund a “Doomsday Prepper” series on Cable TV as a way to get more data from unwitting would-be preppers who deluged the show’s web site with comments, photos, and requests to be on TV, all without raising suspicion. The government had about ninety percent of all the Level One strong houses in the country located, photographed, and monitored continuously by high altitude drones. Level One structures—many with bunker-type constructions below ground, like the Phelps Cabin, were at the top of the government’s list.