by Schow, Ryan
She spun around a tree, hiding, her gun up and waiting.
The second they passed by her, she emptied every last round into them. The first three went down quick, but then her weapon fired dry.
She dropped the pistol, grabbed her knife, slashed at the nearest man, opened up a gash in his throat, dodged a bullet, slapped the gun away and buried the blade in the nearest man’s chest. She tried to yank it out, but instead used the man as a shield, bullets ripping through the body, blood splashing her, getting in her eyes.
She wasn’t hit, but she couldn’t see.
The man’s body collapsed, a fist coming in fast. Her head rocked back, she stumbled away and fell, tried pawing the blood out of her eyes. There was no time! She saw the man through a tinted red haze. It was too late. Scrambling backwards, she tried to get away.
He grabbed her leg, looked at his gun, the slide all the way back, the mag empty. Tossing it aside, he rolled her over, climbed up her back.
She was clawing at the soft earth, desperation roaring through her. He punched her back, her sides, beat on her arms until she couldn’t move them. When she was as weak as she ever was, when he flipped her over, they both looked at each other, both breathing heavy.
The man was unshaven, his skin pockmarked, his eyes wild with the hunt. Smiling that sick, victorious smile, he started to hit her, the punches coming in slow, but hard.
Her head rocked one way then the other, over and over again.
At first she braced herself for each labored blow, trying to lift arms that would not lift, but then it became useless. Her mouth opened up in cuts that draped strings of bloody saliva across her cheeks.
She’d always wondered what it took to let go of the fight. At what point does a person break? She knew now. It’s when you lost feeling in your body and you looked at each raining blow as one more step toward the end.
He stopped for a moment, took a big breath, looked down at her. From his perspective, he was looking at a woman who would not die. Blood was splattered all over her face, her nose bloody and broken, her right eye swelling shut. She wasn’t even fighting him anymore.
He was resolved to ending her for what she just did to his men, but when he took that next breath and lifted that punching arm, something hit him so hard, it blasted him off the top of her, Stephani’s body rolling sideways, her head flopped over facing the attack.
Skylar was suddenly there, on top of the man, plunging her blade into the man’s chest over and over again, like a banshee—ten times, twenty times, thirty times—before she stood and started stomping on his head.
She did it until the thing cracked like a broken cantaloupe.
When she turned to Stephani, she saw her own flesh and blood, let out a whimper at the sight of her. If she was only a few minutes earlier, she could have stopped this. But there she lay, bloody, beaten, dead.
The tears coming fast, she walked over to Stephani, saw her blink, then broke into a grateful sob. She fell to her side and said, “Oh my God, you’re alive!”
“Barely,” Stephani said, blood drizzling out of her mouth.
Skylar quickly grabbed her cousin by the shoulders, dragged her into the brush, slid a gun into her hand and said, “I’ll be back. Close your eyes.”
Stephani did as she was told.
Skylar then covered her body as quickly as she could with pine needles. When she was done, she said, “I promise, I’m coming back for you.”
What Stephani wondered in that moment was whether or not Skylar would make it. If she didn’t, no one would know where she was.
At least she had a gun.
Skylar broke out of the tree line only to see one man launching a rocket propelled grenade. She shot him twice but it was too late. The rocket was gone.
She was suddenly hit from the side by another man, spun around, knocked down. She kept her gun, fired it up into his crotch, scrambled to her feet, kept moving. Bullets were coming from behind her, or ahead of her. There were bullets flying everywhere. She ducked under the bottom of a truck, crawled to the other side, shot up at three men, killing all three.
Logan and Harper were now moving through the forest, taking fire and firing back. Both of them were bloody, but judging by the way they were moving, both were wearing other people’s blood.
Up the line, Ryker shot a guy in the crotch. He doubled over, done for. Ryker sprinted into a hailstorm of gunfire, dove on top of the guy. He grabbed the man’s jacket looking for ammo, found a grenade instead, then scuttled under the truck. Without allowing himself a moment’s thought, he pulled the pin, tossed the explosive a few vehicles down, then scampered out the other side and ran into the woods.
When Ryker’s grenade exploded, Harper, Logan and two other shooters used the distraction to move their assault forward. The line of men headed their way, however, was massive—a hundred soldiers easy, all of them sprinting up the interstate to join the troops already in battle.
Noah said to Connor, “Let’s go,” but he found he couldn’t get up. Turning to his friend, he saw the man’s face changing color.
There was a flood of red down his face, but he was slowly pawing it out of this eye, the effort monumental.
“That bee sting was something else,” Connor said.
Both men were lying prone.
“They got my head, in case you can’t tell,” he mumbled, blood bubbles in his mouth. “You got any rounds left?”
“Some,” Noah said, his voice raw.
“Let me have them,” Connor said. “You get out of here.”
“Shut that crap trap, talking like that,” Noah replied, his words nearly unintelligible.
Turning back around, he saw the Jeep that Ryker had blown up, and then he watched a dozen men meet their makers. After that, there wasn’t much ammo left, and the surge of men converging on them numbered in the hundreds.
“Get your ass up, Connor,” Noah grumbled. “We’ve got our window.”
“Can’t make it, brother.”
“Yes, you can,” he said, barely getting up himself.
Noah turned back around, lined up a shot on another SAA man with an RPG. He fired on the man, aiming for center mass, hitting him in the inside of the thigh. The shooter bent forward hard, the RPG firing off into his own people.
Across the way, the explosion gave an advantage to Ryker, so he broke cover, ran right into the smoky highway, firing on the men running from the explosion. He fired until his rifle was empty. Not missing a beat, he snatched up another from a dead soldier, dropped to a knee and started picking them off as they came through the smoke.
“Cover Skylar’s six!” Ryker told Logan, who was suddenly there beside him.
Logan spotted Skylar ahead, watched her heading for a pack of ten or fifteen SAA men. She started shooting into the crowd, but then they all ducked down and Logan lost sight of her.
“That woman is insane!” Ryker rumbled.
Logan was already moving, his leg now numb and kind of dragging. But then a surge of enemy soldiers converged on them and all they could do was turn and run. Ryker and Logan both paused, unable to go just yet. Neither wanted to leave Skylar.
“She’ll be okay,” Logan said.
It was enough for Ryker, so the two of them hit the western edge of the interstate, looked back at the line and saw the entire army converging on them.
“Time to get to the hills,” Ryker said.
He took off, but Logan said, “I’ll catch up. Get to the kids!”
Logan wasn’t even sure if Ryker heard him. No matter, he turned around and went back for Skylar. Harper screamed his name from across the interstate, but there was no time. He heard gunfire from the left, wondered if it was her and made a bee-line toward the noise.
When he got to an opening, he saw a smattering of dead men, one of their faces smashed in. Another man was lying on the ground, dying. Something was crawling out of the pine needles, her face bloody as hell.
“Stephani?” he said.
“Skyla
r.”
“She’s this way,” he said, pointing into the abyss. He quickly helped her up, but she looked like a horror show. “Can you keep up?”
“Just go,” she said. “I’ll follow you.”
Stephani wiped her face, the entire thing swollen, then started in the direction he’d pointed to. Logan grabbed a few of the weapons and headed to Skylar’s last known location.
When he was close enough, there were men circling the interior cab of a troop truck. They shot out the windows, but then a rip of bullets cut through the side of the door and three men standing around the truck dropped.
Logan rushed in from behind them, killing everything he saw. Unbeknownst to Logan, Stephani had positioned herself outside the fight. When the men converged on Logan, she lit them up with gunfire.
“Skylar, you in there?” Logan called out.
“Logan?” she said, a face popping up from the footwell.
“We have to go, now!”
Skylar scrambled out of the truck, over the bodies, then high-tailed it into the woods. They were all worked over pretty good, but Stephani had it the worst.
“Couldn’t stay away,” she told Skylar.
Skylar’s smile was contagious, for she was happier than ever to see her cousin.
The three of them made their way through the forest, hustling along on low energy, but managing to stay ahead of the hundreds of soldiers now closing in on them.
Looking down the line, Ryker saw bodies scattered everywhere. He and the others thought they were doing okay, but the truth was, they were getting slaughtered out there.
There was just too many of them and this was not the battle of Thermopylae. Five Falls didn’t have three hundred trained, armed and committed Spartans. All it had was a bunch of regular people with the will to defend what was once theirs to the best of their ability.
It was time to admit they couldn’t hold them off forever. Still, they tried, but then the calls started coming in through the Uniden.
“I’m out of ammo, can’t get to more,” and “I’m out,” and all kinds of variants of that. Finally someone said, “Pull back,” and that’s all it took.
People were anxious to retreat, seeing the dead mounting, seeing their brothers and sisters, their friends and lovers being killed.
He saw Boone and Clay moving swiftly into the woods, chased by an SAA man. He shot at the brothers but missed. Boone spun around, dropped him with a head shot.
That’s when Logan saw Connor and Noah. They were stocked better than most thanks to Noah’s ammo vest, but how much ammo did they have left?
Logan whistled for them, but they didn’t move. Noah’s weapon discharged. The old man worked the bolt, slow but steady. Logan knew the veteran was still a hell of a shot. He’d be okay, but what if he didn’t know they were retreating?
Through his rifle, Noah was picking them off. The old man and Connor fired until they were out of rounds.
Noah finally got up, tried to drag Connor away, but the man was too big.
“Get on your feet!” he screamed as distant gunfire broke through a sudden pocket of silence. Connor showed Noah a lighter and stick of dynamite. Noah let go of his shirt, dropped him back down in the dirt. “You gonna go out in a blaze of glory?”
Noah was shot, too, but not as badly as Connor.
“Gonna get as many of them as I can,” Connor said, his face slack, blood dripping out of his mouth. “Get out of here. I got this.”
Noah shook his head, then turned and headed back to the bug out location. He only got so far before he stopped, turned around and looked at Connor on the ground, waiting.
He couldn’t do it. Emotionally or physically.
Noah pulled his blade from its sheath, felt the energy waning inside him. He knew he couldn’t make it to the bug out location. It wouldn’t matter anyway. He was no coward, so he wasn’t going to run and leave his friend to die alone.
When he heard the approaching men start screaming in Spanish, he hobbled/trotted back to Connor. His friend had been shot several times, but by some miracle he pushed himself up enough to lob the TNT into the crowd of them.
Shots were fired, Connor falling backwards. The dynamite blew the hell out of a lot of men, and it gave Noah the cover to get back to Connor. The foul smelling smoke drifted over them both. Noah knelt down in time to catch Connor in his final moments of life.
“Chest,” Connor uttered, gulping for air.
His eyes were wide and weak, focused on something else entirely, the other side perhaps. Even his face had the pallor of death.
Noah looked his friend over with a deep pain in his heart, his gaze caught on Connor’s blood stained lips, and the strings of red draping across his cheeks.
Speaking louder than normal, his hearing obviously damaged by the blast, Connor said, “Tell Orbey, Skylar and…Stephani…”
“I will,” Noah said, both amplifying and accentuating his words.
Blood had trickled out of his ears.
“Did I get them?” he asked.
The thick smoke was starting to thin out, the threat of exposure becoming real. Noah fell into a coughing fit that hurt everything in him, especially the bullet holes he didn’t realize he had.
“Hell yes you did,” Noah said. He looked through the haze, knew what he had to do. “And I’m about to get us some more.”
“You have to go,” Connor said, blood in his teeth, tears in his eyes.
“I ain’t getting out of this alive either, brother. You just warm up God with a joke or two when you get there because I’m coming, and boy do I have a lot to answer for.”
Connor laid his head down, glanced up at Noah for a moment, then his eyes settled and his chest stopped moving.
For the first time in a long time, Noah’s heart ached and his eyes got a bit shiny. Patting his dead friend’s shoulder, he said, “I’m right behind you, brother.”
Waves of thinning smoke surrounded him, causing him to cough.
A few shots were fired, some of them hitting things behind him. Noah got up, pushed through the haze, nearly tripped over one of the men Connor blew up.
He was alive, but an arm and a leg were blown off. He picked up the man’s rifle, fired it, but it was broken. Squinting, pulling his shirt over his mouth and nose, he moved to the next man, his lungs burning, his eyes stinging, his body quickly giving out on him.
When he found a gun that worked, he pushed forward past the bodies and the smoke, staggering really badly now, coughing out sprays of blood, his eyes stinging so hard he could barely keep them open.
It was when he stepped out of the haze that he saw what was on the other side of all of that smoke. There was the convergence of a hundred of men easy, some of them pulling bodies out of the mist, most armed and ready to rain down hell.
They all stopped and looked at him.
He looked back and smiled.
Then he fired the weapon as quickly as he could, and maybe he got a few of them, but the loud noise and the pelting that first hit and staggered his body became a roar of gunfire that kicked his soul clean from his body.
Across the way, Ryker watched the old man go down hard. Noah, a.k.a. Edward Scisserand, now lay there, arms splayed out, his body riddled with bullets, his head unmoving.
Dammit, this hurt. Not much shook him, but he knew the pain of this one would last. Ryker turned and ran for the hills, taking sporadic fire before glancing back one last time. The ache inside him started to spread.
The SAA soldier stepped around Noah’s body, pressing forward, telling their men to make a path around the trench, and to kill anything and everything in their path.
As he hit the hillside road heading up to the Madigan’s house, Ryker saw a Jeep racing up the winding road. For a second, he thought he saw Orbey driving.
“What the hell?” he said out loud.
That’s where the chopper had been headed.
A few minutes later, he wasn’t sure if the Jeep beat the chopper, or what happened,
but there was a massive explosion right where the Madigans lived.
Orbey, he thought, suddenly weak.
Oh God, this is horrible.
Then it occurred to him that Cooper was there. Did she go after the dog? Another explosion shook the earth. He caught up to a slow moving crowd of women and injured men.
“We have to hurry!” he said, helping the slowest of them.
But then the chopper was overhead, making a sweep of the hillside. Everyone started running, but they were out of energy, so they were slow.
The man in the gun pod opened fire on the masses. Bodies dropped, including the one he was helping. He took off with the others at a dead sprint, barely reaching cover as the chopper circled back around. He couldn’t outrun the damn thing. But for the gunner to hit him, he’d need to be exposed as well.
Ryker lined up a shot, didn’t have it. But he had rounds, so when the mini gun opened up on the rest of the survivors, Ryker opened up on the chopper. The bird banked hard, left them for richer pastures, but not before claiming eight more lives.
When he got to the bug out location, he looked around. Everyone was tucked into their shelters as planned. Boone, Clay and Harper came in after them, helping a group of the weak and injured. Felicity followed next, uninjured, but clearly shaken. She hugged Clay, then just held him, her eyes vacant, her face a mask of despair.
“Where’s Orbey?” Harper asked.
“She was up at the house,” Ryker said with a lump in his throat. “But the chopper…the explosion…”
Their faces paled.
If they lost Orbey, if something happened to this woman, the very best of them, all this would be for nothing. But if she was still alive, Ryker knew she’d never be the same. Not without Connor, and maybe not without Skylar. Where the hell was Skylar?
Clay said, “Where’s the rest of them?”
He was asking about Logan, Stephani and Skylar. Ryker sat down, dropped his head in his hands and realized this was not just a bad idea, this was the worst idea ever. They’d stood their grounds and failed. Half the town was dead. And what did they do? As Skylar would say, they were mice who slowed down the elephant. Until the elephant stepped on the mice.
