Day of Wrath by William R. Forstchen Read Free Book Online Page A

indeed aroused some instinct in him. He wasn’t Hindu; he was a Pakistani Christian who had fled the region near the Afghan border with his family back in the early 1990s. He had raised his children as Americans and was grateful every day for the peace of this land. The sight of these men triggered some instinct of fear. It was their eyes. As a young man he remembered fighters coming across the border during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, recruits flooding into the war zone from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria to become jihadists and kill communists, but happy to kill Christians as well even though the local Christian community ran a hospital for wounded refugees. These fighters had the same dead, shark-like eyes.
    The way one of them turned and faced him told him that even here, in America, in the state of Maine, which all assumed was far safer than places like New York or Chicago, was now as dangerous as the streets of his home village, as dangerous as Mosul, Tikrit and Aleppo. It was the last thought of his life. Though nervous at approaching the men, they did not even give him time for that nervousness to turn to fear.
    Little more than three seconds after he asked the question his brain was shattered by the impact of a single round to his forehead, his conscious thoughts did not even register the flash from the muzzle of the 9mm fired from less than three feet away, nor did he hear the triumphal cry of "Allahu akbar!"
    The two vehicles left the parking lot thirty seconds later. The maid, who had apprehensively stood in the doorway and watched as her friend and manager innocently walked into his death, collapsed to her knees, screaming and calling out to the Blessed Virgin, while another maid, a refugee from the madness of Ethiopia who was far more used to the sight of cold blooded killings, began to fumble a call to 911.

CHAPTER FOUR

    11:43 a.m., near Portland, Maine
    Kathy looked up from her pad. She had been trying to connect to her friend Mary in Austin, Texas, texting her, while her attention remained glued to the television where the murders along Interstate 35 near Mary’s neighborhood were continuing and the ticker along the bottom of the television reported a second shooting incident in Syracuse. Apparently an accomplice of yesterday's school shooter had been cornered in the parking lot of a shopping mall.
    Kathy heard a siren, a police car racing past on the state highway, one block over from her home. Seconds later a second police car followed.  
    It sent a chill down her spine. What was going on?
    A third police car, seconds later.
    Fear. Her heart constricted, beating faster. Surely this was not all interrelated in some way? She and Bob had shared whispered conversations often enough after Wendy was asleep as to the possibility that some horror could indeed happen here and what was their drill, their response? They had talked about it scores of times but were those fears and whispered conversations now triggering her into an overreaction?  
    She texted Bob again, “Turn on the news now!” He had not responded so far.

    11:44 a.m., Joshua Chamberlain Middle School, Portland, Maine
    He had made the mistake of setting the remote control back down on the table, a gesture of long habit when watching a program with Kathy who on their second date had accused him of being a typical male because he hogged the television remote control.  
    Margaret Redding snatched it back, switched the channel back to the program she had been watching, clutched the remote and glared at him defiantly, all but begging him to try and make a physical grab for it. She had already announced that she was filing a complaint of harassment, that to even try and touch her to get the remote would be a career-ender for certain and she was egging him on to do so. There was a flicker of a smile of the self-righteous professional victim who sensed that she just might have one hell of an excellent case if she could push him just one step