“Stay and what?”
“Stay and make love to me again?”
“Why?” he asked.
“Why?” she repeated with a single laugh. “Why, because it feels good. Why, because I like you. I like you a lot.”
“I don’t know if that’s enough,” he said and reached for the door knob.
“Why, because I just killed a bunch of people, and I saw their faces in my sleep,” she admitted. He looked over his shoulder at her, searching her face for the truth. “I don’t want to be alone, Cobb; I don’t want to feel this pain.” She sobbed and felt the tears rolling down her cheeks. “Those stories from all those people—the world is falling apart. Damn it, if having you inside me for a few minutes gives us pleasure and makes me forget about the fucked-up hell we are living through, how is that a bad thing?”
“It isn’t,” he said and turned, holding out his hands. She flew up from the sleeping bag, fell into his arms, and pressed her head against his well-muscled chest, sobbing like a little girl. “Shhh,” he whispered; “it’s okay. I know how it feels.”
“Do you?” She gasped and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
“Yes,” he said.
She looked into his eyes and saw something she could not have understood until that day. She saw the look of someone who’d killed, a look she would now see in the mirror every day, for the rest of her life. “Oh, Cobb!” she bawled and fell to her knees.
He went down with her and held her tight. She wasn’t certain, but she thought she felt his tears falling on her shoulders. “I’m so sorry it had to happen.”
She couldn’t reply, only nod her head and cry.
When the tears passed, her hand strayed between his legs, and she felt his hardness. “Do you really want to do that?” he asked.
“More than anything,” she replied. He nodded and folded her into his arms.
They lay next to each other afterward, and Cobb slept in her arms. She marveled at how peaceful he looked and sighed. The house was quiet, with most of their new friends trying to sleep. She hoped everyone hadn’t heard them, then she realized she didn’t care. As she felt herself drifting off, she remembered her other bag, left on the abandoned ATV, somewhere in Mexico. In it were a few personal things. There wasn’t anything she’d miss much, just some extra clothes, a hair brush, a toiletry kit…and her condoms. “Well fuck,” she said and fell fast asleep.
* * *
A scream and a gunshot woke them. Kathy looked around in confusion, but Cobb was on his feet instantly. He was as naked as the day he was born, but somehow had a pistol in his hand and was sweeping the room. She marveled at his reaction and his physical perfection.
“That was a shot,” she said.
“And a scream,” he agreed as he put the gun on the floor. As everyone woke, she could hear shouts in Spanish. In a split second, Cobb had slid into his pants, thrown on a T-shirt, and snatched up his pistol. “Lock the door. You still have the gun?”
She fumbled around next to the mussed sleeping bag and found it. “Yes,” she said with hushed urgency.
“Good. Keep it handy and stay here.” He pulled the door open. “And you’d better put some clothes on.”
At his words, she looked down and realized she was also naked. Well, not entirely, her pants were looped around one ankle. She padded over and locked the door. “What the fuck, Kathy?” she muttered to herself as she looked for her bra. “You’re acting like a teenager.” She was just pulling her shirt over her head when she heard a second shot, followed closely by a third. She was sure they were all from the same gun. Then she heard the deep booming report of Cobb’s HK91, first one shot, then two more in quick succession. A fusillade followed. She could hear everything from little pops that reminded her of the .22 her grandfather taught her to shoot, to duck-hunting guns.
After a few seconds, it tapered off to nothing. A couple of isolated bangs followed, then silence. Kathy sat on the sleeping bag, gun held in both hands, watching the door with a growing feeling of dread. The seconds ticked by, then she heard footsteps. The wood floor creaked and popped. The steps came closer. Her hands shook as she raised the pistol and lined up the sights on the center of the door. When she heard the knock, she almost fired.
“Senorita?” a voice asked. “Señor Cobb says come downstairs.”
“O—okay,” she stammered, and the footfalls retreated. She sat and breathed deeply for a few seconds, painfully conscious of how close she’d come to killing whoever that was. Finally, she managed to stand on shaky legs.
Downstairs, she moved through a crowd cramming the front room of the house. Many were men, and most carried guns, which explained the shooting she’d heard. They moved aside for her. The front door was open, and Cobb stood on the porch, his big rifle held cross-body. Scattered on the ground outside was a trail of bodies, the last one at the foot of the steps. It was a boy, no more than 10 years old. A woman cradled his head in her lap and was rocking back and forth, keening. His torn-out throat told the story.
She came up behind Cobb. What exactly was he to her now? Savior, certainly. Lover? Without a doubt. More? She didn’t know. She put a hand on his shoulder, and he glanced back. “What happened?”
“The boy went out, thought he saw a rabbit, and was going to get it for food. One of the crazies jumped him,” he said and pointed at the dead. “He almost made it back. A dozen more showed up, and it turned into a one-sided fire fight. They just kept coming.”
She nodded in understanding, and looked at the solemn-faced men on the porch. All had weather-beaten faces, cracked from untold days under the southern sun; they looked as hard as the sunbaked earth they toiled on. They held their weapons with grim determination.
“Quite a militia you have here,” she said.
He shrugged. “They’re courageous, at least. Probably only have a few dozen rounds each.”
“Hadn’t we better get them moving?” she asked. “Those shots are going to bring more.” She glanced at the sky and was surprised to realize it was still early afternoon. It felt like they’d been there a week, instead of just a few hours.
“We can’t.”
“Why?” she asked. He gestured with his rifle barrel.
Kathy looked in the direction he was pointing and gasped. Several hundred yards away were hundreds, maybe a thousand, crazies. They stood there, watching the house, showing no outward emotions. They weren’t jumping up and down, waving their arms, or moving around. They were standing perfectly still. “What are they doing?”
“Waiting,” he said.
“Waiting for what?”
“If they were intelligent, I’d say waiting for reinforcements or artillery.”
“They’ve only acted insane before,” she said, “like animals.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “and this is worrisome.”
“Why?”
“Because it suggests they could use tactics. And tactics means planning.” He stepped off the porch, and she followed. He walked to the rear of the house. The land behind was similar, except that an old grove of trees was there, spreading off into the distance. There was no sign of anyone as far as they could see. Cobb clutched his gun with white-knuckled force and sucked air through his teeth.
“What?” she asked.
“This place crawls,” he said, finally.
“Huh?”
“Ambush.” he explained. “They’re trying to scare us out.” He shouldered the rifle and looked through the powerful scope, sweeping from side to side. “Yeah, they’re out there.”
“How many?”
“I can see a couple hiding behind trees, and there’s one behind a wood pile. Motherfuckers are trying to flush us into them!”
“What do we do?” she asked.
“Make them come to us.”
“But all we’ve got is your rifle and the bunch of little guns the Mexicans brought!”
“Oh, we’ve got a little more than that, remember?” He turned around and examined the ho
use for a long moment. “I always thought that building looked stupid out here in the damned Texas desert,” he said, taking in the architecture. “Who builds a Victorian with a widow’s walk out here?” He shrugged. “Now all I can say is; thank God it’s here.”
It was just past 2:00 p.m. when they came. The line of enfermo that waited in the afternoon heat decided it was time. Slowly at first, they quickly picked up speed until they were sprinting. Then they began to scream, visceral, inhuman sounds from throats already raw from overuse.
“Wait!” Kathy yelled over the screams. “Wait…” Cobb had told her which trees marked the 100-yard line. That was the range he deemed to be most effective for their rag-tag arsenal of weaponry. When they crossed it, she screamed, “Now!”
They opened fire with every gun, from the powerful .308 H&K she wielded, to ancient 6mm single-shot hunting rifles, to .22 caliber pistols. They fired as quickly and as accurately as they could. As the attackers passed the 100-yard line, volleys of flying lead engulfed them.
Kathy looked through the scope; the range was almost perfect for the sight. The rifle was set to single shot, so she fired, moved, and fired again. “Center of mass,” Cobb had told her as he taught her how to use the ranging marks on the rifle. “It’s a big cartridge. One shot to each center of mass.”
“What if they don’t go down?”
“It’s a .308 my dear; they’ll go down. If not immediately, in a few heartbeats.”
The first one she shot was a big bull of a man in tattered overalls. She firmly centered the sight’s crosshairs over his Adam’s apple, one tick high as he’d told her to do at that range. When the rifle settled from the recoil, she saw him plowing into the ground, a hole the size of her fist in the center of his back. Breathe, new target, fire. Shift target, breathe, fire.
The front of the wave fell like wheat under a scythe. Dozens dropped to the ground, screaming. Some got back up and hobbled on, and some didn’t move. Still more tried to crawl, mowed down by those behind them. Others tripped over their fallen fellows, and a few dropped to feed. One woman tripped over a splayed leg, her face smashing into a sharp rock. At the speed she’d been running, it split her skull like a grapefruit. Kathy swallowed her gorge and moved on, glad she’d saved a round, and cursing herself for the thought. That was a woman, someone’s child. Now she lay there with a split skull, dying in the dirt.
They were 50 yards out, and they were coming fast. Everyone fired as quickly as they could. Kathy emptied her magazine. She fumbled for the magazine release before finding it, the metal box clattering to the floor among the spent brass, and she turned the smoking gun sideways, so she could fit another. There were eight more magazines on the dressing table next to her. She slapped the bolt release, just like Cobb showed her, and the gun charged. They were 40 yards out as she started firing again. A hundred or more were down, but they weren’t slowing. She felt her pulse pounding in her ears like a big kettle drum, and her eyes were wide with fear. All around the scope, her vision was red and nothing else was visible. It was like looking down a tunnel. Shoot, move, shoot.
“Fuck, fuck fuck!” she screamed. The attackers were running past the corpses, only yards from the house, when she heard the machine gun’s long “Brrraaaap!”
Cobb worked the M240 along the line of packed crazies. The 7.62mm rounds chewed through flesh and bone, often going through one body and into another at such close range. The belt fed smoothly from the huge pile on the floor. He’d emptied three boxes, linking the belts together to give him 750 rounds. Against every instinct, he held the trigger and shot a continuous string of death.
Bright white lines of tracers every three rounds told him where to aim. He used the ornate ironwork surrounding the widow’s walk to support the gun. He would have been horribly exposed in an armed attack. Against unarmed lunatics, his position was ideal.
He didn’t aim for the vanguard. Instead, he picked the mass clumped up behind them, those slowed slightly by the bodies on the ground. They formed a concentrated wall of targets he methodically chewed into hamburger with the chattering gun. He could see smoke rising from the barrel as the marker indicating the end of the first belt of 250 rounds went by, and he kept working it from side to side. “Wooohooo!” he yelled as he unloaded belt-fed death.
The first of them hit the porch and threw themselves at the doors. They crashed into the heavy wood with bone shattering force. Many broke arms and shoulders, even skulls as they smashed against the ancient oaken door. They continued to plow in behind, until the porch was so full it groaned under their weight.
Cobb stopped firing long enough to lean over the side and look down at the traffic jam. The crowd hideously crushed dozens of their own as they continued to bear down on the doorway until it gave, spilling them into the huge front room and entry area. He waited a long five-count as they rushed in to find every exit barred and nailed shut. Every piece of furniture that would fit blocked the stairs. “NOW ENRICO!” he screamed.
On the second-floor landing, Enrico barely heard the missive from above. He nodded his head, picked up the thing called a “clacker,” and, just as Cobb had shown him, smacked his hand down on the spoon three times.
When Kathy took the M240 and the ammo for it, she’d had a little room left on the trailer, so she’d grabbed a final crate without looking at what it said. When Cobb unloaded and moved the machine gun inside, using the villagers to help haul the gun and ammo to the widow’s walk, they’d brought that box along. When he saw it, he laughed so hard they thought he was insane.
He’d taken the contents and set them all up, half in the living room by the front door, the other half around the front of the porch. When Enrico hit the detonator three times, he set off all 20 Claymore mines. Each one unleashed seven hundred steel ball bearings, propelled by a half-kilogram of high explosives, set in a convex shaped charge that created an inconceivable zone of death.
The daisy chain of explosions ripped through Kathy’s ears, making her scream and drop the rifle as she instinctively put her hands over her ears. The Claymores’ ball bearings tore through flesh and bone, eviscerating and shredding bodies as they killed hundreds. All around the house bodies disintegrated like cobwebs hit by a wind machine. A killing arc 50 meters deep spread gore in all directions as the house thundered and shook from the detonations, completely shredding the first floor, which was empty of all but the enfermo. The once stately house became a grisly slaughterhouse.
None of the crazies survived the overlapping fields of fire inside the house or on the porch. Outside, where Cobb had set the mines with less overlap, some were still alive, but wounded. They were missing arms and legs, or had huge holes punched through their torsos. They staggered or crawled about, rapidly bleeding out.
For a second, there was a stunned silence and then a deafening cheer. Kathy stared at the scene with a mixture of elation and horror. It looked like the floor of an abattoir she’d once visited in Kansas City for a story on Mad Cow Disease. Only it wasn’t parts of cows that writhed on the ground, it was men, women, and children. This time she did puke, though it was little more than bile.
She wiped her mouth on her filthy shirt and spit to clear her mouth, then picked up her rifle. “More out there!” she yelled.
“I see them. Hold fire,” Cobb replied from above.
Hundreds more arrived, and this time they stopped to feed. “Oh Christ,” Kathy moaned as she watched a girl of eight or nine pick up a severed arm and start tearing at the flesh like it was a chicken drumstick.
The uninjured descended on the dead and dying to feast. In only minutes, Kathy realized their victory wasn’t a victory at all. She’d thought Cobb’s mines and machine gun fire had slaughtered most of them. She saw just how wrong she was.
“More from behind!” Cobb called above her.
Kathy picked up the rifle, careful to avoid the hot barrel, and ran to the back of the house. Women and children, packed into upstairs spaces, cried out in alarm. By the time she r
eached the back room that had been set up as a firing position, she could see the crazies running through the grove of trees. “Got it!” she yelled. “Shoot?”
“Yes!” Cobb answered as his machine gun began chattering. He’d had quite a job manhandling the overheated gun and almost four hundred rounds of ammo to the rear of the widow’s walk, and he had almost fallen over the side. He’d hoped for a few minutes’ respite to let the weapon cool. Although the engineers had designed the barrel for sustained fire, this was extreme! As he resumed firing, he could see occasional sparks from the barrel, which were not good.
Luckily, between his barrage and Kathy’s below, they were able to stop the rear group. Confused by so many dead, they stopped their assault and crouched behind trees and under bushes. “Cease fire,” Cobb yelled. “Cease fire!” He lifted the gun off the railing and set it on its bipod on the walk’s deck. As he did, he noted the railing where he’d rested the barrel was smoking.
He made sure the barrel wasn’t touching anything flammable and swung into the house through the widow’s walk window, and walked down the stairs. It took him a minute to push through the panicked crowd and reach the back bedroom. He found Kathy sitting there, the rifle propped between her knees, both hands holding the foregrip. She looked like she was praying. “Are you okay?”
She looked up in surprise, then calmed when she saw who it was. “Yeah,” she said. He noticed the puddle of puke at her feet, but didn’t say anything. “You think that licked them?”
“No,” he admitted. “I don’t think they’re smart enough to get beat.” He pulled out his canteen, took a long drink of lukewarm water, and handed it to her. She took a drink and swished it around, then spat it out the window before taking a much bigger swallow. He fished into his pack and came out with a couple of foil pouches. “Here,” he said, handing one to her. “Protein bar.” She ripped it open and started eating.
“What are our chances of getting out of here in one piece?” she asked when she’d devoured the bar.
“Depends on how many of them there are.”
Turning Point (Book 1): A Time To Die Page 27