Free Lone Wolf #8: Los Angeles Holocaust by Mike Barry Page B

attention, could feel himself beginning to function. Then he got the gun up and at a seated position raised his hand, pumped out two shots, then ducked again as response bullets tore their way again through the windshield, falling around him like ball-bearings.
    Too much, too much; these guys had to be crazy. Who would set up a roadblock on an interstate highway and what did they think that it would profit them? Even if they were able to nail him in this trap, didn’t they understand that traffic was going to pile up rapidly behind him, even on a seemingly empty highway, three cars a minute passed a given point … and as if in confirmation far beyond Williams heard the dull pounding of a truck, the hiss of air brakes. The knowledge that traffic was then already beginning to form behind him, that he was not functioning in isolation, gave him the courage to rear all the way up and from this position, peering over the dash, he saw the situation in true perspective for the first time; everything had happened too fast before. There were just two of them, a Chevy van over on the side of the road, the sawhorse slung crudely across the two lanes as a block. Another bullet came, but Williams from this vantage point was already beginning to feel invulnerable. He got his gun up and out and put a clean shot into the near man, a shorter type holding a sawed-off shotgun. The man fell across the hood with a scream, the shotgun firing, the pellets misdirected, and the second man loomed behind him then. Williams saw a man in his forties wearing an odd, double-breasted, gray suit, some archaic aspect coming out of the fields of Interstate 90 to kill him, and in a slow and terrible calm he pointed the pistol at the man and shot him in the throat. The man had not even fired a shot; apparently the death of the man first in line had shocked him. He fell straight to the concrete, spread-eagled, little objects falling from his pockets scattering on the highway; pieces of paper, a few dollar bills, jolted loose by the impact. Breathing heavily, Williams leaned against the door of the Ford, got the handle up from memory, and went out onto the roadway.
    Behind him a huge diesel, motor idling unevenly, had come to a stop just a few feet behind the Ford. The truckdriver, a thin man concealed behind enormous sunglasses and cap, was looking out the side. “What the fuck is this?” he said, pointing, taking in all of it; Williams, the roadblock, the two dead men lying on the concrete. “What the fuck is going on here?”
    “I don’t know,” Williams said, “I don’t know.” And he meant it. Little knives of Nebraska heat filled with dust and light went through him. He put his pistol away and walked toward the sawhorse. The near corpse was bleeding thickly, dribbling blood into the concrete in a Rorschach pattern. Williams kicked it aside and put his hands on the sawhorse, bit his lips, heaved it upward. Surprisingly light, the contraption came up easily. He staggered to the side of the road, holding sixty pounds, dumped it on the shoulder, came back to the Ford noting abstractedly that there seemed to be bloodstains on the hood. Well, that was to be expected, wasn’t it? He had shot, let’s think about this now, the first man close on the hood, getting him in the throat, or was that the second man, but anyway it had been a bloody shot and of course at that proximity to the Ford he would have.
    “I think we better get the cops, friend,” the truckdriver said, still leaning out the window. Another car was lumbering up, a black shape just coming over the horizon. Behind it Williams could see a few more like insects, slithering, stumbling along. There would be five or six cars here in a minute; behind them another five or six more. Traffic was sparse but not all that little; even in Nebraska people still got on the highway, if only to get out of Nebraska, of course. “Really,” the truckdriver said, “we ought to get some cops in here; find