by James Hunt
“How much longer is he going to take before he gets back?”
“Can’t he go any faster?”
“They’re getting closer.”
Kate stepped in front of the group, holding up her hands. “He’s moving as fast and as safely as possible. But as a precaution, we should stand by the gate. If the terrorists arrive before Rodney returns, we’ll head to the second location.”
Exhalations followed Kate’s orders, and while everyone nodded in agreement, she tensed in preparation for the knife she was sure someone would stick in her back. And what was to stop them? They were strangers. Despite their good intentions, deep down, Kate started to feel the truth of what Rodney had warned.
Kate scanned the alleys between the buildings in front of the docks. The views only offered narrow glimpses into the streets. In a way, it was good, because the docks were kept hidden. It was why there were only a few dozen people at the gates instead of a few thousand.
Three more gunshots sounded, these slower than the automatic fire they’d heard before. Were there people fighting back? Kate latched onto the mesh of the chain-link fence.
People sprinted past the alleyways on the other side of the buildings, the gunfire reaching some crescendo, unintelligible screams echoing between blasts. Voices barked loudly in a language Kate didn’t understand. She turned back toward the river. Rodney had just turned the boat around.
“We don’t have enough time,” Kate whispered to herself.
The group of people in her charge kept their faces glued toward the screams and gunfire. Kate’s heart thumped quickly, and she grabbed their shoulders, pulling them toward her.
“Listen! We’re going to move to the secondary location,” Kate said.
“Are you crazy?” One of the men in the back shoved his way to the front. “Those people are out there, and they’re going to kill us!”
“If we stay on the docks, we’re sitting ducks,” Kate said, her tone sharp.
“Maybe they won’t see us?” a woman asked, a hint of skepticism to her voice. “Maybe they’ll just pass right by.”
“We can’t risk that.” Kate turned back toward the alleyway. People were heading north, which meant the gunmen were still to the south. “We need to go.”
“And why the hell is it your decision?” The voice accompanied a harsh shove, and Kate bounced into the fence, the wire mesh buckling and cradling her as she looked at the big man staring her down. “Who put you in charge?”
“Hey, knock it off!” A woman and two other men stepped between the pair, but if the big man was nervous, he didn’t show it.
“No,” Kate said, pushing herself off the fence and adjusting her coat. “He’s right. I’m not in charge. I don’t have any real authority. But I can tell you that Rodney won’t let any of you get on board if he doesn’t see me.” She eyed the big man. “So if you want across that river, then I’d suggest you shut your trap and start moving, because I’m leaving.”
Kate reached for the gated door and swung it open, slipping down the fence as another round of gunfire spat into the evening air. It cracked loudly, echoing down the alleyways. Kate turned toward the sound just in time to watch the body collapse.
The distance and winter clothes made it hard to tell if it was a man or a woman. They wallowed on the ground, and their last gurgling breaths of life traveled down the alleyway.
Another person appeared, this one with a rifle tucked under their arm and a ski mask over their face. It aimed the weapon at the wounded person. Another gunshot. A yelp sounded behind Kate, and she turned to see one of the women covering her mouth, every group member looking on in horror.
The gunman shouted into the alley, and then three more armed terrorists were at his side.
“Run!” Kate sprinted just as the gunfire started. Her feet pounded the pavement, and adrenaline helped mask the fatigue and stiffness. She traversed the slick patches of pavement carefully, stealing glanced behind her to the group that followed. But with her eyes off the road, Kate landed on an ice patch and slipped.
A dull thud sounded as her ass greeted the pavement, and a sharp pain ran from her tailbone to the base of her neck. The cold numbed it quickly though, and the hot flash of pain dulled to a throbbing ache as she tried to stand. Then hands were suddenly on her shoulder and her arms, helping her off the ground.
“Are you all right?” The voice came from the red-haired woman.
“Yeah,” Kate answered, not the least bit convincingly, as she frowned and grimaced from the pain in her back. She stole a glance behind her as the others caught up, and her eyes widened in terror as she saw the three gunmen exit the alleyway near the docks. “We need to move!”
Kate hobbled forward, her speed half of what it had been prior to the fall, and the herd of people shuffled forward. Gunfire chased them, and Kate refused to look back. Even when a cry bellowed to her right and she saw a body collapse in the periphery, Kate kept her eyes forward.
Wind numbed her face, and Kate tasted the snot dripping from her nose. Everyone was screaming, crying, running. No one stopped. The primal instinct of survival guided them now.
Bullets zipped past, and a window shattered in an apartment complex to their right, the glass collapsing like a broken ice shelf that plummeted into the snow. And despite the cold, the pain, the heightened sense of danger, everything seemed to pass in slow motion. Kate looked to her left and saw strands of hair bouncing on a woman’s face as she ran. She looked right and saw the muscles on a man’s face twitch in fear at the sight behind him.
Finally, she looked back. The gunmen were still in pursuit. They were closer. And she saw the three casualties of their group from the gunfire.
Kate spun back around, looking for any place they could hide, anywhere they could run, and she thrust her arm out to a back door of a building that she prayed was open. “There!” She veered from the group, but not everyone followed.
The rest sprinted ahead, and when her hand curled around the handle of the door and she pulled it open, she caught only a glimpse of the fate of those that had gone straight, and it was of their bodies hitting the floor after a spray of gunfire.
Kate waited until everyone entered and caught one final glimpse of the gunmen before she slammed the door shut, still having the presence of mind to lock it, sealing them in darkness.
Bullets thumped against the door and exterior, and Kate hunched over, still pressing forward. “Go! Go! Go!” She shoved against the bodies in front of her, pushing everyone ahead blindly as more bullets ricocheted off of the door behind them.
The narrow hallway ended and opened into a lobby. Light drifted in through the front windows and revealed the huddled shapes of bodies on the floor. Frightened expressions covered everyone’s faces, and before Kate could speak a word, another series of gunshots thundered from the back entrance, and the harsh crack of the door opening propelled her toward the front exit. “Get out! Everyone get out now!”
But the gunfire had already triggered the beginning of the stampede, and Kate was hurled in the middle of it. The herd carried her out of the doors like a wave, and suddenly the gunshots multiplied. They thundered like hail on a roof, and that same wave of bodies collapsed, and Kate was suddenly flattened to the sidewalk outside.
Kate thrust her hands out to try and catch herself, but the weight of the people behind her buckled her elbows, and she smacked the concrete hard. A bright white light flashed in her vision, and then suddenly things went dark as more bodies piled on top of her.
The screams suddenly faded, and the gunfire stopped. Kate lay still beneath the bodies, her visions limited to a small space between two bodies above her. But while she heard the thick, foreign accent of the gunmen as he drew closer, almost as if they were standing right next to her. Their tone was angered and hurried. And then, as she felt a pressure applied to her left ankle, she suddenly realized that they weren’t next to her: they were on top of her.
The pressure from the boot heel drove a flurry
of pain up the side of her leg, and she muffled a crying gasp. The heel ground into the tender joints of the ankle, but Kate neither screamed nor moved. Either meant death.
Finally, the pressure was relieved, and it took the same amount of concentration to keep herself from crying out in relief. Soundless puffs of breath passed through her nose, and then she dared herself to lift her eyes toward the small hole of light that broke between a shoulder and elbow that lay across from one another, forming a buttress of support that kept the bodies to her left slightly elevated.
An ear and then a shoulder passed overhead, and a sudden striking fear pulsed through her veins as the eye of the shooter appeared. She looked away quickly, still feeling the eye on her even after she did. There was more talk between them, and then another boot pressed into Kate’s back through the body on top of her.
Kate bit her lip hard, drawing blood. She scrunched her eyes shut. A gunshot rang out, and a burst of warmth splattered her cheek as blood trickled down to her chin. She jumped from the sudden blast, but the body next to her jumped as well.
She froze, positive that she’d been discovered underneath the pile of bodies. She braced for the inevitable gunshot. Her thoughts ran to her children. Luke and Holly smiled at her. She thought of Mark, and she thought of her career, and then the flashes stopped as the terrorist’s voices drifted away along with the gunshots.
Kate wasn’t sure how long she lay there, but after a while, she wiggled underneath the bodies, shifting beneath the corpses. She grunted, pushing herself off the pavement, the dead rising with her. Her arms trembled from the weight of the bodies, but she finally burst from the mound. She gasped for breath as she quickly scurried back into the apartment building and into the safety of the lobby, which was empty save for the bodies of those that hadn’t made it out in time.
A few bloodstains crept from beneath the corpses, but in the cold weather, the blood quickly congealed. Whatever warmth the building had once possessed before the power went out was gone. Death had taken its place and curled its icy fingers around everything.
Kate half collapsed, half lowered herself to the floor. She sat in the middle of the lobby, rocking back and forth. Her eyes darted between the bodies in the lobby and the bodies out front. The door was still open, propped by the foot of a man wearing black boots with bright neon laces. They caught the eye vividly and greedily.
As Kate rocked back and forth, shivering from both the cold and the brush with death, she couldn’t take her eyes off those laces. And as she stared at them, she thought of all the people that had died, all the people that had followed her, and when she remembered the kids on the other side of the river, waiting for their parents, their mommies and daddies, she broke down.
The sobs rolled her shoulders, and she clutched her knees to her chest. The grief poured out of her, the tears stinging her cheeks as they froze from the cold.
They had followed her, and they had died. It was a realization that would haunt her for the rest of her life. But another thought broke through the cold of her mind, thawing her frozen body.
On the other side of that river was a child that still had a parent and a husband who still had a wife. And if she didn’t get to that boat, she was sure that she’d never see them again.
“Get up,” Kate said, her voice shaking as she forced the command from her lips. She pressed her gloved hand against the concrete and pushed, rising to a sitting position. Her boots scraped the lobby tile as she stood, her back hunched in pain.
When she finally straightened, she took shallow breaths, the cold like an anesthetic to help numb the pain. Slowly, she straightened again and this time avoided the sharp spasm in her back. Her ankle was tender as she broke into the rhythm of walking, and while her body clamored for her to stop, anger caused her to grit her teeth and press forward.
With her destination burned into her mind with a fresh determination, Kate limped forward, hobbling out the back, away from the bodies, away from the light, casting herself into the darkness of the hallway from which she had emerged.
The back door was cracked open from where the terrorists had entered, and the handle had disappeared, a ring of bullet holes around it. She pulled it open and squinted against the burst of light. She hobbled along, thinking of only getting to the docks.
Absentmindedly she reached for the revolver, forgetting she even had it. She gripped it firmly and glanced out to the river. She spied Rodney’s boat making its way upstream. There was still time. The sight propelled her limp into a hobbled run, her movements more exaggerated by her arms as she used their momentum to swing herself forward.
But the wind had picked up, and when Kate looked out to the river, the boat had already sailed past. “No,” she whispered. She attempted to hasten her pace but failed, her body too broken to follow her demands for speed.
Sweat trickled from her armpits, and her cheeks flushed from exertion. She couldn’t miss that boat. She wouldn’t miss that boat.
Up ahead, Kate saw the sign for the Regency through a pair of trees. Almost there.
Kate turned down the side of the building and immediately saw the docks. Hope swelled in her chest as she saw Rodney approach.
“Hey!” Kate shouted, but all that came out was crackled static. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Hey!”
Rodney waved.
Kate smiled and waved back excitedly. He had seen her. He would wait. She was going to make it. She was going to see her family again. And the more she centered her thoughts around that hope on her Frankenstein-like hobble toward her escape, the more real it felt. It solidified like concrete, and suddenly that was the only outcome. Everything else became fantasy.
Gunshots echoed to her left, and Kate stopped, her boots sliding against the slushy pavement. Flashes from the rifle muzzles were less than two blocks west of her. They chased a group of people sprinting in her direction. The impulse to flee, to live, triggered her face to look away and back toward Rodney and the boat.
But in that turn, her eyes caught a flash of something colorful. Afterward, Kate would reflect on the fact that if the sun hadn’t appeared on the horizon, breaking through the clouds in that exact moment, she probably wouldn’t have seen it. But it just so happened that she did, and that recognizable flash of red hair caught her eye.
Kate spun, this time her boots catching against solid ground, and saw a portion of the group that had run with her sprinting back.
They had a good lead on the gunmen, but they were closing fast. Kate stepped forward, gun raised. They were screaming, and Kate waved them forward. “Come on! Come on!” She finally intercepted them a quarter of the way down the alley. Bodies passed by her in a blur, and once they were clear, Kate squeezed the trigger.
The first shot missed wildly, and she had closed her eyes at the sound of the gunshot and the jerk of the pistol. But when she opened her eyes again, she saw the gunmen had stopped at the alleyway entrance, using the building walls for cover.
Kate fired again, her body adjusting to the recoil of the pistol, and though her eyelids fluttered, they didn’t close. The bullet ricocheted off the right corner the alleyway, pushing one of the terrorists farther back. She fired again, taking a step closer, standing in the middle of the alley and void of cover. She squeezed and screamed, the reverberations from the gunshots issuing a throbbing ache in her forearm, and then suddenly everything stopped at the click of the hammer.
“Kate!”
She turned around, her arm still rigid and outstretched. She saw red hair and eyes wide with terror.
“RUN!”
Kate’s joints stiffened, and even adrenaline couldn’t ease the pain. Bullets pinged and bounced along the pavement and brick walls, the gunmen’s retaliation more verbose and violent than anything Kate had thrust at them.
Bullets chased Kate all the way to the end of the alleyway, and the red-haired woman thrust out her hand, Kate reached for it, and one final yank pulled her from the clutches of danger.
Kate wrapped her arms tight around the woman, squeezing her firmly. “Thank God.” She lifted her face from the woman’s shoulder. There were five of them left. She smiled and nearly burst into tears.
More gunfire ended the reunion, and the red-haired woman pulled her toward the docks. “C’mon!”
Kate did her best to keep up, but fatigue had forced her to do little more than latch her hand around the red-haired woman’s arm and hang on for dear life.
Out on the docks, the building provided cover from the gunshots. Kate tried to step over the high rails of the boat, but her body refused to cooperate. “I’m sorry.” She stopped, trying to catch her breath. “I can’t move.”
“Help me.” The red-haired woman motioned for a man, and he came and lifted Kate in his arms.
Kate smiled drunkenly, the solid ground suddenly shifting, and she swayed left and right, rocking with the boat. They set her down in a chair, and Kate’s body sighed with relief. Her head lolled lazily on her shoulder, and she closed her eyes.
More shouts. More thunder. Suddenly everyone was in a hurry, and Rodney was screaming to shove off. But Kate didn’t move. She finally felt warm, which was odd, because the river only made things colder. But here she was, closing her eyes, drifting off to sleep.
The boat rocked, and the wind rippled against the sails. Rodney was screaming for everyone to duck, but Kate just slouched lower in her chair. She was tired, but she was on the boat. And she was on her way to see her family.
13
A sharp pain woke Kate, her whole body screaming in protest. She blinked away the blurred vision and sat up, trying to get a grasp on her surroundings.
“Kate? Oh, thank god.”
The words were followed by gentle hands, and Kate immediately leaned into their warmth. They were hands she knew, hands she remembered.
“How are you feeling?” Mark asked, crouched low by her side.
“Half dead,” Kate answered, and then she suddenly sparked to life. “Holly? Where—”
