Gun (Gun Apocalypse Series Book 1)

by Lee Hayton

  Annie whistled.

  Rebekah hooked the tiny metal circle with her forefinger, pulling out the pin, then snapped the safety aside with her thumb. She looked down to check that she had done the job, her heart beating so hard her eyes wavered with every pulse.

  A hook with a small post dangling from it hung off her finger. The grenade itself didn’t look any different. Even when she released her tight grip, so the lever snapped out from the body.

  If the company producing them asked for her feedback, she'd instruct them to put a pulsing red light on the weapon to show it was primed and ready.

  How long have I been looking at it?

  Rebekah jerked and ran toward the door, drawing back her arm and hurling the grenade. It struck the post of the porch railing and ricocheted back, bouncing on the hardened earth.

  She pinwheeled her arms against the forward momentum, twisting her body to the side. Her balance shifted too quickly, and she fell heavily to one knee, a shard of pain gouging her inner thigh. The grenade sat, fat with menace, only two yards separating them.

  In slow motion, Rebekah tried to catapult herself away. She saw, in excruciating detail, each new plant in the broad cornfield and the evenly spaced rows where earth heaped up then dipped down. She saw the individual stones of gravel sprinkled on the yard beneath her knees.

  As she dove forward, she saw tire tracks, forged in autumn mud, dried over the long winter to form ridges, like rock. Her shoulder hit the ground, nerves firing as her weight drove her hard at its unyielding surface.

  Then the world exploded.

  Annie

  Annie crouched far back from the house, head tucked, fingers poked deep into her ears.

  The explosion tore through the air around her. Small projectiles pelted her shoulders and the top of her head, a hundred little punches. Dust rose to choke her, coating her tongue with old soil, wood, and lead.

  Cautiously, she looked up and lowered her hands. Another explosion ripped the air apart in a cloud of smoke and cordite. Becca.

  Annie charged for the side door into the kitchen. Her shoulder was turned toward it, expecting the resistance of a lock securing it in place. When she pushed down on the handle, and it opened, she stumbled inside and fell to her knees, the rifle skidding across the floor.

  Should have stayed in the suburbs, housewife.

  Annie looked up to see a skirmish of attacking women. Clouds of smoke hung in the air. The acrid taste of burnt match heads flooded her mouth.

  Whipping her head around to take in the scene, Annie saw Frankie standing off to her right in an open room, the Remington held firmly in her outstretched hands. Despite the explosions and the drip of blood from one ear, Frankie stood motionless, focused solely on the target in front of her.

  People were everywhere. Flashes of movement. Armed men fired their rifles at random. Women ran at them, fighting them with their desperate bare hands.

  Fire the damn gun, Frankie.

  While Annie struggled to gain her footing, a woman nearby grabbed a butter knife from the table. She ran at the man Frankie was aiming for and plunged the dull, flat blade into the joint between his neck and shoulder. The rifle in his hand fell to the floor as he reached for the knife handle.

  Annie took her chance. She leaned forward, stretching her arm full length to snag the butt of her own rifle. Pulling it toward her, she gave a small cry of triumph.

  Frankie heard the sound and turned. For a second, their gazes locked, Frankie’s eyes wide above her clenched and trembling jaw. The gun in her hand remained unfired.

  Annie didn't bother to aim. At this close range, even if she missed the man’s head, she’d hit something.

  What the bullet struck was his upper crotch, staining his jeans with blood and urine.

  A woman near him brayed in victory and stabbed a bread knife deep into the meat of his arm. Two men pushed their female assailants aside to run to their leader’s aid. One stopped to slam his knee into the attacking woman’s face as he passed by.

  Annie tried again, this time aiming carefully at the howling target’s chest. She pulled the trigger just as someone slammed a blunt object into the side of her head.

  Her ear exploded in a fireball of pain.

  Another blow propelled her sideways into the wall. Her skull ricocheted off the thick plasterboard. The rifle dropped from her hands.

  Annie’s eyes rolled, flashes of random color and light confusing her vision, and she pressed her shoulder against the wall for the balance to stagger forward.

  A war cry behind her, and she turned to see a woman kicking the feet out from under her assailant. A foot stamped into his throat transformed him into a writhing snake.

  Elle stood in the doorway, behind the men to Annie’s left. She centered on the leader and held the trigger down to let off half a dozen rounds. Before his companions could advance, she swung the barrel and downed each with a spray of bullets.

  To Annie’s right, a man advanced on Frankie, who was still a frozen sculpture. As he raised a knife to slice her throat, Becca appeared behind her friend and fired the Glock straight at his face. He crumpled to the floor, hand clutching what was left of his cheek and neck.

  A high shriek ripped through the tumble of sights and sounds. When Annie turned, she saw scissor handles protruding from a deep wound in her former assailant’s abdomen. The overwhelming smell of shit filled the room as the blades pierced his bowels, releasing their sludgy contents.

  A slim Asian girl straightened up from her attack. On one hip, she cradled a young boy, pressing his face close to her chest to shield him from the horrendous view around them.

  Time slowed to a crawl.

  Instead of mass confusion, Annie’s ears picked out single cries, gunshots, and the horrible wet rip of rending flesh. Her eyes swallowed up and digested each individual pixel of color and movement in the rooms. Warm energy buzzed in an electric charge through her body.

  She moved toward the child, her arms extending in the slow-motion dance of a nightmare.

  A shotgun blast caught the Asian girl in her torso, spraying a scattered crimson cloud of blood, flesh, and bone. Annie inhaled a breath tainted with salt and copper. The girl collapsed forward onto the floor. The boy lay motionless, pinioned under her weight.

  As Annie turned, a blond woman standing to Frankie’s side ran at the check-shirted perpetrator. Another shotgun blast tore through the air. The shot hit the blond in her shoulder, leaving her right arm dangling by a sinewy thread as her body twisted and she dropped to her knees.

  Annie crouched and swept her hand in a wide circle. Feeling for her rifle while her eyes stayed glued to the action. Her fingertips bumped over the barrel, and she picked it up. She lined up her aim just as the man shucked the shotgun and swiveled. His weapon now pointing at Annie’s face.

  Death stared at her down the barrel and Annie refused to look away.

  She squeezed her finger. The man’s body jolted as the bullet found its target. His gun fired, shells whistling by an inch above Annie’s head.

  Elle ran forward, roaring, and slammed the butt of her semiautomatic rifle into the side of the check-shirted man’s skull. Beside Elle, another woman stood ready, stamping her heel into his head after he landed on the floor.

  Frankie continued to stand, locked in place. Becca used her stable shoulder as an armrest while aiming at the last standing male target. Elle fixed on him also, both firing their last shots in unison.

  An elderly woman surveyed the room. Picking a discarded revolver from the floor, she walked up to a groaning male and shot him point blank in the head. Next target sighted, she moved a few feet and repeated.

  Annie ducked low and crawled back to the Asian girl. Becca came to kneel beside her, and together they turned the girl over, exposing a gouged crimson cavity instead of a chest.

  The boy lay still. Annie’s eyes greedily ate up the sight of his hands, his legs, his face. For a moment, she wondered if the son she saw before her was just anothe
r hallucination. Like the Mikey she’d tried to save from the rear seat of a burning car.

  Freckles of blood were dotted over his cheeks and nose.

  Why would I hallucinate that?

  Her throat tightening until she struggled to breathe, Annie stretched out one finger to touch the tip of his ear. She traced the soft skin down to halfway between cheekbone and jaw, where it was chubbiest. Faint blue lines drew a memorized pattern under his pale closed eyelids. Tiny veins that pulsed beneath the surface.

  Her fingers moved to grab his earlobe and give a gentle tug. When he offered no response, she tried a pinch instead.

  The corner of his eye scrunched up in a wince against the pain.

  Annie gathered her son into her arms like she was pulling her heart off the floor to insert it back into her body. She looked to Becca, “He’s real?”

  Becca nodded, her expression caught between confusion and wonder. “Is this Mikey?”

  Annie let her fingers trace every inch of Mikey’s back, searching for a wound, trying to find an injury that would signal his impending death. She found nothing.

  Mikey squirmed in her grasp, his small body warm, wriggling and alive against hers. Then he grunted. She must be holding him too tight.

  Instead of releasing him, giving him space, Annie squeezed her young son even tighter.

  Chapter Eleven

  Annie

  While eating dinner, a combination of canned beef and overcooked rice, Annie couldn't stop herself from reaching out and touching Mikey. Every few seconds, her hand would put down her cutlery and sneak a feel. The brush of his cheek. A rub along his shoulders. Stroking back his tousled hair.

  The fight over, Annie had corralled a distraught Frankie and Becca and left with Mikey cradled in lovingly beside her.

  Eleven women remained alive after the battle. There were weapons aplenty to pick from to defend themselves. Annie didn’t bear enough responsibility for them to stick around and find out what they intended to do.

  The vehicles left at the commune—two trucks and a tractor—might have held memories full of terror for the women who’d been picked up and tossed into them, but they worked. They could get the survivors to a place of safety.

  Annie wanted to get her new family to safety. To get Mikey home.

  Frankie said her son had been speaking freely in the cellar, but Mikey had yet to talk to her. On the ride from the commune back to the farm, he’d reverted to a form of babble that reminded her of his eight-month-old self.

  Annie didn't mind. For the time being, it was enough to have Mikey safe in her care. If he didn't start talking in the next couple of days, perhaps she would start to worry. Until then, she was just pleased to have him with her. Alive.

  She reached out to stroke back his silken hair again.

  Frankie

  When Frankie woke the next morning, energy buzzed along her veins like a drug. The ordeal should have left her tired. When Annie timidly suggested she have a nap, Frankie curled her lip and shook her head. No, thank you.

  “I'm fine,” she repeated. When Annie wouldn’t leave her alone, she added, “I'm just hungry.”

  That had Annie bustling into the kitchen, Mikey propped on her hip like a permanent implant. Frankie would’ve been happy just eating dry cereal out of the box, but she wasn't offered that option. Instead, Annie laid a disastrous hot meal in front of her with an expectant glance, demanding appreciation for the effort.

  Frankie didn't feel like appreciating anything.

  Ramped up on adrenaline, her mind picked over everything that had happened the day before. Robert shot. The dead women. Seeing Julie’s life drained from her through an unremarkable hole in her head.

  The wound hadn’t even been a half inch across. When Frankie had looked at Julie’s dead body afterward, she wondered with horrified fascination if a finger over the wound would’ve trapped Julie’s soul inside. Her life force.

  She’d pushed the thought away. If ever there was a time to confront the real world without a mask of myth and superstition, this was it.

  After shoveling in as much of the meal as her delicate stomach could handle, Frankie leaped up to go outside. She walked steadily to the edge of the shelter belt. Once out of sight behind the trees, her walk transformed into a sprint, faster and faster. Instead of draining away with the effort, the energy thrumming through her body hyped up until she was more awake and alert than ever.

  When she fell panting to the ground, sweat dripping down onto the field in such abundance that it stained the gray soil black, Frankie's mind replayed the scenes at the commune over and over at an ever-faster pace. She crossed her stomach with her arms, pulling tighter and tighter. Her fingernails dug into the skin on her elbows.

  If she’d just stayed still and kept her mouth shut, those women would still be alive. While Elle, Annie, and Becca took down the gang, Julie and Mae would have been safely hidden in the basement dungeon.

  You didn’t even tell them the truth about the gun.

  Frankie bit her lip and rolled over to press her face against the dry grass. The tip of her nose reached the dry topsoil, hardened like concrete.

  You got Julie killed. Just like you got Angela killed.

  Frankie pushed up off the ground to run again, sprinting until her lungs burned and her breaths didn’t seem to transmit oxygen. As she fell to the field again, panting, her memories rewound to play again.

  Bony fingers rifled through the sequence, trying to find fault. Trying to find blame.

  Rebekah

  While Annie played with her son at the table, Rebekah cleared away the dishes. It was the least she could do after Annie had cooked the meal, although it seemed to be for Frankie’s rather than Rebekah’s benefit.

  To clean them, she had to boil water over the fire using a hook Annie had set up earlier then pad her hands with several layers of oven mitts to carry the boiling water over to the sink. After pouring it quarter full, she then added cold water to get it to the right temperature.

  As she stacked dish after dish on the drying rack, Rebekah cast a longing glance at the hot tap. Hot taps were so easy. She couldn't remember why she would ever have complained about doing the dishes at all, considering that until today, the water supply had been so easy.

  A lot of things were like that now. So many things in her life she’d taken for granted.

  Her parents, for example. Rebekah had moaned about them in long conversations with Frankie, which was returned in kind. Her parents were a nuisance she expected always to be there. Now that they were gone, she wished only that they were still hanging around, her mom nagging her to “help out more” and “tidy up your room.”

  School. Another thing she’d complained about at length. Now Rebekah would give her eyeteeth just to be able to sit in class, stare out the window, and dream. The boredom of lessons, the ease of learning assignments, the dull, uninterested drone every teacher adopted the first month back from summer vacation.

  And other kids. The ones who’d never made friends with her. Rebekah wished just a couple of them were here now. Even their teasing offered a welcome break from the tedium of bad-mood Frankie.

  With the dishes draining, Rebekah wiped out the sink with a sponge then walked over to the table to sit next to Mikey.

  Annie treated him like a new toy she couldn't keep her hands off. Rebekah didn't feel the same attraction. Each time she turned to look at him or include him in the conversation, he glared or shook his head.

  The poor kid had probably been through a lot and had reasons to be yet another person in the household not talking to her.

  Each time she popped her head in on Blain, he pretended to be asleep. Something he wasn’t, judging by the rapid rise and fall of his chest. Right now, she'd rather poke her eyes out than go near Frankie given Frankie’s current mood.

  For a second, she clenched her teeth and imagined if she hadn't rescued Frankie from impending death. A savage joy filled her chest, replaced quickly by horror. If F
rankie wanted to be by herself for a while, who could blame her?

  “Would you help me with Mikey?” Annie asked.

  Rebekah raised her eyebrows in query.

  “He needs a bath. Don’t you, Mikey?” Annie pulled up Mikey's T-shirt and blew a raspberry on his stomach. Instead of a smile, Mikey grimaced and pushed her face away. “Would you heat up some more water?” Annie said from a face broadcasting hurt.

  If it were up to Rebekah, she’d leave Mikey alone to sulk in peace. But Annie just moved his silken hair back from his face and rubbed the back of his neck, pulling her son into a snuggle while he wriggled for release.

  “Of course,” Rebekah said, refilling the cast iron pot with water. Why not? Nobody else wants me for anything. After all, I’m just Becca.

  She hated that name. Had always hated it from the moment an elementary school teacher attached it as a label. A woman who couldn't be bothered with the effort of pronouncing three whole syllables. Instead, she had tagged Rebekah with a nickname, though she'd neither asked for nor wanted one.

  Within a day, everybody called her Becca. When a week had passed, she’d left it too late to ask them to stop.

  After Rebekah had boiled the water and filled the bath, Annie asked her to undress Mikey. Annie was trying to adjust the water to the perfect temperature.

  Maybe bathing Mikey was a treat for Annie, but for Rebekah, it soon became a chore. Mikey’s grizzly bad temper rubbed off on her. She’d rather have been left alone, to be given the space to pause and think, to read a book alone upstairs.

  Mikey fussed as he sat in the tub. As Annie washed the accumulated dirt off the boy, his skin started to glow through, his complexion fresh pink and white.

  Maybe it was the past couple of days, but Mikey was certainly not the delightful boy Annie had spoken of once or twice, a whimsical note to her voice. When Mikey looked at Rebekah beneath lowered lashes before slapping his palm flat against the water to direct spray into Rebekah’s face, she excused herself.