by Lou Cadle
He jerked to a stop, then moved. But he was limping. She’d gotten him, winged him at least. Now all of them were out of sight, beyond the log. One of the freed kids was lying on the ground in front of the log, his hands over his head.
“Joan,” she yelled, giving the whistled signal to advance. Then she forgot about her for the moment and edged up to where Curt had last been. He didn’t respond to a signal. But she arrived at a spot where she saw a half-dozen shell casings on the ground and some trampled brush. He had been here. There was no blood, so she hoped he was fine.
She backtracked and signaled for Joan, who whistled her response. Sierra went back up the road to the spot opposite her and, in few words, told her the situation. “I need you to hold them there at the log by firing. I’m going to try and get around them. It might take me fifteen minutes.”
“I only have one full magazine left,” Joan said.
“Single shots then. Space them out, slower than you want, like one or two per minute. And try to get closer to the Quinns to signal one of them to support you.”
“What’s that signal? Sorry, I forget.”
Sierra demonstrated it to her. “Got it?”
“Thanks.”
The fastest way to flank the enemy would be to run across their road, through the Quinn back yard, and emerge on the main road to the right of the men. She’d have to go back down the road a half-mile to be out of sight.
She signaled her presence as she ran into the Quinnyard. No one answered. Maybe the Quinns had the same idea, to flank the attackers. No way could Sierra entertain the thought that they’d been hurt by those explosions. She ran at an angle, past the garden, the hens, the rabbits, whistling the “friend” signal more than once.
“Who is it?” Rudy’s voice. But where was he?
“Rudy,” she hissed, coming to a halt. “Is that you?”
“I’m down here.”
She leaned down and looked. He had wedged himself under the rabbit hutch. “You okay?”
“It smells bad. And I feel awful. Like I should be helping more. I didn’t help Oliver either.”
Sierra didn’t have time to reassure him right now. But there was something she wanted to know that he might know. “Is Dev okay? His folks?
“I just saw him and his mom come around the house.”
“Good. I have to go.” She wove through the trees, remembering just in time to slow down to look for the tripwire. She stepped over that, and then she ran through the woods, hoping they hadn’t decided to come around this way to get into the neighborhood. She didn’t want to confront the remaining men alone.
But she made the main road without incident. She stopped, caught her breath, and listened. She wished Joan had more ammo, for she would have told her to wait ten minutes and then really let loose to keep their focus on the neighborhood road. But she had the situation she did.
Inching her way out of the trees, she kept listening, for anything significant—gunfire, shouts, the sound of footsteps on the gravel of the road’s shoulder. She looked to her left, and she saw the head of a man inside one of the cars. He wasn’t looking her way, but she stepped back into cover before he turned around. There was a steep drop here down to the road. A slight curve in the road to her right several hundred yards away was what she’d been thinking of aiming for, but as she studied the road, she realized there was a little dip right in front of her. It was as if the ground had sunk under the asphalt after a freeze-thaw cycle. It might be deep enough to conceal her if she crawled.
Gunfire and a male voice snapped her attention away from the road. The answering gunfire was more distant than Joan’s position.
Curt. Had to be him, flanking them to that side.
While they were all looking in Curt’s direction, she jumped out and skittered down the steep hill, barely keeping to her feet on the shoulder. Another few feet right, and there was that dip. She risked a glance at the invaders, but none of them were looking her way. Forget crawling. Putting on a burst of speed, she raced across the road. Two lanes and two shoulders had never seemed so wide before.
Sierra ran straight into the woods without looking left again and kept running until she was a dozen yards into the trees. She stopped, listened for gunfire, and heard a single shot. Maybe they too were running low on ammunition?
Moving quickly, not worried yet about how much noise she was making, she wove through the pines, keeping close to the road. A grenade exploded, surprising her into freezing. Sounded like they were trying to get Curt with one, the way they’d been trying to get the Quinns earlier. She hoped he was moving, or staying low, or whatever you needed to do to avoid being hurt by a grenade.
She was close now. Another step to her left and she could see the invaders. A dead body had been hidden by the last car, lying in a huge pool of blood. No way could you bleed that much and live through it. Dev or someone must have gotten him early on.
The ones still alive were behind the log, popping up to fire over it at Joan. Another person to worry about. Joan had to be out of ammo or close to it. She looked out and saw the guy with the grenade launcher load up what had to be a grenade and raise his weapon again.
It was time for Sierra to act.
Chapter 22
Dev’s mom’s eyes opened. “Wow,” she said. “That hurt.” Her voice sounded as if it was spoken through cotton balls crammed into his ears.
“I can’t hear very well,” he said.
“I can’t hear very well,” she said, and for a second he was confused about the repeated words.
“Are you hit?” he said.
“Bruised. A couple bits of shrapnel. I’ll hurt tomorrow.”
“We need to get to better cover,” he said. He suspected the big pines had protected them from getting hurt any worse. They needed to get behind something more substantial than this brush.
There were bursts of gunfire from up their road—defensive fire, he hoped. Time to move. He held out his arms and pulled his mother up. “Where’s your rifle?”
“No idea.”
Didn’t matter right now. Just move away from the danger. He put his arm around her waist and half-towed his mother along, getting away from the road and the attackers. Dev knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long. His body was demanding that he lie down and rest. There was a noise inside his head he’d never heard before. He wove around a fat pine, steering his mother clear of it. Another few thin pines were ahead, but beyond them, another wide trunk beckoned. That’d be far enough for the first effort.
He hated not being able to hear right. Anyone could be coming at them from any direction. His mother sagged against him, and he fought to keep them both upright. He was fighting her and his own body, which was insistent about sitting down. “A few more steps,” he said, as he pulled her up from a slump. The pine bark ahead was dotted with beetle bore marks. Looks like shotgun wounds almost. He made it to the tree and let himself fall against it, resting. Two deep breaths, then he took the bulk of his mom’s weight and pivoted her around so the tree trunk was between them and the road. He let himself slide down the trunk, letting go of his mother. A moment later, she sank to her knees beside him.
“You’re hurt,” she said, holding herself up by pressing a hand against the tree.
“I’ll be fine.” As soon as he could rest a few minutes.
“Don’t move.”
“Not planning on it,” he said.
“No, stay still.” She sounded less confused now. He looked up at her, and either she was swaying on her knees or the world was swaying in his brain. “That’s good. Look up farther. Up at the sky.”
He did. “Why?”
“A splinter in your eye. Damn. I’d like tweezers, but I want this out right now.”
Come to think of it, his right eye did feel strange. He reached up for it, and she slapped his hand as if he was a three-year-old going for the cookie jar.
“Stay still. Keep looking up. Don’t blink.” Her hand came closer to his eye until
it blurred out. He didn’t feel anything more than a tug, which was really a weird sensation, but not painful. In a second, she held up not a splinter, but a pretty big chunk of wood. Yikes.
“Uh, can I see okay?”
“I was going to ask you that. Can you see? It wasn’t in your pupil, just down in the white.”
It took him a few seconds to figure out he had to close the other eye to test his vision. It was a little blurry, but he thought that was from tears. Now that he was paying attention, he realized that eye had been dripping tears onto his face. Or he hoped it was tears. He reached up, intending to wipe it and look, make sure it wasn’t blood, but his mother grabbed him by the wrist.
“Leave it alone,” she said. “I want to check it with a magnifying glass as soon as I can. Don’t rub it.”
When she said that, he got a strong urge to rub it that he hadn’t had until then. Wasn’t the human mind weird? He forced himself to quit worrying about his eye. “Are you okay?”
“My hearing is bad. I think I took shrapnel—metal—in my arm. And maybe wood splinters elsewhere. And, let’s see, blast effects.” She frowned in thought. “I have some information on that somewhere. There could be internal injuries.” She shook her head. “I guess it doesn’t matter. I mean, it does matter, but without hospitals, all we could do for that is rest and hope for the best.”
“All three of us are hurt. That isn’t good,” he said.
“All three of us are alive. That’s very good.”
“For now. There has to still be at least eight of them left alive. In a minute, I want us to get to better cover.”
“Damn their eyes. Those children being there made it harder for me to shoot like I wanted. I could have killed two or three otherwise.”
“I know.” Dev imagined it had been harder for her than for him. He’d been pretty ruthless about it, trusting his scope and his aim and his steady hands. Too much thinking about it, a little bit of shakiness, and he’d really hesitate to pull the trigger. Still, he wasn’t sure that he’d killed anyone by the log.
“I hope your father is okay. And that Rudy stayed put.”
He knew he was forgetting something, but that’s all he knew. It wasn’t more than a distant tickle in his brain, like he’d told himself not to forget...whatever...but now all that was left was that he was supposed to not forget. “My brain isn’t working right,” he said.
His mother looked so worried that he was sorry he’d said it. “I’ll be okay with some rest,” he said.
“I’m sure you will,” she said. “Can you move yet?”
“Yeah,” he said. He bit back a groan as he struggled to his feet.
He offered his hand to his mother, but she shook her head. “I can manage.” And she did, using the tree trunk for balance and getting to her feet. “Let’s get to the house.”
Later, Dev wouldn’t remember much of that stumbling walk back home. His mother took over toward the end, scouting for possible trouble, and signaling his father that it was them coming. When they got to the porch, she ran back around and he heard her say something to his father. Dev leaned against the side of the house and tried to keep his eyes open. He tested the vision in his hurt eye again—seemed to be working okay now. His tears has dried on his cheek, so he licked his finger and touched it, and then checked his fingertip. Not blood. That was good.
His father and mother came around the corner of the house together.
“If I can just get some help,” she said.
“I’ve got him.” His father leaned down. “Put your arm around my neck, Devlin.”
“Arch, your arm.”
“I can manage.”
“But you’ll hurt yourself.”
Dev had no idea what they were arguing about, but he wanted them to stop. He was trying to figure out how to say that when his father scooped him up and lifted him into the air with a grunt.
“See?” his mom said. “Your arm. You hurt it, didn’t you?”
“It’s my back. Devlin’s no lightweight any more.”
His mom continued to fuss at his father as he carried Dev into the house and took him to the living room sofa. Her saying “Get my medical kit” was the last thing Dev heard for a while.
Chapter 23
Another two steps and Sierra had a perfect, clear shot at the man set to fire another grenade at Curt’s position. She took the shot. He coughed, stumbled forward, and as he fell, he must have fired, for a grenade shot out, angled forward and down, and it hit not twenty yards ahead of him. There was a short delay, barely long enough for one of the men to start to shout a warning, and then it detonated. Sierra’s eyes closed of their own volition, and when she forced them open, a spray of fragments and asphalt were raining down over everyone, herself included, though the pines protected her from the worst of it. She bowed her head, and waited for it to stop.
When the worst was over, she looked up. The invaders were all, to a man, on the ground, their heads covered. The man with the grenade launcher was down and his rifle was ten feet behind him. Beyond him, there was a new crater in the road. A lot of the force had been driven down, and the road had taken the worst of it. The first of them rose, shedding pieces of the highway, and Sierra raised her rifle and took aim at him.
She fired and missed, and as he turned toward her, she fired again and hit him in the gut. A second shot hit his chest.
Only one child was now anywhere near the men, the little girl, still held by the ankle by the man she’d shot in the leg. She was on the ground, but whether she’d fallen, been tripped, or the force of the grenade blast had knocked her there, Sierra couldn’t tell.
What she could tell was that the son of a bitch who’d been using her as a human shield had her only by the ankle. The rest of the length of him was clear. Sierra ignored the other two men getting to their feet and moved a step to the side, getting her shot lined up. The leader raised his head, then turned it. Right at the end, he was looking straight at her, and his face was in her crosshairs. She squeezed the trigger and finished him.
The other two men on their feet were running, and neither still had a child tethered to him. One stopped to snatch up the rifle with the grenade launcher. The other ran without pause, made it to a car halfway up the line of them, and yanked open the driver’s door. He jumped in and she lost sight of him. She fired twice at the other man, running now with a rifle in either hand. Dimly, she was aware of a child running away from the shooting through the trees across the way. It was enough of a distraction that she no longer had a shot at the fleeing men. There were three men newly on the ground. And some other ones Dev or his mother had gotten earlier. She shouldn’t risk stepping out to pursue the man with the grenade launcher until she made sure these were all dead.
She hoped the little girl had survived the blast. She was lying still, facedown on the road.
Security before compassion. A car started and the engine revved, then it took off up the road. She heard Curt firing at it as it passed his position.
Excellent. You both keep going that way.
She moved to one who’d never moved after the grenade exploded, fearing he’d been playing possum all this while. He was face down, his rifle next to him. She kicked it away and put her own rifle’s barrel to his neck and pulled the trigger.
Click.
This had been her last magazine, so she was totally out of ammo. She snatched his rifle up, pointed it at him, and felt around with her thumb for its safety. It wasn’t exactly like her rifle, and she couldn’t get the safety without looking. She raised the rifle and checked. The safety was already off. She put the tip of the barrel against his neck and fired.
He didn’t even flinch. Okay, call that one dead. The one who’d had the grenade launcher didn’t have much of a face left, and what there was had been scorched by his proximity to the blast. The man she’d shot as he rose was dead. The ones someone else had killed earlier, all dead, and already hosting a number of flies. One had lived a while beyond being shot, for
there was a bloody line where he’d crawled along the road before being able to go no farther. He lay on a flat piece of pavement, in a pool of congealing blood.
Last of all, she checked the one who’d been leading, the one who’d had the little girl in his arms. Shot in the head, he was gone. Good.
She whistled the all clear to Curt, to Joan. They’d repelled the attack. Then she realized she could speak aloud. “We’re all clear,” she shouted. She turned around and counted bodies. “Nine dead out here.”
She looked back at the man she thought of as the leader of the invasion. He hadn’t shot at her—he’d been shouting directions at his men and holding tight to the girl—but that had been worse than if he’d been firing steadily in her direction. It didn’t matter to her if he’d been hungry, or angry about her shooting his friends back in town, or what had been in his mind. What mattered was how he’d behaved, and he’d behaved despicably.
She stood over him, hating him, though he was well beyond being able to appreciate feeling loved or hated. With her boot, she rolled him over to see what evil looked like. Like anyone. There were no horns. Without thinking about it, she put her foot on his chest, standing for a second like that, applying light pressure, proving her control over him. It felt good. She felt like a goddess, the goddess of vengeance, of justice, and she had to still a powerful urge to hoot in victory.
When she turned her head to look at the little girl, her triumphant feeling left her. She hurried over, knelt by the girl, and checked her pulse at the neck. Her neck was damp with sweat, and Sierra could smell her. It was a little kid kind of sweat, unlike any other smell. And there was a pulse, heart pumping blood just as it should.
But the kid wasn’t moving. Sierra leaned down and said, “Kid? Little girl? Honey? You can wake up now. The bad men are all gone.”
But the kid wasn’t moving or opening her eyes. Sierra rolled her carefully and checked her over. No blood. No bones obviously broken.
