by Lukens, Mark
It was time. The table had been set up, the food and drinks on the table. Now, the cake. Luke was with Mike on the roof. She’d heard the gunshot a few moments ago, so they would be down the ladder soon, and Luke was supposed to bring Mike over to the deli area, what had now become their cafeteria.
Everyone else (except Phil and Lisa who had volunteered to hang out on the roof and keep watch) was hiding, waiting for Luke and Mike to get to the table.
Jo stuck twelve candles in the top of the cake. She looked at Brooke, who was eyeing the dessert, like she was looking at a relic from the past, something that shouldn’t be around anymore, like a dinosaur that had come back to life.
“Are we ready to bring the cake out?” Jo asked Brooke.
“Yeah,” Brooke whispered with the biggest smile.
Jo looked at Gil. He’d been helping in the kitchen along with Max and Becca. Jo felt something for Gil, maybe the same thing she’d felt for Jackson. She swore Gil was a little sweet on her too—he’d flirted enough; that was for sure. And he’d already decided to stay at the store after Ray and his group went looking for Avalon, and Luke, Max, and Phil went looking for Petra in Hell Town. He said someone had to stay and help guard the store. Maybe he just didn’t want to be on the road anymore.
Jo’s walkie crackled. Then Luke’s voice: “Okay, we’re coming down.”
“Got it,” Jo said into her walkie. She smiled at Brooke and Gil. “We need to get the cake on the table, the candles lit, and then we need to hide.”
Gil carried the cake, setting it in the middle of the table. He lit the candles with a long disposable lighter.
“Hurry, we need to hide,” Brooke said with urgency, but she couldn’t stop smiling.
“I know,” Jo whispered back.
They hurried to the aisles where a few others hid. Others were behind the deli counters, crouched down and out of sight.
A moment later Jo heard Luke and Mike approaching, Mike talking excitedly about shooting from the rooftop. Then he stopped in mid-sentence. “What’s this?”
Jo and everyone else jumped out from their hiding places. “Surprise!”
Mike’s face lit up.
“Come on over here and blow the candles out,” Ray said.
“We don’t want the cake to melt,” Josh joked.
“How’d you guys make a cake?” Mike asked.
“We had it delivered,” Josh said. Emma elbowed him in the side.
Mike blew out the candles.
*
An hour later everyone had eaten the food and a piece of the cake. Some had drifted back to their tents, but most had stayed around, watching Mike, Brooke, and Patrick play games with the balls Josh had found among the toys in the loading bay. Josh and Ray even joined in for a little while, then came back to the table, content to let the kids play together.
Mike’s gifts were stashed at the far end of the table: some comic books and the board games. Josh had also gotten some toys for Brooke and Patrick so they wouldn’t feel left out.
This was good. Jo felt good. The kids were playing. They had food and drinks, a safe building to stay in. Everything felt right for the first time in a long time.
Jo’s walkie crackled to life. It was Phil, his voice panicked. “We need shooters up here. The Dark Angels are coming!”
Everyone at the table heard Phil’s voice on the walkie-talkie. Luke jumped up, ready to get to the roof. The kids stopped playing with the ball, frozen like startled deer.
“How many?” Jo asked as she got to her feet with the walkie in her hand.
“Four vehicles. That’s all I see. Coming in from the road, through the restaurant parking lot.”
Same place Ray and Gil drove through the ditch, the path the shallowest there now, the shrubs already flattened by their vehicles from a few days ago.
“Might be more coming,” Phil added. “I don’t know.”
“Airplanes? Drones?”
“None that I can see.”
Jo hurried toward the middle of the store where the lift was extended up to the now-shattered skylight, the extension ladder tied to the side of it. Luke dashed in front of her getting to the ladder first and climbing it quickly.
CHAPTER 14
Dawson
Dawson knew this operation was going to be very risky, but staying with the Dragon had its own terrible risks too. But even more important, this was the right thing to do, and he needed to keep telling himself that. He’d been a decent person once; maybe a coward, but always a decent person. He couldn’t go along with the savagery of the Dragon anymore.
There weren’t as many rippers in the parking lot of the store as there had been before. The gunfire from the two Dark Angels inside the cages of the two pickups had driven back most of the rippers on the road. They were afraid of gunfire, but it wouldn’t hold them back forever; they were hungry, starving, desperate.
Dawson sped through the restaurant parking lot with the other three trucks behind him. He sped across the wide strip of grass between the back of the restaurant parking lot and the edge of the Super Bea’s parking lot. He saw the ruts in the mud, the same place where they had parked their trucks the night two of the Dark Angles had murdered Lance, Dale, and Crystal in the middle of the parking lot. They were supposed to use the three of them as bait—they weren’t supposed to kill them—but the savagery, and the cruelty, of the Dragon rubbed off on many of his Dark Angels, his evil seeping into the flesh and their minds, and everything had spiraled out of control that night. The rippers had been getting closer, slinking through the dark, moving in toward the lights of their vehicles. Maybe the two Dark Angels had panicked; maybe they wanted to get back to the trucks before they were left alone in the middle of the parking lot with hundreds of rippers closing in. Or maybe they had just wanted to kill their three hostages.
Later that night Dawson had talked to George about rebelling against the Dragon. George had already hinted about it and he’d brought Bella onboard with his plan. And then J.J. and Barry had joined them. J.J. and Barry had been with Dawson a few days ago at the execution of Audrey and Scott. The execution had been the last straw for them. Audrey and Scott were supposed to have gotten away with Petra, but Scott’s friend had told on them. Dawson had been notified by Jacob of Audrey and Scott’s plan, and he’d been handpicked along with the others to meet the traitors at the gas station, where one of the Dark Angels had already taken the battery out of their getaway vehicle.
The Dragon hadn’t killed Petra. He still needed her as bait to get the people from the store to her. He needed them to come to him because he was afraid of them for some reason.
Dawson drove down into the ditch and then up the other side, flattening the ruined shrubs even more. The other three trucks were right behind him.
“Get the megaphone ready,” Dawson told Kramer.
Kramer turned and George handed him the megaphone from the back seat.
“Why do I need this?” Kramer asked, not even hiding his suspicion anymore. “I thought we were ramming the gate. Blowing the back doors open.”
“We are,” Dawson said. He could practically feel Kramer going for his sidearm, see the subtle movements out of the corner of his eye, see Kramer’s hand slowly reaching for the holster on his hip.
“Then why are you slowing down?”
It was time. George knew the plan. Dawson was confident George and Bella would go through with it, and hopefully J.J. and Barry wouldn’t hesitate once everything started.
Dawson raced across the parking lot, speeding past trash, overturned shopping carts, scattered bones and strips of clothing among the large bloodstains. He was close to the front of the building, getting closer to the chain-link fence at the side. He wanted to be close to the gate, but he wasn’t going to ram it.
Dawson slammed on the brakes, gripping the steering wheel hard. He’d been ready for the sudden stop, and so had George, but Kramer and the Dark Angel in the back seat hadn’t been. Even though Kramer had been caught off
guard, he was still suspicious; he had drawn his sidearm just as they stopped. Dawson had no choice, he drew his own pistol and shot Kramer in the side of his head, rocking him toward the passenger door, his head hitting the glass and shattering it, blood spraying from the gunshot wound.
George shot the other Dark Angel in the back seat at the same time.
The other vehicles came to screeching halts behind Dawson’s Humvee. He put the vehicle in park. The gate to the fence was only thirty feet away in front of them, the Super Bea’s building to their right, the line of cars and trucks blocking that side of the parking lot off to the left.
Dawson only had a second to glance back at George, but he knew they were on the same page. They both got out of the Humvee with their assault rifles in their hands. Bella shot the driver of the Humvee behind them and got out of the passenger side, aiming her rifle at the men in the back seat. J.J. had his rifle on the men inside the cage of the pickup, yelling at them to throw their weapons through the bars, their side arms too.
A few shots rang out from the roof, one of the bullets shattering a back door window of the Humvee Bella had been in moments ago.
The last truck, another black pickup truck jacked up on large tires with a cage of bars welded around the back, reversed suddenly, tires screeching before gaining traction. The two shooters in the back were hunkered down, the driver down below the dashboard as he sped backwards.
J.J. brought his rifle up, aiming it at the front of the truck.
“Let them go,” Dawson yelled at J.J. through the megaphone.
Rippers were almost to the edge of the parking lot. Some were peeling off from the group, racing to the road to intercept the fleeing pickup truck. Even with the gunfire, the rippers were growing bolder, a few already at the line of cars and trucks blocking the far side of the parking lot, climbing over them.
Bella ordered two of the Dark Angels out of the Humvee she’d been in, aiming her rifle at them.
Two more shots rang out from the roof of the store, but then they stopped firing. Dawson heard a few of the people up there yelling at each other.
He raised the megaphone up to his mouth. “Don’t fire, please! We’ve come to surrender! We don’t want to be with the Dragon and the Dark Angels anymore! We want to stop them!”
CHAPTER 15
Jo
They had to go up to the roof one at a time on the ladder—it was too risky to have more than two at a time, too much weight on the ladder and the ropes securing it to the lift; Jo had told them that and it had slowed them down.
Luke had shimmied up the ladder first, then Ray. Jo was next with Max waiting impatiently on the floor for her to get most of the way up, his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, jiggling it.
As Jo climbed she remembered the three kids: Mike, Brooke, and Patrick. They had frozen when Phil’s shouts from the walkie started, when she and the other adults had run toward the ladder up to the skylight. The ball they’d been tossing around had dropped to the floor, rolling away, forgotten in some deeper and gloomier part of the store.
Someone would take care of the kids, Jo thought. Rebecca would; she’d become like a mother to all three of them. But Rebecca could only do so much, and none of it would matter if the Dark Angels got inside.
Four trucks: That’s what Phil had said on the walkie. She hadn’t heard any shooting so far coming from the roof, so maybe the trucks were still far away, too far to start shooting.
Jo was up through the skylight and onto the roof. The air was just as cold up here as it was in the store, but it felt colder because of the freezing wind which slammed into her as soon as she stood on the roof, hunched over a little, still traumatized by the gunfire that had come from the airplane before Luke had shot it down a few days ago. The gunshot wound on her upper arm ached from the cold. Luckily it had just been a grazing shot, but it still hurt like hell.
She hurried across the roof. Phil was at the other side with Lisa, both armed, Lisa with a pair of binoculars hanging from her neck. Luke and Ray were already with them, Luke spotting the Dark Angels below through the pair of binoculars he kept around his neck. She rushed up to the four of them, crouching down beside them, the cold air burning her lungs from her sprint across the roof. She was out of shape. She’d never been a health nut, but beginning some kind of jogging schedule inside the store (if they survived) crossed her mind suddenly. In this new dawn of human history you needed to be in shape, you needed to be able to run at a moment’s notice without becoming winded.
“Where . . . where are they?” Jo asked Phil as she fought to catch her breath.
“At the end of the parking lot. They just came through the ditch over there, over the shrubs.”
Luke kept his own pair of binoculars up to his eyes, watching, saying nothing, not wasting energy with words.
Jo didn’t need a pair of binoculars—she could see the four black vehicles easily enough: two black Humvees and two black pickup trucks with a cage of bars around the back of the trucks, an open ceiling above the cage so the Dark Angels could crawl in and out. There were two Dark Angels each in the back of the pickups. The grills of the pickups had steel mesh wired to them, and there were other pieces of armor welded over the wheels to protect them. The two trucks looked like something from a Mad Max movie. The other two vehicles, the Humvees, looked like military vehicles. The Humvee in the lead raced toward the far corner of the store where the gates to the back area were.
Luke picked up the M-16 he had with him, ready to fire. Josh and Max were there a few seconds later, breathing hard from their run across the roof. Everyone was getting their weapons ready, preparing for battle.
The Humvee leading the small convoy screeched to a halt when it got just past the front corner of the store. It had stopped so quickly Jo thought it was going to tip over. The other three vehicles skidded to a stop, doing their best not to collide with each other.
Joe could practically feel the tension from Luke—he was getting ready to shoot, aiming at them, ready to pick them off one by one. Ray had called Luke their expert shooter, and he had to be if he’d shot the airplane down with one shot.
Two gunshots sounded from the first vehicle right after it had stopped. Two men got out with assault rifles, one from the driver’s side and one from the back. The other two men didn’t get out.
Did they just shoot the men inside?
Another gunshot sounded from the second Humvee. A woman got out from the passenger side, aiming her weapon inside at the back, yelling for the two men in there to get out and get on the ground. Two other men got out of one of the pickups, aiming their weapons at the two Dark Angels inside the cage of bars. The last pickup started to reverse.
Someone fired from the roof—Jo couldn’t tell who it was. Not Luke; someone else. “Wait,” she said. “They’re shooting each other.” She raised her binoculars up to her eyes, watching.
The last truck backed away from the first three, tires spinning at first, smoke rising up from behind the truck.
The driver from the first Humvee told a man aiming his rifle at the pickup to let them go, barking the orders at the man through a megaphone he held in one hand.
“What the hell is this?” Ray asked.
Someone on the roof fired another shot, blowing out the back door window of the first Humvee.
“Hold your fire for a minute,” Jo yelled.
“Just a warning shot,” Luke said. “If I wanted to hit one of them, I would’ve.”
The apparent leader with the megaphone turned toward the building. “Don’t fire, please! We’ve come to surrender! We don’t want to be with the Dragon and the Dark Angels anymore! We want to stop them!”
“You think it’s a trick?” Josh asked. He had an M-16, but he didn’t look comfortable with it in his hands.
“Could be,” Ray answered.
“They might have information we need,” Max said.
Jo knew what Max was thinking, that the group down there might have information abo
ut Petra. But she couldn’t deny that this could be an elaborate trick. She figured the Dragon would have no problem setting this up, sacrificing a few of his own men to get some of his soldiers inside the store.
“Rippers are starting to come,” Lisa warned. She was crouched down by the knee wall. She didn’t have a weapon, only the binoculars up to her eyes, spotting for Phil.
“How many?” Jo asked.
“Just a few so far crawling over the barricade of cars, but others are starting to group together, coming closer. Some are flooding the streets, going after the truck that just left.”
Jo raised her binoculars back up to her eyes, panning until she saw the truck that was retreating. It sped down the street, but it didn’t get very far before the rippers swarmed it, bogging it down. Rippers smashed the windows, pulling the two men out of the truck. The two men in back shot through the bars at the rippers, mowing them down, but there were too many. In only a moment they were out of ammo, and the rippers swarmed again, crawling up and over the cage of bars like ants, dropping down inside the bed of the truck, tearing the two men apart with knives.
She panned her binoculars back to the three vehicles, the four Dark Angels aiming their weapons at the other two Dark Angels who were out of the vehicles, kneeling down on the pavement, and the other two inside the cage of the pickup truck.
The Dark Angel with the megaphone looked up at the roof and yelled at them. “Please let us in! The rippers are coming!”
Jo wasn’t sure what to do. This was all going so fast. This could be a trick, but Max was right; they might have information.
Luke aimed his M-16 and picked off a ripper crawling over a white car that was part of the barricade. The report echoed through the air, the bullet knocking the ripper back over the car. The other two rippers who had come with him cowered back down behind the line of vehicles.