The Tenth Circle by Jon Land Page A

louder this time, and a woman just a few feet in front of him went down. He had his SIG Sauer palmed in the next moment, eyes sweeping the crowd as panic finally set in, the highway patrolmen starting to rush in as well.
    “There he is!” someone screamed. “It’s him!”
    It took a full instant for McCracken to realize arms and fingers were being thrust his way, identifying him as the shooter, the guilty party.
    “Somebody stop him!”
    In that moment, McCracken saw Rule’s remaining guards aiming pistols his way through widening slivers in the fleeing crowd. Pictured them seeing him with SIG steadied in his hand, pistols ready in theirs as well.
    They were going to shoot; two of them, sighting in even now. McCracken had no choice and, even if he had, instinct and experience overruled it.
    He readied himself to fire. But then …
    Pop, pop, pop, pop …
    Again, the SIG held cold and unfired in his hand. The guards were there, standing and about to fire themselves, and then they weren’t. When the crowd parted next, he saw two more downed bodies on the damp ground not far from where others had toppled the Reverend Rule and continued to protectively cover him.
    The skies opened, unleashing a windswept downpour that engulfed the scene. Thunder boomed and a bolt of lighting seemed to arc downward directly over Rule’s toppled frame.
    McCracken lit into motion through the torrents, instinct again taking charge. He caught up to the thickest swatch of the fleeing throng and melted into it, knees bent to reduce his size and thus target, gun camouflaged against his hip. Felt the mass shift as highway patrolmen pierced it, likely on his trail. But they were quickly swallowed up, and McCracken centered his attention on a grove of trees and thick brush rimming the park where he could elude them across Straight Street near a basketball court.
    The storm proved a blessing now, providing camouflage he could never have concocted on his own. Making every soaked form separating from the swell of the crowd to flee the area look the same. McCracken might have to abandon his rental vehicle, still a small price to pay for getting away.
    “There he is! Over there!” a voice cried out.
    “Somebody, stop him!”
    “Shoot him! Shoot him!”
    And McCracken saw fingers thrust his way ahead of the gunshots.

CHAPTER 20
    Mobile, Alabama
    The members of the crowd fighting for a fix on him in their sights surged forward, toppling a laggard segment of elderly attendees and causing a mass pileup of bodies that looked like a chain collision on the interstate. McCracken had just veered left when an older woman hit the ground hard not far from him, crying out in pain and panic.
    He never hesitated, swooped in and scooped her off the drenched ground that had gone soggy under the canopy of the wooded area of the park. With no other alternative, he carried the woman forward through what now felt like hail in search of a place to gently lay her down where she might be swiftly found and tended to. The hailstones pelted him and he heard the distinctive rattle and clacking of their impact against trees, brush, and ground. McCracken felt hail pellets crunch underfoot, some almost as big as golf balls spit from the sky. He tightened his grasp of the old woman, canting his body to shield her from the torrents as best he could. Remarkably enough, that had the unintended effect of providing him the ideal cover, for who would expect a potential target or fleeing assassin to delay his escape to rescue a fallen senior citizen?
    Soaked to the bone himself, McCracken kept his head down and his grasp of the woman’s moaning form tight as he neared the street where a phalanx of additional highway patrol cars were tearing onto the scene. Certain the arriving officers had no clear sense of what was happening or whom they were actually after, McCracken moved straight up to the line of cars and laid the woman down on the soft grass near a pair of patrolmen yanking on