Like right now? she thought.
No. Not right now.
She smirked to herself. Maybe if she told herself that enough times, she might actually believe it.
Maybe.
She went up the stairs before she could change her mind, stepping around as much of the blood as she could. It was an impossible task, and after a while, she stopped trying. The soles of her shoes squished against the plentiful wetness.
The second floor was as empty as the first. And just like below, the stink of death was in the air, tickling at her nostrils.
Emily switched to breathing through her mouth.
She climbed the last step and turned right to see up against the hallway. The open doors to her left, the wall to her right, and the master bedroom on the other end. There were no signs of Don or the dogs. There was no additional blood on the carpeted floor that she hadn’t seen when she was moving through earlier before encountering Savannah at the stairs.
Nothing.
There was nothing.
That should have made her feel better, but it didn’t. Instead, it just made her even more paranoid, if that was even possible.
She moved up the hallway, glancing up for a second or two to pick up the attic door. There, closed like the last time she’d run past it. The rope dangled from one end to make pulling the heavy wooden slab easier.
Emily refocused on the first door in front of her. Cole’s former office turned would-be nursery. She stopped and peeked inside, shotgun ready to blast anything that moved.
Empty, unless she was counting Barnes’s dead body, still where she’d left him.
But no signs of dogs or Don, or any other psycho.
She proceeded forward.
The attic was closer now, the rope dangling oh-so temptingly in front of her. She stopped underneath it and looked toward the door at the end. Into her bedroom. Where she’d last seen Don.
The buzzing of flies could be heard, even if she couldn’t see them yet.
Did she want to make sure Don was dead?
No.
Yes.
Maybe.
She wasn’t sure when she made the decision, but she was soon moving past the attic and to her bedroom.
She had to make sure. She just had to make sure.
Emily didn’t walk right through the doorless master bedroom. She eased her way into it, the shotgun leading the way. The room was as messy as she’d last seen it, but there wasn’t anything new to make it messier. Her bed—her poor king-size bed with the silk duvets all the way from Europe and the sham pillowcases all the way from Asia—was shredded and bloodied. She’d chosen everything, including the bed, herself.
Emily sighed as she focused on the bathroom at the end. The door hung from the same single hinge, and there were no signs of either Don or the dogs.
But she could smell them.
There was, again, blood in the air.
A lot of it.
Emily moved cautiously forward, her forefinger on the trigger. That was, again, bad trigger finger discipline, but she didn’t give a damn. She didn’t want to think about it. If anything appeared in front of her, she was going to pull.
There was a lot of blood on the floor leading to the bathroom and even more once she could see inside. The tiles were slick with the red stuff and fur and…even more blood.
Jesus, there was a lot of blood.
Emily stepped inside, lifting the shotgun, ready to shoot.
She didn’t have to. The dogs were dead. The two that had attacked Don lay crumpled around the big one that had first assaulted him, almost as if they’d crawled there with their last dying breath so they could be together. She couldn’t tell where they’d been stabbed or how many times. Dark black blood matted their fur to their thin frames, making it difficult to tell that their eyes, like their infected human counterparts, were bloodshot. Flies flitted across them like dust clouds.
Emily glanced past the animals at the figure sitting on the floor, his back against the counter.
Don.
He was still alive.
Her neighbor looked up and over at her, his chest heaving. She could almost see the adrenaline pumping through his veins, trying to get him to stand up. But he couldn’t, probably because he’d lost too much blood. Even breathing seemed to take a lot out of him.
Don’s face was a mask of blood, as were his shredded golf shirt and ripped slacks. The dogs had gotten in their licks, all right. There wasn’t an inch of Don’s body, from head to toe, that wasn’t bleeding. Thick, syrupy red liquid dripped from him and joined the obscenely large pool underneath his sitting form.
Don was reaching for the gardening hoe lying next to him. Or he attempted to. His fingers twitched in its direction, but he couldn’t muster up enough energy to actually get to it. He had, she saw, lost three of his fingers, leaving only the thumb and pinky. Blood spurted from the stumps as he tried to move the appendages.
“You don’t look so good, Don,” she said.
Emily didn’t know why she’d said it. It wasn’t as if Don could even hear her. Or understand her.
Could he?
She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything. As much as she wanted to gather intel, survival had taken precedence. When this was over, when she had a minute to breathe, she’d do what she was trained to. But right now…
“I guess taking you to the hospital is out of the question.”
His eyes, still bloodshot, drilled into hers. She couldn’t tell if he was in pain, but she could see the bloodlust in his eyes. Even now, torn to ribbons and more dead than alive, his need to end her burned on his face.
Emily lowered the shotgun until it hung by the sling, then drew the hunting knife from its sheath. Don didn’t react. He just continued bleeding.
From his eyes, from his lips, cheeks, his chin…
The man was swimming in blood. The neighbor she first introduced herself to, and who Cole called a “CPA, only less athletic,” was unrecognizable. In his stead, there was just this…thing. This wretched figure that was once Don Taylor but was, now…something else.
She wanted to ask him what had happened, how he had turned, or what was running through his mind as he stabbed Mrs. Landry to death when all of this first started. She wanted to know the why of it.
But looking at Don, staring into those cold, bloodshot eyes of his, she didn’t think even he knew.
Don was gone.
He was long, long gone.
Emily walked toward her neighbor and tightened her grip on the knife’s wooden handle. Her hand was slick with sweat, but she passed that off to the heat of the bathroom instead of hesitation at what she was about to do.
“Sorry about this, Don,” she said, even though she didn’t think she meant it.
In her mind, she was just putting the man out of his misery. The fact that she’d be putting him out of her misery, too, was just a coincidence.
Chapter 28
She wasn’t feeling very good about what she’d done. Not that she’d had a choice, but there was a big difference between doing what she had to and being happy about it. Right now, she’d settle for feeling nonplussed, but even that eluded her.
Emily walked quietly out of the bathroom and across the bedroom. She didn’t even notice the mess the dogs and Don had left behind. She couldn’t bring herself to care anymore. Once upon a time, this place had mattered. Now, it was just a building with some rooms and walls and a rooftop and floor.
It wasn’t hers anymore. She didn’t want it to be hers.
She thought about Cole instead and how he was on his way to her right now. Or that was what she’d told Greg and Savannah, and what she wanted desperately to believe, but the truth was, she was just hoping.
Because that was all she had.
Hope.
Hoping that Cole had escaped the madness that had consumed her neighbors.
Hoping that she was right about their blood type being, if not the primary reason they’d remained unaffected,
then at least a big part of it.
Hoping that Cole had gotten through the last three days just as she had.
Hoping…
Emily stopped moving.
She could hear it. Breathing. It was coming from the hallway, on the other side of the wide-open master bedroom door. She couldn’t see who or what was causing it, but she could hear it.
She could hear it.
Slowly, quietly, she slipped the hunting knife back into its sheath, then reached for the slung shotgun and slid it forward, then up.
The door was less than ten feet, but it might as well have been ten miles. She’d been moving slowly, walking in a haze after dealing with Don once and for all. She should have been alerted to the presence of someone else—maybe something else—beyond the bedroom much earlier.
Emily did nothing for the next five or so seconds, and just listened.
Footsteps, accompanying the slow but haggard breathing. Someone was having trouble getting each breath out.
Emily took a quick sidestep to hide herself from the wide-open door so whoever was on the other side couldn’t see her before she spotted them. She stopped only when she bumped into the foot of the bed and lifted the shotgun and took aim.
The Remington came with iron sights, not that optics would have made much of a difference given the distance. The 12-gauge was just a shade under 8 pounds and had a capacity of 4 shells. She carried another dozen in the pouch behind her back. If she ever ran out of ammo, she had the Glock on her right hip, along with the two magazines for that.
Yeah, she’d come prepared. She just hoped it was enough.
An interminable five seconds followed.
Then ten…
…fifteen…
A figure burst through the opening in front of her.
No, not a figure, but two figures!
Two men locked in combat, flailing as they fell through the doorless frame and slammed into the floor in front of her. Blood flitted from their eyes as they struggled, both armed with some kind of bladed weapon.
Emily took a sudden step back, the pump-action ready to fire, except she didn’t know who to shoot.
They were fighting each other. (Did they even know she was present?) They were stabbing each other. The one on the bottom was driving a knife into the other man’s side, grunting every time his weapon found flesh, while the other man’s own bladed weapon stabbed into his chest.
Over and over, and over, and over.
Emily stood silently, not sure what to do. Not sure how to respond. She’d never seen anything like it. She’d thought she was ready for everything, but she was wrong. She wasn’t ready for this.
Two maniacs with bloodshot eyes killing each other.
Before her eyes.
And not giving a damn that she was even there.
At least, they didn’t, until the one on the bottom succumbed and lay still, his knife falling to the carpeted floor next to him. Blood seeped freely from his yellow T-shirt with a smiley face on it. He was wearing joggers and running shoes, but she didn’t recognize him. Early thirties, blond hair—
The other psycho looked up, blood dripping from his left side where the jogger had been stabbing him. There was no pain on his face, no registering of his wound. He only had eyes for her.
Emily took a step back, the Remington wavering slightly in her hands. Something that might have been fear but could also have been shock raced through her body.
The killer was young, early twenties, with a cross earring dangling from his right ear. He might have had an identical piece of jewelry on his left ear too, but most of that ear was gone. The remaining part of the ear was caked with blood, as was the entire right side of his face. Cuts that looked as if they’d been put there by knives and gashes from claws or teeth—or both—crisscrossed his exposed chest. That also made it easy to pick up the heavy palpations underneath his chest as his heartbeat hammered like a runaway train.
But it was the man’s eyes that Emily focused on. They were bloodshot. Just seconds ago, the man had only seen the other psycho with those eyes, but now that he was dead, the killer only noticed her.
She was next.
He jumped up to his feet, the blade in his right hand—it looked like half of a large pair of scissors—rising at the same time.
The boom! of the shotgun rocked the bedroom walls—somehow way louder than Emily had been anticipating—and the psycho was flung back by the blast. She’d caught him in the naked chest with the full buckshot load.
The man crashed to the floor. Not that he stayed down. And she didn’t think he would, either.
Emily stepped forward, racking the Remington’s forend, as the man struggled to pick himself up. He hadn’t dropped his scissor-knife-whatever-the-hell-that-was. It was clenched tightly in his hand.
Boom! again, and the man’s face turned to mush.
Instinctively, Emily reached behind her, grabbed two shells, and began feeding them into the shotgun. She was putting the second shell in when she heard it.
She froze in place and listened.
No way.
Was she imagining it? Did she want to hear it—or something like it—so badly that her imagination was running wild?
No fucking way.
No, it wasn’t her imagination. This was real. What she was hearing was real.
It had been a while, but Emily recognized the sound for what it was, even inside her house with the walls in the way.
The whup-whup-whup was unmistakable.
A helicopter. She was hearing a helicopter!
She ran toward the window and shoved it upward. She stuck her head outside and glanced around, before looking up—
There.
A chopper, skirting over the front gate of Arrow Bay. It looked like a civilian helicopter, which surprised her. If there were going to be aircraft in the sky, she’d expected military ones.
She stared at it for a few seconds, watching its path—
It was coming toward her.
It was coming toward her.
Cole. Could it be Cole? Could it—
The heavy thump-thump-thump of footsteps from behind her like a runaway locomotive shattered her thoughts.
Emily spun and lifted the Remington and pulled the trigger.
A large man wearing torn black slacks and a leather jacket rose off the floor and landed on his back. A heavily chipped baseball bat, hair matting much of it, rolled away along the floor nearby. If the man hadn’t been so heavy and made so much noise, he might have gotten closer to Emily before she heard him. She’d been so focused on the chopper—
The chopper!
She whirled back around and looked out as the aircraft got closer, the sound of its rotors even louder now that she had the window up.
Screams, from below. From the first floor of the house.
“Emily! Emily!”
Her eyes widened. That was Savannah.
Emily raced across the bedroom to the door, jumping over one, two, three dead psychos in her path. She could have gone around them, but that would have slowed her down. Even a second might be too much.
“Emily!”
Savannah again, the fear in her voice coming through loud and clear.
Emily burst through the open door and into the hallway.
The bang-bang! of a pistol firing from below.
“Emily!”
She ran faster, the shotgun clutched in front of her while the pouch with the extra shells thumped relentlessly against her back.
Bang-bang! from the first floor.
Savannah. Or Greg.
One of them or both of them.
Bang-bang!
She waited for the girl to shout her name again but didn’t hear it. She could, though, pick up the continued whup-whup-whup of the helicopter approaching from behind her, impossible to ignore now.
Emily reached the stairs and grabbed the round newel with one hand, slingshotting herself around and down the steps. She didn’t so much as run as she fell, s
omehow managing to keep on her feet all the way down.
The bang! of another gunshot, this one coming from the direction of the back hallway. But it was too loud to have come from inside the backroom. Which meant either Greg or Savannah, or both of them, had come outside for whatever reason.
A body lay on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. Not the woman in the white dress, but another one. This was also a woman, lying over the one in the white dress. Bloody red eyes stared awkwardly in Emily’s direction as she flung herself down the stairs. A meat cleaver, the blade covered in blood, rested next to the woman’s outstretched arm. There were two holes in her chest, fresh blood pumping out and spreading across her one-piece cotton nightgown.
Another one of her neighbors, whose name Emily didn’t know.
A figure appeared over the dead housewife, stumbling backward.
Savannah!
The girl appeared out of the back hallway, fumbling with a Glock. She was attempting to reload it but having a lot of trouble. She wasn’t watching where she was going and tripped on the woman in white and went down.
“Savannah!” Emily shouted.
The girl looked up and over at her, her hands and clothes dripping in the blood of the two dead women she was sitting on. It was a sight that Emily would probably never forget, but she thought Savannah would probably remember it even more vividly, if the horrified look on her face was any indication.
Emily was almost down the stairs when Greg appeared. He also came out of the back hallway and was running toward Savannah, a Glock in his left hand. If Greg noticed her coming down, he didn’t turn to greet her. He couldn’t, she found out, because he was too busy pointing his gun toward the door and firing.
Bang-bang-bang!
Emily couldn’t see what he was shooting at, but whatever—or whoever—it was, Greg wasn’t stopping them, because he kept pulling the trigger. The Glock, Emily saw, was moving way too much in his hand with every shot.
Bang-bang-bang!
Some of that, she thought, was because he was using his weak hand to hold the Glock. It wasn’t like he had any choice, with his right still heavily bandaged and in the makeshift sling—
A teenager in drooping black pajamas and a Captain America T-shirt appeared out in the peripheral vision of Emily’s left side. He was running toward Greg, a bloody hammer cocked back behind him to strike. Blood gushed out of his chest as he ran, out of control.
Fall of Man | Book 2 | Homefront Page 22
