Cincinnati Run Read online

  “Yuck,” Hickok said, swiping at the invisible strands.

  “I can see a faint light at the end of the hall,” Blade mentioned.

  “Lead on,” Geronimo stated.

  Blade moved toward the vague illumination, batting cobwebs aside with every stride. “This might be our way out.”

  “None too soon,” Hickok said. He took three steps on the heels of the others, then froze when something the size of his hand, something wiggling and heavy, plummeted out of the blackness overhead and landed in his hair.

  Chapter Twelve

  Blade sidled up to the door, the Commando in his right hand, clasped the smooth doorknob, and placed his left ear to the panel. The upper and lower edges of the door were outlined in a pale glow. Beyond were the sounds of upraised voices, honking vehicles, and the tramping of boots on the pavement. He tested the knob to verify the door was unlocked, and circumspectly eased the door open several inches.

  Delhi Road was swirling with activity. The traffic jam was worse than before; evidently the officers on the scene were not permitting any of the vehicles to budge. Military uniforms were everywhere, with a heavy concentration in the proximity of the jeep. The colossal front gate hung open, and three rows of soldiers stood at attention near the entrance.

  People lined the sidewalks, watching the soldiers bustling to and fro. An ambulance was parked in the drive to the L.R.F., its red lights flashing.

  Stars sparkled in the heavens.

  “We’ll mingle with the crowd,” Blade whispered over his left shoulder.

  “Then head for the downtown area.”

  “We’re right behind you,” Geronimo assured him.

  Blade jerked the door open. A sign was attached to the wall to his right, within a foot of the jamb, its black lettering illuminated by the combined glare of the numerous headlights and spotlights.

  WARNING: THIS BUILDING IS CONDEMNED. PUBLIC ACCESS IS DENIED.

  Blade strolled casually down the concrete steps to the sidewalk and took a left. He glanced at Geronimo, who was right behind him, then at the partially open door to the condemned building. “Where’s Nathan?” he asked, and halted.

  Geronimo stopped and turned. “Hickok?”

  “He was with us a minute ago,” Blade mentioned.

  They waited expectantly for the gunman to emerge.

  “Do you think he got lost?” Geronimo queried after a minute.

  “If he took a wrong passage, all he had to do was give a yell,” Blade said.

  “What else could have happened?”

  “Beats me,” Blade responded.

  “Maybe he walked into a wall and knocked himself out,” Geronimo suggested.

  “Be serious.”

  “I guess I should have held his hand,” Geronimo said.

  Blade sighed and started up the steps. “Stay put. I’ll go find him.”

  “Hold it right there, Private!” commanded a stern voice.

  The Warriors pivoted to the west.

  A tall Soviet officer stood eight feet away, his hands at his sides, his countenance haughty, his green eyes regarding them critically. A holstered pistol rode on his right hip. “What are you men doing?” he demanded.

  “Conducting a search of these buildings, sir,” Blade replied, holding the Commando next to his right leg and hoping the officer would not notice the firearm’s unique contours.

  “What unit are you men with?”

  “We’re perimeter guards at the L.R.F.,” Blade said, taking a gamble.

  The officer twisted and stared at the commotion surrounding the damaged jeep. “They have every available soldier out here,” he said, his right arm obscured by his body. There was a sudden motion and he whirled with the pistol clutched in his right hand. “But the two of you are not perimeter guards. You will lower your weapons to the ground now!”

  Blade placed the Commando on the concrete. Out of the corner of his left eye he saw Geronimo also complying.

  “You will be so good as to raise your arms,” the officer directed.

  Frowning, Blade obeyed. Several of the spectators had witnessed the officer pulling his gun and were staring at the Warriors. None of the other Russian soldiers were aware of the situation yet, but that would change any moment. The distance was too great for Blade to try and employ his Bowies; the officer would shoot him before he could grab either knife. He knew Geronimo was in the same boat with respect to the Arminius and the tomahawk. They needed a break, a distraction, or for the officer to make a mistake.

  The Russian unwittingly obliged.

  “Come here,” the officer said. “Slowly.”

  Blade walked down the steps, his hands next to his shoulders, and deliberately stepped in front of Geronimo, obstructing the officer’s view.

  “Don’t!” the Russian snapped, wagging the pistol. “Stand aside!”

  Blade stared blankly at the officer.

  “Move, damn you!” the Russian barked.

  “Sorry,” Blade said politely, and flattened.

  His shirttail hanging out, Geronimo had the Arminius extended and cocked, and he fired a single shot.

  The slug caught the officer between the eyes and knocked him five feet to tumble onto his back. Screams and shouts erupted from the spectators, and all eyes suddenly focused on the Warriors and the figure on the ground.

  Blade was up and bounding to the Commando.

  “Do we go find Hickok?” Geronimo queried, hastily retrieving the SAR as he slid the Arminius under his shirt.

  A half-dozen AK-47’s thundered simultaneously before Blade could answer, and he was forced to drop to the sidewalk, hearing the repeated smacking and zinging of the heavy slugs as they struck the building. Their position was untenable. If a live round didn’t get them, a ricochet just might. “On me!” he cried, and dashed between a pair of green trucks.

  “Don’t shoot!” someone was shouting. “Don’t shoot! You’ll hit civilians!”

  Blade turned to the east, jogging down the center line with a row of vehicles on both sides, heading toward the heart of the city. Although many of the drivers and passengers had vacated their vehicles to catch a glimpse of the bustling troops, there were still dozens patiently waiting in their cars or trucks for the military to allow them to drive on. A man in a blue car saw Blade coming and poked his head out the driver’s window.

  “Hey, buddy. What’s happening?”

  “Some big guy is shooting people,” Blade replied as he came abreast of the car, and grinned wickedly.

  “No shit?” the man said, then did a double take and frantically rolled up his window.

  Blade sprinted past the blue car. The mission was rapidly dissolving into a first-rate farce. The element of surprise was totally lost, the odds of completing the assignment were less than nil, and to compound their predicament, Hickok was missing. He looked to the east, amazed at the size of the traffic jam caused by a mere fender-bender, and increased his speed.

  “They’re twenty yards behind us,” Geronimo stated.

  “Let’s hope we can outrun them,” Blade said over his left shoulder. He passed the last of the vehicles occupying the right lane.

  “I don’t like leaving Nathan.”

  “Can’t be helped. We’ll go back for him later.”

  “Provided we’re alive.”

  “Cheer up,” Blade quipped, breathing heavily as his boots pounded on the pavement. “What else could possibly go wrong?”

  A pair of helicopters abruptly streaked in low over the L.R.F.

  installation, angling above Delhi Road. Each chopper was outfitted with a spotlight mounted on the nose, and they banked to direct the bright beams at the road.

  “I had to open my big mouth,” Blade said, slowing so as not to attract the attention of the pilots.

  “Maybe they have no idea where we’re at,” Geronimo remarked.

  The helicopters unexpectedly fixed their spotlights on the Warriors, bathing them in a brilliant glow.

  Blade stopped
and held his left arm in front of his eyes to reduce the glare.

  “I never did like being the center of attention,” Geronimo said, and sighted the SAR. He fired a half-dozen rounds and one of the spotlights went out. The choppers swerved and danced in the sky.

  Shadowy forms were bearing down on the Warriors from the rear.

  “Drop your weapons!” a raspy voice commanded.

  In response, Blade spun and squeezed the trigger, the Commando booming and bucking.

  Someone screeched.

  The pursuing Russian soldiers dove for cover.

  Blade nudged Geronimo’s right shoulder and took off, racing to the east, a feeling of impending doom gnawing at his consciousness. Sooner or later the Soviets would hem them in. He needed a bright idea, and he needed it right away. To the left were idling vehicles and a block or two of condemned buildings. To the right was the L.R.F. facility. Scores of soldiers were to the rear. The persistent helicopters hovered just out of effective gun range. One of the choppers still had a spotlight trained on them. Frustration and a sense of helplessness welled within him.

  “Surrender!” bellowed the raspy, metallic voice.

  The speaker must be using a bullhorn, Blade deduced, and ran at his top speed, his flinty gray eyes narrowing when he spied a stand of trees far ahead and to the left. What better spot to make their last stand? The trees would allow them mobility while sheltering them from the enemy. He thought of Jenny and Gabe, and sorrow racked his heart as he realized he might never see them again.

  An elderly couple appeared ahead, standing near their dark brown sedan, both of them well dressed. They were gazing to the west, obviously wondering about the cause of the delay and the uproar. The man spotted the Warriors first and recoiled against his car, his arms around his wife.

  “Look out, dear!” he cried.

  Blade swung around them. “We won’t harm you,” he said.

  “Nice night for stargazing,” Geronimo added courteously.

  The elderly couple gaped at the Warriors, and when the giant and the Indian were five yards past them they looked to the west at the advancing Russian soldiers.

  “Here!” the man yelled.

  “The ones you want are here!” the woman elaborated.

  Geronimo glanced back at them and chuckled. “They certainly know how to make a stranger feel welcome.”

  “I have an idea,” Blade commented.

  “I’m open to any suggestions,” Geronimo said, straining to match his friend’s speed.

  “We should separate,” Blade stated, inhaling loudly.

  “Forget it.”

  “We’d have a better chance of one of us coming out of this alive,” Blade noted.

  “No way.”

  “This is an order.”

  “I can’t hear you,” Geronimo responded, huffing and puffing.

  “I never pegged you as a dummy.”

  “That’s Hickok’s department.”

  Blade went to argue, then reconsidered. Geronimo knew the stakes, and Warriors were trained to always be loyal to one another. A Warrior never deserted another Warrior. The Elders instilled a profound appreciation for supreme values in every man and woman who served as a defender of the Home and a guardian of the Family. In the 105-year history of the Warrior order, only one had ever gone astray.

  “Why aren’t they shooting?” Geronimo asked.

  Blade’s thigh muscles were beginning to hurt. “My guess is they want us alive.”

  “Lucky us.”

  “I just hope they’re so busy concentrating on us that they overlook Hickok.”

  “He probably stopped to take a leak and couldn’t find the zipper in the dark.”

  They sped onward, cutting the distance to the trees in half, attended by the choppers and chased by scores of soldiers.

  “We’ve got to reach those trees,” Blade said.

  “Don’t tell me you need to take a leak too?”

  “Are you still considering quitting the Warriors?”

  “I can’t imagine why.”

  Another 25 yards were covered, and then the growl of a jeep motor arose to their rear.

  Blade glanced back.

  Two jeeps were after them, both straddling the sidewalk on the south side of Delhi road.

  “May I?” Geronimo inquired.

  “Be my guest.”

  Geronimo halted and whirled, lowering himself to his right knee and aiming the SAR. “I wonder if their windshields are bulletproof?” he queried, and sent a burst into the foremost jeep.

  The windshield shattered and the jeep veered sharply to the right, bouncing up and over the curb and barreling for the L.R.F. wall. A man in a uniform tumbled from the driver’s seat mere seconds before impact. The crash was tremendous. A fireball enveloped the vehicle and billowed skyward.

  “One down,” Geronimo said, and pointed the SAR at the second jeep.

  “If you pull that trigger, you’re dead men!”

  Blade spun toward the speaker, to the east, astounded to behold 11 Soviet soldiers blocking the route to the trees. Ten of the troopers were ready to fire, their AK-47’s leveled. The eleventh stood in the middle of the road, his hands clasped behind his narrow back, his angular features inscrutable. “Put down your weapons this instant,” he ordered calmly.

  “What do we do?” Geronimo whispered.

  “I will repeat myself only this once,” the Soviet officer informed them.

  “Lower your weapons or my men will kill you where you stand.”

  Blade frowned and deposited the Commando at his feet.

  Reluctantly, Geronimo did the same with the SAR.

  The officer stalked forward. His hair was black, his eyes blue. Four rows of ribbons decorated his chest, aligned neatly above his left shirt pocket. A red star adorned each slim shoulder. “I’m pleased to see that you are reasonable men,” he said. “I’m a reasonable man myself. My name is Ari Stoljarov. General Stoljarov. Some of our more imaginative citizens like to refer to me as the Butcher.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  What was the blasted critter doing?

  Taking a snooze?

  Hickok stood as immobile as a statue, scarcely daring to breathe, feeling the weight of the creature on the top of his head, his neck muscles twitching.

  How long had he stood there?

  A minute?

  Two?

  He was tempted to give a yell, to let his pards know he was in trouble, but the slightest motion might agitate the thing perched on his noggin, might provoke it to bite him. Being bitten wasn’t a big deal. Being bitten by a potentially poisonous spiker was. And Hickok believed the critter was a spider.

  A mutant spider.

  From the pressure on his hair, he knew that eight appendages were gripping the sides of his head, and spiders sported eight legs. Plus there was the matter of the cobwebs all over the place. By his reckoning, a spider was the only candidate. From the size of the thing, it must be a mutant. But if so, where did the midget monster come from? Cincinnati had not sustained a nuclear hit during the Big Blast, so the radiation levels shouldn’t have climbed very high, definitely not high enough to permanently pollute the environment. Genetic deviations, as Plato liked to call the varmints, were usually the result of radiation or some other toxin disrupting the inheritance factors in the genes. If radiation didn’t produce the creature on his head, what the dickens did? As far as he knew, no chemical weapons were used in the vicinity of Cincinnati.

  Wait a minute.

  He was forgetting something.

  The fallout.

  Think, you dunderhead! he chided himself. What did he know about fallout? What had the Elders taught him? Whenever a nuclear doohickey detonated at ground level, the explosion sucked all kinds of dust and debris up into the atmosphere. The winds would then scatter the radioactive particles all over the landscape. The important distinction to make was between a ground blast and an air burst. Air bursts hardly produced any fallout, and the Soviets had wisely empl
oyed primarily air bursts during World War Three. Exclusively blanketing America with ground-level strikes would have been a drastic case of overkill and defeated the Soviet Union’s purpose. The Russians wanted to conquer America, not reduce it to a smoldering cinder.

  Hickok felt the spider shift its weight.

  If he recollected correctly, the Russians had generally reserved ground strikes for military targets, and there had been any number of primary military targets to the west of Ohio. There had also been two prime military sites north of Cincinnati.

  But what were they?

  Think!

  He remembered a course taught by one of the Elders concerning the known Hot Spots in the country, those areas where there had been ground blasts. They also covered known and suspected air-burst targets.

  Columbus, Ohio, was one of the cities believed devastated by an air burst because of the proximity of Rickenbacker Air Force Base. Oddly, Dayton, Ohio, near which Wright Patterson Air force Base was located, was not hit. So the closest confirmed target to Cincinnati, namely Columbus, sustained an air burst, and the prevailing high-altitude winds would have carried the minimal amount of radioactive particles to the east, not to the southwest toward Cincinnati.

  Which brought him back to square one.

  What accounted for the danged spider?

  Hickok was becoming impatient. He didn’t want Blade and Geronimo to get too far ahead. Surely they had noticed his absence by now! He expected them to show up at any moment.

  Gunfire suddenly punctuated the blackness, arising from the direction of Delhi Road.

  Blade and Geronimo were in trouble!

  Hickok hesitated for less than a second. He couldn’t stand idly by and do nothing while his friends were fighting for their lives. He might be bitten if he so much as moved a muscle, but that was the risk he would have to take. His hands were at his sides, and he tensed his fingers and his shoulder muscles in preparation for making his play.

  There was a slim hope.

  If he could smash the spider before the arachnid bit him, he’d be home free. Everyone claimed he was one of the fastest men with a shooting iron who ever lived. Here was his chance to prove his speed with his hands.