Army of Devils

The battery cable had broken.

No problem. Use a jumper cable to replace the battery cable. He wished bleakly that his neighbor from Haiti had accompanied him on this journey, because of the arrangement to use a car. Raoul had fixed Jean-Claude's wreck of a Chevy back home many times.

Haiti — now there was a problem. To be returned to Mexico was not good. A visit with relatives, then perhaps a week or month of travel before crossing the border again. But Haiti? Jean-Claude had told Raoul of the boats drifting in the ocean, of the many dying, of the fear of return to the torture chambers.

Raoul thanked God for his Mexican birth as he went to the trunk. He took out one of the jumper cables.

Headlights illuminated the rear of the Buick. Jumping aside, Raoul looked back to see a car slowing to a stop.

Highway police? A tow truck? He could not see through the glare of the high beams. He waited with his hands in sight — he did not want any pistol misunderstandings with the police.

Raoul Valencia never heard the shots that killed him. Thrown backward ten feet by the impact of a double-barreled blast, he died before his wife screamed.

Gang punks swarmed from the idling car. The driver waited, revving the engine, his hand on the gearshift, as the others smashed the windows of the Buick. One punk grabbed Maria Valencia by the hair and tried to drag her out. Her eight-year-old firstborn son, Miguel, beat at the attacker with his tiny fists.

A punk shoved a short-bladed sword through the boy's body. Another punk fired a .38-caliber revolver wildly into the back seat, hitting six-year-old Thomas.

Maria fought to protect her baby. The punks laughed at her screams, finally dragged her out. They tore the baby from her arms.

As hundreds of cars passed only steps away, the gang raped the young mother in the roadside darkness, then hacked her to death.

The gang escaped in their metal-flaked and lowered Chevrolet. Careering south on the Harbor Freeway at eighty miles an hour, they smoked cigarettes of an acrid-stinking synthetic drug.

When they tired of tossing Maria's baby among themselves like a ball, they threw it out the window.

Lou Stevens listened to his grandson cry. He heard the oak floor creak as his daughter paced the bedroom with the baby in her arms, crooning to quiet his cries.

In the years since his wife died, Stevens had lived alone. Though the neighborhood people knew him as a man unchanging in his daily routine, he welcomed the disruption of his daughter and son-in-law's visit to show him his grandson…

His chairmanship of his corporation did not allow Stevens the time to visit his daughter and son-in-law in the East. Therefore, he had persuaded them to take the money for the air fares and lost wages. Their visit came at an inconvenient time now, but he would not postpone their trip. If the company objected to his limited concentration on the pressing business of microprocessors, let the board vote him into retirement.

In the late night silence, lying alone in the darkness of his bedroom, Stevens listened to his blood pulse in his ears. He felt the rhythm of his heart. Sixty-one years old, he did not imagine himself immortal. After fifty years of work, forty years in electronics, twenty years as a manager in a high-stress industry, he knew he neared the end. He had seen men ten years younger than he was drop on the office floor and die before the paramedics arrived.

But in one lifetime, he had climbed from the gutter to within grabbing distance of the upper class. Self-educated — with the assistance of the U.S. Army Signal Corps and the G.I. Bill — he had learned to design circuits. When companies refused to share the profits of his imagination, he formed his own company dedicated to the opportunity to achieve and to receive a fair reward. His patents and the patents of the young engineers staffing his research and development labs now earned more profits than his company's manufacturing division.

Though his daughter and poet son refused his offers of guaranteed positions with his company — he had listened to their refusals with pride — Stevens would not give them the opportunity to refuse their inheritance. He had no fear they would squander the money. In their own ways, they reflected his puritan discipline and creative drive. His son won award after prestigious award for his poetry, while sacrificing the tenure and financial security of a university to devote his genius to full-time writing. His daughter had invested ten years of Spartan existence to win post-graduate honors at her university, then preeminence at a foundation dedicated to the study of emerging modern culture.

Neither of his kids made any money. None of his friends ever opened the books of his son's poetry that Stevens gave away by the hundreds. And he could not even tell his friends what his daughter studied — he never understood her explanations.

Alone in the dark, listening to the crying of his grandson and the singing of his daughter, Stevens realized he had not been so happy in years. He regretted only that his wife had not lived to see their victory.

Lou Stevens thought of his life and wealth as a victory over impossible odds. As if in a vivid and brilliantly colored dream, he remembered going through the trash of Los Angeles neighborhoods to find discarded electrical appliances. He hit the cans first with a stick to chase out the rats, then searched for appliances and wire and bits of metal he could sell as scrap. Many years ago…

Music blasted the street's quiet. Music, ha! Stevens snorted in the dark. How can kids think that electronic shrieking is music?

Stevens laughed at himself. Your designs and components, mister. That kind of music will pay for the boy's schooling twenty years from now.

A car door slammed. Other doors slammed. Raucous laughter became hyena cackles. The sound of those voices made Stevens's body flash cold. He sat up in bed. He often lay awake all night worrying over business and technological problems. He knew the voices of every neighbor on the block.

He did not recognize the voices in the street. Going to the window, he eased the drapery aside an inch.

Four figures in black walked to his home's gate. One pointed to the new Cadillac in the driveway. They laughed. In the street, the passenger-side front door of their lowered car opened.

In the moment that the dome light revealed the interior, he saw two young men in the front seat. One wore banda

The banda

Heart pounding in his chest, Stevens saw the four shadows at the front of his house vault the low fence. They walked through the flowers to his front door.

In his pajamas, Stevens went to his bedroom door. He stopped. He went back to his bed and reached underneath. By touch, he disco

A SPAS-12, the weapon had represented more of an indulgence than a precaution when he bought it. A good slide-action shotgun would have been enough. Instead, he bought the SPAS, a 12-gauge assault weapon with dual automatic-manual action modes. Fitted with an Aimpoint site, the weapon cost almost a thousand dollars total, including gunsmithing. But he could afford it. And what it did to beer cans made him laugh all day.

He gripped the cold plastic and phosphate-black steel. His right index finger confirmed the position of the safety. Then he went to the guest room. "Julie," he hissed. He listened for sounds from the front of the house as he waited for her answer. "Julie!"

"He'll be quiet in a minute, dad. Sorry he woke you up."