by Bobby Adair
I hurried up the stairs. As I neared the top, there was almost no light coming in from the burning houseboats in front of the island. I reached up and touched the bell tower floor above my head. Steel. A very nice modern upgrade. Leaving the old oaken floor up there for tourists to fall through would have been a bad idea. So, the park service, when they installed the stairs, had also installed the steel floor. I just hoped it was thick enough to protect me.
The rifle fired again.
Okay, buddy. Yours is coming.
I reached up through the stairway hole, put the grenade on the floor, and then gave it a hard push across the metal floor. It clinked on the metal above my head as I took off down the stairs.
My bet was on the table, my dice were rolling. If one of those guys up there figured out quickly enough that a live grenade was on the floor and had the presence of mind to kick it back down into the stairwell, I’d likely die.
I was almost halfway down the stairs, running and nearly falling as I went, when an explosion boomed through the stairwell and knocked me off my balance. The air was immediately full of dust. My ears rang. I coughed, but I was alive.
Chapter 46
Expecting something to fall from above, I stumbled down the spiral stairs and reached the bottom. I tripped on something and rolled through the door into the chapel with a villainous grin. I didn’t have a count on the number of Jerry’s hardcore thugs, but now there were three less of them alive than when I’d arrived at the island.
I scrambled to my left, stepping through what I was coming to think of as post-apocalyptic floor crap. Survivors tended to leave their useful belongings in whatever bag they carried, or they left it scattered near whatever passed for their bed. They were the usual sorts of things—blankets, jackets, and foods packaged in a time before the world went to shit. The other class of post-apocalyptic floor crap was those things that ended up on the floor of a ransacked house, things of no use in a survival situation, or things too heavy to carry. Scavengers didn’t tend to tidy up after themselves when they were searching houses for something to fill a belly that had been empty for days.
Anxious hollering from outside made it clear to me that curious armed men would very soon be coming to investigate what was going on inside the old church. I tucked myself into a shadowy corner piled with a bunch of floor crap and drew a pistol. I had no confidence that I could hit anything that wasn’t already in machete range, but if I found myself outnumbered by Jay’s thugs, noisy gunshots and a hail of bullets would put enough fright into my attackers to ruin their aim.
I heard Gretchen’s amplified voice echo through the open door, telling Jay to come to a decision or another houseboat was going to sink in flames.
Jay hollered something angry in return. Then his voice changed. He was ordering his people around, though I couldn’t make out what he was saying, at least not enough of his words to make any sense of it. Two explosions, one rapidly following the other, cut him off. Flashes through the open front doors cast the chapel interior into sharp shadows.
No one came in, though. Jay must have guessed the bell tower had been taken out by the grenade launcher.
Good for me.
I ran back into the bell tower and wound my way up the spiral staircase, not pausing at all when I stepped up through the metal floor at the top level. I didn’t think either one of the men who’d been up there could have survived the grenade explosion. It turned out to be a good guess. I only saw one mangled body, so the other must have been blown out. Just as well—the forty-foot fall would have killed him even if the explosion hadn’t.
I stood behind a roof support column and peeked out over the compound. Two houseboats, one anchored next to the second, fifty yards offshore, were both aflame. For the moment, the gunfire had ceased, the explosions had stopped. The splash of swimming infected seemed to be coming from all directions, though I could see nothing out in the darkness. Then I heard the howls—close by. Some Whites had made it to the bottom of the cliff and were scaling it just as I had. Soon, they were going to come over the wall and into the compound, and that was going to be bad for everyone.
Jay’s voice yelled back across the water. “Here are my demands.”
I looked down at the courtyard.
Shit.
Jay understood he was in a losing position and had apparently decided that no price was too high to avoid defeat.
A row of islanders was on their knees, facing the water. Jay stood at one end of the row with his pistol pointed at the back of little Megan’s head. Next to her knelt Amy. Next to her, Steph’s hair glowed red in the firelight. Three of Jay’s thugs stood behind the row, looking out into the darkness. Karl was a fourth, talking to one of them and gesturing toward the back of the compound, telling his companion about me, no doubt. The companion wasn’t interested though.
Jay yelled, “I’ll trade you these three twats for that fifty, that grenade launcher, and all your ammunition. And if you don’t scoot those boats up in the light where I can see you and do it in the next sixty seconds, I’m going to start shooting. And this little twat goes first.” He looked down at his watch.
“Don’t, Jay,” Gretchen called back through the bullhorn. She said some more things. She thought talking might help. I knew words were a waste. Jay was as ruthlessly smart as he was crazy.
But I was too.
I turned and went flying down the spiral stairs as fast as I could go. At the bottom, I leapt through the door and into the chapel. Outside, Gretchen was still talking. I crossed the floor toward the back wall of the chapel and spotted exactly what I hoped to find there—fissures in the old wall where stones had fallen away. I took a grenade and jammed it into the first fissure that looked like it was large enough to wedge the device inside. No luck. I tried another. Too small.
A gun outside fired a single shot.
Gretchen’s amplified voice turned frantic.
My rage boiled; I knew what Jay had just done. I found a fissure in the stone where the grenade fit. I jammed it in and pulled the pin.
Dammit.
The hole was too small and held the spoon down as if it were still in my hand. It’d never explode that way.
I quickly found another hole, large enough. I lay the grenade inside, and I ran to the other end of the chapel, diving through the door at the base of the bell tower.
The grenade exploded. Rock flew all through the chapel. Whites howled. A dozen voices out front were yelling at once. I peeked around the door hoping, hoping.
Gritty, thick dust blew through the chapel on a breeze that seemed to come from where the back wall had been. There was a hole, a massive hole, larger than the double doors at the front of the chapel. Through the hole, all I saw was black.
C’mon, Whites.
I still heard the howls. They were still out there.
I drew my pistol, ready to coax them in with the noise of a few gunshots. But I didn’t need to. They started to pour through the hole in the wall, running toward the light they saw through the open double door, running toward the people outside.
Nothing happened for a long, frozen moment. Everyone was still trying to process the sound of the explosion and the screams of the oncoming Whites. They were all a tad slow in realizing just how fucked they were. Then the gunfire started. The screaming followed. Someone shrieked, and I ran out of the bell tower enclosure and joined a line of Whites running out of the chapel.
Chapter 47
Seven or eight Whites lay dead or wounded just outside the chapel doors. Others were on their knees around the dead, satisfying their hunger. More Whites were pouring through the chaos and running at the gunmen who were defending themselves as they retreated toward the boats anchored offshore. With their gunfire, they were unwittingly drawing the attention of most of the Whites in the compound. The price of ignorance is high.
I scanned quickly around for Steph’s blazing red hair. I looked for Jay.
The islanders who had been on their knees were up and r
unning; many of them were in the lake, racing clumsily through the deepening water toward one of the boats anchored offshore. A White tackled a man in knee deep water. Another White jumped on.
And there was Jay with a handful of Steph’s hair, dragging her toward a boat behind the cover fire of his thugs. A man was already at the helm working on starting the boat. Jay waded toward the stern, and in water just up to his thigh, he raised his pistol and shot the man in the back. He threw himself over the transom without letting go of Steph’s hair. He apparently valued her as a bargaining chip, and he wasn’t about to let her go.
Just as well, that made my job easier. My two objectives were in the same place.
Jay’s thugs were backing into the water close to the boat Jay had just commandeered.
People were swimming. Not a single normal person was left on dry land. The Whites were pursuing them into the water. I ran across the courtyard, intent on making a flanking move at Jay’s men, and then thought better of it. I still had two grenades. I stopped, pulled a pin, and heaved one over the heads of the Whites who were attacking the last of Jay’s thugs.
My aim wasn’t perfect, but close is good enough with a hand grenade. It bounced on shore just a few paces’ distance in front of the gunmen. I saw one’s eyes go wide as I jumped to lay belly flat on the ground. The grenade exploded, and I sprang back to my feet.
All three gunmen were down, along with a dozen Whites who’d been closing in on them. I looked up in time to see Jay still flinching from the explosion. He shoved Steph into the seat beside his at the helm, and I saw the water at the stern boil as the propeller started to spin.
I ran at top speed and hit the water with a huge splash, raising my knees high to keep from tripping. But Jay’s ski boat was already starting to move as the engine revved loudly.
I wasn’t going to make it.
Jay was going to get away with Steph as his hostage.
I wailed a curse.
A stream of tracers cut a path into the stern of Jay’s boat. Fiberglass disintegrated, and sparks flew where bullets ripped into the engine. The boat stopped dead and immediately started to draw water and sink at the stern. Jay lost his balance and fell.
I put my faith in Dalhover to cease fire before I arrived at the back of the boat, and I didn’t slow.
Explosions sounded behind me up in the compound. Murphy was working on the Whites pouring through the chapel, trying to improve the odds of the relatively innocent islanders making their escape into the lake.
The fifty-caliber machine gun stopped shredding the stern of Jay’s boat just before I grabbed on. My weapon in hand was the machete, exactly the weapon Jay deserved to have used on him.
Inside the boat, Jay lay on his back, feet forward and head toward me. Steph had a hand on the windshield and the other on a seat, trying to keep her feet below her as the boat slowly angled its bow up out of the water. She was looking at the gun in Jay’s hand, pointed directly at her.
I was only halfway into the boat as I realized that Jay might shoot her at any second.
“Asshole,” I yelled.
Jay glanced up and saw me. His face turned to surprise, then fear, as he saw my raised machete.
I was up over the transom by then, tall enough to put some muscle behind my swing.
But Jay was quick and was bringing his pistol to bear as my blade came down. The gun fired, my machete split his skull. I felt the bullet tear a wound on my left side as I fell. The gun fired wildly twice more as Jay’s body twitched his dying response to a machete lodged deep in his big, squirmy snail brain.
Steph shouted or screamed. I’m not sure which.
I climbed into the boat as it listed to port. I wrenched my blade out of Jay’s skull as I spun around to look for threats that might be coming from shore. Suddenly, standing became difficult. Balance was lost. I was trying to face the shore, but I only saw a black sky speckled with a billion stars. I was looking up, and I was confused as I lost consciousness.
Chapter 48
Drizzly, cold wind howled through the aluminum framework that held the canopy up over the pontoon boat. I found myself looking at the black metal legs of the grenade launcher from exactly where someone might sit on the deck of the pontoon boat to operate it. I heard the voices of people in contentious discussion. I felt the deck rock a little too vigorously on swells driven by the wind.
The boat’s motor wasn’t running. We were anchored or drifting. I lifted my throbbing head and looked around from where I lay on the deck. Two other people lay under blankets on the deck near me. One had a big, bloody bandage on his face. A woman I didn’t know sat at the stern, staring emptily at the shore. Beside her, a man I also didn’t know leaned on her and slept. To my left, Steph sat fallen over on a padded bench, eyes closed, sleeping, apparently unharmed.
I felt relief.
I lay back on the deck and started putting together my memories from the night before.
Bang.
In all the pandemonium and the noisy violence of modern warfare, the sound of one gunshot stuck crystallized as clearly as a ringing Christmas bell over a frozen field. It was that one gunshot that killed Megan. It enraged and depressed me that a man would murder a child just to further his perverse ambitions. My anger seethed behind closed eyes, and I found solace only in recalling the satisfying crunch of my blade smashing through Jay’s cranium and slicing into his gray matter. I hoped when he saw my blade coming down at his forehead he had time in that tick of a second to feel the horror of his impending, gruesome death.
Please God, at least that.
Jay deserved so much worse.
“You awake?” Steph asked.
I looked over at her green eyes, vivid in the gray morning light. She was still laying sideways on the bench, a few strands of red hair stuck across her face, some of it blowing in the wind. Without thinking about it, I said, “You’re beautiful.”
She smiled, embarrassed. “How do you feel?”
I hadn’t thought about it. “Cold.”
“You banged your head pretty hard when you fell in the boat.”
Thinking back to the moment after I cleaved Jay’s skull, I said, “I lost my balance.” Remembering Jay’s pistol firing at me, I put a hand to my left side. It felt a little odd, just under the ribs. A bandage covered a wound on the left side of my abdomen.
“He shot you,” she said.
“I guess I’m not going to die.” I smiled as though I was making a funny joke.
“A few inches to the right and it would have hit the bottom of your lung.” Steph sat up. “You probably would have died.”
Feeling around on the bandage, I said, “A half inch to the left and the bullet would have missed all together.”
Steph rolled her eyes but didn’t smile. “The bullet went through your oblique muscle just below the ribs under your left arm. You were lucky. The Lucky Null Spot.” Steph smirked almost imperceptibly.
I ignored the wisecrack. “I’ll be all right then?” I felt the wound under the bandage. It was just about where my elbow would touch the side of my abdomen when my arm was at my side.
“I cleaned your wound when you were out and sewed you up. If you don’t get infected, you’ll probably be okay. And you bonked your head pretty hard when you fell.”
I put a hand to my head and felt another bandage on the back. I propped myself up on my elbow and felt a hammer inside my skull. “Whoa.” I laid back down.
“Murphy and Dalhover are on shore looking for antibiotics and whatever else they can find.”
“Dalhover shouldn’t be on shore,” I said. “The Whites will see him.”
“He thought you were worth it.” Steph smiled. “Besides, we drove the boats way up the lake last night after everything happened. Murphy said there aren’t many Whites around.”
“It always seems that way,” I said. “Then they are.”
“You’re not the only one who knows that, Zed. Let other people be responsible for themselves.”
She said, “Thank you for coming to get me.”
“Jay was crazy. I had to do something.”
Steph nodded but didn’t comment on Jay. “I know I’m wasting my breath when I say this, but you need a couple weeks of rest to let that bullet wound heal.”
“And my head?” I asked.
“I think history has shown what a hard head you have.” Steph shrugged. “You’ll probably be just fine.”
I made a slow, determined effort to sit up. I leaned on the grenade launcher, facing Steph. “Did Rachel and Molly make it?”
“We picked them up near where they dropped you into the lake.”
I looked away from her when I asked my next question out of the smallest of hopes. “What about Megan?”
Steph shook her head and from the sadness suddenly on her face, it was clear that Megan didn’t make it.
“Jay?” I asked.
She nodded and her face took on a harder edge. It was as I suspected. Jay shot Megan.
“How’s Amy taking it?”
“She’s on one of the other boats. She’s not talking about it.”
I asked, “How many made it off the island?”
“Eleven, counting me.”
“Eleven.” I slumped. There were probably nineteen people on their knees when I’d blown the wall to let the infected in. Had that choice cost the lives of eight people I’d been trying to save?
Steph got down off her bench, kneeled in front of me, and engulfed me in a hug. “You did what you could to help them. Most of us got away.”
“And Jay’s men?” I asked, feeling a frog in my throat for the dead and second-guessing my choices.
“Dead, as far as anybody knows.”
I wrapped my arms around Steph. “At least there’s that.”
Chapter 49
I slept through most of the day. Had it not been for haunting thoughts of dying faces and guilt, it would have felt good to do nothing.
