81
“Chrissy, they’re almost there. I’ve even diverted Team Two. They’ll be there right after the reinforcements arrive. Just hang on, damn you.”
Orien said, “She’s beyond hearing that, boss. You know she’s going after Mary, right? You got the racer bike, so why are you still here? You need to go.”
“She won’t leave her post. She can’t.”
“You know her. She will.”
David snarled, curling back his lip as he continually evaluated incoming reports with one ear. She very well could go after Mary… “But those teams’ crossfire is forcing the bandits to take cover. The hotel is still alive because it slowed the bandits’ attack.”
Orien shrugged, raising one eyebrow, and pointed at the door.
“I already left my post once to save her. I’ve got to manage our movements, too, for the fake fallback along the main strip. We can’t screw that up. It’s the only way we can even the odds—”
“They’ll be fine. I got it. You need to get your ass moving, or you’ll lose her.” Orien turned back to the window and fired his rifle.
David called out movement orders to a team about to get cut off, then looked at his partner again. “She’ll die anyway if I don’t save this damn town.”
Orien paused half a second between firing and cycling his rifle to chamber another round. Bang. Over the clatter of chambering a new round, he said, “If you don’t save her, you got nothing holding you here anymore, and the town dies anyway. Just, tomorrow instead of today.”
“What?” David blinked. Orien thought she was the reason they were still there? No, he’d just seen a chance to do real good, for real people, instead of licking Denver’s mayoral boots. Or maybe they were gubernatorial boots, but who knew for sure… That was why he’d stayed, wasn’t it?
A dawning horror gnawed the back of his mind. He fought to keep the thought from materializing, but the image of Chrissy lying dead on the floor wouldn’t be pushed aside.
David’s eyes welled up. She was the reason…and she was ignoring the radio, about to do something stupid. Something Chrissy. “My God…”
He half raced, half slid down two flights of stairs, out the door, and leapt to the leather seat of a British racing-green Triumph T120 off-road racer, a total beast in the dirt or on the road when it rolled off the line in 1965—and still was. The farmer who had lovingly restored it almost cried when he’d handed over the bike for use during the siege.
Controlled lightning… Its single carb, its heart, pumped gasoline lifeblood to the engine as David gave the accelerator a little nudge, and the beast roared like a caged animal as it shot almost out from under him in its eagerness to run.
He jinked left, then right at the intersection, and shot past four of his people beating a single bandit with their rifles, amidst several bandit corpses. He turned left, and passed a half dozen bandits in a front yard, shooting into the house. At the intersection, he veered right, onto the main drag. Keeping low over the handlebars, he raced past a pair of startled-looking bandits, but swerved around a dead car just before he heard two rifle reports behind him, and the driver’s side window blew out as he passed it.
He glanced down the road at the next intersection and saw a mob of his own people, running toward him. The reinforcements were coming…
Only a block from the hotel on the left, a dozen muzzle flashes lit up the upstairs windows to its right. Then more. They were firing so fast, David’s first thought was that they were giving covering fire. Immediately, he looked for the cause, and then the cause darted out the front door of one of those houses and crossed the street, up ahead.
David gunned the bike and aimed for the hotel’s backyard, opposite the bandit assault, and crashed through the knee-high white picket fence just as Christine reached the sidewalk.
She turned at the bike engine’s roar, and promptly fell.
David ran toward the corner of the building. If she’d been hit… Well, he’d go get her and drag her back behind cover, he decided.
But as he reached the corner, Christine flew by him, literally, as she dove for cover, and guns fired over at the hotel’s front—bandits shooting at the hotel, or trying to hit her.
He grabbed her arm and helped her up. “Are you hit?”
She checked her rifle and replied, “No. Mary is inside, and the bandits keep moving up even with us wasting so much ammo.” Her forehead wrinkled, eyebrows furrowing. She turned to peer around the corner. “I have to go get her out. I don’t know why you’re here, but thank you.”
“I’m here for you—”
“And I’m here for my friend. Stay out of my way, then.” She banged on the back door.
“I’ll help, if you’ll come with me after. Damn you for being stubborn.” David’s lips flatlined.
Before she could reply, the door opened to reveal none other than the Fort Morgan rep, Michael Brown. His left sleeve was missing, and he wore a bloody bandage over his bicep. He turned and ran through the house, yelling over his shoulder, “Get inside. Got guns? They’re coming.”
David and Christine followed from the mudroom to the kitchen. She said, “David, thanks,” as they passed into the living room.
A glance told him this had been a big house converted into a duplex, but somewhere along the way, they’d turned it into the B-and-B. Most of the downstairs on that side had been converted into the big kitchen and a communal-style rec area, while a door on the room’s far end led to a short hallway lined with doors—the beds in “B&B.”
Half a dozen people crouched behind a low sandbag wall reinforcing the building’s front wall, and they fired rifles through the shattered remains of a huge bay window. More gunshots rang from the bedroom or rooms, through the door that led into the hallway.
Michael crouched at the bay window’s far end, firing an M16-style assault rifle on three-round burst, crouched beside a stack of maybe a dozen large ammo magazines. “Start shooting. How’d you get past the bandits? We’re surrounded.” Bang-bang-bang.
Mary crouched roughly in the middle, looking out through her rifle’s scope.
Christine didn’t hesitate, dropping to her hands and knees to crawl toward an open spot on the right end. There, on the carpeted floor, a rifle and three magazines lay.
David crawled to reach Christine. “We ran up to the back door. No one shot at us.”
She swung her rifle’s barrel onto the sandbag wall and fired, but she’d left a bit of room to her right. “Where’d they go, then?”
Reaching the small space left where she had positioned herself, David grabbed the semi-auto hunting rifle, probably 7mm, with a decent scope.
He followed Christine’s lead, bringing the weapon up, and scanned for a target. A woman rose up, ahead and to his right, and sprinted into the front yard. By the time he lined up on her, though, she dove behind a picnic table.
He gulped, and fired just above the overturned table’s edge, hoping the woman would rise up at the right time, but no joy.
At the same time, a man ran forward on the woman’s left, but again, he hit cover before David could line up on him. The bandits were leapfrogging pretty good, or whatever they called that maneuver in the Army. Bounding? Was that the name? What a time to be thinking about military terms. But, he could guess where the missing bandits had gone. “They’re flanking the houses across the street, or they’re about to push hard.”
As though on cue, a deafening explosion to David’s left shook the house, forcing him to flinch down as a portion of the wall blew inward.
He looked over, swinging his rifle to bear at the same time, and saw a big hole in the wall, between Michael and Mary, along with a haze of dust and smoke. The townie who’d crouched there lay motionless, blown back a full six feet.
A short, heavy-set man with a 1911-style pistol stepped through the opening, facing the defenders lined up along the window, and fired twice before David, Christine, and someone else fired rounds into him; he fell to the floor, twitchin
g.
Christine screamed Mary’s name, and another man stepped into the opening. He turned the opposite direction and fired his pistol, but before David could take him out, someone else put a round through the back of the bandit’s head and painted the wall with crimson gore.
The bandits and the blast victim weren’t the only corpses on the floor. Mary lay sprawled as well, and so did Michael Brown.
Christine rushed to Mary, screaming her name, but another bandit came through the opening before she got to her friend.
David put two bullets into the bandit’s chest. “Reloading.”
The woman to David’s right laid down a steady rate of fire, methodical, about one second apart. “Covering.” Once David had a new magazine in, she said, “There’s too many. Why aren’t the mines going off?”
Startled, David missed his shot. There were mines out there, weren’t there? And there was only one reason for none to have gone off. He said, “Keep shooting,” then fished out one of his radios. “Orien, you there?”
The radio crackled to life. “Boss, you okay? Where are you?”
“Yeah. I’m at the hotel. We’re about to get overran, and we got high-value casualties. Figure out the grid opposite the front door, and blow them!”
David fired, waiting.
After a moment, over the din, Orien crackled, “Boss, that’s chained into the failsafe.”
Dammit. No further explanation was needed. Each of the likely attack sectors had explosives—not only mines, but improvised explosives as well—daisy-chained to blow out the enemy if they’d overrun a sector. They’d been planted inside houses and buildings, as well as in potholes and under dead cars…
David shouted back, “Who do we have in that sector?”
Orien replied immediately, “Unknown. Things are crazy. I think it’s mostly bandits, now.”
David grunted. He could see that through the defensive portal.
Good luck, everybody.
He clicked the radio button. “Do it. Now.” He rose up to fire again, and immediately ducked. Bullets riddled the back wall, and sand sprayed down over him from others striking the sandbags. “Shit.”
82
Boomer stood with his fists planted on a dead car’s hood, looking down. Beside him, two bodyguards looked around, slouching, with their rifle and shotgun held at the low-ready.
Wiley had three bullets for the rifle, but they were 7mm hunting rounds—they’d take the fight out of anyone, for sure. He aimed through the scope, crosshairs over the back of Boomer’s head. Wiley had crawled within forty meters or so, and at that range, he hardly needed the scope, but it was mounted with screws.
He let his breath out, slowly, then held it, and squeezed the trigger.
His scope view blurred, right before the rifle bucked in his hands. He immediately aimed again and saw a bodyguard falling to the ground. He must have walked in front of Boomer at the last second, dammit, but with the scope, Wiley’d had no peripheral vision.
At the same time, Boomer dove behind the car.
Wiley raised his head and looked. No Boomer, but the other bodyguard had his shotgun pointed in Wiley’s direction, and was running toward him. Probably didn’t know exactly where he was, but that would change any moment. Wiley aimed and fired, and the rushing guard fell face-first, skidding to a halt, and curled up. His shotgun landed a few feet away, but he made no move to reach for it.
No way he was letting Boomer get away. Wiley let go of the rifle and rose up, snatching the shotgun, and dug his toes into the ground as he sprinted toward the car. As he ran, his glance revealed that a few people in the background were turning toward this new gunfire, though most stayed focused on the row of houses under assault, but he reached the car in under three seconds. In the back of his mind, he hoped they just assumed he belonged there and everything was okay, but he was already there—too late to have second thoughts.
Where was Boomer? Wiley leapt out from behind the car, a dusty Ford Focus that had been a beauty two months ago, but now was an ornament.
Where’d the bastard go?
Wiley turned to go around the other side, keeping the car between himself and Boomer’s “army.” The shotgun ripped from his hands as he turned, flying over the trunk, accompanied by a deafening clang from Boomer’s maul-like mallet chunking into the Ford’s fender as the bandit leader’s momentum carried his swing onward.
Wiley leaned forward, putting his shoulder into a jackrabbit punch that struck Boomer on the chin. Pain shot through his hand, but through his adrenaline, it felt somehow far away.
Boomer staggered backward from the blow, but kept his grip on the heavy mallet.
Wiley came up with a left uppercut toward Boomer’s ribs, but the bandit swept his hand to block, and the blow only grazed him. Wiley swung his other arm, fully extended, across Boomer’s chest, to distract, even as he brought his right knee up and planted it firmly into Boomer’s stomach.
Boomer dropped the mallet as he blocked the feint, but he was already reaching with his right arm, and grabbed Wiley’s shirt as the bone-crunching knee hit him. “Oof.” Boomer shoved hard.
Wiley staggered back, and his foot caught something. He toppled backward and hit his head on impact.
Boomer grinned as he stepped forward and raised his booted foot high, but Wiley rolled out of the way, and the bandit’s boot heel crunched only ground.
Wiley swung his legs out, one catching Boomer at the ankles, the other behind the knees; Boomer’s legs buckled, and he fell forward, joining Wiley on the ground.
Boomer rolled onto his side, away from Wiley, but on the ground, his massive bulk wasn’t an advantage.
Wiley was faster, using his momentum to flip himself over, and shoved off, scrambling to his feet. Something wet trickled down the back of his head, and pain lanced through his skull, piercing through his adrenaline-fogged pain receptors.
Hope it’s not a concussion.
That half-second pause had let Boomer rise to his hands and knees, but Wiley was already on his feet again, stepping toward the big man to gain momentum, and buried his foot into Boomer’s belly. It felt like kicking steel.
Boomer rose up from the force, letting out a gasp, and fell back down.
Wiley kicked again, this time thrusting downward with his heel right into the bandit’s back, over his ribs, with a satisfying crunch.
His satisfaction lasted only an instant. Boomer, ignoring the blow, snatched Wiley’s other leg at the ankle and jerked his foot out from under him. Again, Wiley fell backward.
Boomer let out a roar, and as Wiley struck the ground, the giant crawled on top of him, between his legs, preventing him from kicking out. Boomer grabbed his throat with his left hand and cocked back his right.
With his left hand, Wiley grabbed Boomer’s wrist above the hand crushing his throat, and brought his right palm smashing into the back of Boomer’s elbow.
The pop was audible, and the giant collapsed, screaming.
From his back, Wiley swung his elbow, jamming it as hard as he could into Boomer’s spine, then rolled over and scrambled to his feet. As Boomer struggled to rise to his one hand and knees, Wiley planted his foot into the giant’s gut and was rewarded with a hiss of air and Boomer’s gasping, airless breaths.
Gasping for air himself, Wiley staggered to the huge meat tenderizer Boomer had carried, and hefted it with both hands. He walked up to his former captor and grinned as he raised the mallet over his head.
“Pop goes the weasel,” he said, looking Boomer in the eyes, and swung the giant hammer down.
David looked around the room. A short stack of corpses filled the doorway, but no more were trying to come through it, yet. Inside, Christine crouched by Mary’s motionless body, with her rifle aimed at the breach. Michael, the rep from Fort Morgan, hadn’t moved.
Outside, the bandits’ gunfire petered out, a bit.
David looked at the back door. No time to run, though. He shouted into the lull, “Get ready! They’re blowi
ng the mines.” Hopefully, the people in the other room had heard.
The gunfire outside increased, and the woman beside him ducked down again just in time, as Orien’s voice came through the radio. “Three...”
David crawled to Christine.
“Two…”
He grabbed her arm and pulled, but she resisted, shrugging him off.
“One…”
No time… David grabbed her by her collar and waistband and heaved himself backward, away from the opening, landing with a thud behind the low sandbag wall under the empty bay window frame.
The world erupted in heat and noise.
Christine sat up with Mary’s name on her lips. She cried out and reached for her friend, but the flames and heat licking up from the floor and walls singed her outstretched fingers, like an invisible barrier of heat between them. Mary…unrecognizable, skin blackened, or was that her clothes?
The heat receded as the flames washed back out through the opening, sucked by the hot air rushing outward.
“My God,” David said, still clutching her from behind.
Christine ignored him, her streaming eyes locked onto Mary. Why? Why had she tried to save Michael? The man had chosen to come back. But she knew why. Mary had done it to save Weldona, not Michael, and Fort Morgan could help them do that if they just made it through this one challenge. And not even for Weldona, but because this town was what was keeping Christine and her kids alive and safe.
Safe. Ha. No one was safe, and now Mary was…
“She’s gone,” David said. “Look out there.”
Dazed, she followed his arm to where he pointed, out through the sagging, now-burning bay window frame. All was a gray sheet of paper. It took a moment for her to realize it was smoke, hanging heavy in the air. A draft made the smoke swirl, and she caught a glimpse of the yard, both in front of the “hotel” and across the street—and even the street itself. It looked like an old video she’d once seen, a World War One battlefield, pocked with artillery craters. That glimpse showed the land scattered with bodies, but it was eerily silent.
Inception of Chaos: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Story Page 49
