Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [111]
“I don’t make the law, Officer,” Cochrum said. “I just—”
“Shut up,” Delgado said. “Are you all right, Jack?”
“Yeah, I think so,” the young man replied. “It just, uh, knocked the wind out of me when you flipped me over like that. You gotta teach me how to do that!”
Delgado smiled. “If we live through this, I will. In the meantime, is there anybody else here at the school?”
Jack shook his head. “Just the six of us.”
“Well, that gives us almost twenty people,” Delgado mused.
Rowdy asked, “Can we put our hands down now?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure.” Delgado motioned for his “troops” to lower their weapons. He turned to Jack again. “Your mom’s not here?”
“I haven’t seen her all day,” Jack said, trying not to let too much worry creep into his voice. He was trying to stay confident that she was all right. He asked hopefully, “Have you seen her?”
“Yeah, she was okay a little while ago. She was going to try to make it to the station.”
“No!” Jack couldn’t hold in the exclamation. “That place is full of those guys!”
Delgado nodded grimly. “That’s what I was afraid of. She sent me sneaking around town to gather a resistance force and bring it here. She said she’d meet me here.”
“She’s not here yet… but I’m sure she will be.” Jack tried to feel as confident as he hoped he sounded.
“Yeah, I’m sure she will be, too,” Delgado said, but Jack had a feeling that the older man was sort of whistling in the dark, too.
Cochrum said, “Listen, is this all the people you could get? There’s gotta be at least a couple hundred of those Hispanic guys, and I’ll bet they’re all cold-blooded killers.”
“Unlike that client of yours, eh?”
Cochrum’s face flushed in what appeared to be a mixture of anger and embarrassment. “This doesn’t have anything to do with Emilio Navarre,” he snapped.
“I wouldn’t say that. Those are his amigos out there.”
“You don’t know that. Nothing has been proven. Anyway, my point is that you can’t fight an army with less than two dozen people! It’ll be suicide!”
“Didn’t you ever hear of going out fighting, Cochrum?”
The lawyer sneered. “That’s just another way of describing losing. I’d rather win.”
“So would I. You got any ideas?”
“Well… we could call for help.”
Delgado shook his head. “Won’t work. Somehow they’ve blocked all communication with the outside world. Radios, cell phones, computers, none of ’em work. My guess is that they’ve got some sort of machine broadcasting an extremely powerful electromagnetic pulse. No, Cochrum, win or lose, I think we’re on our own.” He paused. “But this may not be all of us. I couldn’t cover the whole town, so several men I talked to volunteered to try to round up some more fighters. If they’re successful, they’ll be rendezvousing here, also.”
“There still won’t be enough to make it an even fight.”
Rowdy said, “Hey, sometimes you’ve got to buck the odds, dude. We’re Texans. That’s what we do.”
“He’s … right,” Jimmy said. “We can … do it.”
Wilma had emerged from hiding by now. She stared at the group gathered in the library and demanded in astonishment, “Seriously, are you people actually going to listen to this … this retard? You can’t fight an army. You’ll just get yourselves killed! We’ll be better off just waiting. They don’t seem to know we’re here, and if we stay hidden, maybe they’ll just leave without bothering us.”
“The lady has a point,” Cochrum said. “They can’t hope to hold on to the town for very long. They’ve got to be here for some specific reason, and once they get what they’re after, they’ll go.” He shrugged. “We should just lie low. I say we put it to a vote. That’s the American way, isn’t it?”
One of the townsmen said, “You don’t know a damned thing about the American way, mister. You’ve proven that.”
“And you shouldn’t call Jimmy bad names, either,” one of the women said as she glared at the reporter. “He’s a fine young man.”
“He’s not playing with a full deck,” the blonde shot back. “None of you moronic hayseeds are, evidently.”
Bud stepped forward and said, “That’s enough, Wilma.”
She looked at him in surprise, then her face darkened