by Nick Randall
Josie shrieked and kept dragging Roy through the hallway as the teeth of the saw chewed through the wooden door and the two-by-four boards holding it shut, sending splinters shooting into the hallway.
Roy, in an enraged panic, blindly blasted his AR-15 away at the door.
The saw blade shuddered and jerked upward as the person holding it dropped it. Roy continued to fire until the weapon clicked empty.
As he fumbled blindly at his vest for a spare magazine, an explosion and mortal shriek erupted from the front yard. Josie dropped Roy and ran to check the front room. The rest of the gang were crossing the front yard, closing in on all sides and running fast towards the house.
Flames began flicking up the insides of the windows, catching the drapes and blackening the ceiling. The front rooms began filling with smoke as the sides of the house burned, and Josie coughed violently into the crook of her arm as the boards on the front windows began to get pulled off by grasping hands and gnashing teeth on filthy faces. A clinking sound bounced across the den floor and Josie instinctively ducked.
A moment later she was blinded by an intense phosphorous light and a deafening explosion; one of the attackers had tossed a flash bang grenade into the house!
Josie’s ears rang. A second bright flash and dull thump of an explosion came from the back, followed by the muffled swearing and screaming of Roy.
She ran back to him and found him writhing on the ground, his ears now bleeding from the percussive force of the second flash bang; a burned out husk of the explosive lay right by his head.
She reached out and grabbed the shoulder straps of his vest again, blinking back tears from the smoke and straining to pull her husband down the hall towards the bunker.
A moment later, the saw blade growled back to life and started chewing its way through the door again.
Josie looked up in time to see the door get kicked open, and there stood the terrifying silhouette of Python holding the rumbling chainsaw in both hands and covered head-to-toe in riot gear.
Josie screamed.
Her scream was drowned out by the snarl of the chainsaw as Python charged in a rage and swung the saw over his right shoulder, but before he could swing down at her, she kicked him in the groin as hard as she could.
The chainsaw sputtered as Python buckled and roared in pain, nearly falling to the floor.
Seizing her opportunity, Josie reached forward to Roy’s belt and struggled to free his Beretta 9mm from its holster. Seeing this, Python tried to attack again with his saw, but he was too late.
Josie yanked the Beretta free, swung it around towards Python, and squeezed the trigger three times. All three shots punched into Python: the first two struck his body armor while the third found its way under his plastic riot mask and into his skull.
Python’s head jerked back and he slumped lifelessly against the hallway. Now there were twelve gang members left.
Josie held the pistol in one hand and continued to drag Roy to the basement with the other. It was only twenty feet away but it felt like twenty miles.
As she pulled him, she turned to the kitchen just in time to see another armed attacker wiggling his way through a broken window.
She leveled the pistol and fired at him; once, twice, three times. The man flailed and flexed as the rounds struck his unprotected back, neck, and the top of his skull.
A moment later, he fell limply, hanging by the waist, halfway through the window. Blood dripped in clumps onto the kitchen floor. Eleven left now.
“Almost there!” she screamed, to her husband and to herself.
The front rooms were now completely filled with smoke, the light from the fires illuminated the scene as the corpse in the window got pulled back outside.
Another flash bang grenade dropped through the same window and went off in the kitchen. The front door started shaking and shuddering as someone on the other side started battering it down.
With Herculean strength, she hauled her husband down the bunker’s stairs. Her efforts were made easier by the downwards descent.
As soon as she got him to the bottom, she left Roy and scrambled back up the stairs just in time to hear another door crash down and pairs of feet stomping into the house from all sides.
“Let’s go! Take everything! Check the whole house and get everything out!” she heard a gruff voice shout with an accent she couldn’t place.
Josie reloaded Roy’s AR-15 and ran back upstairs. She had target practiced with the weapon a few times at the range with Roy, so she knew how to use it even if her experience was limited.
Upon reaching the bunker door, squeezed the trigger repeatedly to spray bullets wildly around the house, hoping at least one of them would catch an attacker.
A second later, two smoke bombs and a flash bang grenade tumbled down in front of her. She ducked back into the bunker and slammed the heavy metal bunker door shut just as the explosions went off.
She hit all the latches and ran back down the short flight of metal stairs into the body of the bunker, where the pale emergency lights that lined the floor illuminated her daughter, knelt sobbing and distraught next to her broken and still-writhing father.
Alex looked up at her mother, and Josie stayed standing, without a word, rifle slung.
“Take everything you can!” shouted a voice from the other side of the bunker door.
“Watch that door, anybody comes up from there, you shoot ‘em! Come on, let’s go, there’s a lot of food and ammo down here! Let’s get it out before the whole house burns down!” shouted another.
Josie clenched her eyes shut and tried to breathe. The smell of smoke crept to her nose -- the smell of her home burning down, as these men stole all her years of hard work right off the shelves.
She clutched the rifle to her chest and slowly sank onto the staircase, biting back tears and turning her head away from her daughter. Roy moaned and coughed on the floor, bleeding from his wounds and holding his daughter’s hand.
The house was conquered and burning, and Roy, Josie, and Alex were trapped in the bunker.
Chapter 11
Ben gripped his Glock 17. The polymer framed gun felt light and plastic, like a toy in the midst of a real battle. The gang members had attacked the house with reckless abandon as if they didn’t even fear for their own lives.
He saw one gang member go down at the start of the battle, begging for help in that deadly lawn now littered with traps and explosives. It was unwise to try and help. Ben had watched detached.
In fact, he was so detached he still hadn’t fired a single round and didn’t even join the fight when the Molotovs were thrown in. He only watched as the flames licked the wooden panels and spread across the roof lapping up the house and sending thick smoke into the night sky.
The gang members were jumping about gleefully and with deadly intensity in their faces as they dove into the burning husk of the house. Even while the fire was raging in places, the cupboards and dressers and nightstands had all been raided.
As the looters picked their way back to safety they lost their focus and began comparing trinkets and squirreling away valuables. Once the fire had grown too hot and intense, they abandoned the home completely and stood watching it burn down from the outside.
Maybe nobody will notice, Ben thought, maybe now is my chance to slip away.
Ojo was laser-focused on the steel bunker door that was remaining completely undamaged even as the home burned to the ground.
“Benny Boy!” barked Ojo. “Come here!”
Ben went to him, crumbling up his thought like a used tissue.
Ojo explained: “What I need is someone smart, someone, like you. We need to get into that bunker. All the food and stuff is in there. So here’s my plan: we’ll all go hide, but one of us goes over to them, surrenders, gets them to lower their guard. Once the time is right the inside man gives the signal and we come outta hiding and get those devils. You’re the only one Ben, counting on you.”
Ojo plucked the
Glock from Ben’s limp hands and Ben gave it up far too easily. “Go get em’, Benny boy. Love you, brother.”
Ben felt a push and he was thrust three steps towards the house, uncomfortably close to the fire. The world fell silent, all that could be heard was the blood pounding in his ears and the raging flames.
When he looked back, Ojo and the other nine gang members were melting into the darkness of the night. The car battery was failing and the headlights winked and flickered and dimmed weakly.
Ben waited for the flames to die down, which took a good half hour. By then, the house had been reduced to smoldering ruins, with flames still going in just a few places, but the metal bunker door leading down to the sanctuary under the ground had remained fully intact.
The only choice then was to walk towards the smoldering house. Ben cautiously placed one foot in front of the other.
Slowly, very slowly the metal door to the safe house came into reach and he still hadn’t been shot or blown up or impaled by spikes.
Then, as if in a dream, he was at the metal door and all was left was to knock.
Carefully, so as not to alarm the holdouts inside he raised his foot and kicked it twice against the metal of the door. He dared not touch the door due to the fact that it was burning hot from the fire.
“Hello! I’m unarmed and alone! I just want to talk!”
Ben waited for the pain, thinking there must be some kind of pain before getting blown sky high.
The sharp clack of the peephole sliding open in its armored shutter nearly made him wet himself. The slide and barrel of a Beretta 92FS extended out of the slot, its open muzzle end aimed at his head.
The fierce feminine eyes of Josie looked at Ben and regarded him with cold judgment.
It dawned on Ben in this strangest of situations that he hadn’t talked to anyone besides the gang members in quite some time.
The panel snapped shut and then there was silence. Ben waited, wondering what would happen next.
“Hello?” Ben fidgeted in his stance. “I’m alone, I’m unarmed they all – I think they left me.”
Still, nothing happened. If she wanted to kill him she would have already. Instead, she had shut the door on him as if he were a chilly draft, or at best, a nosey raccoon.
Ben felt very cold as the fires were dying out around him, shrinking against the waxing strength of the late fall chill.
Suddenly, he heard the distant crack of a gun being fired, and the needlepoint weight of something strong yanked his leg and pulled him off balance!
The bullet had come from behind. Ben stumbled and crashed to his hands and knees. That’s when the pain finally came.
When the pain came so did the shriek of ghastly realization at the sight of his wounded leg. The pain sharpened and spread, filling his whole leg like searing hot lead!
* * *
Josie didn’t know how much time had passed since she shut the door on the bunker, only that Roy was in bad shape despite her best efforts at medical care, the air filtration system in the bunker had been activated, and Alex was now curled up on one of the fold-out bunk beds, sleeping. Her little white rabbit was long gone, lost in the fire that was destroying their home.
The knock at the bunker door had startled Josie out of her exhausted trance. She stood up from her place beside her wounded husband and pulled his pistol from his belt.
As she walked towards the stairs, she could hear the scared voice of a young man. He was asking for help, and claimed to be alone.
But Josie had just heard a second voice, and she knew somehow that the tension in this man’s voice was from being watched. She stood with her ear pressed to the door.
“Don’t you do it, Josie,” Roy whispered, speaking in an awful rasp and the right side of his face covered in bandages. “Don’t open that door.”
She stared back at him, and recalled how he treated the last person who asked for help. With defiant silence, she turned back to the door and opened the sliding shutter.
The young man, Ben, had leaned back as she pressed the muzzle of the Beretta through the viewing slot. Just as she had feared, she could see their home had burned down and all that was left was smoldering black wood and a few small scattered fires. The putrid air smelled of burned wood and plastic.
Ben looked frail and malnourished, eyes darting frantically from her to her gun and back towards the staircase. She slammed the sliding shutter back and locked it again.
No way was this a real plea for help. Suddenly she heard a gunshot and the unmistakable wail of a person in fresh agony.
Ben outside started pounding on the door, and cried out: “Please! Please let me in! I lied, I’m sorry, they’re still out there and this guy is completely crazy! I’m sorry we burned down your house, I’m sorry we did this to you! I’ve been trying to get away, these people are crazy!”
“Josie!” Roy said. “Don’t you do it. It’s a trick, you let him in and he’ll kill us all! Don’t do it!”
“Please, they’ll kill me if you don’t let me in!” Ben continued crying.
“Don’t do it! Don’t open that door!”
“He just shot me in the leg, he’s gonna kill me if you don’t let me in!”
“Keep that door shut, Josie!”
“For the love of god, help me!” Ben was now banging his fist on the door.
“Mom?” Alex said.
Josie started and turned around. She hadn’t heard Alex walk to the base of the stairs. Her daughter looked at her with a pleading expression, sadness and fear in her voice.
“Don’t open the damn door!” Roy shouted. “Keep it shut!”
Josie stood up, inched open the door, and grabbed Ben by the collar and threw him down the bunker stairs, slamming the door shut behind her and locking it.
“Don’t move a damned muscled you son of a bitch!” she shouted as she descended the staircase with the Beretta pointed at him.
Ben lay still on the ground, curled in a ball with his hands outstretched over his head.
“Don’t shoot, please don’t shoot,” Ben whimpered, his wounded leg trembling and leaking blood all over the floor.
“If you make one move I don’t like, I swear to god I will kill you,” she said, slowly advancing on him.
“Okay, okay,” Ben said, nodding.
“I mean it!” she shouted.
Ben nodded again vigorously.
“Who the hell are those people and what do they want?” she asked, though she already knew half the answer.
“They’re convicts. We’re all escaped convicts, from a penitentiary in the next county.”
“And why the hell did you all decide to attack my house and my family?!” she asked, voice rising.
“Because you killed Dominic!” Ben pleaded. “Or somebody did! He was Ojo’s brother, the leader! He wanted revenge and we all needed your food!”
“What happened to the rest of the world?!” Josie barked. “Where is everybody?!”
“I don’t know… I don’t know…” he said. “One day the power —”
“Keep your hands up!” Josie shouted as he started to pull his hands back to his pockets.
He flung them back out.
“Sorry! I’m sorry… One day the power just went out in the prison. Back-up generators for security failed, too. Wasn’t long before there was a riot. The prisoners took over pretty quick. It was awful! We haven’t seen anybody else since. It wasn’t until we got to that town that we thought something bigger might be happening.”
Roy had turned his head to look at Ben on the floor, not saying a word and not moving a muscle. He watched like a coiled snake, occasionally glancing with a betrayed and violent expression up at his wife.
“And why should we help you?” Josie asked, ignoring her husband’s accusatory gaze. “Why shouldn’t I just put you down right here, right now?”
Ben glanced up at her again, and his expression had changed. He was a bit calmer, with a glint of perceptive cunning in his eyes.
&n
bsp; “I don’t think you would do that, you’re not the type,” he whispered, and then hid his face again. “I just stuck with that gang upstairs to get through the territory. I kept waiting for my chance to get away!”
Josie nudged him with her foot again and he looked back up to see the pistol pointed at his face.
“Why should I believe you?” she whispered, lip trembling with fear and rage, eyes wide with uncertainty and dancing with guilt.