by Derek Gunn
She heard another deep boom and the thrall she had hit slumped to the ground and remained still this time. They might have an incredible healing factor but when Warkowski hit them with a .50 calibre bullet there really wasn’t a lot left to work with. Sandra’s weapon clicked empty and she calmly ejected it and pulled another clip from the bag at her waist. Bullets slammed into the ground around her but she ignored them. There was no cover anyway and moving about would only make her easier to see so she continued loading.
She was too busy to look at the colour strip they always applied to the clips to mark which contained normal and which contained the coated bullets and slammed the first clip she found home. Her first shot hit one of the thralls and he spun back as the bullet slammed into his shoulder.
Even through the gloom she could see the thrall recover quickly and he turned back in her direction. He took a moment to line up his sights and then began to pump fire toward her. Sandra saw the line of bullets stitch across the dry earth as the bullets sought her out. Her mind shouted at her to move but the approaching bullets were moving too quickly. She tensed as she prepared for the impact when the barrage suddenly swerved violently and split the air far to her left. She looked toward the thrall and saw that he had stopped firing. In fact, the thrall was shrieking in agony and seemed to be tearing at the point where her previous bullet had struck him. She watched the thrall throw down his weapon and tear at his clothes as if they were on fire.
She must have loaded the wrong clip, she realised, as the thrall tore at himself and thrashed about in agony. Pat Smyth’s ‘magic bullets’ were too scarce to use on thralls, especially now that they were no longer part of the community. They just didn’t have the resources to make them in the quantities they required. Besides, the thralls did die with normal bullets, it just took a few more rounds, so they tended to use high velocity rounds and hope that they hit them often enough to keep them down.
Harris had reported that when he had used the bullets on a raid two months ago that the thralls had taken far fewer rounds to take out, but he had said nothing about such an extreme reaction. Maybe his shots had been more accurate than hers and he had killed them outright. Smyth’s bullets were coated with a liquid that was deadly to the vampires, but each one had to be coated individually and they never had enough of them. They had decided long ago to keep as many as possible stockpiled in case the vampires ever found them.
Their experience in the Cave had brought home to them just how many rounds were needed to fight off a concerted vampire attack. She wasn’t sure if these thralls were wearing armoured jackets or not, but either way, she’d have to be more accurate if they wanted to survive the day.
Joshua and April finally caught up with her and added their firepower to hers, but Sandra’s attention was still on the thrall she had hit. The thrall had fallen to the ground at this point and his screams were audible even over the thunder of the surrounding gunfire and the roaring of the trucks. She was mesmerised. Bullets still flew around her but now even some of the thralls had noticed something wasn’t right and had stopped firing as they looked to their colleague to see what had caused such an extreme reaction.
Sandra shook herself and sent another three-round burst toward the thralls, striking one of them in the leg. The thrall ignored the wound and continued to fire and Sandra was forced to dive to her left as bullets whizzed past her. It only took about a minute, though, before he too began to scream and thrash about as he tore at his wound. By this time the first thrall had stopped struggling and lay in a contorted heap on the ground. The screams from the second thrall began to unnerve the other thralls and their rate of fire began to dwindle.
The occasional deep boom followed by another thrall pitching forward dead, along with the crossfire from Carlos and Al on the other side of the road finally began to take its toll on the thralls. With no cover, and with their numbers dwindling alarmingly, the thralls began to panic. The commander tried to rally his men, but another deep boom from above took his head from his shoulders, and the thralls were isolated and vulnerable. When another of their colleagues fell to what looked like a minor wound and began to tear at his own flesh as if trying to rip something from the wound, they finally broke and threw down their weapons and surrendered.
Chapter 16
Ricks rolled away from Delilah as bullets slammed into the ground around them. He heard her grunt in pain but there was no time to check on her. He rolled into a crouch and returned fire into the swirling dust, spraying blindly and hoping that he would hit at least one of his assailants. The fire coming from the dust didn’t seem to slacken at all, though, and Ricks suddenly found that his XM8 was empty.
Shit! In his panic he had made a basic mistake and kept his finger on the trigger instead of firing in three-round bursts as he had been trained. He cursed himself for being so stupid and groped for another clip as he saw figures begin to emerge from the dust as if they were suddenly materialising from nowhere.
He was caught. The thralls emerged from the dust too quickly and saw him almost immediately. Nature seemed to conspire against him and a sudden gust of wind cleared the dust away and left him completely exposed and vulnerable. Ricks was still loading when the first of the bullets slammed into him and he fell back as darkness rushed around him and sucked him down.
Delilah felt pain burst up her shoulder as she slammed into the ground. Something had crashed into her and her feet had been taken from under her. She was vaguely aware that someone was struggling to disentangle themselves from her, and then her head grazed a rock on the ground and she slumped forward. She was still conscious and could hear the howl of the wind around her but she couldn’t move. Panic gripped her as she thought she might be paralysed. She cried out in fear and frustration as bullets tore through the air around her but she couldn’t do anything and merely lay helpless in the middle of the fire fight.
She had never been in a real battle before and the sheer volume of the machine guns booming around her was terrifying. The noises seemed to come from everywhere at once and the cacophony seemed to physically assault her. Her head still ached from where it had struck the rock and her stomach heaved with nausea as she struggled to focus. She was desperate to move, to somehow get to safety away from the madness of the dust-obscured battlefield, but her body was still sluggish to respond.
A sustained burst of fire suddenly erupted to her left and the noise sent a painful throbbing through her skull. Strangely, at one level, her mind recognised the high-pitched, phut noise of the XM8 machine gun. She had trained relentlessly with the weapon herself and its distinctive noise was almost comforting in the mayhem around her. Her mind continued to analyse everything around her as her body struggled to recover.
If the XM8 was to her left then that would be Ricks, she realised, so it must have been him who had crashed into her. She lay there frantically trying to get her body to move while her mind continued to analyse the sounds around her. She noted that the rate of fire was far too long and she heard Harris’s voice in her mind as he reminded her to fire three-round bursts just before the noise suddenly stopped and the weapon ran out of ammunition.
Fire erupted to her right now and she heard a cry to her left as someone was hit. Shit, that would be Ricks, she realised. She had to move, to help, anything but remain helpless here. It felt as though her body was moving through glue at first, but, finally, she managed to roll over on to her back and had to suppress a sudden gasp of shock as she saw three thralls loom above her. They hadn’t seen her as they had passed because their attention was directed toward where the cry had come from. She had been so still they had probably thought her dead.
The thralls continued forward and one of them raised his weapon as he seemed to see something. Delilah snapped her head toward where the thrall pointed his weapon and saw her brother try to raise himself before slumping forward. The thrall steadied his weapon and prepared to fire and Delilah suddenly screamed. The scream attracted all three of the thralls’ atte
ntions and they snapped their heads toward her. The scream had also galvanised her own body as adrenaline surged through her and she brought up her XM8 and began to pump the trigger in perfect three-round bursts as she swept the weapon from target to target. Delilah was still screaming long after the thralls had fallen to the ground and she lay heaving for breath as her brain began to catch up on events.
She had done it. All three thralls were slumped on the ground and none of them moved. She felt her body tremble as the adrenaline began to wear off and she felt suddenly cold. It was some time later that she was finally able to pull herself to her feet. When she did, she crossed first to check each thrall to make sure they were dead as she had been trained to do, and only then did she allow herself to check on Ben and Ricks.
Denis Jackson awoke to a splitting headache. He tried to open his eyes but the pain increased so he lay for a second as he tried to gather his thoughts. Everything was so quiet Was he dead? No, he was in far too much pain for that. Maybe the battle was over. The question now was: who had won?
He remembered running into the dust and firing at anything that moved. He thought he had seen a figure stumble and fall but then something had hit his head with such force that he hadn’t even felt any pain. He had felt the impact sure enough but he had no memory past that. And then the next thing he knew he had woken up with this blinding headache.
“It’s all right, you’re safe.” He heard the words as if they had been spoken from far away and then felt a something damp press against his forehead before he passed out again.
Delilah saw Jackson’s body relax as he passed out again. A bullet had creased the side of his head and had torn a deep furrow along his skull. She had cleaned the wound and tied some gauze tightly around it, but it was still seeping blood at an alarming rate and she didn’t really know what else to do. She looked down at her brother. She had pulled him over beside Jackson once she had checked that they were all alive. She tried to smile but she was just too tired.
Ben had taken a bullet to the shoulder. She had strapped up the wound as well but the bullet was still lodged somewhere in his shoulder and he was in a lot of pain despite his best efforts to smile at her. They would have to get that bullet out or the wound would become septic, but she had no idea how to do that. Warkowski’s wife was the closest thing they had to a nurse but she was back at the Cave. It would be a long trip back, longer still with the wounded, and she wasn’t sure how long they had before infection would set in.
She was most worried about Ricks, though. She was fairly certain that Jackson and Ben would be fine until they got back but Ricks was barely alive. Two bullets had struck him in the chest, one high on the left side that had torn through him and taken a chunk of flesh with it as it had exited just under his shoulder blade. The other one had gone in just under his rib on the right side and had torn through and excited messily just under his shoulder. She was no doctor but the wound was seeping blood rather than spurting so she hoped that that was a good sign. Another bullet had taken a chunk out of his thigh, but it was the amount of blood he was losing that worried her most.
The boy was sheet white and already looked like one of those zombies she had seen in the movies before the vampires had come and turned Hollywood into reality. She had bandaged him up as best she could, tying the wounds tightly to prevent further blood loss. She knew she would have to loosen the bandages to allow the blood to flow at some stage but she wasn’t sure exactly when. She would have to listen more carefully next time she was given first aid training. She had given Ricks some morphine so his thrashing didn’t reopen the wounds, but their field dressings were used up now and she had no idea where the others were or how their mission had gone. Was she the only one left not wounded? Her head still throbbed but she was fine other than that.
Now that the trucks were still once more, she could see the road and the vehicles of the convoy they had targeted. The jeep lay out past the road in a ruined heap. She could see a number of bodies laying on the ground around the wreck in such contorted positions that she hadn’t bothered to check that they were dead – some things could be assumed she had decided. The truck that had held the thrall guards lay on its side just off the road, the driver lay slumped at the wheel and two more thralls lay beside the wreck with enough bullet holes in them to kill an elephant. It looked like Jackson had taken a few out before they got him. She raised a small smile as she looked down at Denis Jackson.
She hadn’t realised that she had such deep feelings for the man until she had seen his still body and all that blood. Sure, she had flirted with him - there really hadn’t been that many eligible men in the community after all. There were even fewer in their new group. He was quite a bit older than she was and neither of them had really analysed what, if anything, might be between them. It was a new world, she realised with a shudder, and there just wasn’t time to waste when somebody you cared about could die at any time. He eyes lingered over his sleeping form for another minute and then she looked back toward the road.
The transport lay on its side and three more thralls lay crushed beneath its vast bulk. They had lucked out there, she realised. There was no way they could have taken out three more thralls. When she had seen the transport on its side her first thought had been that its dangerous cargo might be cracked and was already leaking deadly radiation into the air. She had agonised over whether she should try to move the wounded and risk doing them more damage or stay where they were and hope that the radiation didn’t kill them all. But, she soon realised, it was already too late if it was leaking. She had decided to stay put.
She felt uncomfortable around such an invisible, deadly killer. She still had reservations about this plan. Playing with radiation was just too dangerous, but she could see that it might just give them the respite they needed. She saw a swirl of dust on the horizon and pursed her lips. Either this was Harris and the others, or it was the thralls from the first convoy and her friends were already dead. There was no way she could move the wounded and no way in hell she was leaving them. She shrugged and rose to her feet to greet the vehicle. She dipped into her pocket for a crumpled pack of cigarettes and lit one. There weren’t many of these left, she thought with a sigh as she savoured the smoke and then walked back along the road toward the approaching vehicle.
Chapter 17
“But where did she go?” Danny Wilkins piped in his high voice.
“I don’t know,” Emma barked with more anger than she had intended. She still felt very conscious of the fact that it had been her that had lost Lohan and not one of the younger members of the team. She was meant to be better than that, damn it. “I looked away for a second and then she was just gone. I looked everywhere but the corridor was just too crowded.”
“Do you think she knew you were following her?” Father Reilly asked calmly as he sipped on a cup of hot water laced with mint. They had run out of proper tea and coffee a long time ago but they were able to grow mint easily enough and the drink had become quite popular among the community. It was just a shame it didn’t pack the same bite the other drinks had.
“I don’t think so,” Emma replied quickly and then sighed. “I don’t know, to be honest. If she knew I was there she never gave any sign of it. I had just taken over from Danny so it wasn’t as if I had been behind her for ages or anything.”
“What happened then?” Father Reilly pressed as he moved the hot cup in his hands.
“We looked everywhere,” Danny jumped in, taking up the story. “Once Emma put out the call on the talkies we all dropped our charges and converged on that area.”
“All of you dropped your assigned targets?” Father Reilly raised his voice in alarm for the first time and the children suddenly dropped their eyes to the floor as they suddenly realised what they had done.
“Well,” Emma spoke up sheepishly, determined to stand up for her team. “We thought that, like, with Lohan disappearing and all, that she must be the one who…”
“Yes, well no
w we’ll never know, will we?” Father Reilly sighed as he put his drink on the table beside him. He had barely touched its contents and steam rose like a coiling snake in the small room. He spread his hands out and all of the children turned their attention toward him. “This is my fault, really,” he began as he looked at each of the children in turn. “Maybe I overestimated your ability to…”
“That’s not fair,” Emma interrupted and stared at the priest with an icy glare. “I made the mistake and I made the decision to converge on Lohan’s last position. Blame me if you want, not them. They don’t deserve it.”
Father Reilly stared hard at Emma for a few seconds and the silence in the room was almost palpable, but she did not give an inch and the priest suddenly nodded. “Good,” he smiled suddenly. Dropping the surveillance on the other targets had only exacerbated the error of losing Lohan. Now they had no information on any of the targets for a whole chunk of time, rather than just losing Lohan. However, the children had performed admirably up until then and he was particularly pleased with Emma’s ability to lead and protect her small band of adventurers. He could teach them how to improve their skills in surveillance but he couldn’t teach them loyalty.
“Okay, we may have lost a day, but we can pick up from now. Do not,” he paused as he intentionally caught the eye of each child as he pressed home his point, “think that you have found our traitor. We are playing for very large stakes here and I will not tolerate anyone assuming guilt based on flimsy evidence. We do not know if Ms. Lohan intentionally lost her tail or even whether she knew she was being followed at all.”