Nash grabbed his rifle from where he leaned it against the trailer frame and took the steps two at a time. He crossed the porch, following Jill through the entrance door. She took an immediate right from the foyer into a room that had windows offering a view of the road.
Nash arrived at the window in time to see line of vehicles slow to a stop on the road by the entrance to the property— Two pickup trucks, one of them the red pickup involved in the incident with the highway patrol car, a long black Hummer, and a black SUV. Several men and women holding rifles leapt from the vehicles to position themselves behind the stone, wing-walls of the gate.
Jill backed from the window. “Shit and double shit! Let’s get to the back door. Make a run for the woods.”
A loud thud, followed immediately by the sound of breaking glass from the rear of the house, voices shouting and feet thudding on a hardwood floor, these things informed Nash invaders had breached their sanctuary.
Shouting to Jill, “Upstairs,” he unholstered his pistol as he ran for the stairwell. Stopping at the base to allow Jill to precede him, he fired a hasty shot at a man entering the other end of the entrance hall. He dodged around the partially open pile of furnishing’s blocking the stairwell and pounded up the stairs.
Jill, fear etched on her face was waiting for him at the top. They heard a man shout, “We’re clear down here.” Another man, his voice so close that Nash and Jill knew he was near the foot of the stairs, shouted back, “They tried to block the stairs. Shot at me. They’re up there.”
There came the sound of running footsteps as the other invaders moved to join the man near the stairway. The pile of furnishings prevented Nash from seeing them.
A man shouted, “You up there. All we want is your supplies. Don’t make us kill you for them.”
Nash called back, “You and your men need to leave. We have guns targeting your men by the road. The rest of us will kill anyone attempting to come up here.”
“Bullshit. We’ve scoped you out all morning. The only people here are you and a blonde haired woman. Like I said, don’t make us kill you.”
Jill called shouted back, “We’ll shoot anyone trying to climb the stairs. Go find an easier target.”
“Not going to happen, sister.”
Someone below shoved the barricade, causing a chair to fall off. Jill startled Nash, when she shouted, “I’m not your sister,” and then raised her pistol to fire four rapid shots down the stairs.
“Are you two, insane?” the man called up to them. “Come down the stairs and you can leave without getting hurt. Keep that up and you’re dead. It’s that simple.”
Jill said in a low voice. “We’re dead if we do. Those men aren’t going to let us go. People like them won’t leave witnesses.”
They heard another crash as the brigands pushed aside more of the barricade.
Jill pointed to Nash’s rifle. “Shoot at them.”
He un-slung his M-4, but was still attempting to come to terms with the unfolding event. Jill saw his indecision and took the rifle from his unresisting hands. Shouting, “We warned you,” she pulled the trigger repeatedly, firing half a magazine into the makeshift barricade. A scream of pain followed by cursing told Nash at least one of the more powerful rounds got through.
“Where’re you hit, Gene?”
“My fucking leg! I’m bleeding bad.”
The main speaker shouted, “You two fucked up.” Then he said, “Move away from the stairs.”
He wasn’t talking to Nash and Jill. An object sailed past Nash’s head. A short piece of iron pipewith a burning fuse protruding from one of the end caps hit the floor behind them and rolled several feet. Nash shouted, “Get down,” and dove for the floor.”
The homemade bomb exploded with deafening sound and a bright flash. His back to it, Nash felt agonizing pain rip his right buttock. Faintly, he heard Jill scream. He rolled to look where she dove to the floor. There was some smoke from the explosion, but not enough to obscure her. She was on her side, struggling to sit up. One hand pressed to her stomach, blood seeped between her fingers. The other hand held her pistol.
Ignoring the initial pain of his wound, moving on all fours, feeling as though he had entered a surreal, alternate universe, Nash scrambled to her. Furthering the unreal feeling, Jill’s next action and words seemed drawn from a melodrama.
She aimed her pistol toward the head of the stairs, fired twice and shouted, “Is that the best you got? Come and get it, you fuckers.
Turning to him, she said in a low voice, “They got me good, Nash. I’m not going anywhere.”
He saw tears streaming down her cheeks. Blood from her belly soaked her jeans, pooled between her legs. “What are we going to do?” He asked.
“We aren’t doing anything. I need the spare magazines. They’re in my purse beside the mattress. Toss it to me on your way out. Use the kitchen stairs and sneak away. If they’d found them they’d already be up here.”
“Sneak away and leave you here. No. I’ll carry you. I know I can.”
“Nash, I’m bleeding out. Metal ripped my guts. I’ll stay here and hope they come up the stairs before I die. I want to take some of them to hell with me.”
“No,” Nash repeated, standing, reaching for her shoulders to lift her.
Jill turned her pistol to point at him. “If you touch me, I swear I’ll shoot you.”
Nash saw in her eyes that she meant it. He backed away. “God, I’m sorry Jill.”
“Not your fault. My life was going too good. Shit was bound to find me, but fuck… I never dreamed fate would send an apocalypse to get me.”
A bullet whizzed past Nash’s head, followed a moment later by the sound of a gunshot and falling glass where it passed through tempered glass at the front of the room. He dropped back to the floor.
Jill said, “Nash, get out of here. Grab magazines for your rifle in case you’re spotted. Go now, god damn it.”
Nash, crawling on all fours, paused by the bed to slide Jill’s handbag to her across the waxed floor. It stopped against her hip. Keeping low, he grabbed his small pack that held, among other items, two spare mags for his rifle.
Casting a glance toward Jill, he couldn’t see her face. Firing her pistol, she emptied the magazine down the stairwell and inserted another.
There was a sudden hail of shots from outside the house fired by the men and women at the gate; so many that all the glass windows exploded in crumbles, leaving the entire front wall open to the air.
Feeling he was abandoning Jill, fear drove him to scurry to the kitchen door. He opened it and went through, closing it behind him. Standing, he donned his small backpack
Pussyfooting down the stairs, testing each one for creaks, reaching the bottom landing, he cracked open one of the pivoting doors to peek. He heard a faint babel of arguing voices from deep in the house, but could not make out what they were saying.
Seeing no one in the kitchen, he strode to the exit door and stood hesitant, wishing there was a window to look through before opening it.
Just as he put his hand on the knob, another explosion shook the house. Gunfire erupted, and he heard the faint thud of many feet rushing the stairs where Jill sat waiting. Nash feared she was dead, killed by the newest pipe bomb, but the shooting continued.
Throwing caution to the wind, figuring it was either safe or he was dead, he flung open the kitchen door, crossed the loading dock, leapt to the ground and ran full speed for the barn, expecting to feel a bullet hit him at any moment.
The firing inside the house ceased as he ran. Nash arrived at the barn without anyone shouting they’d seen him. He dashed through the opening, dodged around the tractor, and ran straight through, past the empty stalls and the piles of baled hay on each side of the far entrance.
Turning left to put the wall of the barn between himself and the house, he rested long enough to catch his breath. He knew Jill was dead, but he hoped her wish to take some of them with her came true.
Before
making a run for the forest behind the barn, he checked to be sure no that one had come in sight while he’d rested. Gaining the forest, he ran straight ahead for ten minutes, dodging and twisting to avoid the worst of the briars and thickets.
He stopped. Gasping for air, heart racing, he stood bent, with his hands on his knees, listened for sounds of pursuit and heard nothing other than his own labored breathing.
He was in good shape and it didn’t take long for him to recover from his panicked exertion. “Think,” he told himself. He didn’t know what to do; he had no destination, no place to shelter. “Okay, okay,” a mental mantra to calm himself; “Think,” he said again. He pictured Jill, shot to death, lying in a pool of blood. “Not about that. What to do now, think about that.”
He saw the trunk of a fallen tree a few yards from where he stood, went to it and sat. Renewed agony in his right buttock brought him back to his feet. The horror of the past few minutes, Jill shot, bombs exploding, escaping the house, made him forget his own wound.
Nash leaned his rifle against the trunk, loosened his belt, slid his jeans and underwear down and explored his butt cheek with his fingers. He felt sticky, coagulating blood and the jagged end of a piece of metal protruding from it. His blood-slippery fingers couldn’t grip to pull it out.
Shrugging his backpack from his shoulders, he retrieved a combination tool and used the pliers to grasp the bomb fragment. The grip was firm, but pulling on the fragment caused intense pain. Nash chided himself. “Just give it a good yank.” He yanked; the metal clung, pulling his flesh with it, refused to come out. The pliers lost their hold.
It took a long moment for him to recover from the agony of the attempt. “Damned thing must have a hooked end. Probably need a doctor to cut it out of my ass. What doctor; what a total freaking bumble-fuck. I can’t even sit down.”
Frightened, despairing, unbidden tears of self-pity began flowing down his cheeks. He shook his head, flung the drops from his chin, and repeated his mantra, “Okay, okay. Stop that. Buck up, baby, and think.”
He tried sitting again and found if he put most of his weight on his left cheek, he could do it. “Okay, okay. Now I can think.” His mind began to review the recent attack, but he shoved that aside. He needed a plan for the immediate future. He had no resources other than a meager amount of water and a few snacks. Worse, he had no place to go.
“What will the gang do now? Will they take the supplies and leave, or will they stay at the house?” That question staggered him; set in place how lost and ill prepared he was for this crisis. The entire world surrounded him, but he was afraid to leave the area of the mansion, even if was only slightly known territory.
Nash decided on a plan, not much of a plan; He would circle around, cross the road far from the house and move to a point where he could observe the invaders.
He wanted to be sure he was out of sight when he crossed the road. It took him over an hour to gain a place in the tree line bordering the wide pasture across the road from the mansion.
The van no longer blocked the gate. The invader’s vehicles were in the circular drive in front of the house.
They’d hitched his trailer to the red pickup truck. Patting his pocket, feeling his keys explained that. He saw they were loading Jill’s rental van as well as their own vehicles with the remainders of his and Jill’s supplies from the mansion, strongly implying they would not stay there. After an hour of watching, he counted eight men and five women. One of the men had a noticeable limp. Nash thought he might be the man Jill wounded when she fired the volley from his rifle.
At the tree line, there was no convenient log for a seat. He was tired, but at least he felt no blood flowing from his wound. The gang didn’t seem to be in a hurry to transfer their booty, so he abandoned his position to search for a place to rest, figuring he could check every thirty minutes to see if they left.
Another hour went by before the gang ceased bringing the supplies and other booty from the house out to the vehicles. Three more hours passed before they came out, entered the vehicles and drove from the mansion. They turned right, headed back in the direction they’d come from. Seeing his trailer go with them almost brought tears.
Nash waited another thirty minutes before leaving his place of concealment. He moved only a few feet, and stopped, mentally smacked his forehead. “Damn, why didn’t I count? How many left the house?”
He reviewed them coming from the house and getting into the vehicles. He believed they had all come out, but he wasn’t one-hundred percent positive. “Nothing for it except to go back the way I came.”
He retraced his path back to the mansion until he was again inside the barn. He rested a few minutes before running to vault onto the rear loading dock. He moved to stand by the open backdoor; listened for any sound that would indicate someone had stayed behind.
Other than the normal creaks a building makes, he heard nothing to indicate anyone inside; still, he found himself trembling as he entered through the kitchen door, leaving it open to allow light.
Nash saw why it took so long for the invaders to leave after loading the supplies. They had taken time to prepare frozen food from the walk-in freezer.
In a huge frying pan, he saw an uneaten T-bone steak. Suddenly ravenous, he took the cold meat from the pan and bit off a huge piece. A few bites later, he tossed the bone back into the pan and wiped his fingers with a used dishtowel one of the brigands tossed carelessly onto a prep table.
Leaving the kitchen, he conducted a cautious search of the downstairs, creeping on tiptoes, listening for any sound to indicate he wasn’t alone the mansion.
Finally, he stood at the bottom of the stairs dreading what waited. Halfway up, though testing each one, he put his weight onto an oak tread that produced a sudden loud squeak.
“Who’s there?” A feminine voice called from the great room.
For an instant, hope flared, Jill survived, was alive. The next question destroyed that misconception, “Is that you, Gene? Did you change your mind? I told you, we’re done. I’m finished with you and your murderous friends. I have the lady’s pistol and I’ll use it.”
Before Nash could react, a tall, slim, brunet beauty appeared in the opening at the head of the stairs. He moved to bring his rifle to bear, but she pointed a pistol and shouted, “Don’t! I won’t miss. You’re the man who ran, aren’t you? Bastard. You left a woman to fight. Coward. I should put a hole between your eyes.”
To Nash, her words and countenance suggested she was ready to pull the trigger. He hurried to speak. “Wait. The bomb you all threw upstairs blew a hole in her guts. She was dying. Listen to me. She threatened to shoot me if I didn’t leave. She was determined to kill some of you if she could.”
He could tell by her change of expression that his words rang true. She half lowered the pistol and said, “Well she did what she wanted to do. She suckered them right into a trap. Come up and look. Just know I’m not with that gang of trash. My husband is the one mixed up with them; ex-husband now. I told Gene I’d kill him if I ever saw his face again.”
Nash said, “I won’t shoot you if you won’t shoot me.”
She used the pistol to wave him up the stairs. “Don’t give me a reason to. I’m sick of men thinking they can order me around like chattel.”
As he climbed the rest of the stairs, the woman moved from the doorway, lifting her legs high. As his head rose above the top step, he saw why. A man’s leg and booted foot lay across the floor just beyond the doorway. The doorframe and wall hid the rest of him.
Breasting the stairs, he counted four more bodies scattered on the floor between the doorway and the place Jill and he stacked their supplies. The supplies were gone, but Jill’s bloody body lay just beyond where they were.
Avoiding the bodies of the invaders, avoiding the drying blood pooled around them, stepping over the hole in the floor caused by the bomb thrown after he left, Nash followed the blood trail Jill made dragging herself to hide behind the supplies.
“Merle was the first one up. Why he’s not dead is anyone’s guess, but she held off shooting until most of the men were inside the room, and then she unloaded on them.”
Nash knelt beside Jill’s body. She lay on her back. A short section of ragged, ripped intestine had slipped through the rent of the blouse she wore. The belly wound would have eventually killed her, but four bullet holes, three in her chest and one through her neck hastened her death.
Nash used a hand to wipe his tears and then reached to her face to close an eye, open, staring into nothing.
“Was she your wife?” the woman behind him asked.
Nash stood and turned to face her. “No, she was my friend. You say you stayed behind because of the shit the gang is doing?”
“This is the first time they did something like this. Merle called himself a prepper. Gene, the sorry, weak-kneed sheep of a man, is a member of Merle’s survivalist club. They all pitched in and bought some property about twenty miles from here. When the shit hit, when news got out that Ebola was going to kill anyone it came in contact with, Merle called the club members to their bug-out.”
Nash asked, “If they’re preppers, why are the out looting and killing.”
“Calling themselves preppers and walking the walk are different. All they did was get together once a month to barbeque, drink beer and shoot their damn guns. When I found out they had no supplies stockpiled, I was pissed. Seems all the money Gene said was going to stockpiling went to beer, food to party on and for bullets.”
A memory clicked, and Nash said, “Gene’s the one Jill shot in the leg.”
Working With Cedar: A Post Apocalyptic Tale Page 9