“Get down!” I yelled as I ducked below the driver’s window.
I figured they’d start shooting. But instead I heard a voice amplified through a bullhorn, “Turn off your vehicle. Place your hands on the dashboard. Resistance will be met with deadly force.”
Well, duh. I’d stalled “the vehicle” already. Alyssa crouched in the passenger footwell and Ben bent over so he was mostly behind the dash. Alyssa looked scared. Ben looked about the same as he always looked—a bit detached.
“You must comply or we will open fire!” the voice boomed. “Ten . . . nine . . .”
“Can we get out the passenger side?” I whispered.
“Their tactical position is excellent,” Ben replied. “We could take cover on the opposite side of the truck, but if we climb the snow pile or move down the road in either direction, we’ll enter their field of fire.”
I thought about trying to restart the truck and using it to ram the telephone pole. But they were only thirty or forty feet away, and they were above us. Would the truck’s roof stop a rifle shot from that close? I didn’t think so. As the voice counted “three . . . two . . .” I got out of the footwell, leaned forward to lay my hands on the dashboard, and told Alyssa and Ben to do the same.
Four of them detached from the troop, sliding down the knoll toward us. They wore white and gray military camo—the first people I’d seen who had the perfect camouflage to hide in the volcanic winter. When they reached me, the nearest one wrenched open the driver’s door while another guy trained his rifle on my head. One of them searched me, efficiently and none too gently, but he took only the knife and pistol off my belt. The patch on his chest read BLACK LAKE LLC. I stifled a groan. No way did I want to repeat my experience with Black Lake, locked in one of the camps they ran as a subcontractor for FEMA. But it wasn’t like I had much choice.
On the other side of the truck, two guys were dealing with Alyssa and Ben the same way. Ben started moaning, and Alyssa tried to comfort him, but there wasn’t much she could do.
“Hands behind your back,” the guy ordered. When I complied, he slipped plastic ties around my wrists and cinched them tight. My right arm didn’t like being held behind my back and wasn’t shy about telling me so. I quickly had spasms of pain shooting toward my neck. I grunted as they pulled me out of the truck.
Alyssa, Ben, and I stood together, watching a short, pudgy Black Lake guy work his way around the edge of the knoll toward us. He was the only one not carrying an assault rifle, although he had a pistol on his belt. “What do we got? Flensers?” he asked as he approached. He unsnapped the leather strap that held his pistol in its holster, and the other four Black Lake guys took a step back, away from us.
“We’re not flensers,” I said.
“Looks like a flenser truck. One of the old-model deuces we were using ’til the flensers raided our Dubuque depot.”
One of the guys with the assault rifles snorted, and Pudge silenced him with a glare.
“I took the truck from the Peckerwoods. Crashed it. See the windshield?” It would have been hard to miss, with the hole punched in the passenger side and long spiderweb cracks radiating out across the glass. I hadn’t cleaned the blood off the inside of it, either.
“Yeah,” Pudge turned to one of the grunts. “You search it yet? Any flesh on board?”
“No, sir.”
“Do it now.”
“Yes, sir.” Two of the grunts trotted to the back of the truck. I stood with Alyssa and Ben, shifting my weight from foot to foot, waiting. Nails screeched from within the truck as they forced the wooden crates open. Pudge stared at me and fingered his pistol, a greedy look in his eye. The other Black Lake guys had left the crest of the knoll. They were using a hand winch to crank one of the telephone poles back into place. It was affixed to its base with a huge hinge and held up by guy wires. Obviously they’d prepared this spot as a trap long ago—and planned to use it again.
“Ammo and manacles,” one of the grunts reported when they returned from inside our truck.
A disappointed look passed across Pudge’s face. He snapped his holster strap shut. “Davis, Roberts: Follow us in the captured vehicle. Phelps, Miner: Load the prisoners.
I guessed that meant us. Two of the guys led us to the far side of the knoll where a cargo truck was parked. It was tall and armored, looking something like an oversized elephant with stubby legs. The Black Lake grunts lifted us into the enclosed cargo bed.
The door closed behind us with a resounding clang.