So why didn’t he feel lucky?
David held up his hand to placate her. “Chrissy, I know you’re upset, but listen.”
“Go ahead. Tell me why you let that traitor go, and then I’ll go kill him before he brings it all down around us.”
He met her glare, and nodded. “Because he was no traitor. He got captured by the enemy, and conned them. He had no way of knowing you or your son were in this building, but he threw his life on the line to save you when he discovered you here. Your son has a mother because of it.”
Christine lowered her head, but her eyes stayed focused on his. He had to strain to hear her say, “My son has a mother because you came, David.”
Orien, at the window, fired off several shots with one of the recently available rifles, and let out a whoop. “Right up main street. That one’s gonna hurt.” He looked over his shoulder and said, “She’s got you there, boss. You did come. And saved the bunker, a few lives, and chased off that badass biker perp.”
“I—”
“And all it took was for you to do the right thing, instead of some high-brow idea of what duty means. I told you, boss, if you do what’s right, things turn out right. I just hope letting Wiley go was one of those ‘right things,’ you know?”
Bang, bang.
David fought his upper lip from curling back into a snarl. He clenched his jaw and shook his head. “We don’t yet know the full cost of my coming here. We still have a town to defend from a bandit army running loose inside it.”
“You scattered them.” Christine frowned, glancing at Hunter.
Shaking his head, David replied, “No. They’ll regroup, and so should we.”
He turned on his heels, letting the door slam as he left. The sound of it opening again, no doubt Orien following him out, did nothing to calm the tempest raging inside him. Damn her for thanking him. Wiley was the one who saved her—even Hunter saw that. And damn Orien for talking him into abandoning his post.
He pulled out his second radio and began checking status on his various units, sorting the information in his head as he made his way back to his maps.
The news was positive, at least. The town hadn’t yet been overrun, though they were still hard-pressed at the south gate and several of the fallback positions in the west end, while gunfire still rang from the school environs and the field beyond.
And he still had a duty to perform.
Worst of all, he felt good about abandoning that duty and saving Chrissy. How many of his people had died waiting for him to send reinforcements, or medics, or…
He had no way to know. His stomach lurched, and he was almost thankful for the distraction the battle still raging all around him provided. And although it was clear Weldona had the edge in radios, and defensive positions were a strong force multiplier that allowed it to hang on by a thread so far, it was equally clear that the enemy’s numbers were wearing Weldona down.
Another of those defensive positions, a barricaded house two blocks east, radioed in to report they would fall, and the transmission was cut off right after he heard a racket that sounded very much like a door being smashed open.
Soon, the chaos David fought to coordinate was almost enough to forget about Chrissy’s near brush with death, almost enough to stop worrying about whether she had been killed in the two minutes since he last saw her or still lived. The only bright spot in all of it was that even if Weldona fell, Wiley would survive. He had made sure of that, even knowing he’d have some answering to do later, to the townspeople.
If there was a later for any of them. But if this was it for Weldona, at least he’d saved one person.
80
The echoes of heavy shooting faded, though Wiley remained close enough to hear gunfire, so he stopped and cocked his head to listen. A few intermittent gunshots, but nothing more.
“It can’t be over, yet.” Wiley shrugged and started walking again, but three steps later, he stopped once again. He put his fists on his hips, and with pursed lips, glared at the soil beneath his feet. “What the hell is wrong with me? This is not my field, not my problem. Not anymore.”
After all, before the bandits got there, Weldona’s people had been ready to hang him.
And yet, David had let him go. That sonuvabitch cop had made him paranoid for the last six weeks, told Chrissy and anyone who would listen that they shouldn’t trust him, and had even had the balls to tell Hunter and Darcy to stay away from him… And David was the guy who had saved his life. Twice.
An image of a bloody corpse lying on a checkered linoleum floor flashed through his mind. Although he recognized that floor, the one beneath his own sister’s corpse when he’d found her, it was Chrissy’s face he now saw. It was only a mixing of memories, right?
“Maybe.” That didn’t stop his stomach from cramping, however, and his heartbeat quickened.
The gruesome image faded, superimposed by one of Hunter and Darcy, crying just like he had when he’d found his sister on that checkered floor. “Fuck.”
Wiley turned around, and took a step toward Weldona’s north bridge. Then another step. He paused, his instincts and his heart doing battle in his soul. “Don’t be so melodramatic. Do what you will, and stop whining about it.”
He looked up to find the bandit army in the distance, or part of it, and that gigantic sonuvabitch who led them. Boomer stood out, a foot or more taller than anyone around him. Wiley took a deep breath, and he realized his hands shook. He should run, not walk, from that dinky town of assholes who wanted him dead...
Yep. He should. So why wasn’t he? Why wouldn’t his racing thoughts stray from Weldona and its people?
Because they’re my sister, all over again.
The thought made him wince, it hit him with such force. He tried to ignore it, tried to take another step to distance himself from Weldona, but his feet stayed stubbornly rooted in place.
“Ah, fuck it.”
He headed toward the bandit army, and this time, his feet obeyed. He streamed curses at his conscience, to no avail. Dammit. But it was going to be different, this time, because the next time Boomer looked him in his eyes, it sure as hell wasn’t going to go down like it had the last time. “Count on that, you mongrel bastard.”
When he was still a few hundred yards away from Boomer’s command center, he lay behind a bush and watched the bandit sitting at a table with three chairs, shouting at two armed bandits, a man and a woman. They spun around and, half walking and half jogging, they skittered away from Boomer, heading roughly west. They disappeared into the gently rolling terrain surrounding the creek, between two slight rises.
“Bingo.” Wiley smiled and backed away from his cover, then changed course with quickening steps.
He circled the hill that stood between him and the two who had just separated from the herd. Once he was certain the terrain concealed him from any other bandits, he sprinted to skirt the hill, moving counter-clockwise.
Ahead, he found the creek again. Being summer, it was a mere trickle, exposing the creek bed and allowing the banks to dry to a smooth, cement-like hardness, which made the short descent easy. Up close, he saw that it had dug through the topsoil, and now bubbled along on a stony bed. He had no problem finding several fist-sized rocks with a good shape, pocketing two and keeping two more in either hand. He crouched down behind the sloped creek bank, beside a spot where it rose up at a shallower angle similar to a boat ramp. He focused on slowing his racing heart and steadying his breathing as he waited for the “moment of truth,” counting seconds in his head.
At “five,” the man emerged from between the two low hills, following the creek bed, with his rifle resting on his shoulder. The woman was only a step behind him, though she carried her rifle at the low-ready. In the abrupt calmness that washed over Wiley, he noted that her rifle was actually a shotgun, not a hunting rifle as he’d assumed. At only fifteen yards, she was the decidedly deadlier threat.
From Wiley’s position, the creek’s winding banks obscure
d all but the top half of his head from them, and neither reacted to him when he drew back his arm and hurled one of his fist-sized, disc-like stones, then the second, and began to scramble up the creek bank.
The first missile struck the woman upside her head, on the right side, and she was collapsing with a muffled cry, the man staring dumbly at her, when Wiley’s second missile nailed him directly in his face. He staggered back, dropping his rifle as both hands covered his face, and fell backward off the creek’s bank.
Wiley crossed the distance, drawing a third stone as he reached the woman while the man was falling.
She knelt down, clutching her head in both hands as blood ran freely through her fingers on one side, her forehead almost touching the ground. She raised her head, too late to even see Wiley’s face before he smashed his clutched stone against the back of her head. With his momentum adding to his strength, her skull caved under the force of his blow, which drove her pitching face-first into the dirt.
Wiley reached his blood-drenched hand down to snatch up her shotgun. For half a second, he saw the same bloody hand, poised over a knife on a bloody checkered floor, juxtaposed with the here-and-now hand…
He shoved the memory aside and checked the weapon with practiced ease, flicking the safety button off—it was already off, however—and moving the slide back half an inch to ensure it had a shell chambered. He kissed his teeth, walked up to the creek bank where his opponent had fallen, and aimed his new shotgun at the man’s head from less than ten feet away. A moment later, the 12-gauge kicked hard, but the man in the creek bed would never kick again.
Wiley stepped back to the woman’s corpse, grabbed her ankles, and dragged her to the creek’s edge. He dumped her to the ground, then kicked her over the creek bank’s edge at the spot where the man had fallen and watched as her corpse flopped over and over. It came to rest with one arm sprawled across the dead man’s chest.
“Better you than me,” Wiley said, then spit toward the corpses. He climbed down the bank and grabbed the rifle, as well, then searched for their ammunition. There wasn’t much of it, though. He swung the rifle over his shoulder to dangle by its sling, and kept the shotgun in hand, then headed upstream, sticking to the rocky creek bed’s dry edges without climbing back up. He counted shells and bullets as he made his way toward his reunion, whistling softly.
Out the window, across the bridge, the bandit positions looked like they were boiling with movement. Christine sighted in on the top of someone’s head, a few inches showing from behind a rock pile in the middle of the field. As she squeezed the trigger, her AR-15 bucked a little, but her target’s exposed portion ducked below the rocks at the same time.
“Missed.” Dammit. She scanned for another target, peering over the window sill with her front hand-guards resting on the sandbag “wall” below the upstairs window’s missing glass pane. Weldona’s defenders weren’t the only ones shooting. The bandits, both in the field behind the bridge and those who occupied the fallen checkpoint on the north bridge, also fired, and there were a lot more of them.
Hunter grunted, then fired. Through the ringing in her ears, Christine could barely make out the words as he said, “Mom, it looks like they’re gonna try to rush the bridge again. Look, they’re clustering up.”
Christine’s lip curled back of its own accord. She lowered her scope to get a better look at the overall picture, then cursed under her breath. Her son was right. It would be the third push in half an hour, if they did try again. Although David had ordered the gate garrison to fall back quite a while ago in the face of an earlier attack, and it seemed that many of them had pushed through during the chaos and were running around in the town—such as the ones that had assaulted the school’s outer office building, earlier—the defenders had managed to get organized enough to halt the bandits flowing over the bridge. Firefights raged all over Weldona, but the bandits in town were cut off, at least for the moment, by a ring of fortified houses with overlapping fire arcs on the bridge, as David had put it.
“Well, conserve your ammo. Make your shots count.” Christine brought her scope back up so she could follow her own advice.
Mary, on position at the room’s far end, said, “Oh, crap. Christine, check your three o’clock—two-story white building.”
Christine exhaled sharply, swinging her barrel right. She found the building, and saw what Mary had seen—bandits, leap-frogging across the street adjacent to the white house, firing as they went. She brought up her walkie-talkie. She couldn’t remember the call-sign, so she clicked it and said, “David, Christine.”
“Go ahead.” David’s voice came through clearly.
Well, at least he wasn’t going to correct her on the air. This was more important than that. “Bandits are pushing on the hotel. I count at least ten, all armed and shooting, so they got ammo.”
There was a pause. Then, he replied, “Copy that. Interrogative—do you mean the house where the Fort rep is?”
“Yes. Affirmative, that one. The bed-and-breakfast.” Christine frowned.
Mary said, “He sounds upset.”
“Yeah, well, if the Fort Morgan rep dies while we’re supposed to be protecting him, that could mean trouble for us all, later.” If there was a later for Weldona, of course.
“David looked pretty ticked off, when Michael came back saying he’d earn our trust.”
Christine could well imagine why David had been upset. Michael was, for all intents and purposes, a foreign dignitary in this new crappy world, and David already had his hands more than full fending off the bandits. He didn’t need another responsibility on his plate.
Mary echoed her thoughts, saying, “He doesn’t need to be worrying about this, right now. I meant for us to shoot them, not to ask David to take care of it. We’re here.”
Christine was already working on doing that very thing, though, and held her half-exhaled breath as she squeezed the trigger…
Bang. A bandit fell in the middle of the street.
Mary let out a whoop. “Got ’em!”
Christine’s lips flatlined. That was her kill.
That thought stunned her for a moment… She was irritated at Mary for claiming she’d killed that man… Christine frowned. There was something fundamentally wrong with wanting credit for killing another human being, even in self-defense.
Five more bandits bolted across the street. “Damn. Mary, keep shooting! There’s more; they’re pushing on the hotel now—”
She squeezed again, and one of the five staggered, but kept going until the last five were out of sight, in the “lee” of the bed-and-breakfast they’d begun to call the hotel.
A man’s voice shouted, “Mary, get your ass back here. What the...”
Christine spun toward the door from the upstairs living room to the hallway that led to the stairwell. She caught a glimpse of Mary, just before she vanished down the stairwell on the hallway’s far end.
Shit…
“Should we go help her?” Hunter asked.
David’s voice rang through the radio before she could answer Hunter. “Chrissy, I got two squads moving up, abandoning—never mind that, actually. Just keep shooting; keep them out for one minute, and we’ll have them in our crossfire. How copy?”
“Solid copy,” she replied, looking Hunter in the eyes. “We’ll do what we can. Out.”
Hunter looked away, but then brought up his bolt-action hunting rifle and began to fire, methodically, just as fast as he could work the bolt action.
Christine followed his lead and began to fire, though she had no clear targets. Hunter couldn’t have seen any good targets either, but he kept shooting, muttering in between shots in a voice low enough that she couldn’t make out the words. That was probably a good thing, though.
A streak of movement, from beneath Christine’s row of windows, darted into the street, and vaulted the low fence around the “hotel.” Christine’s heart rate skyrocketed as she realized she was actually seeing what she thought she saw—Mar
y, with a rifle, moved faster than Christine had ever seen her go, so fast that she had a hard time keeping her friend in scope view.
Hunter said, “Mom, what’s Mary doing out there?”
“No, no, no…” Christine watched as her friend, without slowing down, reached a window frame and dove through headfirst, out of view. Across the perpendicular street that intersected hers, a figure moved into her scope picture as she swept the so-called hotel with it. The dirty, raggedy face, gaunt with hunger, snarled toward the yellow building, shoulders shaking as he fired into it repeatedly.
She was already bringing the walkie-talkie to her mouth with her bracing hand. “David? David! Mary, she ran to the… She’s at the hotel. They’re still coming! Do something,” she screamed, her words and thoughts jumbled. She kept screaming into the radio, button pressed, willing him to make more people show up.
Mid-rant, David’s voice erupted from the speaker with the double-chirp signifying he was broadcasting on the “alternate channel,” a second frequency her handset could receive, but not transmit on.
“Chrissy, let go of the button. Reinforcements are already on the way, E-T-A two mikes.”
Still pressing the button, she heard her own voice shouting. “Damn you, David, get off your ass and save my friend!”
It wasn’t fair, and she knew it. David had done all he could, saving her once and sending units they could hardly afford to strengthen the hotel’s defenses, necessary to defend that idiot, Michael Brown. The CSP rep from Fort Morgan hadn’t left when he should have, after all, and now Mary was trying to be a hero.
Damn her.
Christine dropped the walkie-talkie and began unleashing a flurry of snap-fired rounds toward the bandits as panic threatened to overtake her, but her damnable, shaking hands refused to settle down enough to get off a clean shot. With every missed shot, the pounding thunder in her ears grew louder, drowning out David’s voice entirely, until there was only her purgatory of rhythmic shots inevitably missing the bandits swarming toward the hotel and Mary.
Inception of Chaos: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Story Page 48
