Crack!

  The tiny grenades flashed a brilliant white color, the sound of the detonation nothing compared to the perceived sound of the incredible explosion of light in my retinas. Closing my eyes did nothing — I knew I was blind and would be for half a minute. The stinging in my eyes continued as I pulled the door fully closed.

  Joey had fared worse, as I knew he hadn’t turned his face away from the blast. The flashbang grenade — just like the others they’d thrown through the windows — was military grade, the sort of thing you didn’t get your hands on in the States unless you had connections with people very much outside the States.

  Worst of all, I knew there was absolutely nothing we were going to be able to do to stop them from entering. They’d gotten the jump on us, and they knew they had almost a minute to get inside and start shooting.

  I had my arm over my face, still squeezing the pain out of my eyes, but I was shouting at the others. “Hannah!” I yelled. “Get my gun! Get over here and get ready. They’re coming in.”

  I turned the direction I thought Fellows was in. “Fellows! Keep us away from the door. They’ll shoot straight through —”

  As I finished the sentence, I heard the cracking of wood and the sound of gunshots, the former only milliseconds before the latter. They’d shot through the door. God, I hope Joey isn’t still standing there.

  I wasn’t entirely sure where he’d ended up after the blast, but I hoped Fellows and Hannah were jumping into action.

  I felt a hand on my back.

  “Move back,” I heard Hannah say. “You’re in the doorway.” I let her guide me behind the bar, but then I immediately heard her turn back and start shouting orders at the others. “Move back, Joey! Fellows — stay on the front door. I’ve got this one.”

  My vision returned, but I was still seeing double. I didn’t care. I ran the few steps to Hannah’s location. She was aiming through the kitchen door, trying to line up with one of the new holes.

  “See anything?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “It’s too dark, but I’m sure they’re still —”

  Three more rounds peppered the door, these lower than the first three. I grabbed my pistol from Hannah and mentally checked it, noticing its weight, as I rolled in front of the door. I stood up quickly, then kicked as hard as I could on the center of the door, right inside the knob.

  The frame cracked, splintered wood sprinkling down to the floor, but the door flew open.

  A man was standing directly in my shot, so I fired two rounds at him. The first hit his chest, but he was already in the process of ducking, so my second shot sealed the deal and caught up with him right through his forehead.

  He fell backward, dead, but I heard shuffling around the corner. A second guy was hiding between the shelves and racks of equipment. I tried to lean around the corner but wasn't about to give him a clear shot of my own head. I ducked back out and looked at Hannah and Joey, who was finally back on his feet. His eyes were red, watery, but I could tell he could see once again.

  “One more in there, but he’s guarding the vent. I’m sure we’re going to have more company pretty soon.”

  “And they’re probably going to start shooting from the side of the building,” Joey added.

  I nodded. "Yeah, I considered that. I doubt they'll do it now since they know we're all still up and fighting in here. It'd be stupid to try to climb through the broken windows — they'd be sitting ducks."

  “So the kitchen, by way of the roof,” Hannah said. “Then the front door? They’ll be hitting us from both sides.”

  “That’s what I would do,” I said.

  As if on cue, I heard Fellows shout. “Coming in the front door! I can hear them on the porch!”

  22

  I sighed, checked the weight of the magazine but already knew I had twelve rounds left, and looked at my team. Hannah and Joey. They were the best people I knew, but I knew them too well. I’d rather have had a few Army grunts I didn’t know too well fighting with me. I could almost be okay with losing someone I didn’t know well, but if I lost Hannah or Joey…

  I shook my head. No time for that, Dixon.

  "Joey, why don't you guard the front door with Fellows? If they pull the door off its hinges, it'll be easy enough to get a bunch of them inside at once so we can use another set of hands over there. I'll guard the kitchen. I can at least pop in and take out anyone trying to come in through the vent, so I should be good."

  “Got it.”

  I knew Hannah didn’t have a pistol, but when I turned to see where she’d gone, I was amazed.

  She was standing behind the bar, pouring an entire bottle of liquor into the sink.

  “Hannah,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “Relax,” she said. “This stuff wasn’t any good anyway.”

  “Well, I bought it, so I’d prefer that you didn’t pour money down the drain.”

  "Look," she said, holding up the now half-empty bottle. She grabbed a dishcloth near the sink and ripped it in half, then shoved it into the top of the bottle. Finally, she dipped the hanging end of the dishcloth into a clear liquid that she'd poured into a bowl.

  “What’s that stuff?” I asked.

  “Butane.”

  I nodded, impressed. I kept a big plastic jug of butane beneath the bar to refill the lighters we often used, either to light certain cocktails for flourishes or to light some of the candles we sometimes placed out on the tables.

  “Molotov cocktail,” she said. “Right?”

  "Mostly," I said. "You got the butane on the dishcloth — the wick — right. That'll definitely light. But you usually fill the bottles with fuel. Gasoline or something."

  “We could use butane, but there’s not really enough for more than two of these.”

  “Right,” I said. “But if we use overproof stuff — Bacardi 151, some of the grain alcohol, that sort of thing — they should work.”

  “I checked,” she said. “There’s not a lot of that, either.”

  I thought for a moment. She was right. I might have had a couple bottles of 151 sitting back there, a bottle of high-proof Absinthe, and a few bottles of overproof Wray and Nephews rum. “It’s at least worth making a few more. At the very least we’ll have some blunt objects to throw when we run out of bullets.”

  She nodded and continued working, pouring a third of the next bottle’s contents into the sink.

  “Mason.” I looked over and saw that Joey was staring at me, wide-eyed.

  “What’s up?”

  “You do realize you’ve got plenty of high-proof stuff here?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “We were completely out of the rye, and the Bacardi and —”

  He shook his head. “I’m not talking about behind the bar. I’m talking about in the kitchen.”

  I paused, at first unsure of what he was talking about, then it hit me.

  The moonshine.

  I had the wines that I was going to redistill sitting in five-gallon buckets in the kitchen. They were easily 175 to 180-proof, possibly higher. That made them about as close to pure ethanol fuel as someone could make outside of a laboratory. The liquor I had was, effectively, that old standby for bathtub punch — Everclear.

  And that made it perfect for Hannah’s little science experiment.

  “I think they’re about to come in!” Fellows shouted.

  Shit. There was no time. The alcohol was in the kitchen, along with the man who’d come down through the vent. And by now there were probably a few more men in the shaft, waiting to drop into the kitchen when their buddies gave the signal that they were ready to start the siege on the front door.

  “Hannah,” I said. “Give me one of those. And keep going. Tear the cloths as small as you can, since there are only a couple rags out here. The rest are in the kitchen.”

  She nodded, then tossed me the first bottle she'd prepared. It was a little more than half-full, and I knew that it was a wise choice. The alcohol itself wouldn't be burning, but the vapors it gave off. The liquid component, therefore, could be watered down enough to prevent the cocktail from igniting if the proof was too low. By having a little extra airspace in the bottle, I hoped it would help the liquid spread out more on impact and not let it smother the flames before it released its incendiary vapor.

  I couldn't help but appreciate that I was holding in my hand a perfect example of an age-old "proofing test." The story I'd read was that ships in the British Royal Navy, upon purchasing rum for its rations, would pour the spirit over a pellet of gunpowder. If the soaked pellet would ignite — enough alcohol vapors were rising from the liquor — it was considered "over" proof, or over about 57% pure alcohol.

  If the pellet didn’t ignite, it meant the water content was too high, or the alcohol level was below proof.

  I held in my hand a Navy-worthy test of my own spirits: if the Molotov cocktail ignited, the liquor manufacturer had been faithful to their word, supplying us with high-proof — and flammable — swill. If not, well, we'd been duped.

  And since liquor was a pretty tightly controlled substance in the great United States, I had little doubt that the proof listed on the bottle would be any different in reality. But I tried not to think about all the other variables that could go wrong. These bottles had been designed and tempered so they would not break easily. Unlike the cheap, thin-walled glass bottles the original purveyors of the Molotov cocktails — the Russians — used, these bottles were made to stand up to some serious jostling and tumbling.

  It was also possible that the rag just wouldn't burn all the way through, and upon impact, the dishcloth would smother itself and become a delicious-smelling waste of liquor.

  Other small things were bothering me about this plan as well, but knowing that I had about three seconds to figure out something better, I decided to just stick to it. I walked to the front side of the bar and looked at the front door.

  “Joey, keep an eye on the kitchen. My guess is that they’ll try to hit us all at the same time. Fellows, stand back. When I throw this, be ready to follow it up with a few shots. We want to make as much fun as possible for whoever comes through that door.”

  He nodded.

  For the first time in half an hour, I noticed Billy. He was standing, eyes on me, his hands at his side. If I didn't know any better, I would have thought he was actually ready for all of this. His face was stoic, but I could almost see a spark of fear — or excitement — in his eyes. He knew the danger. He knew what was happening.

  This is for you, Billy, I thought. You got us into this mess.

  23

  “Now!”

  I heard the man's voice shouting from outside the bar, and I knew exactly who it was. Rafe was out there, safely tucked between two vehicles, sending in his hired guns to do his dirty work. I felt disgusted toward the man. Only cowards made other men fight their battles. Once again my mind drifted back to some of the battles I'd been in, always fighting for some higher-up and better-paid coward. They always tried to rally us to the cause with tight speeches about honor and loyalty and what's right and wrong, but it was still just the same few words wrapped in that deadpan excitement you can only find in the military.

  I didn’t hate my time in the service — it made me who I am today. It’s just that I hated the hierarchical nature of the whole system. There was no autonomy down where it was needed most: at the bottom. The grunts who ran in fighting for the brass were told what to do by the same men who’d decided there needed to be a fight in the first place.

  Rafe reminded me of those schmucks. The kind of man who thought nothing of sending out his soldiers to do his dirty work, "leading" from behind. Weirdly it made me feel a little more respect for the man's "soldiers," the other guys who were involved in all of this crap and probably didn't want to be. They didn't see that they had a choice; they were used to following orders and doing whatever the man upstairs told them to do.

  Respect or not, it didn’t mean I wouldn’t be killing all of them.

  The door flew open, and immediately gunshots rang out. I was standing off to the left, near the restrooms where Shalice was safely resting, a support beam between me and the now-open front door.

  The shots kept coming, but they were just shooting for fun, hoping to scare us out or overwhelm us. They probably had unlimited ammunition and were told to use it, so their rounds were peppering everything in sight except for humans. I saw two of my tables nearly destroyed, as well as the front of my bar completely shredded. Hannah was behind the bar, ducking and out of the way, but I knew for a fact it would take more than a few hundred tiny bullets to get through the heavy wood planking, metal frame, and assortment of beer fridges and plumbing and break through the other side.

  She was in the safest possible spot in the bar, but if things didn’t go well out here, there wouldn’t be a safe spot left. Or a bar.

  The gunshots ceased for a moment, and I stepped to the right, trying to get a better view out the front door. I still couldn't see anything from that angle, as the shooters had now ducked back out of the way and were probably waiting on either side of the door. I grabbed the lighter and lit the end of the rag on my Molotov cocktail, then cooked it for a few seconds. When I thought it was a good time, I stretched to my full height and launched the thing at the front door.

  The bottle sailed through the air and tumbled end-over-end, flaming and whispering as it reached its target. It was a direct hit, and I felt pride that I could still throw an object toward another one with reasonable accuracy.

  And then… the bottle clanged to the floor, the rag fell out, and the liquid — overproof rum — began spilling out. The rag continued burning, but it was safely far enough away from the alcohol from the bottle. The bottle and rag came to a rest on the front porch of the bar, and I heard someone kick the bottle out into the parking lot.

  Well, that was an epic failure.

  I waited, holding my breath. They'd attacked, we'd responded, and now there was an impasse. No one had lost their lives, and in this initial exchange, we'd both learned something about the other team. I'd learned that they were prepared for the attack, choosing to fight from two fronts.

  They’d learned that we were scared shitless and didn’t know how to build a proper bomb.

  Worse, I knew that we’d just made a huge mistake. They had drawn our attention to the front door, launching their attack from there. The commotion and chaos they’d started effectively had us riveted to the front of the building.

  Which means it was a distraction.

  “Joey!” I yelled. “The kitchen!”

  I had been in charge of guarding the kitchen, which I’d chosen to do from my perch opposite the bar, giving me a good clear shot of the kitchen and anyone who might exit it. But I had fallen into Rafe’s trap and had been consumed by the attack taking place at the other side of the bar.

  Shit.

  Sure enough, the broken kitchen door had been pulled inward, now wide open. I flicked my eyes to the left, noticing movement from there. Right behind one of the tables up against the wall on that side of the room.

  A man, holding a gun, stood and pointed it toward the front door.

  More specifically, he pointed it toward Fellows.

  He fired.

  24

  Fellows fell, and Joey dove sideways to the floor. I was already in motion, but because of the layout of the place, I wasn't going to be able to get to a spot with an open shot before he swung around and laid a few into me.

  I fired, wild and way to the right, but he didn't move, knowing he had the better position. We were all on one side of the bar, Rafe's guy on the other, and because the men firing in from the front door would be able to see us if we crossed a certain imaginary line extending from the entrance to the corner of the bar, he knew he had the time to sit and wait for reinforcements or to pick us off one-by-one.

  Shit, I thought again. This is my fault.

  My concentration had shifted to the front door during the initial attack, and now Fellows was injured. I couldn’t see him, as I had my back to the front door now as I watched for the man on the side of the room to move into open space, which I knew he wouldn’t do. He could safely park it alongside that wall with the blasted-out windows, knowing that Rafe and his team outside wouldn’t shoot.

  In a word, everything about the attack was perfect. We were the underdogs and our castle, the building itself — our only line of defense — had been breached. I saw the man's shadow stretching tall on the floor, moving toward the front of the building. That meant he was moving backward, toward the bar. I watched the kitchen, hoping there weren't going to be any more men coming through. If there were, all I could hope for was that they'd stupidly run straight into the center of the room and let me and Joey cut them down.

  The man kept creeping along the side of the room until he was parallel with the bar, closer now to the kitchen door than when he'd first shot Fellows. I knew he was setting up a post near the entrance to allow his comrades to come through the door, and I knew that he'd be able to keep his position of strength the entire time.

  I cursed under my breath, then watched his shadow step forward into the perfect position in the entire place — right next to the front side of the bar, nearest the window on that side of the room. From that spot, the man could guard the kitchen, the front door, and within seconds, anyone coming out of the bathrooms or waiting on that side of the bar. Anyone like me.

  “Nowhere left to hide, Dixon,” the man said. He knew I was safe for the moment, my body hidden behind a table and a column that would stop any of his shots from reaching me. But he also knew that once he had a few more men inside, then a few men to shoot in through the windows and front door, we’d be Swiss cheese. “What’s the plan? Just wait for us to walk in and take the place?”

  I didn’t answer. At this point, there was no plan.

 

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