by Kyla Stone
Luther’s body jerked. He might have made a sound; Liam couldn’t hear it.
Luther tumbled back on his knees, chest heaving. The carbine sagged in his hands, his left arm slack.
A hole appeared in his right shoulder, a rip in his jacket beneath his armpit, a few inches to the right.
Not much blood. Blood being a lousy indicator of actual injuries. There were enough tendons, bundles of nerves, and tissue in a man’s shoulder to do plenty of damage.
The real problem was the stuff you couldn’t see—internal organs punctured, intestines shredded, tendons ripped to hell.
“I’m sorry!” Luther said. “Tell my dad—” He gave a sharp shake of his head. Like he wanted to say more but realized there was no time.
This wasn’t the movies. Bad guys didn’t wait for moving speeches.
“Go,” Liam mumbled. “Just go.”
Footsteps pounded. Getting closer.
Liam heard it as if underwater—dim shouting, distant cracks like thunder.
They’d breached the kitchen.
“Don’t—”
Luther didn’t hesitate. Leaping to his feet, he turned to face the onrushing hostiles beyond the counter.
Rifle butt propped against his stomach, firing one-handed, he unleashed a spray of firepower. Rounds exploded from the barrel. With a muzzle velocity of over 2900 feet per second, the slugged ripped through anything in their path.
Distant booms shook the room. The tile floor quaked beneath him.
Liam held the carbine against his shoulder, biceps trembling from the exertion. Finger on the trigger. His muscles straining. The pain hit him in unrelenting waves.
The gunfire ceased. Smoke drifted in the air.
Silence, but for the dull buzzing in his head.
His pulse hammered in his throat. He waited, unable to move, to get up and fight.
He couldn’t see anything beyond his limited line of sight. The bullet-pocked cabinets across the aisle. The steel doors dented and dinged.
Blood rushed in his ears. Dread slicked his insides.
“Luther,” he said hoarsely.
No sound. No response. None that he could hear.
He tugged on the man’s pant leg. Tugged harder. Nothing.
Liam forced himself to wait. He strained to hear, but his senses were muted. Still no sound or movement that he could discern.
When enough time had passed, he moved.
With the fridge as leverage, he managed to scoot sideways. He looked up.
Luther slumped facedown across the counter. Still standing—only because the countertop bore the weight of his listless upper half.
Unconscious or dead? Liam wasn’t sure.
He leaned the carbine against the cabinet within easy reach, then used the counter to pull himself up. From the waist down, he was numb. His legs two sacks of concrete attached to his torso.
Using his upper body strength, muscles straining from the effort, he raised himself far enough to see over the lip and scanned for threats.
The air was hazy with gun smoke. Nothing moved. Amidst the blood and shell casings lay five bullet-riddled bodies.
Luther had killed them.
Didn’t mean more weren’t coming.
Liam turned to Luther. He didn’t have the strength to turn him over. He didn’t have to. The gruesome exit wounds gaping from his lower back told the grim story.
James Luther was dead.
Liam wasn’t. Not yet.
But it was coming for him. He could feel it depleting his strength, leaching his vitality, sapping his lifeblood.
Death marched toward him, determined to take its due.
69
Quinn
Day One Hundred and Fifteen
“Be careful of tunnel vision!” Bishop said. “Keep moving so they don’t zero in on you!”
Terror filled Quinn. She felt stunned, shell-shocked.
“Quinn!” Bishop whipped around and grabbed her arm. “Are you okay? Are you with me?”
Quinn managed a nod. “Yeah.”
“Retreat!” Jonas yelled.
“Stay close to me!” Bishop pushed her ahead of him, and they broke into a run.
Hayes’ team covered them as they sprinted back the way they’d come, boots pounding across the bridge, a barrage of firepower at their back.
Focus, focus. Jaw clenched, she fled. The explosive rounds screamed overhead, jarring her bones, rattling her teeth. Stay alive!
Her boots slapped pavement, legs like pistons, panting from exertion. Half expecting a bullet to the spine, flinching at every salvo of gunfire.
Someone to her left jerked and fell. Dallas Chapman toppled to the ground. Quinn couldn’t afford to look, couldn’t afford to do anything but run.
The rifle so heavy in her hands. Her biceps ached. It felt like she’d been holding it for hours. It weighed a hundred freaking pounds.
When they reached Friendly’s, Bishop ushered her inside while he spun and knelt in the doorway. Two others stacked up on the opposite side as they laid down covering fire for the first teams to fall back.
Quinn took a concealed fighting position, kneeling behind a pile of sandbags stacked below a window in the employee break room which held a good view of the approach road.
Dawn lit the sky in pale sickly light. The entire world painted in shades of gray. Smoke and dust everywhere, swirling like fog.
Everyone aimed their fire at the bridge. Poe’s trucks kept coming. Those manned with turrets and gunners shredded the barricade, ripping through their defenses, pushing closer and closer.
Three hundred yards away. Then two hundred.
A Fall Creek shooter took out one attacker only to have ten more take his place. They kept coming and coming and coming. Hundreds of them. Thousands.
Automatic fire battered their position. Slugs flew above her head, chewing desks, office chairs, and bookcases to splinters. Plaster and concrete dust swirled thick in the air. It clogged her nostrils, her throat. The entire room flashed like a strobe light.
Her slide locked back. Hurriedly, she stripped the empty magazine and seized a fresh one from her battle pouch, hit the slide release, and sent the bolt home.
Up on her knees, she braced the rifle and peered through the scope for targets.
Movement to her right. Dozens of flashes of muzzle fire.
Horror jolted through her. An enemy element had swum across the river. They swarmed up the bank, using the berm as cover to fire at them on their western flank. Too many to count.
A burst of gunfire peppered the sides and front of the grocery store. She ducked, forced to seek cover. On her knees, gasping, head filled with static.
Behind her, someone screamed. Someone else was crying, begging for mercy.
Bodies on the ground outside. Bodies down inside. The stink of blood mingled with cordite. Dust and plaster coated her tongue, her throat.
It was happening. The worst possible scenario.
The enemy was still a couple hundred yards away, but they couldn’t keep them back for long. They were pinned down. Trapped on multiple sides. No way to fall back further with the enemy flanking them, firing on them from every direction, tightening the noose.
Fall Creek was about to be overrun.
Bishop’s radio crackled. She could barely hear a thing over the roar in her ears, the constant pounding overhead.
A voice broke through the static. “This is Major Charlie Hamilton with the United States Army. Do not fire upon us. I repeat, we’re friendlies! We’re coming up on your six. I repeat, stand down!”
Quinn blinked, stunned and half-deaf. She must not have heard right. Her frantic mind wouldn’t put the words together. Everything jumbled and hazy in her head.
She crouched low behind the sandbags and glanced over at Bishop.
He looked back at her, the same shell-shocked disbelief plastered to his dusty, sweaty face. She couldn’t make out his features but for the whites of his eyes.
“I rep
eat, we’re friendlies!” Hamilton said. “Confirm!”
As if coming out of a trance, Bishop shuddered. He ducked down from his firing position and went for the radio. “Atticus Bishop here. Copy that! Glad to hear a friendly voice.”
“Take cover! We’re coming through to light these mothers up!”
“Thank God!” Bishop whirled and gestured to Jonas, who crouched behind him. “Send runners! Tell those with radios to pass it on. The Guard is on our side. Everyone take cover!”
Jonas and two others leapt to their feet and took off. Bishop returned to the radio to alert everyone else. “Friendlies on the way! Fire mission inbound!”
A minute later, there was an abrupt pause in the relentless barrage. As if the air itself had inhaled a startled intake of breath.
And then everything exploded.
A cacophony of high-powered firepower ripped through the night. Blast after blast. Rockets screamed overhead. Artillery fire. Louder than she’d ever heard. So loud it thrummed through her cells.
Quinn risked a glance over the sandbags through the window.
From behind them came the roar of a hundred engines. Military vehicles poured into Main Street and gunned toward the bridge.
Armored Humvees and a couple of Bradleys. Gunners behind turret-mounted guns as big as she was, sending blitzes of anti-tank missile fire past them, ripping into the enemy strongholds.
Streams of artillery arced overhead like brilliant shooting stars. Like the most beautiful and lethal fireworks she’d ever seen.
The National Guard.
Fighting for them, not against them.
Salvos screamed overhead. The ground shook as mortars detonated one after another.
A truck exploded. Then another and another.
The enemy scattered like ants before the sudden explosive onslaught.
“They came,” Quinn whispered, dazed, still half in shock. “Hannah did it. Help is here.”
70
Quinn
Day One Hundred and Fifteen
There’s something about the moments after your first battle that they fail to tell you.
You’ve won. The bad guys are defeated. You should feel thrilled, elated, joyous. Everyone around you weak with relief as they lower their weapons, cheering and jubilant.
You stand there, rifle hanging at your side, arms limp, dust caking your face, your mouth, grit in your eyes. Your muscles trembling with exhaustion and nerves. You can’t hear over the ringing inside your head.
Relieved, yes. And more than a little sick.
You lived. God rolled the dice, and you made it. A thousand bullets fired at you, and not one stuck its landing.
The town that you love still stands. The buildings, the roads, the house you grew up in. Still here.
But something is missing.
The adrenaline dump leaves you dizzy, your stomach queasy, and you sink down right there on the curb, blinking up at the sky that you can still see, the clouds and the sun and same old trees, with the breeze that you can still feel.
Because you’re alive. Because you made it.
You search through the crowd and see the people you love and care for, but not the one you most want to see.
Because they’re gone forever.
Because they’re dead.
No matter how much you long for it or how often you dream it. No matter how many times you squeeze that trigger or how many bad guys you put in the ground.
They’re gone, and you can’t bring them back.
There will be other fights. Other battles.
You will lose more people that you love.
That is the truth that roots you in place, that pulses in beat with your heart. No matter how strong you are, no matter what you do.
You can’t stop it.
The Earth spins round and round, and the Sun rises and the Sun sets. And even now there are evil men who plot to tear down everything you will ever build.
It never ends. It’s never over.
And you know, sitting there, dirty and sweaty and spent, that you will not let that fact stop you from trying.
You stood when it was time to stand and you fought when it was time to fight. You were scared to death, but you showed up.
And when your friends need you again, you’ll be there. Every time, you will stand. And you will fight. Even knowing that you may lose everything and everyone.
Because you are a warrior.
It has changed you. Broken you and remade you. You are scarred but not defeated. Wounded but not irreparable.
This you still believe. You must believe.
Through the swirling smoke and dust a figure appears, almost recognizable through the soot and grime on his face, his blond hair gray with dust, his eyes still so blue.
A flash of white teeth as he smiles. Shell-shocked but moving, on his feet.
You know him, this boy. Your friend. Maybe more than that.
Coming toward you. Coming to find you. To bring you back.
You can still go home.
You will live with the nightmares, haunted by blood and the screams of the dying. Both diminished and more than you are, a part of something larger and greater.
You can still go home, warrior.
He holds out his hand.
You hesitate. And then you take it.
71
Liam
Day One Hundred and Fifteen
Liam felt himself fading.
He slumped against the fridge. His worthless legs splayed out in front of him, sitting in his own congealing blood. Darkness lurked at the corners of his vision.
The M4 rested in his lap. He’d switched out the spent magazine and inserted the fresh one he’d confiscated from a nearby corpse. Thirty rounds for one last rodeo.
The ringing in his ears had dulled. How much time had passed? An hour? Two? How long did it take for a man’s lifeblood to leak from his broken body?
His thoughts drifted in and out of focus. His consciousness riding the waves of pain and numbness. Gradually, he began to let himself go.
His head leaned back, eyes half closed, staring at nothing. He thought of Hannah. The feel of her in his arms, the softness of her lips. How she tilted her chin and bit her bottom lip; how when she was angry, her eyes sparked a deep emerald green.
How bleak and unfair life could be. And yet, so fierce and wonderful and spectacularly beautiful. How much he would miss.
And yet, he was satisfied. The Sinclairs were dead. Every last one of them.
Footsteps approached from somewhere behind him. Two sets of boots.
Liam stiffened. Instinct took over.
It was in his blood. In his bones. He’d lived as a warrior. He would die like one, too. Hands shaking, he raised his gun one final time.
“Clear,” said a deep baritone voice.
“Damn it,” said another voice. Husky and familiar. “Look at the carnage. He couldn’t have made it…”
“I’ll search the bodies. I’m not leaving until we find him.”
“Roger that.”
It was a mirage. A figment of his dying imagination, his brain so starved of oxygen that his mind was playing tricks on him.
“I’m here.” His throat dry as a desert, swollen tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. “I’m here.”
Silence. Then, “Coleman?”
Liam’s eyelids fluttered. The gun was too heavy to carry. His eyes were too heavy.
The footsteps drew closer. Two figures rounded the corner in a crouch. Weapons up, scanning back and forth.
One tall, bulky, and black; the other short, broad, and Hispanic. The two prettiest men he’d ever seen.
“There you are!” Bishop said, like he was a recalcitrant child who’d gotten misplaced in a grocery store.
Liam lowered the carbine. “You—came…”
“Leave no one behind,” Bishop said. “You still don’t get it, you stubborn ass. You don’t have to carry this burden alone, brother. You never did.”
> Reynoso looked down and saw the blood. The color drained from his face. “Oh, hell.”
“I’m…shot.”
“Clearly.”
Bishop knelt beside Liam and shrugged off his pack. He pulled out a first aid kit and looked Liam over. “Easy now. There’s no exit wound. The bullet’s still in there, messing you up.”
“I think it’s a fragment from a ricochet.” Stars danced in front of his vision. His eyelids fluttered. “Can’t feel my legs…”
Bishop looked up at Reynoso, expression drawn. “It’s a spinal injury. Get a door! We can use it as a backboard.” He turned to Liam. “Stay with me.”
Reynoso got to work on a door outside the kitchen. The Marine practically ripped the thing from its hinges. A minute later, he’d carried it to Liam’s side.
With great care, he and Bishop lifted Liam and placed him on the board. They filled any voids along his back with clothes stolen from the dead contractors. Bishop fashioned a neck brace with pillows from one of the hotel rooms, using duct tape to immobilize his head.
This was combat field medicine. They were in a war zone with few supplies in the middle of an apocalypse. They made do with what they had.
Once they’d stabilized Liam’s spine, Bishop pulled a makeshift IV bag and kit from his pack. Liam recognized the small battery-operated drill for EZ IO—intraosseous infusion.
It was designed to get quick IV access to the venous system through the shin bone. Though it looked hideous, it was perfect for both medics and untrained people to get an IV line going in a hurry.
Liam’s eyes widened. “You sure you know how to use that thing?”
“Enough to know what to do. Used one a couple of times during my tour in Afghanistan. It looks worse than it feels.”
“Says you.”
“Sorry Coleman, this is the only IV we have for lone wolf types.” With that, Bishop felt for the correct location on Liam’s tibia and pressed the drill bit to his flesh. He drilled into the bone, then inserted the needle directly into the bone marrow. He attached the IV bag and secured the tubing.
