Trigger Warning

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Action & Adventure; Military Thrillers; Political Thrillers

Synopsis

JOHNSTONE COUNTRY. WHERE OTHERS FEAR TO TREAD. From the bestselling authors of The Doomsday Bunker, Black Friday, and Stand Your Ground comes the explosive story of a college under siege—and freedom under fire . . . POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WON’T SAVE YOU Former Army Ranger Jake Rivers is not your typical Kelton College student. He is not spoiled, coddled, or ultra-lib like his classmates who sneer at the “soldier boy.” Rivers is not “triggered” by “microaggressions.” He is not outraged by “male privilege” and “cisgender bathrooms.” He does not need a “safe space.” Or coloring books. Jake needs an education. And when terror strikes, the school needs Jake . . . Without warning, the sounds of gunfire plunge the campus into a battle zone. A violent gang of marauders invade the main hall, taking students as hostages for big ransom money. As a veteran and patriot, Jake won’t give in to their demands. But to fight back, he needs to enlist his fellow classmates to school these special snowflakes in the not-so-liberal art of war. This time, the aggression isn’t “micro.” It’s life or death. And only the strong survive . . . Live Free. Read Hard.

Release date: August 28, 2018

Publisher: Pinnacle

Print pages: 384

Sample

A short, sharp cry in the night made Jake Rivers look up from the book he was reading.

To be honest, he was glad for the distraction. He was on the verge of throwing the book against the wall of his dorm room in disgust. Since it was a hard copy, a thick trade paperback he had bought in the university bookstore for an outrageous price, and not something he was reading on his phone or tablet, he could have done that without breaking anything. Although the book was heavy enough it might have dented the Sheetrock.

The window next to Jake’s desk was open to let in the warm autumn air. Olmsted Hall had been built more than seventy years earlier, before air-conditioning, and updated and remodeled many times, but the windows still opened, which Jake liked. He dropped the book on the desk, switched off the lamp he’d been using for light, and stood up to move closer to the window.

From here on the second floor, he had a good view of Nafziger Plaza, the large, park-like area in the center of Kelton College’s campus. Three residence halls—Pearsol, Olmsted, and Colohan, running north to south—bordered the western side of the plaza. The administration building was at the northern end, the main science building, Terrill Hall, to the south. The big Burr Memorial Library was directly across from where Jake looked out the window. He could see the lights along the front of it through the trees.

He spotted movement in the shadows under those trees. Someone ran toward the dorms along one of the concrete walks. But another figure pursued and caught the first one, grabbing an arm to sling the fleeing person to the ground. Another cry. Definitely female.

Jake had some more reading to do for class—as much as he despised the book he had just tossed onto the desk—but it could wait. He headed for the door of his room.

He wasn’t really aware of it, but he was smiling as he went out.

It didn’t take him long to get down the stairs. A group of students was sitting in the lobby talking about something—he heard the words “microaggression” and “privilege” and “cisnormative”—but Jake didn’t even glance at them as he went by, and none of them called out to him. He didn’t have any friends here, and whatever the subject under discussion, none of them wanted his opinion on it.

He was just a big, dumb brute, after all.

As he strode quickly out into the night, keen eyes searched the area under the trees where he had seen the two figures a couple of minutes earlier. At first he didn’t see anything, but then he spotted movement again. There.

“Damn it, Annie, just be reasonable! I’m not going to let go of you until you start thinking straight.”

“Stop, Craig, just stop.” The words gasped out as the woman clearly fought to hold back sobs. “I told you it was over.”

Jake was still moving toward them, but he stopped as he heard what the woman said. A grimace tugged at his mouth. Lovers’ quarrel. None of his business. That was an old-fashioned attitude, and he knew it. But almost everything about him was old-fashioned, including his dislike of a woman being mistreated.

Of course, if he did step in to help her, more than likely she would stick up for her boyfriend and turn on him instead, accusing him of perpetuating the patriarchy and the myth of women needing to be rescued. He already got enough of that crap every day. He started to turn away . . .

Then the son of a bitch had to go and slap her.

Jake heard the crack of open hand on flesh and stopped in his tracks. He swung around, took several more steps until he could see the two of them fairly well in some stray beams of light filtering through the trees from the library. Couldn’t make out too many details because the light wasn’t that good. But she was petite and blond while the guy was good-sized, with dark hair and a short beard. Something was odd about the shape of his head, and after a second, Jake got it. The guy’s hair was long enough that he’d pulled it up into a bun on the top of his head.

Jake ran his left hand over his own buzz cut. He’d had fairly long hair once, half a dozen years earlier, but he had never worn it in a bun. And if he ever grew it back out, he still wouldn’t.

The guy started tugging on the woman, who was actually crying now. Jake said, “That’s enough, Craig. Let her go.”

Both of them jumped a little in surprise. Jake moved pretty quietly all the time, without thinking about it anymore. More than once people had accused him of sneaking up on them, when all he was doing was going about his business.

“Hell, man, don’t do that. Do I know you?”

“Nope. I just heard you from my window up there.”

Jake gestured vaguely toward Olmsted Hall.

“What, you’ve got super-hearing or something? We weren’t being that loud. Sorry if we bothered you, man. We’ll keep it down. Anyway, we’re on our way back to our place. Be gone in just a second—”

“It’s not our place,” the woman said. Annie, that was what Craig had called her. “It’s my apartment. You need to get your stuff and leave.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Craig snapped. “That Julika girl’s been filling your head full of crap. Anyway, she just wants you for herself, you know that, don’t you?”

He still had hold of Annie’s arm. Jake said, “You haven’t let go of her.”

Craig looked around at him and said in an annoyed tone, “Are you still here? This is none of your business, man.” He paused. “Are you one of the football players?” Kelton College had a football team, but it hadn’t won a game in three years. “You’re big enough, but Olmsted’s not the athletic dorm—”

“I’m not a football player, and you need to let go of the lady.”

“You don’t have to call me a lady,” Annie said. Just as Jake had expected, she sounded halfway offended.

“I’m trying to help you—”

“That’s no excuse for perpetuating stereotypes and spreading toxic masculinity.”

Jake couldn’t hold back a sigh. Even scared and in trouble, Annie couldn’t stop herself from parroting some of the garbage that had been forced into her head. Not for the first time in the past half-dozen years since he’d enlisted, Jake found himself wondering if the people he fought to defend really deserved it.

He’d always concluded that they did, but sometimes it wasn’t easy to convince himself.

Craig said, “All right, we’re going.” He turned and tried to pull Annie along with him.

“No!” she said. “Let me go!”

“You heard her,” Jake said as he stepped closer.

Craig finally released Annie’s arm, but only so he could ball that hand into a fist. He twisted toward Jake and threw a punch. Jake moved his head out of the way and said, “Stop it, man, while you still can.”

“I’m not scared of you!” Craig shouted. “I don’t care how big you are! I know Krav Maga!”

He had just started some sort of fancy martial arts move when Jake hit him with a left hook to the belly. Craig’s eyes got so wide Jake could see the whites of them even in the bad light. As he started to double over, Jake swung a right cross to the jaw that snapped Craig’s head over. Craig went down hard, pounding his face against the concrete walk.

“You killed him!” Annie screeched.

“No. I could have, but I just knocked him out. Didn’t even break his jaw. He’ll be all right.”

She came at him, hissing and spitting. Jake didn’t know many cops, but he had known some MPs and they felt the same as their civilian counterparts about handling domestic disturbances. Those calls were the worst, and this encounter was a living example of it. All he’d tried to do was help this woman, and now she wanted to claw his eyes out because he’d hit her boyfriend.

He should have stayed with that weighty tome about how capitalism was the worst economic system and America was the most evil country in the world. Instead he had to raise his arm and fend off the punches she was throwing at him. Although the blows were ineffective enough, he probably could have just stood there and taken them without any harm being done.

“You . . . you fascist!” she screamed. “You oppressor!”

“Hell, lady,” Jake said, knowing the word would get under her skin again, “how’d you know I used to be in the army?”

He decided he might as well turn and walk away and let her do her worst. He was about to do that when Craig groaned. The sound made Annie break off her attack and drop to her knees beside him. She lifted him into a half-sitting position and held him against her. He seemed like he was still too groggy to know what was going on.

Jake heard a sudden rush of footsteps behind him and turned to see several black-clad figures charging him. He couldn’t make out their faces, and when they yelled, “Fascist! Fascist!” and the words were muffled, he knew why.

They were wearing hoods over their heads.

Then they were on him, swinging bicycle chains with locks on them, metal pipes, and other objects turned into clubs, and this peaceful night on the small, elite college campus turned into a fight for his life.

Jake had battled against superior odds many times, but usually he’d been heavily armed and hadn’t been forced to take his enemies on bare-handed.

The thing to do in a situation like that was to take an opponent’s weapon away from him. Which was what Jake did when one of the black-clad attackers swung a pipe at his head. He ducked, let the pipe go over his head, and then came up with his left forearm under the guy’s chin, forcing his head back sharply.

Not sharply enough to break the idiot’s neck, though. These were kids. Arrogant, small-minded bullies, but still kids. They didn’t deserve to die for being stupid enough to believe the pack of lies they had been fed by their teachers, the media, Hollywood, and more than half of Washington, D.C.

Jake reached up, closed his right hand around the pipe, and wrenched it free of the attacker’s grip. He twirled it, jabbed the end into the kid’s stomach, and sent him staggering backward, gagging and retching. Moving too fast to see in the shadows, Jake let his instincts and a faintly heard sound guide him. He lifted the pipe as another of the figures slashed at him with a chain. The chain wrapped around the pipe, and Jake used it to jerk the guy toward him. Jake’s left fist shot out in a straight jab that popped the cartilage in the guy’s nose. He howled in pain.

Jake pivoted, swung pipe and chain, and coiled the chain around another attacker’s ankle. A quick tug yanked the guy’s legs out from under him and dropped him hard on his back on the concrete. That knocked all the breath out of him and left him gasping for air.

A second later, somebody landed on Jake’s back and wrapped wiry arms and legs around him.

“I got him!” a female voice yelled. “Kill the fascist! Down with oppressors! Kill him!”

The pipe and chain clattered on the walk as Jake dropped them. He reached up and back, got hold of the attacker clinging to his back like a spider monkey, and tore her loose. She didn’t weigh much. He bent forward, swung her over his head, and tossed her onto the ground, being careful to make sure she didn’t land on the concrete or hit a tree. She screeched, “Rape! Rape!” as she rolled over on the grass, and he wished for a second that he hadn’t been quite so careful.

“An-ti-fa! An-ti-fa!”

The chanting made him look around. He frowned as he saw that the commotion had attracted several dozen students. His frown deepened as he realized they were cheering on the black-clad attackers.

“Wait a minute!” he shouted, knowing he was wasting his time but too angry right now to care. “I didn’t do anything wrong! I was just trying to help a woman—”

“Toxic! Toxic!”

“Racist!”

“Nazi! Nazi!”

The whole world had gone freakin’ crazy, he thought.

The black suits were on their feet again and regrouping. As they got ready to charge him, Jake flashed back for an instant to things he had seen in the past: men in black hoods spouting Arabic as they held a Western journalist and sawed his head off with a big knife; more black-hooded figures forcing a scared child with a bomb strapped to him down a street while they threatened to kill his mother if he didn’t blow up himself and some American soldiers; those same evil men or others just like them shooting at him and his buddies . . .

Then the memories went back even further to old, grainy, historical newsreel footage he had seen, row upon row of young men in spiffy uniforms and high black boots marching through the streets of a city, lifting their arms in a salute to the madman in front of whom they passed in review, on their way to wipe out anyone who didn’t think exactly the same way they did. They had disarmed the citizenry, taken over all the newspapers and radio and colleges and universities and made it a crime punishable by death to say or even think anything they disagreed with . . .

And the mass graves and the smoke rising from the crematoriums and later an even worse evil rising in the East, with more millions dead for no reason other than opposing what the party leaders said and did . . . The starvation, the booted marchers coming down the street, the knock on the door in the night followed by wails of grief and anguish . . .

And these people surrounding him now, the bullies in their black hoods and the ones who chanted for them, believed in and supported that hideous evil, all while calling him a Nazi and a fascist . . .

They kept using those words, Jake thought wryly as all that flashed through his mind, but he didn’t believe the words meant what these people thought they did.

Then they charged him again.

Jake reached down and picked up the pipe and chain. He unwrapped the chain, held it in his left hand, and clutched the pipe in his right. He was sick and tired of this. Maybe it was time he actually fought back, no matter what the consequences.

“Drop ’em! Drop those weapons, damn it!”

The shouted command came from behind him. He turned, saw the half-dozen uniformed campus cops converging on him. He said, “Wait! I’m not the one—”

“Phelps, deploy Taser!”

He heard a stun gun fire, felt the fierce jab as the first set of needles pierced his shirt and lanced into his flesh to deliver their jolt of electricity. He staggered as the shock coursed through him, but he didn’t go down.

“Carter! Taser!”

Another set of probes hit him and seemed to turn the blood in his veins and arteries into streams of fire. Agony wracked him as his muscles clamped hard as stone. He knew that he was falling but didn’t feel it when he crashed to the concrete. Consciousness fled from him.

But not before he heard the gleeful, jeering cries from the spectators.

“Down—with—Nazis! Down—with—Nazis!”

“Damn it, Jake, what am I gonna do with you?”

Frank McRainey leaned back in the chair behind his desk, sighed, and shook his head. He was the chief of the campus police, and clearly he didn’t appreciate being called to his office late in the evening like this, when he should have been home with his family.

Jake sat in the chair in front of McRainey’s desk. His muscles still ached a little from being hit with the stun guns, but he didn’t show that discomfort in his face or voice as he said, “I don’t know, sir. I’m sure there are plenty of people who think you should turn me over to the police and have me arrested.”

The balding, baggy-eyed campus cop frowned and said, “Was that riot your fault?”

“Well . . . there was one of me and how many of them? What conclusion would you draw from that, sir?”

“Don’t get mouthy, son,” McRainey snapped. Then he couldn’t help but chuckle. “At least you didn’t kill any of them. There’s that to be thankful for.”

“I tried not to hurt anybody any more than I had to. I was just trying to stop that guy Craig from hurting the girl, at first, and after that I just defended myself.”

“And quite efficiently, too, from what I hear,” McRainey said, nodding. “I’m not going to charge you with anything. Not yet, anyway. Once the activists and the lawyers and the media start putting pressure on President Pelletier, there’s no telling what he’ll insist on, just to get them all off his back.”

He took his phone out of his shirt pocket, tapped a few icons on it, and then turned the screen so Jake could read the headline on the news site the older man had called up.

FAR RIGHT EXTREMIST ATTACKS COLLEGE STUDENTS

“That’s not even close to correct,” Jake said. “I didn’t attack anybody. I just defended myself, like I told you. And I’m not far right, far left, or far anything else. I just want to go to school and get an education, sir.”

“You’ve been here two months. I’ll bet you’re getting more of an education than you ever bargained for.” McRainey put away his phone, then leaned forward and clasped his hands together on the desk. “Why are you here, Jake? Is it just because of your grandfather?”

Jake hesitated. Most people here at Kelton didn’t know who his grandfather was, but McRainey was a family friend and had known Cordell Gardner as a young man. McRainey had known Jake’s father Phillip, too. He just didn’t speak of him. Neither did Jake.

Jake didn’t even use his father’s name anymore. He had changed his legally to Rivers, his mother Donna’s maiden name. He had worried a little about what Cordell would think about that, but the old man not only hadn’t been offended, he had encouraged Jake to make that move . . . just as he’d encouraged him to join the army and then to come here to Kelton College.

Problem was, the army wasn’t what it once had been, and Kelton College sure as hell wasn’t.

“Jake?” McRainey prodded.

But Jake was lost in the past.

Six months earlier

“Well, what else are you going to do with yourself, boy? Pull!”

Cordell Gardner tracked the clay pigeon with the shotgun, leading it perfectly as he squeezed the trigger. The pigeon exploded into small fragments as the buckshot hit it.

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” Jake said.

He and his grandfather were standing at the edge of a large field that Cordell Gardner used for skeet shooting. The roof of the old man’s house, which was big but somehow not ostentatious, was visible over the trees behind them. Gardner’s estate sprawled over a lot of East Texas acres and included tennis courts, stables, and a nine-hole golf course, even though Gardner didn’t play tennis, ride horses, or have any use for golf. Sometimes his guests did, though, and he’d been raised to be hospitable.

He broke the shotgun open, took fresh shells from his pocket, and thumbed them into the gun.

“You’d better start thinking about it,” he told Jake. “You didn’t reenlist, so now you have to do something else with your life.”

“Why?” Jake asked bluntly. “I could just sit around and wait for you to die so I’ll inherit that fortune of yours.”

Gardner threw back his head and laughed. He was a big old man, although not as big as Jake’s six-four and two hundred and fifty pounds. The shock of hair on his head was snow-white, which made the deep, permanent tan on his weathered face seem even darker than it really was. He had an air of vitality about him despite his age and seemed to be nowhere near dying.

“How do you know I haven’t disowned you?”

“You wouldn’t do that,” Jake said. “I’m too much like you.”

Gardner grunted.

“Might be a good reason to, right there. Pull!”

One of the old man’s groundskeepers, who also served as his assistant when he came out here to shoot, triggered the trap that flung a target into the air. Gardner blew it to pieces, then turned and held out the shotgun to Jake.

“Want to give it a try? You used to be pretty good at this.”

Jake took the gun and loaded it with the shells his grandfather handed him. He said, “It’s been a long time.”

“Like riding a bicycle. It’ll come right back to you.” Gardner turned to look at the groundskeeper. “Send two this time, Benny.”

“You want to make it tough on me?” Jake asked.

“Just setting a bar.”

That wasn’t all of it. Jake knew the old man still had a strong competitive streak. He wasn’t necessarily trying to show Jake up, but if Jake missed one or both of the targets and then his grandfather took the gun back and broke both the next time, he would get a considerable amount of satisfaction out of that.

Jake was contrary enough that he didn’t want to give the old man that much satisfaction. He set his stance, held the shotgun ready in the gun-down position, and nodded.

“Pull!” Gardner called.

The targets flew spinning into the air. Jake brought the shotgun smoothly to his shoulder, tracked the leader, squeezed off one barrel, shifted his aim just slightly, and fired again.

Tiny fragments of both targets pelted to the ground, all that was left of them.

Gardner frowned and asked, “How long’s it been since you did any target shooting, boy?”

“At targets like that? Seven years. Maybe eight.”

Gardner just shook his head in admiration.

“You’ve got a knack for it. Always have. Never saw a boy who could handle a gun like you, even when you were a little kid. You could shoot like a grown man when you were twelve years old. Drive like a grown man when you were fourteen. I’d ask some of the mamas of your high school buddies what else you could do like a grown man, but I don’t think I want to know.”

Jake handed back the shotgun and said, “Driving just got me in trouble.”

“Street racing, you mean.”

Jake shrugged.

“The cops frowned on it. I would’ve wound up in jail more than once if it weren’t for you and your lawyers.”

Gardner pursed his lips and said, “Yes, and it was a mistake saving you from your own foolishness. I should’ve let you spend some time behind bars. Might’ve taught you a lesson. But at least I realized I was about to make the same mistakes with you that I made with your father and stopped in time to keep from ruining you the same way.”

Jake didn’t want to talk about his father, but the old man had brought it up.

“Most people don’t consider it being ruined to be a rich, successful lawyer.”

His grandfather snorted.

“Most people never knew what a sorry, no-account scoundrel Phillip Gardner really was. It pains me to say it, but he was my son, so I’ve got the right. Of course, I blame myself—”

“You didn’t shove that cocaine up his nose.”

“I might as well have.”

Jake turned.

“If all we’re gonna do is blow clay pigeons out of the air and talk about a bunch of old crap I’d just as soon forget, I’m out of here.”

Gardner went after him, put a hand on his arm.

“Wait. I just want to know what your plans are, Jake?”

“Maybe I don’t have any,” Jake said, stopping and turning to look at his grandfather.

“Then why don’t you go back to school and try to figure out what you want to do with your life? I know you too well, boy. You may joke about sitting around and doing nothing, but that’s not in you. Never has been. Maybe the army didn’t work out, but there’s something else waiting out there for you. I know there is.”

“Didn’t work out?” Jake repeated. “Two tours in the Middle East and a chestful of medals and ribbons isn’t working out?”

“You did a good job, sure. A great job, even. But did it satisfy you?”

Jake scowled. The old man knew good and well that it hadn’t. Something was still missing in his life. It always had been, no matter how many skills he mastered, no matter how much excitement and risk he sought out.

But college? That was supposed to fulfill him? The idea was plain crazy.

“Look, I know you’re smart,” Gardner went on. “You already had more than half a college degree in your pocket when you were a senior in high school.”

“Yeah, and I never finished senior year, did I?”

“Not because you couldn’t have. Hell, you would’ve been the valedictorian!”

“Salutatorian,” Jake corrected him. “That math team girl would’ve edged me out by a few percentage points. But it didn’t matter. By graduation I’d already enlisted, to get out of trouble with the law. Your idea, as I recall.”

“And you got your GED and your bachelor’s degree before you got out. That took a lot of work, as well as playing the system for all it’s worth.”

“You taught me well,” Jake said with a smile.

“I’d like to think so. But now it’s time to let somebody else teach you. You know I’ve got ties to Kelton College—”

“You’ve built how many buildings and endowed how many fellowships and scholarships for them?”

Gardner made a dismissive gesture.

“I never had a chance to go to college, but I always wanted to. I’ve done all right for myself—”

“A few billion dollars’ worth of all right.”

The old man waved that off, too.

“But maybe I would have done even better . . . more importantly, maybe I would have been a better person . . . with a real education. You can do that, boy. Go get your master’s degree. Hell, get your doctorate.” He grinned. “You could be Dr. Jacob Rivers.”

. . .