Night of Thunder

“Sure, why not,” said Bob. “I got nothing better to do. It’ll be my kind of fun.” Bob threw the chain around his neck so that the badge hung in the center of his chest, signifying, for the first time since 1975, his official righteousness.

He rose, walked through the gathered crowd. He walked across the parking lot to his car, but next to it, came across the curious scene of a Vietnamese family standing in a semicircle around the gunman who had fallen against the bumper of his red Cadillac. One of them was a pretty young girl in a Hannah Montana T-shirt.

“You yelled the warning?” he asked.

“Yes. They were in our apartment all day, scaring my family to death. Horrible men. Monsters,”

“Can on co em. Co that gan da va su can dam cua co da cuu sinh mang chung toi,” he said.

She smiled.

He walked to his car, popped the trunk. He withdrew the DPMS 6.8 rifle, and inserted a magazine with twenty-eight rounds. He looped its sling, held by a single cinch, diagonally across his body so that the gun was down across his front with enough play to allow him to get it either to shoulder or a prone position. He looked at the monitor atop it, that EOtech thing that looked like a ’50s space-cadet toy, figured out which of several buttons turned it on, so that if he had to do it in the dark, he’d know which one to use.

He threw on the vest Julie had provided, in which he’d inserted, in dedicated mag pouches, the other nine magazines, all full with ammo.

Slamming the trunk, he walked back to the stairwell where Nikki’s bike rested under a tarp. He ripped the canvas free and climbed aboard the Kawasaki 350. Shit, the pain in his hip from Kondo Isami’s last cut flared hard and red, but he tried not to notice it. He turned the key to electrify the bike. It took three or four kicks to gin the thing to life, but he saw that he had plenty of fuel. He heeled up the stand, lurched ahead, kicked it into gear, pulled into the lot, evaded the gawkers, and took off into the night, running hard, disappearing quickly.

Nick, his leg throbbing but feeling no pain, watched him go.

Lone gunman, he thought, remembering Lawrence’s words defining the American spirit: “hard, stoic, isolate, and a killer.” But on the Night of Thunder, so necessary.

THIRTY-FOUR

The muzzle flash of the Barrett 107 was extraordinary, a ball of fire that bleached the details from the night, so bright that it set bulbs popping in eyes for minutes. Caleb, who was holding it under his shoulder like a gangster’s tommy gun, felt the heavy surge of the recoil as the weapon rocked massively against his muscle, almost knocking him from his feet, while at the same moment fierce blowback from the point of impact lashed against his face. Without glasses, he’d have burned out his eyes. The muzzle blast, expanding radially at light speed, ripped up a cyclone of dust from the earth beneath; it seemed a tornado had briefly touched down, filling the air with substance.

The 650-grain bullet hit the steel door two inches below the window frame, blowing a half-inch-size gaper and leaving a smear of burnt steel peeling away from the actual crater. It took both driver and assistant driver down, spewing a foam of blood on the far window inside the cab, after the tungsten core, liberated from the center of the bullet by the secondary detonation, flew onward at several thousand miles per hour and ripped them apart.

“Jesus Christ,” said Caleb, himself awestruck and even a little nonplused by the carnage he had unleashed.

“The rear, the rear,” screamed the old man.

Caleb lumbered around behind the truck with the heavy weapon in his hands, locked under his shoulder, as the Grumleys fanned out to surround the vehicle, while at the same time gesturing with their submachine guns to frozen passengers in the jammed cars to abandon ship and run like hell.

“G’wan, git the hell out of here, git them kids out of here, there’s going to be a lot of goddamned shooting.”

Caleb closed his eyes, fired one more time, point blank, into the rear of the truck from dead six o’clock. He even remembered to crouch and hoist the weight to orient the gun at a slight upward angle so that the tungsten rod it flung wouldn’t continue forward, exit the end of the armored box, shred the dash, and end up chewing the bejesus out of the engine. That would have been a mess.

Again, the fireball blinded any who happened to observe the discharge from within a hundred yards, though most civilians had abandoned their cars and were running en masse in the opposite direction. Again, the muzzle blast unleashed a cyclone of atmospheric disturbance. Again, the recoil was formidable, even if slightly dissipated by the give in Caleb’s arms and body as he elasticized backward from the blow. This time, for some reason, the noise was present in force and Caleb, even with ear plugs in, felt his eardrums cave under pressure of the blast.

A crater ruptured the upper half of the rear door.