by Gill, Bonnie
"Showtime," I say.
We went over the plan several times, and it will work if everyone sticks to it.
The van pulls into the driveway and parks. Two guys are in the front, and who knows how many in the back. The driver and passenger get out. We wait. There’s no way they only sent two people.
"Five guys are sneaking through the side yard. I'm sure the others see them, since they're not very stealthy,” Star whispers.
The two guys go into the house. The five guys surround it, pointing their weapons at the doors. We need them to go inside because it'll be so much easier to deal with them. I see a different man's head peer around the corner of the house. They must have another team that came in from the opposite side. I still don't see Seth. The weasel sent his flunkies here and was too cowardly to come himself. Now I'm pissed.
Several men make their way inside the house, their weapons in the firing position. There's a click from the radio. That's the ten-second signal. I count in my head, alternating the numbers with Mississippi for the countdown. I get to ten, and squeeze the trigger. Gunfire breaks out. I hit the two guys closest to me. Star hits another. They shoot back. Bullets ping off trees, rocks, and the side of the shed. Men fall over all around the house, grabbing at their bullet wounds.
Boom. The house shakes. Boom. Fire flares, and a lot of smoke billows out of the broken windows.
The van starts up and quickly backs out of the driveway. I peer through my scope at the driver. Seth. I fire at the windshield. The van stops, and men pile out from the back door of it. The vehicle pulls forward, and I shoot at the tires. I leave the safety of the shed to get a better shot.
"Raven, get back here," Star yells, but I'm focused. Seth is going down. I can't let him live.
A bullet whizzes past my head, and I duck behind a tree. The van is stopped again, and the driver's door opens. Seth uses it for cover. I disengage the magazine and snap in a full one. Seth's head pops up behind the door, looking for a target. I aim and fire but just miss.
Bullets pelt the tree I'm hiding behind. More men are on the ground. Good, we're making a dent. I glance behind me to see if anyone from our group has fallen. I squeeze the trigger until I'm empty. I reload.
The fire is raging through the house. The heat coming from it is almost unbearable. I run to a tree to distance myself from the inferno and to get a better shot. It sounds like a war, which it is. Bark splinters from the tree I'm hiding behind.
A guy runs from the van toward a group of trees, and I fire. He drops and screams, "Seth, help me." Seth turns and shoots him in the head.
There's more yelling and screaming. None sound familiar. I keep squeezing the trigger and snapping in new magazines. My ears ring and the noses become muffled.
A small group of zombies is filing down the street. Of course, they heard the gunshots and want to reap the bounty. It’s like a dinner bell to them. "Get the gabbies," I yell over my shoulder.
I aim at the van and shoot at the engine. I'm not going to let him drive away. The tires are flat on my side, but he could still try to drive the vehicle. If I take out the engine, he can’t go anywhere.
"Raven, give yourself up, and your friends can go free," Seth yells.
“Ha. Like that's going to happen. Do you think I would actually trust you to keep your word?" I yell back.
"You may want to reconsider," he says as one of his goons shoves a disheveled Helga from the back of the van. She spits on the man and kicks his shin. He punches her in the face. She collapses, and they jerk her to her feet by her arm.
"I'll put a bullet in her head," Seth says. "I'm not kidding."
Helga snarls at him. I still can't get a good shot at Seth because he's behind the door. I can shoot the guy holding Helga. If I do, Seth will shoot her for sure. I glance at Star. Fear is beaming from her eyes. I can't let Helga down. She's one of us. She stood with us, shoulder to shoulder, the last time we fought the gabbies. If it wasn't for me, she wouldn't be in the mess. She's family now, and I have to protect her.
"Raven, don't," Dean yells. But it's too late.
My mind is made up. I check the back of my pants, and the pistol I stuck back there is still tucked into my waistband. I also have a knife in my boot. "If I come out, you can't hurt her. You have to let her go." Deep down inside, I have the niggling feeling the douchebag is going to shoot her anyway. If I don't go out there, and he shoots her, I'll have to live with the guilt.
I step from behind the tree but not far. Two steps and I have cover.
"Drop your weapon, and put your hands up," he says.
I let the rifle fall from my hand and lace my fingers behind my head. "Let her go now."
"You were never very bright," he says.
I reach behind my back and pull out my pistol. I jump back to the tree and shoot Helga, she falls to the ground, a look of betrayal haunting her face. A shot rings from behind me, and the man that held Helga drops. Joey shot him. I run to another tree, shooting at Seth several times. He slams against the van, and his knees buckle. More shots sound. Splotches of red blossom over his chest as he lies flat on his back. I sprint to him. He's on his back, his chest bloody.
"You bitch," he says as foamy pink stuff is bubbling from his mouth.
“Shut up.” I raise my pistol and put two bullets into his head. Dead. An underwhelming sense of relief quietly flows over me.
Helga is on the ground with her hand on her shoulder. "You shot me. I thought we were friends."
"She saved your life," Joey says from behind me. "He was going to kill you no matter what she did."
"I'm so sorry, but I couldn't think of any other way to keep you alive," I say.
Her eyes clear, and there's an understanding behind those beautiful brown irises. Oh, she really is more lucid than she wants us to think. She winks at me.
"Let me look at it." Star cuts Helga's jacket and shirt with her knife. She wipes Helga's upper arm with the jacket material. A small hole pumps blood from her arm. "It's not bad. Nothing vital looks damaged. Good shot, Raven."
"I'm going to check on everyone else," Joey says.
There are more shots here and there coming from the area where the gabbies are. I see Dean and Mrs. Garcia walking around the group.
"I've got a live one here," Vinny yells over his shoulder while poking a guy with the barrel of his rifle.
"Ow. Don't kill me. Please," the guy begs.
I march over to them.
"How many more are there?" Vinny asks.
"There are four men and a bunch of women and kids at the base," the man says, tears streaming down his cheeks. There's blood pooling around his body, dark thick blood. Something major was hit. He's a dead man.
"Why do you want to kill us?" Vinny asks.
"Seth said if we didn't kill you, you'd kill all of us, including our children. Especially since we kidnapped the woman." He looks straight at me.
Of course, Seth fed them a bunch of lies. How else would he get a bunch of idiots to follow him?
Bile twists in my stomach. All these lives were lost because of Seth and his hatred of me.
"We need to leave," Joey says.
I walk back to the SUV we had parked off to the side. Helga is sitting in the backseat with a bandage wrapped around her upper arm.
"How's your wound?" I ask.
"It's okay. Star gave me a happy pill." She gives me a lopsided grin.
A wave of relief washes over me as I see everyone made it through alive. "Everyone okay?" I check everyone in our group and eye them from head to toe, looking for injuries. Ben is supporting Mrs. Garcia. There's blood on her leg.
"I'm okay. A bullet grazed my leg," she says.
"I'll take a look at it," Star says.
We load into the SUV. Daria, Star, and I get into the very back. Everyone else is piled inside. It's super cramped, but we only need to go a short distance to our vehicles.
Dean pulls up to a house in the middle of the block in the first subdivision we come to. "T
his house is clear," he says.
We check on the box truck which Dean had parked on the next street. The front door is open. "Did you guys lock the truck?" I ask.
"I did," Dean says.
23
We run to where the truck is parked. The roll up back door is up, and a cut lock lay on the ground. The inside is cleared out. The chickens, our food, the ammo—all gone. "They took everything," I say.
"We need to check out the other vehicles," Joey says. We rush to a white-sided house in the middle of the block with a front porch complete with rocking chairs. Joey and Vinny jog around the back of the house, weapons ready.
We take cover in the front. There's no telling if we're being watched. With my weapon in hand, I signal Star and Daria to follow me behind a bush. Dean is with the rest of our crew in the SUV.
"Who would take our supplies?" Star asks.
"It could be the survivors of the group that just attacked us or someone else. Who knows?" I say. This will probably happen again if we don't start better protecting our supplies. “It's easier to raid someone else's stash than it is to go hunting for it yourself.”
"They need to get their own stuff," Daria says with annoyance.
The garage door opens to reveal my truck, Joey and Vinny are standing next to it. I rush over and exhale a relieved breath. At least the supplies in my truck are still there. They packed our bug-out bags, tent, and most of my more important prepper items in it.
"Everything is here," I say.
"Do you want to stay with it while we check where we stashed Dean's truck?" Joey asks.
"Yes." I'm not leaving my truck or my things. At least, not for a little while.
"We'll stay and patch up Helga and Mrs. Garcia's wounds," Star says.
He nods and signals Vinny to follow him.
Dean pulls into the driveway. We help Mrs. Garcia and Helga into the house. Luckily, Star's medical supplies are also in my truck. Daria fetches the first aid kit for her.
We lay Helga on the couch. Her complexion is pale, and she has a thin sheen of sweat on her forehead. Guilt crashes into me. I shot her. I justify it by saying Seth would've killed her. Most likely he would have. I hand her a bottle of water from my backpack. "Here's some water. I'm so sorry."
She takes the water from me and drinks. "My amulet worked. I'm still alive." That's one way of looking at it.
"Raven, move out of the way. I have to remove the bullet. Go get the strong antibiotics," Star says.
I jump to my feet, grab her bag, and dig out all the prescription bottles.
Star has her instruments laid out on a plate with a paper towel underneath it. She wears latex gloves. "Go wash your hands. You're going to help," she says.
"I know nothing about this stuff," I say.
"You don't have to. Just hand me the tools when I ask for them."
I run into the kitchen, and there's some special hand soap on the counter. I scrub with a little brush, careful to get every bit of dirt lying under my nails and in the creases. I use another paper towel to dry my hands, and I pull on the latex gloves. I hold my hands up like the doctors on television so I don't brush them on anything while I walk into the living room.
Star washes Helga's shoulder with an iodine solution and points to some long tweezers.
I hand them to her.
She begins to work on Helga.
It takes forty minutes to remove the bullet and sew her up. There's a puddle of blood on the couch and floor. Helga is barely coherent. Star gave her some painkillers before we started. Her screams from the surgery echo in my memory.
"How's our patient?" Dean asks.
"She's hanging in there," Star says.
"The guys aren't back yet," he says. They should've been back a half-hour ago. I chew my lip. I hope nothing happened to them.
"I need to look at Mrs. Garcia's leg," Star says. She gets up from her seat next to Helga, washes her hands, and puts on new gloves.
"Raven, I need you to get some supplies from the vet’s office. I'm afraid to send you to a hospital or urgent care. That's ground zero for the gabbies." She totally ignored Dean. She doesn't want to think about the guys right now.
"Just let me know what you need." I look at Dean, "Did you check the subdivision?"
"Yeah, they may have gone to check on their house, but they haven’t answered their hand-held radio," Dean says.
"Star, make a list of everything you need. I'll go look for the guys and pick everything up on the way." I'm beat and just want to fall asleep. I'll have to give those guys a lecture.
"I'm going with you," Dean says.
"We leave in ten minutes." I pack my bug-out bag and load my weapons. I inventory my rounds, less than three thousand. They must have put some in the box truck.
Dean and I get into my pickup, and I back out of the driveway.
"First we hit the animal hospital, then we'll look for Joey and Vinny," I say.
"Good plan." Dean's tired and looks a lot older from the lack of sleep. The usual small bags under his eyes are like travel trunks.
The animal hospital is located on Route Twelve and a couple miles away. On the way, we pass some small groups of gabbies, but no hordes. They're still eating each other. Some were gathering around a body on the ground. The victim's arms and legs are moving even though the torso was almost hollowed out. When I pull into the animal hospital's parking lot, I notice an old Honda Civic parked in the back. Hopefully, no one is still working inside. I turn to Dean, "Ready?"
He pulls out his pistol. "Yep."
We break the glass in the door, reach in, and unlock it. Inside, it smells of death. We search the waiting room but, thankfully, don't see any gabbies. We check the four exam rooms, and they're also empty. Next, we head into the operating room where we find a couple of stainless-steel tables and different machines. We hear a soft barking in another room.
Dean glances over at me and shakes his head. He points to the cabinets that line the room. He goes through one and pulls out bandages, medicine, and IV bags and stuffs everything into the duffle bag.
We hear more barking and some banging coming from somewhere in the backroom. I give Dean my sad face and stick out my bottom lip. That poor dog has been trapped here this whole time.
"Get everything we need first, then you can save the dog," he whispers.
I check things off the list Star supplied, and we carry it out to the truck.
We creep to the back of the building where the kennels usually are kept. I open the door a crack and see a female gabbie crouching in front of a cage. I hold up one finger to Dean and bite the air, so he knows there’s a zombie inside.
We both rush into the room. The zombie stands and turns to us, blood and fur cover the woman gabbie’s purple scrubs. The smell is overpowering, blood, poop, and decomposing carcasses. She moves closer to me. I aim and squeeze the trigger. Her head jerks back, and she falls to the ground with a big hole in her head.
We check for any other threats, and I'm a little afraid to look inside the cages. Most of the bars are bent, and the kennels are sprinkled with bits of animal bones and fur. But, in the corner, a cage is intact. Inside is a little white dog with big brown eyes and pointed ears. It barks at me and shows its teeth. Poop covers the floor of its cage, along with an empty ripped up bag of food and a large, dry, water dispensing dish. I checked the rest of the cages, and they had the same setup. It's like someone knew they would need food and water for a while. It's too bad the other animals were eaten.
"Hey, little fella. Do you want to come with us?" I ask the tiny dog.
He peels back his lips and growls at me.
"It's scared. Just open the cage, and let's go.” Dean makes a hurry up motion with his hand.
"Is it safe? I've seen movies where they have zombie dogs," I say.
He bends down and stares into the cage. "It looks okay. It's a chihuahua. They hate everyone except their owners. Move it."
I unlatch the cage, and the little ankle-biter cha
rges out. He barks and snarls at me. On our way out, we grab two bags of dog food and a few bags of treats. We open the truck's door, and the little guy jumps inside. He sniffs the food bags. Dean opens the treats and gives one to the dog. He takes the treat and wags his tail.
I pull out of the parking lot. "I wonder how long that gabbie was harassing him?"
The dog jumps into Dean's lap, and he reads the tag on its collar. "His name is Goliath. That's a big name for a little dog." He scratches the dog behind the ears. Its tail is thumping the side of the center console. He's cute and seems to be happy to be free of that cage. He curls up in Dean's lap and closes his eyes. The dog has the right idea.
"Looks like you made a friend."
"Chihuahua's are lap whores. If they’re cold, a warm lap trumps their dislike of you." He pets the dog's stomach. Deep down Dean's a softy.
We pull down Joey and Vinny's street. Dean's truck isn't anywhere around that we can see. We decide not to go inside because they warned us about booby traps. Our next stop is back to the accessory shop. Vinny had mentioned their backpacks were inside the semi. We pull into the parking lot.
The semi was there, but their Mustang is missing. It looks like they stopped here, or someone stole their stuff.
"Where to next?" I ask Dean.
"Let's drive through the subdivision, and check on our patients." He scratches the little dog's belly. Goliath is fast asleep.
Rolling River subdivision is an area with older homes, big yards, and plenty of trees. We pull up to the white house where Star and everyone is waiting for us. "Should we stop and check on them first?" I ask.
"Everything looks okay. Let's go down the street to where the box truck was parked."
I go two blocks and make a right turn. Joey had parked the truck in front of a large gray house. The Mustang and Dean's truck are at the corner.
"What are they doing now?" I drive down the road. On the front lawn of a brick house are Joey and Vinny. Their hands are in the air, and their pants are around their ankles. A teenage boy is pointing a gun at them. A little girl with a fuzzy unicorn backpack stands next to the older boy.
