Fall of Man | Book 2 | Homefront

by Sisavath, Sam

  Oh, who was she kidding? He sounded really annoyed.

  Emily had a feeling she had lost Greg as a knight in shining armor. Maybe he’d seen how she’d handled herself and heard her bragging about her past in order to take the gun from Pete, that he didn’t think she needed his protection anymore. She didn’t believe Greg was wise to what she’d done to manipulate him since yesterday, but maybe she was not quite reading him correctly. After all, it’d been a while since she’d had to live and die by how she interpreted someone’s thoughts just using their facial cues.

  “We know what we’re dealing with now, and you have the gun,” Greg said. “I saw you pop that guy with the nail gun. I bet you’re even better with a real gun.”

  “That’s not the point,” Emily said.

  “What is the point, then?”

  “It’s not a good idea.”

  “Why?”

  “It just isn’t.”

  “Tell me why.”

  “You have to take my word for it, Greg.”

  “No, I don’t. Tell me why.”

  Pete and Savannah had gone quiet. They almost looked like children caught in the middle of two squabbling parents.

  Emily sighed and took out the gun from behind her back and held it up. “The magazine has eight bullets. You saw what happened with the denim guy. Pete shot him—twice—and all it did was slow him down. He kept coming.” She looked over at Pete. “Am I right?”

  Pete nodded. “Yeah. I saw the look on his face. He was more irritated than anything.”

  “But they’re not indestructible,” Emily said, turning back to Greg. She softened her eyes and lowered her voice in an attempt to win him back. “They’re still human. They still bleed. A head shot would kill them, just as it would any living being. But it’s risky. I’m good with a gun, Greg, but I’m not that good. Movies and TV shows make it look like shooting someone in the head is easy, but it’s not. It’s really not. Especially when they’re moving as fast as those psychos can. There’s a reason even the guys in Special Forces go for chest shots first to put someone down, then finish them off with a headshot. The headshot is easier when they’re on the ground and not moving.”

  Emily looked back out the window before continuing.

  “Eight bullets. That’s all we have. And there are 200 houses in Arrow Bay alone. Let’s lowball it and say two per house. That’s over 400 people at least. That’s a lot of people, and we don’t have a lot of bullets.”

  “But they’re killing each other, too,” Greg said. “Like with the mailman. And the old lady. Then there’s what Pete said happened at the gate. They’re not coordinating. They’re just slaughtering anyone who gets in their way. Even each other.”

  “Emily’s right,” Savannah said. Then, when the men turned to look at her, “We tried to get out, but it’s too dangerous. It’s just too dangerous out there. If it’s safe in here, we should stay in here. Wait for the cops. Or whoever is out there. There has to be someone still out there, right? Right?”

  Pete smiled at her. “As long as you’re with me, I’m cool with staying in here.”

  The girl returned her boyfriend’s smile, as if the two of them were the only people in the room at the moment.

  Emily gazed back out at the street, at the white van parked in front of her house. “Greg. Is your van’s doors locked?”

  “No,” Greg said. “Why?”

  “I don’t want to make a run for the gate and expose ourselves out in the open like that, too far from the house in case we need to retreat. But your van is a different story. It’s a lot closer.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “We know they’re out there—my neighbor Don, in the house across the street, notably—but we also know there are others hiding, waiting to pounce on anyone that steps outside. I’m wondering if there’s anything in your van worth the risk?”

  Greg thought about it for a moment. “I have extra nails for the nail gun, battery-powered lamps, and a generator in the back.”

  “How big is the generator?”

  “I could carry it by myself, but it also has rollers, so one person could definitely transport it into the house.”

  “What else?”

  “Flashlights, batteries, and a portable radio. If there’s nothing on TV, maybe there’s something on the radio. And oh, a spare battery pack for the nail gun, remember? If we’re going to be locked inside for a while, all those things might be worth bringing in here with us.”

  “We should do it, then,” Pete said. “There’s four of us now.”

  The three of them looked over at Emily as if to get her approval.

  She nodded. “Let’s give it an hour and see what happens. There’s no point in rushing anything when we don’t have to.”

  “And after that?” Greg asked.

  “After that, we try to salvage what we can from the van.”

  Chapter 9

  “We should barricade the rest of the windows and reinforce the kitchen back door,” Emily said when they were walking back down to the first floor. “We got lucky last night when the psychos didn’t try to come in while we were in the backroom, but I don’t want to count on luck two nights in a row.”

  “Too bad you don’t have security bars over the windows,” Greg said.

  “That would defeat the purpose of paying all this money for a lake house all the way out here, Greg.”

  He chuckled. “I guess so.” He thought for a moment, before adding, “We can use the tools from upstairs to remove the doors and hammer them over the windows. The nail gun will come in handy for that. Until the nails run out, anyway.”

  “We sure we don’t want to make a run for the van for more supplies right now?” Pete asked.

  “There are hammers upstairs, right?” Emily asked Greg.

  He reached up and touched his temple, wincing a bit. “Yeah.”

  “We’ll make do with what we have for now. Let’s not take any unnecessary risks until we absolutely have to. Help might come tomorrow or even later today. I want us to all be alive when that happens.”

  That seemed to do the trick, and all three brightened up at the prospect of being rescued from this nightmare. Emily didn’t really believe it herself (especially the part about being rescued today), but that didn’t really matter. She needed them—even the girl Savannah—to concentrate on the here and now.

  And right here and right now, she needed all three to keep her and her unborn baby alive. If Pete’s stories about the psychos attacking each other at the front gate and what she’d seen with her own eyes told her anything, it was that she didn’t have to outrun the psychos; she just needed to outrun the three people walking down the stairs with her.

  That selfish thought should have made her uncomfortable, but it didn’t. Emily put a hand over her stomach—not so overtly that the others would notice—and understood what she needed to do.

  Step one, after all, was to stay alive.

  And she would, no matter the cost.

  “Let’s get to work,” she said.

  Someone had to stand watch in case one of the psychos decided to use the opportunity to come in. God knew they were making a lot of noise between the constant moving up and down the house and the banging of hammers and the thumping of the nail gun at work.

  She had offered to help carry some of the doors down, but Greg would have none of it. In his mind, he was still protecting her. Or, more precisely, her unborn child. That kept her on sentry duty with the gun in her hand, so she didn’t argue nearly as strongly as she could have.

  They removed the bookcase she had placed against one of the windows yesterday and used it to brace the front door to augment the deadbolt. Then they fastened doors they’d removed from the second floor over the windows, nailing them sideways to cover as much ground as possible but still leaving a half-foot crevice between each section in order to let light in and, at the same time, see out into the outside world. It wouldn’t have made much sense to seal themselves in the da
rk—literally and figuratively.

  While Savannah and the men were upstairs taking apart her master bedroom’s doors, Emily sneaked into the garage to make sure the steel door was still closed and intact, then spent a few minutes inside the Audi to check on the gas. Afterward, she went into the backroom and came out with a case of bottled water Greg had put inside last night and tossed it into the trunk, along with some supplies and just enough nonperishable canned goods for a few days. She couldn’t take too much without the others noticing, especially Greg, who had collected those things himself yesterday.

  She was back standing guard by the time they came down with her master bathroom’s doors. As she watched them cover up the dining room windows, Emily thought about what she had done—keeping the supplies in the Audi from them—or the fact she carried the key fob in her pocket at all times. Could she do it? Could she escape without them if she had to?

  The answer came quickly.

  Yes.

  Yes, she could do it.

  It wasn’t like she really knew these people. They were strangers to her. Besides, the Audi was a last-resort plan, something to consider when all else failed. She hoped she never had to use it, but if she had to, she would have no trouble falling back on it. Whenever she had any doubts about that, all she had to do was think about the fetus growing inside her. It was counting on her to save its life. She would do anything—anything—to keep Cole’s child safe.

  “You okay?” Savannah was asking her.

  Emily smiled at the girl. She hadn’t realized she had spaced out and that the teenager had noticed. “Yes. Why?”

  “You look like you’re a thousand miles away.”

  “I was thinking about Cole.”

  “Your husband, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine.”

  “He is.”

  The girl gave her a weak smile, as if to say, “Of course he is, even though we both know he’s probably already dead.”

  The teenager said, “What about the boat?”

  “What about it?”

  “Should we think about taking it?”

  “Where would we go?” Pete asked. He was holding the door in place as Greg hammered the nails into the wall. The nail gun had, predictably, run dry one door ago.

  “What do you mean?” Savannah said.

  “Think about it, babe. This thing—whatever it is—it’s not just limited to Arrow Bay. It’s happening everywhere. Bear Lake is landlocked. It’s not like we can boat into the ocean or somewhere safe from these psychos. We’d still have to come back ashore.”

  “I didn’t think of that.”

  “Pete’s right,” Emily said. “Right now, staying still until help arrives is the smartest thing we can do.”

  “This place is going to be like Fort Knox by the time we’re done,” Greg said. He tried pulling at the doors fastened over the windows, but they barely budged. “There’s just the kitchen back door left. What about the garage?”

  “It’s secured.”

  “What about the door connecting it?” Savannah asked.

  “We can put a bar over it just to be safe,” Greg said.

  Emily thought about her secret plan, but saying no would not have made sense. She said instead, “We should do that, but don’t make it too difficult to open in case we need to gain access to the garage in a hurry. The steel door should be enough to keep someone out. From what I’ve seen, these psychos are too clever to stand out there trying to bash down the garage door. That would expose them to the other psychos.”

  Greg ended up hammering a heavy piece of two-by-four over the garage door. He had nailed one end into the wall, which still allowed the wooden slab to swing up and down onto a latch he had drilled on the other side of the frame. It was a crude extra lock, but Emily had seen how cunning the psychos outside could be and how they avoided situations where they would become the victims.

  It was almost three in the afternoon by the time they finished covering all the vulnerable entry points into the house. The interior had become much darker as a result, and Emily was already starting to feel slightly suffocated. At least they continued to have ventilation and the weather outside was cool enough that they weren’t all swimming in their own sweat.

  Later, they sat in the dining room and ate all the perishable food that Greg hadn’t looted from the kitchen.

  “Eat everything,” Emily said. “They’re going to go bad soon. Might as well get everything we can out of them now.”

  Not that they needed her encouragement after the hard labor of the past few hours. Pete and Greg wolfed down everything Emily put in front of them, while she and Savannah looked on with amusement.

  After a few minutes of nothing but the sound of chewing and cans opening and water guzzling, Emily asked, “What about your parents, Pete?”

  The young man was between bites of a turkey sandwich, with a large helping of mayonnaise (just the way Cole liked his, too). The teenager didn’t answer right away, but eventually said, “I don’t know. They both worked in the city. I don’t know if they survived this or where they are right now if they did. I tried calling them on the phone, but they’re not working.”

  “No one’s phones are working,” Greg said. “Just like the power grid. Everything’s down.”

  “That’s crazy, right?”

  Not if you want to bring an enemy to his knees before finishing him off, Emily thought. If that’s the plan, then it’s goddamn standard operating procedure.

  She said to Savannah instead, “What about your folks?”

  “I don’t know,” Savannah said. “I couldn’t reach them on the phone, either. You think they’re dead?”

  “Let’s try to stay positive,” Emily said. “Look at us. There’s nothing special about us, but we made it through yesterday’s madness. A housewife, a contractor, and two high school kids.”

  “She’s right,” Greg said. “Let’s concentrate on the good. We’re all still alive, so let’s stay that way.”

  “Definitely,” Pete said, nodding.

  “Yes,” Savannah said. “If we stick together, trust each other, we can get through this.” She looked over at Emily. “Right?”

  Emily smiled back at her. “That’s right. We just have to stick together and trust one another.”

  “You saw that?” Greg asked.

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “What was that?”

  “Don Taylor. My neighbor. He’s been camped out in Mrs. Landry’s house across the street since yesterday.”

  They were on the second floor again, looking down at the quiet street. It was quiet down there. Too damn quiet.

  “Who’s Mrs. Landry?” Greg asked.

  He stood across the window from her. They had covered up all the entry points on the first floor but hadn’t done the same to the ones on the second. They didn’t have to, unless the psychos could crawl up walls.

  Shit. I hope they can’t crawl up walls…

  The lack of boards over the second-floor windows made it ideal to spy on the world outside without being seen. The teenagers were downstairs finishing off the last of the food.

  “The dead fat lady in my front yard,” Emily said.

  “Oh. I was wondering who that was.”

  “Don did that. After she stabbed him in the back.”

  “You mean literally?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So he’s running around out there with a knife wound?”

  “At least a knife wound.”

  “I still remember that guy Pete shot. Two bullets in him, and he still kept coming. And it took you putting nearly the entire nail gun into him to stop him.”

  Emily didn’t answer him. She was too busy staring at Mrs. Landry’s house, waiting for Don to show himself after having peeked out from behind the living room window earlier. But he didn’t. For some reason—maybe because he thought he’d been spotted—he remained hidden.
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  I know you’re out there, Don.

  “What do you think he’s doing in there?” Greg was asking her. “Your neighbor?”

  “Waiting,” Emily said. “He’s waiting…”

  Chapter 10

  Single pistol shots, followed by the unmistakable blasts of not one, but two shotguns firing almost simultaneously.

  I could use one of those shotguns, Emily thought.

  Whoever had landed at the southern tip of Arrow Bay had come well-armed. She counted a dozen shots and half a dozen shotgun blasts in the span of twenty minutes since the first signs of activity.

  After that, there was nothing.

  Silence.

  She peered out the second-floor window of her master bedroom and quickly spotted a figure across the street hiding behind a two-story white house. It was Don Taylor again, gardening hoe in hand, sticking his head out into the open and looking south toward the source of the gunfire. Instead of running headfirst into whoever was causing the chaos, Don glanced up and down the street before slinking back into the shadows.

  Insane and murderous, but not stupid, Emily thought.

  She waited at the window and watched, listening for more sounds of gunfire. None came. Whoever had let loose hadn’t fired again, either because they’d run out of ammo or they didn’t have to.

  Emily was leaning toward the latter, because the psychos were smart. Too smart to take on men with guns.

  It took a while—almost another twenty minutes—before a figure appeared, walking down the street to her right. He was walking calmly, as if on a Sunday stroll in the park. Maybe his lack of concern had something to do with the shotgun he was cradling or the gun belt he was wearing. The sun glinted off some kind of star on his chest, and he was wearing the tan colors of a Sheriff’s deputy uniform.

  And he wasn’t alone.

  Two more men appeared from behind him, rushing forward until they flanked the first. They were spread out across the street, all three wearing uniforms, and all were very well-armed. The other two were carrying handguns at the moment but they had identical pump-action shotguns slung over their backs, along with bulging duffel bags stuffed with, Emily guessed, more weapons and ammo.