by MacCraw
…
“That was so sweet of you”, Hannah smiled as she huddled up against Kirkley.
“It’s not just because I love you, Hannah; it’s because I treat others the same exact way I’d like to be treated”, Kirkley stated.
“So changing the subject, tell me; what are our chances?” Hannah softly asked.
“Um, all things accounted for, so long as we’ve got bullets, we’ve got hope. 650 rounds-per-minute seems to take us pretty far, but at the end of the day it’s the person behind the trigger that keeps us fighting to the end”, said Kirkley.
“I mean, with humanity”, Hannah clarified. “Takistan’s an irradiated wasteland. America destroyed its civilization and infrastructure during the Drone Wars. And now there are armies of dog soldiers running amok through Scotland. If those beasts have somehow made it out of the UK, then the world is done for. They’ll go through Europe’s population in a matter of months, and they’ll stem out to Africa, and Asia, and devour all life there.”
“This fight isn’t lost yet”, Kirkley reaffirmed. “We need to find the source of the problem, and wipe it out in a swift, decisive blow. And besides, the Italians are still working on a way to fight back against them. Our priority should be to make it to Italy. If we build this car, and we drive to London, we can take a ship to the mainland and fight alongside a greater force than ours. We should get some rest. We’re definitely going to need it.”
…
The past 7 hours had been the best of Kirkley’s life. Not running from a bunch of wolves was an immediate plus, but having overwhelmingly pleasurable sex with his newly-found lover, discussing some of their thoughts, and getting some much-needed sleep made it the best break ever. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and soon enough, Kirkley and Hannah were both forced to redress, rearm, and report down into the lobby so the group could discuss their next move.
“Okay, so Kylie, what exactly should we seek out first?” asked Kirkley.
“If there’s a parking garage anywhere near here, that could serve as a pretty good start”, explained Kylie. “Plus, some parking garages have maintenance sheds and stuff. A healthy assortment of repair tools and spare parts and screws and shit.”
“Good thinking”, Kirkley nodded. “Alright lads, pack your bags and load your mags. We move out in 5.”
5 minutes transpired, and the survivors set off through Glasgow in search of a parking garage or auto-shop. Being in a downtown residential area meant that most citizens probably parked their vehicles in parking garages, which meant that there was more than likely to be a parking garage nearby. Everybody was transfixed by the amount of capsized cars lining the block. It was a long, straight road bordered by a forest of tall apartment complexes, but the wrecked vehicles totally robbed the area of its quiet, peaceful scenery.
“How drunk do you think these people were on a scale of 1 to 10?” Kylie chuckled.
“They weren’t drunk”, said Logan, “They were frenzied and in mass hysteria.”
“You think we can salvage any of these cars, Kylie?” asked Hannah.
“Not a chance”, Kylie replied, tapping the badly morphed grill and hood of one of the wrecked sports cars. “These things are way too damaged.”
“So any ideas on what kind of car we should build?” Kirkley stated.
“How about we build like an open-cockpit car with a roll cage that holds the additional seats and gear and stuff?” Logan suggested.
“That actually sounds pretty awesome”, Kylie smiled.
“Can you build it?”
“Give me the parts, and some time, and we’ll be blasting our way to London.”
…
A month had gone by, and Kylie was still at work on the car. She had taken a flat, open-cockpit classic sports car with a slightly extended rear, and had added a custom-built roll cage to fasten the seats to, despite the fact that the car wasn’t going to be flipping over. The 6 seats were positioned with 3 on each side, and the seats had been built into the body of the car as if they were an integrated part of the vehicle. Between the rear seats were spaces for stowing the weaponry and backpacks full of food and medicinal supplies carried by Kirkley’s crew, and the seats prevented the stored items from tumbling out of the car. The original pair of weathered seats were removed, and replaced with much more comfortable seats, and on the dashboard facing the passenger seat was a series of high-tech panels: a very accurate fuel meter, a basic radar system, and a few other assorted gadgets that basically turned Kylie’s car into the Batmobile. Kylie had also taken the liberty of painting the entire vehicle white, though at Connor’s request, she painted the cobalt Celtic emblem that was on the ball of his battle club.
“Alright, all aboard the Kylie-mobile!” Kylie laughed, only to receive mixed looks from her friends.
“The car’s beautiful; you did a great job, but ‘Kylie-mobile’ doesn’t really sell it”, Pack sighed.
“How about the Typhoon?” Hannah smiled, wrapping herself around her lover to try and win his approval. “It has such an aggressive ‘flow’ to it.”
“That does seem kind of unrelated”, Kylie remarked, “But it does sort of work. But I’m driving.”
“Shotgun!” Connor laughed as he vaulted over the passenger door.
“Alright, lads, stash your gear and get some ass-to-seat action”, Kirkley announced. “We’re finally gunning it out of Glasgow.”
“About damn time”, said Kylie as she turned the key. The loud engine began growling as it powered up, and it surprised Kirkley that the wolf men didn’t immediately come barreling towards the noisy vehicle.
The car began driving down the road at a swift, but not ludicrously fast pace. Kylie was also an experienced driver, and she was able to expertly navigate through the occasional wrecked car without a scratch to the vehicle.
“We still headin’ south, Connie?” Kylie yelled.
“Affirmative”, Connor replied, but he slowly looked upward when he heard the sound of gunfire coming from down the road.
“You hear that, guys?” Kylie nervously hollered to her passengers. “There appears to be some kind of a battle down the road.”
“We’re going to just have to gun it through the firefight”, shouted Kirkley. “Everybody, keep your heads down!”
The Typhoon went blazing down the residential streets of Glasgow, and sure enough, there was a remnant group of bandits in the middle of a heated battle against a large army of dog soldiers. The bandits were bunkered down in the windows of the ground-floor apartment buildings, and the dogs were trying to cross the road to get to their entrenched prey. And Kirkley’s band of survivors was about to be caught in the middle of it.
The car drove through the center of the conflict, and rounds pounded around the 7 survivors. The passengers sitting in the roll cage-mounted seats opened fire on both parties, and Hannah laughed maniacally as she fired long, uncontrolled bursts at her canine assailants, who didn’t appreciate the young girl’s enthusiasm towards shooting them. Hannah was having a fantastic time shooting at her defenseless targets from the safety of a roll cage mounted on a sports car, but her joy turned into agony when a bullet fired from one of the bandits on the opposite side of the road struck her in the shoulder, causing her to release her rifle and scream in pain. Kirkley shouted in anger and horror, furious that he couldn’t return fire on the shooter.
“What happened?!” Kylie hollered as she raced through the carnage.
“Hannah took a bullet in the arm!” Kirkley roared. “We have to pull over and treat her, now!”
“We can’t do that right now, dude!” Kylie urged. “We’ll need to stop once we’re far enough away from all of these hooligans! Put pressure on the wound!”
“Aw, Jesus”, Hannah sobbed as she squirmed about; “My arm’s a bloody garden hose!”
“It’s okay, mate”, Kirkley said as he placed his hand over the large entry wound, “We’re going to patch you up as soon as we can!”
Hannah was in colossal pain, an unbearable amount of it. The bullet, which had also nearly scored a headshot on Captain Pack, had hit her right shoulder, blasting clean through it and snapping bone. In a fury, the rest of Hannah’s friends delivered maximum firepower on the bunkering bandits, cursing angrily as they fired. At one point, a bandit foolishly stepped out into the middle of the street, only to be rammed in full force by Kylie. The wounded man was barely alive on the hood of the car, but Connor nonchalantly wiped him off of the hood and out of the way using his club. The bandit tumbled onto the ground, and was promptly devoured by the dogs.
“Who needs windshield wipers anyways?” Kylie laughed, giving Connor a high-five.
The sound of the bandit-versus-dog-soldier combat began to die down, but Kylie refused to stop so long as there was a possibility of the wolves immediately tracking them down. Kylie drove several more city blocks before making a series of turns that ended with her pulling around to the drive-through window of a fast food joint. Almost immediately, everybody dove out of the Typhoon and rushed to aid their injured comrade. Hannah was shivering and hyperventilating at an alarming and uncontrollable pace, which terrified Kirkley.
“We’ve gotta get her somewhere warm soon or she’s gonna die of hypothermia!” urged Kirkley.
“Hey, buddy, this’ll ease the pain”, Logan nodded before giving Hannah a shot of adrenaline. Hannah strained and her eyes briefly sank back into her skull as the needle quickly punctured her skin. As Logan gave her the shot, Connor pulled out his machete and very delicately used the tiny hooked tip of it to dig out the bullet casing, which made Hannah shriek in pain. Once the bullet was out, Pack ripped his white tank top off, shredded it into rags, and tightly wrapped it around Hannah’s shoulder. The shirt was almost instantly stained and permanently colored maroon, but considering that he destroyed his shirt, Pack could care less.
“Get her through!” Kirkley shouted. Connor acrobatically sprung up and kicked through the drive-through window before pushing the pieces of serrated glass out of the way and helping to lift Hannah up and into the darkened building. While Logan, Pack and Poet stood watch outside with the car, Connor and Kylie helped Kirkley with addressing Hannah’s critical condition. Kirkley dug into his carryall and pulled out his blanket, which he wrapped Hannah inside of. Even under the smothering blanket, Hannah continued to shiver and convulse, so at Kirkley’s order, Pack handed his own military sleeping back to Kirkley, who gently slid Hannah into it. At last, Hannah ceased twitching and shaking, which eased everybody’s nerves considerably.
“Alright, looks like we’re digging in again”, Kirkley sighed. “Until Hannah gets better.”
“Which may or may not take awhile”, Kylie remarked, patting her friend on the forehead.
Kirkley stuck his head out the window, and ordered the three sentries back indoors. “Poet, go up top, and take Connor with you. Kylie, keep an eye through the window, make sure those wolf soldiers don’t go on a joyride in our car. Rest of you, stay behind the counter. I want a secure perimeter with a clean, clear field of fire.”
…
The night hours during the eclipse felt even colder to Kirkley. He hadn’t seen the sun in years, and the cold nature of the apocalypse, and the brisk Scottish climate always chilled him to the bone. This night cycle seemed colder than before, and to ensure Hannah’s survival as well as his own and his friends’, Kirkley had built a miniature campfire. To prevent the possibility of a smoke alarm going off, Kirkley removed the batteries and stored them in his satchel, since batteries were almost as much of a premium as ammunition.
To Kirkley’s joy, Hannah slowly began to wake up. “What the fu- what happened?” Hannah groaned. “Where are we?”
“I hope you aren’t on a diet, because we’re in a fast food joint”, Kirkley joked. Hannah grinned, and went to punch Kirkley in the shoulder, but her own shoulder disagreed with her, and stabbed her with a spike of pain that pulsed through her arm. Hannah gasped in pain before plummeting back down on her back.
“You’ve got to take it easy, Hannah”, Kirkley insisted.
“Take it easy?” Hannah chortled, “I got shot in the fucking arm. Pass me the whiskey, mate.”
“I don’t know if going after painkillers, antibiotics and adrenaline shots with a bottle of alcohol is the best idea”, Kirkley commented.
“Well you wanna pop the champagne?”
“We don’t have any”, Kirkley stated.
“Fucking shite!” Hannah cursed, clenching her fists.
“We have Coca-Cola and Pepsi, among other things”, Kirkley joked.
“Can I get that with a silly straw?”
“Negatory.”
Kirkley’s playful and nonsensical exchange with Hannah was cut short by the all-too familiar, and skin-crawling, alert whistle from Poet; the whistle that basically shouted that company was coming.
“Oh shit”, Kirkley snapped, whipping out his sidearm.
“I want to help”, Hannah grunted. “I don’t want to just lie on the fucking floor like a microwave burrito.”
“You lost your ‘85 during the skirmish”, Kirkley explained, “And your shooting arm isn’t exactly armed and operational.”
“Very funny, arsehole”, said Hannah, “But I’ve got another arm, don’t I? Give me a pistol, help me up, and I’ll cap all of those motherfuckers singlehandedly.”
Poet fired a loud, echoing, plunking shot of her GOL, and it nailed her target in the neck. The contact immediately dropped dead, which told Poet that the attackers were human bandits. Poet nodded to Connor, who was preparing to relay the intel to the survivors holed up in the restaurant, but the barrage of incoming bullets spoke for him. Everybody inside fired back, and it escalated into a fierce gunfight.
“It’s just like Antietam!” Kylie growled as she spit out an aggressive storm of 5.56 bullets.
“Like what?!” Logan hollered as he blindfired with his MP5 from behind the cover of the counter.
“Bloodiest single battle of the Civil War!”
“Not a clue what that is, but I’ll take your word for it!”
The battle was currently in a major stalemate, but Kirkley and friends were at a considerably dangerous disadvantage, for their ammo was running extremely low. Even deadeye sniper girl Poet was having a difficult time, for the enemy gunfire had her suppressed, and she couldn’t peek over without getting her face blown off by the gunshots.
“Running low!” Logan shouted.
“Short, controlled bursts!” Kirkley bellowed as he fired careful precision shots with his pistol.
When it seemed like all hope was washed overboard, a sudden arrival of a pack of wolf soldiers changed the circumstance of the firefight entirely. Kirkley recognized that they could use the new arrivals to their benefit. “Stop firing and hide!” Kirkley shouted. His comrades acknowledged him by ceasing fire and hiding. The hostile humans continued to fire on the restaurant, foolishly deceived into believing that they had their enemies suppressed, and also oblivious to the ambush about to happen during the ambush.
“Why are we hiding?” Hannah hissed through clenched teeth.
“Because our canine companions are going to kill these fuckbuckets for us”, Kirkley smirked.
Once again, the dog soldiers displayed no mercy or remorse as they savagely chewed through the bandits, who, to them, were nothing more than chew toys with pellet guns. Being up on the roof, Poet and Connor watched the full, uncensored carnage without being sensed themselves. Poet tallied up a number of half a dozen wolf men, which were blazing through the humans like nobody’s business. One man with an assault rifle dumped bullets into his persistent attacker, only for the dog to plunge forward and tackle him to the ground before bluntly and wildly slashing him apart with his oversized claws. A female bandit was unlucky enough to be caught between two wolves, which literally ripped her in half, spilling her organs all over the ground only for the ravenous creatures to scarf down in the blink of an eye. The final remaining bandit chi
ckened out, and made a frantic run for one of the nearby buildings, but a large white wolf – possibly the same one that had once been harassing Kirkley, Poet and Pack – sprinted towards his prey and pounced on him, knocking the poor soul face first onto the asphalt. With no time to acknowledge the pain of having a broken nose and smashed teeth, the white wolf man severed the bandit’s head with its powerful jaws. The wolves howled in triumph, and after chewing up the carcasses for a little while, they had had their fill, and departed in search of more humans to slaughter. Despite the wolves’ exit, Kirkley felt the need to wait an additional 10 minutes before it was safe to resurface and check the corpses for spare ammo.
“Alright, good work”, said Kirkley. “Check the bodies for bullets, and once we have everything worth looting, we pack up and get back in the car, and we get out of this wretched city once and for all.”
Kylie received Hannah’s magazines, due to being the only group member with an L85. The rest of her compatriots were armed with MP5 submachine guns, a GOL magnum, a SPAS-15, and a set of exotic melee weapons. The aforementioned survivors reluctantly scrounged through the mutilated remains of the bandits that besieged them, and they received a fair amount of supplies. The good news, primarily for Logan and Pack, was that most of their aggressors were armed with the same submachine guns as them, and the bandits who wielded those had several spare magazines on them. To Kirkley’s joy, one of the renegades was equipped with a pump-action shotgun, and was wearing a bandolier loaded with spare shells. Kirkley carefully slid the bandolier off of the dead body, and put it on himself. His shotgun was in the car, since he deemed it impractical to haul around without any spare ammunition, so he walked back towards the fast food joint where the car was parked.
None of the bandits carried weapons of Poet’s caliber, but since she was a sharpshooter taking precision shots from a bolt-action weapon, she was able to properly regulate her ammunition supply. The two submachine gunners were chewing through their ammo at the fastest pace, and since their weapons fired unbelievably fast, ammo was absolutely paramount. For once, Kylie had the most ammo, since she was the only one using an L85, and the only one using STANAG magazines. Any extra ammo she found, she crammed into her backpack.