Many of Rob’s new companions were facing other directions. The mob was on all sides.
There wasn’t enough firepower aimed at the rushing mob.
Rob couldn’t take them all out himself.
Olivia didn’t know what she was doing.
And the kid wasn’t a whole hell of a lot better.
It was up to Rob.
He glanced at the kid. There was something about him that reminded him of his own son. He didn’t know what it was. After all, his own son had only been four years old. But there was something about the attitude, the diligence and determination that was spread across Dan’s face.
Rob knew what he had to do.
The door to the car was already open. He reached in, grabbed Olivia roughly by the arm, and yanked her towards him.
“What are you doing?” she cried out.
Rob could barely hear her. Her cry sounded faint and distant.
She fought against him.
But Rob was stronger. Her pulled harder.
He let his AR-15 drop out of his hands. It hung behind him at his side on its sling.
He grabbed her with both hands and pulled her completely out of the car.
“What!” she screamed at him.
Her face looked up at him. He saw the betrayal that she felt.
But there wasn’t any time to explain.
He had to act fast.
“What are you doing, Rob? Rob!” it was the kid, shouting at him.
“I’m going in. Don’t hold back your fire!”
“What? What the hell are you talking about?”
They could barely hear each other.
“Don’t hold your fire!” shouted Rob again. “Don’t hold your fire!” He needed the message to get through. No matter what. He needed Dan to understand.
Olivia lay on the ground at Rob’s feet. She was in pain. It was all over her face. He’d probably hurt her injury by yanking her out of the car like that, dumping her on the ground. But he was doing it to save her life.
Rob stepped over her and slid into the passenger’s seat.
The keys were still in the ignition.
The car was still running.
He glanced at the gas gauge.
It was on empty.
But he didn’t have to drive far.
“What are you doing?” screamed Dan.
Rob knew what he was doing. And there wasn’t time to respond.
He threw the car into reverse and hit the accelerator.
He jammed his boot to the floor. The engine roared. But he barely even heard it over the ringing in his ears.
The wheels spun in the dirt.
Would the car move or was it stuck?
The wheels kept spinning.
Finally, something happened. He felt the jolt as the tires dug out of the rut.
The car rocketed backwards.
That was good. He hadn’t been sure it was going to make it. It had taken a lot of damage from the people he’d run over.
Rob had one hand on the wheel, his other arm extended. His whole body was turned and he looked out the back windshield, which wasn’t yet shattered.
The car was rear wheel drive. But he didn’t have to turn it much.
He headed in a straight line right for the rushing mob.
He hit the first one.
A sickening thud.
If there was a scream, he didn’t hear it.
The gunshots around him didn’t let up.
Rob’s boot didn’t budge from the accelerator.
He knew he was going down. He knew this was his last drive. He knew these were his last moments.
He just hoped that Dan would keep shooting as he’d ordered.
Rob had to take out as many of them as he could if the kid and the others were going to have a chance.
It didn’t seem strange to sacrifice himself for people he barely knew. It didn’t feel good either. It didn’t really feel like anything at all.
The only feeling Rob had was that he had a purpose. He had a goal. He was going to make it work.
He let his eyes close for a brief moment as the car careened backwards. He saw his family there.
A thud.
Another one down.
Rob opened his eyes.
There were some of the mob members off to his right.
Rob yanked the wheel hard.
The car swerved.
He hit them with the side of the car.
Then another impact.
The car shuddered.
The back wheels spun uselessly.
The car was tilted slightly.
The wheels were stuck in some kind of rut. Or a ditch.
There were people all around him. They crowded the car. He saw the violence on their faces.
They’d surrounded the car.
Good. He’d distracted them.
Now all the kid and Max and the others had to do was keep shooting. They just needed to realize that Rob was a lost cause, and not to worry that they’d hit him with friendly fire.
Rob couldn’t tell if they were shooting or not. There wasn’t any point in worrying about it.
Two strong hands reached in at him through the passenger’s side window. The window was down.
Rob pulled on the sling of his gun, got it into position. His hands gripped it.
It wasn’t a bad way to go out. Gun in hand. Fighting the good fight. There were worse things that could have happened.
His finger was working the trigger.
The gun recoiled in his hands.
Someone was yanking the driver’s side door open. Rob hadn’t had time to lock it. Wouldn’t have mattered, anyway.
Rob picked up his feet and spun his body around on the battered upholstery.
He was facing the open driver’s side door. He kicked with both feet. One boot collided with someone’s stomach. The other slammed into the door. Pain shot through him.
He got his gun facing the right way. He pulled the trigger.
Someone screamed.
Blood.
Someone fell.
Someone grabbed the gun. Gaunt thin hands that shouldn’t have been as strong as they were.
Four hands on the gun. Now six.
He couldn’t hold onto it.
He pulled the trigger one last time. A bullet went somewhere. He wasn’t sure where.
The gun was yanked from him. His hands hurt from trying to hold onto it.
He saw the gun go out of view. Any second, he was expecting it to be turned on him.
But the mob wasn’t thinking. Through the crowd of hands and bodies in front of him, he glimpsed the gun one last time as it fell, unused, to the ground.
Hands were on him. They were trying to pull him from the car.
Rob grabbed his handgun. The safety was off.
He took aim at the nearest head. He pulled the trigger. The gun kicked and the man fell, most of his face missing.
Before Rob could pull the trigger again, hands were on the handgun.
He pulled the trigger anyway.
A scream.
A bullet had pierced someone’s hand. Maybe two hands.
But the gun was ripped away from him.
Rob kicked out with his boot as hard as he could.
But hands caught him around the ankle and pulled him from the car.
Rob’s head slammed against the car as he fell.
He was on his back in the dirt.
They were all around him. Too many to count.
It was the end. But at least he’d taken a lot of them out.
But it wasn’t quite the end.
Rob reached for his knife. A large, combat style knife. Sharpened on both sides. Made of good steel.
Boots and shoes and bare feet collided with his stomach. They were kicking him all over. On his back. His shoulder. His feet.
A piece of wood swung like a club and smashed into his skull.
His vision went funny.
Knife in hand, Rob swung his
arm. The knife slashed against an ankle. Someone screamed.
Why weren’t they shooting?
Rob would have preferred going out by friendly fire if it meant that he’d done something. The whole point was to distract them enough that the kid and the others could take them out one by one. But it seemed like they were delaying for the sake of Rob.
But Rob knew he was gone anyway.
And then it happened.
He didn’t hear the gunshot. There was too much gunfire. Too much chaos and too much noise.
He didn’t see the bullet slam into the torso. But he saw the result. He saw the woman falling, and he saw the bullet wound.
They were shooting.
What he’d done had mattered. He accomplished what he’d set out to do.
Another one fell. Another bullet wound.
Something slammed into his head again.
His vision went black.
28
Mandy
“Max!”
But it was too late.
He wasn’t stopping.
“Max! Stop!” called out Mandy, as loud as she could. Her voice sounded frantic and she didn’t care.
Max was sprinting towards the car. Sprinting towards the group that had surrounded Rob.
Mandy hadn’t seen it until it was too late. She’d been busy with the other side.
When she’d finally turned, Max had already been running across the dirt. He carried only his Glock. His coat and pants were torn. His gait was uneven because of his leg.
She couldn’t see his face. But she knew what expression she would have seen.
Mandy didn’t know who the man in the car was. And neither did Max.
But he was still risking his life for him.
Mandy trained her rifle on one of the men who was beating the stranger on the ground. It looked like they were about to kill him. Or maybe they already had.
Mandy could make it easier for Max.
She pulled the trigger.
But nothing happened. It seemed like it was jammed.
Mandy’s brain was a mess. She couldn’t remember what she was supposed to do. She slammed her fist into the rifle in frustration and tossed it to the side.
All around her, her friends were still fighting.
The mob had been thinned considerably. They’d almost made it. But those who were left were still coming.
Georgia was picking them off one by one with machine-like precision and control.
John and Cynthia had ventured into the fray, into the scattered mob. They were shooting them at closer range.
Some of the mob were lying on the ground, half alive. Some had given up, and were simply sitting in place.
Others were still fighting, still rushing the van.
The mob was a broken mess. Disorganized and destroyed.
But still dangerous.
Max, off in the opposite direction of Cynthia and John, was firing as he ran. His Glock was held outstretched in front of him.
Mandy grabbed her own handgun and dashed off towards Max.
A hand reached out for her. It was a man in his twenties, wearing no shirt and nothing but tattered underwear. He held a meat cleaver in his other hand.
The cleaver swung towards Mandy.
She shot him with her handgun. It was almost all automatic. She barely had to think about it.
She took aim and pulled the trigger and the young man fell, his cleaver falling with him in his clenched fist to the ground.
Mandy sprinted away from the body, towards Max.
Someone was running behind her. She checked over her shoulder. It was a kid with a gun in his hand. He wasn’t part of the mob.
She ran on.
She didn’t fire as she ran. She didn’t want to hit Max.
She heard the Glock discharging.
She reached Max as he was plunging his knife into someone’s stomach.
There was someone coming for Max, two hands on a stone that swung towards his head.
Mandy raised her gun, took aim at the woman’s head, and pulled the trigger.
The bullet struck the woman in the arm. She didn’t collapse, but the rock smashed into the ground rather than Max’s head.
Max spun and, without hesitation, plunged his knife right into the woman’s stomach.
The kid reached them, panting and out of breath, his gun raised.
The man who’d driven the car lay on the ground, bleeding from his head.
Mandy looked around. The mob was scattered. Most of them lay on the ground. Many of them were dead. The rest were injured, moaning and screaming and crying.
Mandy’s ears were ringing. She was partially deaf.
The kid got down on the ground, dropping his gun into the dirt. He got both his hands on the stranger and started shaking him, as if he was trying to revive him. He was saying something, but Mandy couldn’t hear what it was.
Max put his hands on the crying kid and pulled him away.
Mandy saw him open his mouth, but she heard nothing.
As Mandy looked around, her heart sank.
They were alive. Mandy and Max. John and Cynthia. James and Sadie.
But she didn’t feel joy or triumph.
Her body was so weak she felt like she might collapse to the ground at any moment.
The carnage around them was horrible. Terrifying. And completely real. She could close her eyes, but it would never go away.
This was the world she lived in now.
29
Max
Max woke up with a headache. His leg hurt and his entire body was sore from yesterday. He’d pushed it harder than he had in who knew how long. Maybe ever.
But he was alive. They were all alive. Except for Rob, who Max had barely met.
“You awake?” said Mandy, who lay beside him.
Max nodded.
“How’d you sleep?”
“Not good,” said Max.
He didn’t elaborate, but his dreams had been filled with nightmarish images of the carnage from yesterday.
“Me neither,” said Mandy.
Max closed his eyes again, remembering yesterday.
It had seemed more like a series of days than a single day. The reality was, he didn’t know how long it had all taken. His automatic watch, which had proven so durable on countless misadventures, had finally broken. The acrylic crystal hadn’t cracked, and there were no marks on the stainless steel case, but the watch had finally stopped ticking. No matter how much he shook it or wound it, the red seconds hand didn’t move.
The battle hadn’t felt like it had really ever ended. There’d been no final victory to celebrate. There’d been no decisive moment that they had all seen.
Sure, Rob, whose name Max had finally learned, had helped turn the tide of the rushing mob. But the battle had continued after that.
The battle had simply continued to wind down, further and further.
Max and the others had split up into groups of two. They’d wandered the battlefield, walking between the corpses and the injured. For those that weren’t yet completely dead, but lay bleeding out onto the dirt, Max and the others had shot them in the head. Usually point-blank range.
The images were still in Max’s head. He’d shot more than the others. Mandy could barely stomach it. She’d shot one woman in the head, whose arm had almost been torn off, and then she’d thrown up. Mandy had been able to keep it together in the battle, but then the horror of the whole thing had come crashing down on her like a tidal wave.
The adrenaline of the battle had gradually worn off and they’d all been left exhausted, with the task of finishing the mob off.
It didn’t seem like many of the mob had gotten away. When things had gotten bad, they’d started attacking each other.
Max remembered finding two men fighting each other. They’d been slashing at each other with axes, anger and rage on their faces. By the time Max had gotten to them, they were on the ground, both of them bleeding. They’d been lying on their
backs, too injured to get back on their feet. They’d both been dying, bleeding rapidly out onto the dirt. But they’d still been slashing at each other, picking their arms up and letting them fall with the weight of the axe in their hand, hoping to strike one final blow.
It had been senseless. Senseless violence just for the sake of expressing frustration and anger.
Max had shot each in the head with his Glock. He’d done it calmly, his face impassive. He’d felt nothing when he’d done it. Nothing at all.
Now, the next day, he wasn’t sure what he felt. He was pretty sure it was still nothing. Except for the headache and the bodily pain.
They’d fallen asleep outside, and the ground was cold.
Max opened his eyes again and sat up.
Bodies were everywhere. It’d been all they could do to put the injured ones out of their misery.
Today was cleanup day, taking the bodies off somewhere else. Or else move camp. And they weren’t going to do that.
John and Dan were out there, walking together between the bodies. It looked like they were talking, but they were too far away to overhear.
Mandy sat up beside Max.
“What are you thinking about?” she said.
Her hair was a mess. It was tangled and a clump of it had been torn away. Her face was dirty and sweaty.
But to Max, she’d never looked better.
“I can’t believe we’re alive,” he said.
Mandy flashed him a little smile with just the corners of her mouth.
Max leaned towards her and she leaned in towards him.
Their lips touched and they held them there for a moment, not moving them.
“Max,” called out someone. “Max!”
Mandy pulled away from Max and pushed a strand of hair behind her ear.
Max looked up.
It was Dan, the kid who’d arrived yesterday, the one that he and Mandy had set out for.
He was walking towards Max with a serious expression on his face and his hand outstretched.
Max took it and Dan shook it vigorously.
“I know we met yesterday, but I just wanted to… introduce myself again.”
Max nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yesterday was intense. How you holding up?”
“Fine,” said Dan. He had an eagerness on his face that hadn’t been totally wiped out by yesterday, by the carnage, by the death of his friend.
Getting Home_A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Thriller Page 16
