33 A.D.
Page 31
Austin was the last one down. When he reached the bottom, he noticed the banging inside the house had stopped.
The killers were coming.
Austin waved them toward the backyard where a line of trees marked the beginning of a large patch of wilderness. “Into the woods!”
The backyard was a wide open patch of dead grass. Other than a swing set and a candy cane-shaped septic system vent, there was nothing to hide behind. They were totally exposed. But there was no choice. They had to run.
The group moved as one, like flocking birds, crouch-running across the grass. But a child’s toy tripped Vanderwarf and sent her to the ground only five feet from the back of the house. White turned around and stopped. He reached down to pick her up. With his head down, he heard the dull thuds of someone running inside the house. Thinking he had at least ten seconds before the person reached the barricaded back door and perhaps another minute after that, he didn’t bother raising his weapon.
When the window exploded from the inside out, he was totally unprepared for it. A woman flew through the air, shards of glass covering her face, arms and naked upper torso. White and the woman hit the ground a second later and before anyone, including White, who had the wind knocked out of him, could respond, the woman shouted, “I’m sorry! I don’t want to—” She drove her rigid fingers into his throat with unnatural strength. Her fingers disappeared into his neck up to the third knuckle.
White twitched beneath her.
Vanderwarf screamed and kicked away from the woman and her now dead lover.
The woman wailed, as though wounded.
A single gunshot silenced her.
Austin.
The bullet struck the woman’s forehead and sent her flailing backwards.
“Vanderwarf!” Austin shouted. “Move!”
Though horrified, Vanderwarf’s instincts and training kicked in. She climbed to her feet and ran toward the others. Glass exploded again as a second body emerged from the house. It was a man. Nearly naked. His body charged like a killing machine on speed. But his face was twisted with agony. The expression locked solid as Austin fired a second shot, piercing the man’s brain and sending him to the ground.
The silence that followed lasted only a moment.
Voices—a sea of them—rose up in the distance.
“The woods,” Austin growled. “Now!”
There was no pause. No looking back.
They ran like prey.
Like the man killed in the driveway the night before.
The same man who followed them now.
Unlike the others, he looked back, eyeing the bodies on the grass—watching their eyes—and then followed the group into the darkness of the dead woods.