She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,237

didn’t acknowledge the gunfire at all.

They kept coming.

They didn’t stop coming until they reached the concrete surrounding the main buildings of the steel mill. At that point, they finally stopped advancing forward and went still.

I could see their faces now. They were close enough. Their expressions, all were blank, void of any emotion or thought, and that blank stare probably frightened me more than anything else about them. I thought about how quickly I had turned my gun on Hobson back at Cammie’s house when David Pickford told me to. I thought about what he told each of these people, his voice probably being the last they heard.

Over the radio, I heard, “I’ve got eighteen on the north lawn!”

“Sixteen on the south end,” someone replied.

“Twenty-eight in and around the front of the building.”

I did the math in my head.

Sixty-two.

“The ones out in the open are standing still, but we’ve got movement in the trees. Couple dozen out there, maybe more.”

This was hopeless. I don’t think any of us were prepared to kill nearly a hundred people.

All of them took a step forward at the same time, perfectly in unison.

“Holy shit, you see that?”

“How are they coordinating?”

Someone fired a shot from the roof. The ground in front of one of them, a balding man in his late thirties, exploded in a puff of black dirt. He didn’t budge, his face blank.

Another step. All of them, moving closer.

“I think we’re done with warning shots. We need to start laying them out.”

“Negative,” Dunk replied. “We open fire, they rush us, and we’re done. We can’t stop them all, not like that. There’s too many!”

I recognized Hobson’s voice. “If the Pickford kid is telling these people what to do, they may be innocent in all of it. Just pawns. Like what he did to me.”

I pressed the button on my radio. “Does anyone see him? We take out Pickford, and maybe we end this.”

Nobody replied. Only a handful of us even knew what David Pickford looked like.

Without any noticeable command, every person in white reached behind their backs and pulled cowls up and over their heads, hiding their faces.

Then they moved again.

Not a single step forward or back like before, but a fast shuffle—some moved to their left, others to their right.

Forward, backward, diagonal. Nearly a dozen more came from the woods and through the gully near the railroad tracks to join the others as they shuffled again. Although they moved in multiple directions, absolutely none of what was happening appeared to be random. They moved at the exact same speed. Nobody looked up or down at their feet, to the side or behind, yet nobody collided.

They all continued to face forward. Like a flock of birds shifting position while in flight. A well-coordinated shell game.

When they finally stopped, at least twenty new people in white stood among the already large crowd. Heads covered, burning candles in hand.

David called out from below, somewhere to my left.

I hit my transmit button. “Headphones on!”

All around us, Dunk’s people placed the noise-canceling headphones on their heads, powered them up, and plugged in their radios.

Stella and I did the same.

The sounds of the outside world disappeared.

A moment later, I heard Dunk through my headphones. “Keep radio chatter to a minimum, or we’ll all end up talking over each other.”

I gripped both of Stella’s shoulders and mouthed the words, “Are you okay?”

She nodded and tried to force a smile.

Over the radio, I heard my father’s voice. “Jack? You’re not in the bunk room. Where are you?”

Stella heard him, too. Her eyes went wide.

I looked up and down the catwalk where we sat and only saw Dunk’s people.

To Stella, I gestured toward the stairs.

She nodded.

I stood and helped her to her feet.

At first, I thought she might collapse, but she drew in a deep breath and somehow found the strength to remain upright. I put her arm over my shoulder and led her down the catwalk, down a series of steps, and into the large space where I had met with Dunk ten days earlier, Blast Furnace #7.

My father again, over the radio. “Jack. They gave me no other choice. I had to let them experiment. It was part of the deal. That was the only way I could keep you and your mother safe. If I would have said no, they would have killed her, killed me, taken you. That was never an option.”

I pressed the transmit button. “So you let them try to kill me, instead? Over and