by Kate Morris
“Wait,” she hissed. “What if it’s not them? What if those men went in the front door?”
“Let me go first,” Abraham said quietly. “I’m the only one with a gun that has bullets.”
They both nodded as he slid past her friend. Outside, a gun blast was followed immediately by the tell-tale whine of a dog being hurt. Then some of the dogs grew quiet. It didn’t last long. They started back up again.
Abraham pushed open the door quietly and went up the two wooden steps into their house. Avery had never been in this house before, so it was unfamiliar. They walked straight from the garage into a utility room with a shower, washer and dryer, and a freezer, along with a hot water tank. They all heard a noise again in the house. She knew they heard it, too, because they collectively froze.
Her brother looked over his shoulder and down at her. Then he nodded and kept going ten or twelve feet until they came to another door. He paused a moment before opening it quietly and pulling it toward them. Her brother stepped cautiously inside what she could see was a kitchen with dark cupboards and a linoleum floor. In the middle of the room was an island workspace. She could see feet on the floor sticking out on the other side of the island. Renee rushed over and knelt down. She came back a second later.
Whispering, her friend said heartbrokenly, “Mrs. Quincy.”
At hearing this, her brother raised the pistol, holding it with two hands like Tristan taught him, and aimed it ahead of them. They proceeded more slowly this time as they moved out as a group.
Outside, she heard gunfire again. She hoped they weren’t shooting any more dogs.
“Stop where you are!” a man stated angrily. “I’ve got a gun, and I’ll use it.”
“M-Mr. Quincy?” Renee questioned nervously.
“Who’s there?” he asked gruffly.
“It’s me, Renee from next door,” she said.
“You with them criminals that shot my wife?”
“What?” she asked with shock. “No! No, sir. Never. They attacked us, too. We ran here.”
“I came home a little bit ago and found her like that. They ransacked the house, took the food and money. Didn’t find my shotgun, though.”
“Don’t shoot. My house is under attack. My friends and I don’t know what to do. They burned it. We had to get out of there. Please, Mr. Quincy, they’re after us. Please, help us.”
A moment later, an older gentleman came into view from the dining room, being backlit from the lighting outside. Relief flooded Avery as she saw his shotgun and realized he was a beacon of hope in this dark void tonight.
A second later, a shot rang out but not from Mr. Quincy. Renee screamed. Her neighbor was shot from behind, the bullet having gone through the glass patio door. Avery felt blood hit her. He turned and rattled off a few rounds before falling into the kitchen with them.
Chapter Thirty-two
He had three missed calls from Avery and two from Abraham. His phone had temporarily bugged out. In order to get off the base alive, he and Spencer had killed four of those crawlers and two asshole citizens trying to rob their base. Now he couldn’t get Avery or her brother to pick up their phones, and he was about to lose his mind.
Instead of trying again to reach her, he called Spencer, who was following in the L.T.’s truck behind him.
“I can’t get ahold of them,” he told his friend.
Spencer immediately said, “Me, neither. Something’s wrong.”
“My cell was out for a while.”
“Mine, too,” his friend answered, and their call cut off. He didn’t think this was just the usual call dropping from being on back country roads. This wasn’t as remote as Avery’s. He was on a state route. Even at her place, they could usually get a call to go through. She’d explained that her father had installed cell phone boosters on their property to help with reception.
Tristan pressed harder on the accelerator, not caring if anything flew out of the bed. Nothing mattered right now, not if she was in trouble. All he wanted was one word or text that she was okay. He wasn’t getting anything when he dialed again, just a busy signal, so he accelerated to seventy miles per hour.
Overhead, a helicopter flew low, not military, and not a news chopper. It looked like a private chopper that a businessman would use. Then two Chinooks went blasting by, their big twin engines vibrating the truck they were so low. He knew those were usually utilized to transport troops or artillery. Tristan also knew how to fly one, but it had been a while since he was in the driver’s seat. Wherever they were going, he was glad he wasn’t. And that was a change for him. Normally just the sound of those engines would get him fired up, his adrenaline pumping to go out and hunt down some dirtbag terrorist or third-world Commie wannabe leader. He was guessing those Chinooks were carrying troops and artillery. Lately, everywhere was like living on a military base. The big C-130s would fly over the cities all day. They even made passes over Avery’s house. Wright Patt Air Force Base in Dayton was busy running missions on a constant basis and was now dropping freight at different checkpoint locations in the tri-state area, something he learned from a memo he saw in the L.T.’s office when he gave him his resignation. They’d had a long talk, and his commanding officer was very understanding. He’d also let Tristan in on a lot of what he probably wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. Clearly, he trusted him enough not to run his mouth off and tell others.
One thing he found out from his lieutenant was that by November, only a few weeks away, the military was to have up and operational temporary evacuation sites. They didn’t expect the situation to get any better. Once Tristan found that out, he’d started full-scale collecting and scavenging for whatever he could get his hands on and by whatever means. If they expected people to have to evacuate cities, and that’s what he and his L.T. came to the conclusion of, then this hell they were all in was about to get worse. They were labeling these evacuation sites as ‘blue zones,’ or safe zones. Tristan had no intention whatsoever of going to those or taking Avery and the kids there. It was bound to be a cesspool of sickness- despite the promises of it not being. Plus, a heaping help of violence, theft, rape, and eventually murder. The government just couldn’t take care of that many people. Anyone who was already living off the government on welfare or in public housing or were reliant on them for taking care of their food supply and shelter were headed straight into those blue zones.
The second thing he learned was that the only way to kill the virus was to burn the body. They were planning on mass cremations. Tristan already figured that because of Avery’s mother and siblings. He’d asked about them as soon as Abraham told him what rooms they were in, and once they all four died, he was told by the hospital that they weren’t allowed to release the bodies. He thought maybe it was because he wasn’t family. That’s the way they’d explained it, in a roundabout way. That wasn’t the case, though. They weren’t releasing any dead bodies because they’d set up a huge crematorium site and were transporting them there to be burned in mass.
The last thing he learned was that cities that were overrun with the infected night crawlers were going to be burned. It would work two-fold. First, it would kill off the virus. And second, burning them alive would kill them. Literally. They had no way of curing them, despite the fact that they were still telling people to drop their sick loved ones off at medical sites the government was running. Tristan didn’t trust the government. He’d worked for them for almost eight years. They lied. They used people like tools until the tool broke and was no longer useful.
He slowed the truck so that he didn’t have to take the turn onto Renee’s road on two wheels. Her house wasn’t that far down the street, a little less than a mile now, but he felt something tighten in his chest when he saw smoke rising from a red pit of burning hell. That pit, as he drove closer, was her house. Tristan pulled off the side of the road and cut the engine. Spencer was at his door in a flash.
“What the hell, man?” his friend asked in a more panicked tone.
>
“Easy, dude,” Tristan said and picked up his phone again. It wasn’t even getting a signal. When he tried to dial her, it just sat on the dial screen before going black a few seconds later. The phone had a full charge. The cell companies were having problems. “Let’s roll.”
He grabbed the M4 on the seat, tucked a .45 he took from the armory into the front of his pants, and waited for his friend. Spencer came back with Kevlar vests. He didn’t always wear one, not caring much whether he lived or died. What did he have to come home to anyways? A storage locker with some wooden boxes full of silver coins? Now, he had people relying on him, so he shrugged out of his coat and into the vest. He dug an extra mag out of the ammo box on the backseat floor of the truck, locked it, and pocketed his keys. Once in Aswan, Egypt, his buddy left the keys in their car. It wasn’t there when they got back, and Tristan had to hotwire a piece of shit little white compact car that was probably from the 1970s and almost too small to fit them both inside just to get out of the equally shitty city before the local law enforcement figured out that they’d just killed someone who was causing the United States and Great Britain all sorts of trouble funneling millions of dollars to terrorist organizations.
“Let’s go,” he ordered.
Tristan jogged ahead, wishing he had some night-vision gear. They just didn’t keep that kind of stuff at their rinky little base. He’d just have to make do with the tiny amount of moonlight and the flames of Renee’s home lighting the way. It wasn’t too bad. There was plenty of cover with the brush and woods beside them. Once they came to where her yard started, though, Tristan took a knee and paused to assess the situation.
There were two dead men lying on the front lawn, another in the driveway. Her car was still there. The house was lit up like a roman candle on the Fourth of July. Men were walking around in the dark, creeping, some shouting to one another. A few were loitering near the tailgate of a pickup truck that he knew was not Renee’s. They looked like they were drinking.
Then he heard someone down the way in the dark yell, “There they are!”
Spencer touched his shoulder and nodded. He was thinking the same thing. The girls and Abraham made it out of the house and were trying to get away. He hoped he was right. Whoever that man was just talking about, he was in pursuit of someone.
Tristan rose and then froze a second later as he heard one of those things scream.
“Careful, brother,” Tristan warned. “Assholes aren’t the only enemy here tonight.”
“Got it.”
Somewhere behind the house, gunfire erupted. He saw the muzzle blast. Then he heard a man screaming in pain.
“That’s our queue. Let’s go,” he ordered and jogged down the road staying farthest to the left berm as he could to avoid being spotted. Spencer stuck right with him. Then they came to another house about a half mile away from Renee’s home, the direction of the spotter’s voice. He was right. The houses in this area were too close together.
The woods between the two properties opened up, thinned out, and became a yard that led to another home that was more of a two-story farmhouse style with an attached garage and wraparound porch. Three men were closing in on the front of it. Dogs were barking behind the house. One man opened fire through a glass sliding door on the deck. A woman screamed.
“Move,” he growled, sending Spencer in motion to flank from the left.
Tristan raised his M4 while running, took aim, and shot the man closest, which was probably about a thirty-yard target. He hit him in the middle of his back, startling the person and causing him to lurch forward and land face first. As he passed his prone body, Tristan fired again, this time into the back of the man’s skull. This wasn’t a leave-prisoners kind of situation. Nothing he ever got himself into was, so this was no different.
He kept moving at a fast click because the second man did a pivot at the sound of Tristan’s rifle and took off around the side of the house into the dark. Spencer fired and hit someone because they yelled out in pain. Tristan kept going.
Someone to his right near a small shed took a shot at him. It missed, and he raised his M4 and fired off four rounds to keep whoever it was at bay until he got to the cover of the house. On the other side of it, Spencer fired again. This time, the shot must not have been as clean as he wanted because it was followed up with a pause and then another round. His friend was using an old-style carbine.
Tristan spotted the one who’d run from him as he tried to climb a woven wire fence. He shot him in the ass. Then fired again into the man’s right side. Through the liver. He’d bleed out in minutes.
Then a barrage of gunfire came from his right, somewhere from the cover of those woods. He ran for the house. He needed his own bit of protection. Inside, a shot was fired. The man who’d shot through the glass door had run inside before he could get off a round. Now he was left to wonder if he was in there killing Avery. Or if she were even still alive.
He tried the doorknob for the garage and found it locked. With a hard kick, he was in. Squeezing around an older sedan, he went straight for the door that led inside. It was locked, too, so he also gave it a kick. It took three this time.
Once in, the house felt too quiet for all that was going on outside and around it. He weighed his options.
“Avery!” he called out after a second’s hesitation.
“Tristan?” she cried back.
“Yeah, it’s me,” he said, moving steadily forward. Behind him, someone breached the garage door.
“Just me,” Spencer quickly said and propped a piece of two by four under the handle. Then he joined him in the utility room and followed close behind Tristan.
“Tristan?” she called out again and appeared in the doorway. When she spotted him, Avery rushed over and threw herself against his chest weeping. “I-I thought you were dead. I tried to call…”
Four heavy rounds fired at the house startled her in his arms.
“Stay here. Where’s your brother and…”
As he was asking, Abraham and Renee came through the door. Spencer greeted her the same way Avery had him. Tristan didn’t have time for this. He wanted to finish the job. There would be time for greetings and high-fives and hugs or whatever later. He wasn’t used to this hugging shit in the middle of a battle and didn’t want to lose his edge.
“How many?” he asked her, stepping back.
“I don’t know. There were night crawlers out there, too.”
“We know.”
“We-we shot a few of those men,” Abraham said. “Avery and I.”
“Good,” he said and took Abraham’s gun. He released the magazine and jammed a few more rounds into it.
“I’m out of bullets,” she told him, to which he nodded.
“We need to move.” He looked at Spencer and mandated, “Avery and Renee stay between us at all times.”
“Got it,” Spencer acknowledged.
There was no time to talk now. They could explain everything later if they survived.
Tristan led the way with Avery behind him and her brother behind her followed by Renee and then Spencer as they went through the kitchen, into the dining room, and finally stopped in the living room. He didn’t pause when they came to a dead woman in the kitchen and a man who was probably her husband also dead close by.
Outside, he could hear men shouting. Off in the distance, he heard one of those crawlers scream. Avery said they were out there tonight. Either man or former man would be given no exemption if they were here with the intent to harm her.
He easily found the stairs leading up to the second floor and went first. When they all four reached the top floor, Tristan instructed Spencer with a hand signal to continue on.
“Where are…” Avery whispered.
“We’re taking a high position,” he explained and led her and Abraham to a bedroom. “Abraham, think you can keep this section of the yard clear if you shoot them from the window?”
“Yes, sir,” her little brother answered with conv
iction.
“Good,” he told him. “I’m taking Avery and going down the hall. We’ll hold our positions on this floor until we can’t. I’ll try to take the first shot. If you see them, shoot them. Assume whatever or whoever it is, they aren’t here to be your friend, man. Snipe them. It’s us or them, Abraham. After you shoot, duck fast. Once they see your muzzle flash, they’ll know your position. Don’t shoot at anyone until you have a clear shot. Make each one count. They start shooting back, get down and away from the windows, got me? Spence and I will keep them off you so you can get back up.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tristan gave her brother a firm squeeze on the shoulder. He was just a kid, but he also wasn’t one like he used to be, either. Then he led Avery to the corner bedroom that was separated from Abraham’s by a bathroom and closets.
“I don’t think…” she began protesting.
“I’ve got this,” he said. “Mostly, I’m just hoping Abraham fires off a few rounds to keep them from coming into the house. That’s why I put him over the front door.”
“Oh,” she whispered.
“Avery, stay over here, okay?” he said and took her to the other side of the room where he was sure she wouldn’t catch a bullet coming through the wall when he began this. “Stay down. If I get shot, take my rifle. Get the others and try to make a stand before getting outta’ here. Spencer will know how to provide cover fire to make sure you can take the others and get out.”
She shook her head. Tristan reached out and took her chin firmly in his hand to stop her.
“Don’t argue,” he said a bit too harshly, so he pressed a quick kiss to her forehead before crossing the room and easing up the window.
Without night-vision gear, this was going to be difficult. At least the front porch lights and the security lamp on the electric pole were helping. He quietly eased the window up.
He could hear them out there trying to whisper to one another as they approached the house again.
“I told you,” one said. “I swear I saw two dudes.”
