by D. J. Molles
He was slumped against the desk, eyes still open, still moving, still alive, still gripping his shotgun. Just stunned. Breathing little shallow breaths as he tried to get the air back in his lungs.
Angela was on fire. She didn’t think. Didn’t feel much else besides murder. She lashed out with her feet, kicking at the shotgun and sent it spinning out of his hands. It jarred him slightly and he seemed to regain a little of himself, turned to face her with a look of shock.
Don’t let him get you…
She couldn’t find any words. She opened her mouth but all that came out of her were noises that had no meaning. She rolled onto her back, tucked her legs in and managed to get her bound wrists underneath her butt. Then she rolled up into an almost-sitting position and began working her hands out from under her legs.
Just a few feet away, Jerry was getting a hold of himself, his hand going to the back of his head where it had struck the side of the heavy desk and nearly knocked him unconscious—but no, she hadn’t been quite that lucky.
He shook his head, blinked away some cobwebs. Saw her getting her hands out from under her. He turned, lunged for the shotgun. It had already fired, but Angela didn’t know whether the thing had fired one barrel or both. There might still be a live round of buckshot in it.
She worked her bindings past her feet, then launched herself at Jerry, looping her arms over his head just as his fingertips touched the shotgun. She hauled back like a wagon driver trying to stop his horses, the duct tape that bound her wrists together now becoming a noose around Jerry’s neck.
Immediately, his hands left the shotgun. He catapulted himself backwards, scratching at her hands. She landed on her back with Jerry on top of her, nearly knocking the wind out of her. He thrashed like a wild animal caught in a trap. Somehow her wrists moved from his throat to his face. He let out a wild yell and bit down hard on the meat of her palm. She screamed and jerked her hand away and at the same moment, Jerry twisted his head and rolled, like a crocodile trying to drown its victim.
This time she ended on top, straddling Jerry’s waist, the last bit of air still screaming out of her throat as she looked at her hand, a chunk of pale flesh missing from it and revealing the meaty workings underneath that quickly welled and began to spurt blood. She looked down at the bastard underneath her, saw him grin, the piece of flesh still hanging in his teeth. Then he spit it out and both of his hands rocketed up towards her neck.
She tried to lean away from them but her torso was not as long as his arms and they slipped around her neck and constricted. The world around her took on strange shades of red and green. She tried to make a noise but couldn’t. The two of them, smashed up against the side of the desk and Angela thinking, Not like this. Not for this sonofabitch. I won’t die for him.
She strained to look to her left, her eyes bulging out of the already-swollen flesh of her raw-beaten face. She reached for the desktop, her blue, numb hands scrambling clumsily atop it as she suffocated, her vision blackening. She seized upon something long, thin, and metal. She wasn’t sure what it was, but she got the impression of a tire pressure gauge.
She could barely feel her hands, but she sandwiched the object between them and forced her hands together, not holding it by any grip but simply by the force of her arms, so that the stem of it pointed downward. Then she leaned forward, oblivious of anything but the singular, insane idea that she was going to plunge whatever was in her hands into Jerry.
The sharpness of an object had little to do with whether it could be pushed inside of you.
Mostly, it had to do with force.
Jerry’s arms attempted to lock out, attempted to keep her away from him, scared to death of whatever she had found on the desktop, though he wasn’t even sure himself what that thing might be. But she just kept pressing forward, her bloodshot eyes insane, purple veins standing out around them. She put the stem of that object against the right side of his throat and began to press.
He tried to recoil, but she just kept pressing. He lunged for her hand, trying to bite her again, but it only buried deeper into his skin when he moved. His grip began to loosen, panic taking its toll on him. Angela could barely see anymore. She could feel unconsciousness hovering over her, ready to take her out. She wouldn’t let it. She had to keep pressing.
Jerry gasped, let go of her neck with one hand, at that was the worst mistake he could have made. The shaft of the thing plunged past the barrier of his skin, embedding itself in his throat and breaking through his windpipe.
His reaction was immediate and violent.
He let go of her throat, and it was like his entire body had been jolted with electricity. The movement was so sudden that it threw Angela off of him and he scrambled backwards towards the door, his throat making a strange, rasping, whistling sound as he tried to scream. Angela sat on the floor, trying to catch her own breath past her swollen throat. Jerry touched the little silver thing sticking out of his neck and tried to form words. Blood came out of it in a slow trickle.
Then he crawled through the door, rising to his feet as he went, clawing his way up the banister of the stairs and stumbling down them and disappearing from view. Angela watched him go for a moment, almost shocked at what had just occurred, almost sick to her stomach.
Almost.
She reached her wrists under the jagged metal corner of the desk and rubbed them, trying to get the metal burs to cut through the layers of duct tape. It took longer than she expected, but she didn’t stop. Sweat broke out over her forehead. She took a second to catch her breath, then went at it again. After a few minutes, the duct tape split and she ripped her hands apart with a cry of pain. It would be worse in a moment, she knew, as the feeling returned to them.
The shotgun still sat on the floor. She grabbed it with her ungainly hands, nearly dropped it twice. She had to put conscious effort into what each of her hands needed to do in order to grip the damn thing. After some negotiating, she managed to break the shotgun open.
She shivered uncontrollably as she looked at it.
One shell had a neat little pock-mark in its primer.
The other was clean.
If Jerry had been able to reach that shotgun, her brains would have been all over the office. She would have died right here, right in the same spot as Bus. Killed by the same man, with the same goddamned gun.
She swallowed all of that down. Ignored it for the time being.
Angela stripped the spent shell out, left the live one in. Slammed it closed.
She was going after her daughter.
CHAPTER 41: THE STEPS
Jerry stumbled down the stairs. Everything was a nightmare. Everything was falling apart. Why was this happening to him?
Maybe it’s not that bad, he thought desperately. I don’t feel like I’m going to die.
The thing protruded out of the side of his neck, like some cyborg creation inside of him had just sprouted through his skin, taking over his body. And he could feel it, he could feel the tip of it scraping the inside of his throat, like he had something caught in it, making him want to cough or swallow, or just do some damn thing to make it go away.
He leaned on the banister with one hand as he descended, gripped the object with other, terrified by having it there, but even more terrified by the concept of pulling it out. It was in his neck! In his fucking neck! What if it was the only thing keeping his blood inside of him? What it if was like a stopper in a barrel and if he pulled it he would just drain out?
“I need a doctor!” he tried to shout to anyone that would listen, but all that came out was a wheezing sound, like a broken harmonica.
He reached the bottom of the stairs and looked to his left. Two of the volunteer guards were at the front door of the building. One had the door cracked open, the muzzle of his rifle sticking out. He fired intermittently, but Jerry could not see was he was shooting at. The brass casings pinged off the metal doors and rolled to a stop at Jerry’s feet. The second guard just stood behind his friend, l
ooking scared.
Where was Greg? He spun in a circle, looking for the rest of the people that had volunteered to guard Camp Ryder. They weren’t really Jerry’s people, they were Greg’s people. Greg was the one that knew them, like the union representative knows all his blue collar buddies. They did what Greg told them, and Greg did what Jerry told him, so Jerry considered them his people by proxy.
But the Camp Ryder building was empty. He couldn’t see any of those people. He couldn’t find anyone to help him. He turned back to the two guards at the door, realizing that there was a gunfight going on out there, that he would not be able to make it to the medical trailer to get help. He tried to call out to the two guards at the door, but they didn’t seem to hear him.
Finally, the one that wasn’t shooting looked over at Jerry and stared at him. There was no recognition in his features. Just the same old black fear. The look of knowing that things aren’t going to end well. He seemed not only unimpressed by the fact that Jerry was calling to him, speaking to him directly rather than through Greg, but he also seemed unimpressed by the object embedded in his leader’s neck.
The guard threw a thumb over his shoulder and shouted over the thundering sound of the rifle in the narrow hall. “They’re out there! We’re fucking trapped in here! We’re fucking trapped!”
Jerry turned his back to the guards, faced the interior of the building. It stretched out, all the abandoned tables and chairs. All the little bits and pieces of shanties left over from Jerry’s order to move them out. Under the stairs, the room where Marie had set up her cooking station, now being used to hold Angela’s little brat and the brown kid. Kyle stood outside of the door, looking like he didn’t know what to do with himself.
He gave no reaction either to seeing Jerry.
No one seemed to know him, or care about his injury.
This had to be a nightmare.
He had to find a place to hide. He needed a place to lock himself in, where he could take a moment and think, and maybe figure out what to do with the thing in his neck. He started to feel woozy. Was he gonna pass out? Was he losing too much blood?
He pulled his hand away from it and looked at it. It was coated in a slick layer of blood. He tried to speak again as he saw this, and seemed to get a little better control of his voice. “I don’t wanna bleed to death,” he said, his voice raw, a murmur that sounded like a deaf person talking, which had always given him the creeps when he’d heard it. Even now. But he kept talking anyway.
“Somebody help me!” he mumble-screamed, ambling along the wall in his blank-minded state, looking for a place to hide. “Somebody fucking help me!”
But no one heard him, much less understood him.
Eventually he fell to his knees, less out of his body giving way, and more from sheer self-pity. He found himself just in front of an open door, dark on the inside. Another one of the small rooms that used to be offices and now held supplies of some sort or another.
He wheezed and felt something trickling up his throat. Spat and saw blood. He crawled into the room, still calling for help in unintelligible murmurs, and he hid in the darkness, thinking, Why God? Why do these bad things always happen to me?
***
Angela came out of the office like she’d been thrown out. She stumbled, barely caught herself from pitching headlong down the stairs. The interior of the Camp Ryder building was a racket of urgent noises. Two men at the bottom of the stairs, firing their rifles in that tiny space so that even their small arms sounded like the booming of cannon. They yelled at each other, and someone else was yelling but the noise of it was hoarse and nasally and no words could be clearly distinguished.
All of that was just distraction.
Below her, right below her, she could hear Abby crying.
It is the singular ability of a mother to be able to pull the sound of their children’s voices out of chaos, to hear them cry in between the screaming of wounded and the thunder of guns. She didn’t think about it, didn’t pride herself in it, she just moved forward, like Abby’s cries were tethered to her by a winch, pulling her in.
She clambered down the stairs, holding the shotgun between her hands. She still couldn’t get her hands to cooperate and she doubted that she could even pull the trigger. But if she needed to, she would find a way. She would figure it out, if it came down to it.
She paused at the bottom of the stairs, fearing that one of the two guards at the doors would notice her and take some sort of action. But the one man was entirely focused on firing shots out of the door, and the other was barely holding his rifle anymore, his face stricken. Angela looked at them for what felt like minutes, but was only a few seconds, wondering if she should risk simply walking out in front of them. Maybe she should hide the shotgun. Maybe…
The man with the sad face looked up at her and her heart felt like it was going to crumble. But he didn’t raise his rifle. He just shook his head and murmured something about being trapped.
Angela took the last step down, turned her back to him and walked stiffly around the stairs. When she turned the corner she could see Kyle standing there, rifle ported across his chest, pacing rapidly in front of the door behind which Abby and Sam were being held. She stood there, still as stone for a moment, not quite sure what to do. Kyle looked distressed himself, rubbing his head, his hand not on the grip of his rifle.
Angela raised the shotgun, somehow fumbled her finger into the trigger guard. She held the sawed-off piece out in front of her like a pistol, her elbows locked out, the entire structure of her body shaking violently. She marched forward, like the shotgun was a divining rod and she was forced to follow it towards Kyle.
“Hey!” she yelled, her voice harsh and cracked.
Kyle spun around and froze. He didn’t raise his hands in surrender, but he didn’t brandish his rifle either. It just hung there across his chest, muzzle pointed at the floor. Kyle’s eyebrows were squeezed up, jaw slack.
Angela shook the shotgun at him fiercely. “You have my fucking daughter?”
Nothing. Then a single nod.
“And you didn’t hurt her?” tears breaking the hard edge of her voice.
Kyle winced as though the insinuation were painful to him. “No.”
Angela waved the shotgun off to the left. “Go!” she shouted at him. “Get the fuck out of here! If I see you again I’m gonna fucking kill you!”
It was strange, his reaction. He turned, faced deeper into the Camp Ryder building. Confusion passing over his face, like he no longer recognized it, didn’t really know where he was. He took a step. Stopped. Didn’t look at Angela again, but asked a question of her anyway: “Did you kill Jerry up there?”
Angela thought about it. Her arms ached from holding the shotgun up. “I don’t know.”
And that was it. Kyle took a few steps, then broke into a jog, making a wide arc around her and heading back towards the entrance of the building where the rifles were still firing. Angela thought of shooting him anyway, because what if he went over there and started firing and shot one of Angela’s friends? What if he shot Marie?
What if he shot Lee?
“Mommy?” banging on the door. “Mommy!”
She forgot all about it. She ran to the door and ripped it open. Inside, Abby and Sam were seated on the floor, up against the wall closest to the door. Both of them bound behind their backs. And both of them immediately burst into tears of panicked relief when they saw Angela standing there in the door. She dropped the shotgun down on the floor next to them and grabbed them, because she had to touch them, put her arms on them, make sure they were whole and not hurt. Then she pulled them into an embrace, telling them they were okay now, they just had to sit tight for a little bit until all the shooting stopped. Then she reached behind their backs and began to work the duct tape from their wrists.
“What about Jerry?” Sam cried out as she worked. “What if he gets us again?”
Angela shook her head. “Lee’s out there, Sam. And he’s g
onna come for us. He’s gonna come for us.”
***
Lee’s entry team stalled at the front of the Camp Ryder building. The front doors were set back into an alcove, so that you had to run up stairs to get to them, and during that time you were completely exposed, backlighted, and hanging out in the fatal funnel. Possibly one of the worst doors Lee had ever encountered.
To make it worse, they had lost momentum on their push for the door because of a single guard, just inside the door, taking shots every time they peeked around the corner. It didn’t take long to develop a strategy to overcome this, but by then the momentum was gone. Ten, long, slow seconds eked by as Lee stood there at the corner, blinking bits of dust and debris from his eyes as the man behind the door sent round after round exploding through the corner of the cement blocks, just inches from Lee.
A gunfight is not a sterile environment. No decision is pondered all by itself. It is constantly moving, constantly developing, constantly changing. And in those long seconds, there were plenty of other things vying for his attention and his focus.
Jacob at the back of the stack, hard on that corner behind them. The shrieking, barking, chuffing noise of an infected as it rocketed around the corner and Jacob firing round after round, chipping chunks of flesh off and finally hitting it in the chest and neck and face and bringing it down just a few feet from where Jacob stood.
Out in the Shantytown, people cowered, the men and women hovering over their children like hens over their chicks, their arms encircling them as though it would protect them from a bullet, or an infected. There were still a few armed men running around from position of cover to position of cover, trying desperately to avoid getting caught by one of Lee’s snipers in the woods, but they had them caught in a crossfire and they were getting picked off one by one.
Ten seconds.
Lee looked to his left, having to keep his right eye closed involuntarily because he could not get the grit out of it. His stack was behind him, nearly flattened up against the wall, all bunched together and needing desperately to move from that spot, needing to get inside, away from the infected that kept pushing at them.
