From two feet away, impossible to miss, Jill’s bullet shattered his exposed right shoulder joint. Shock and pain caused him to drop his pistol and Sarah both, and as soon as he was clear, she put another round into his stomach. Then she kicked him in the head, ensuring he was out.
Checking Sarah, she saw that the older woman was incoherent and concussed, with one pupil dilated huge, so Jill did what she had planned, if it ever came to this.
With her left hand, she smeared her fingertips into her thigh wound, coating them with ichor. Then she stuck one of them in Sarah’s mouth. Disgusting, perhaps, but if the rumors were true, her blood contained even more of the virus than her saliva, and one good kiss had passed it to Jimmy. This should infect the older woman, and perhaps save her life.
She did the same with the unconscious officer, then scuttled over to the front door. Big Jim looked at her from floor level, still stunned, but he had begun grimly crawling toward the entrance. Jill grabbed his collar and dragged him inside, then fed him a taste of her blood as well.
Next, she grabbed Klutz and dragged him inside. He still breathed, and she shoved a bloody hand between his teeth to coat his tongue. She had no idea if the Eden Plague worked on animals, but it seemed worth a try. Then she stood up and went back to work.
Scanning quickly outside, she spotted two troopers moving toward the barn, left and right, closing in on a flurry of gunfire inside it. Odds were that the remaining SS men would focus on the sniper that was picking them off one by one, and so now it appeared Jill was on the outside of the action, looking in.
Aiming carefully, she popped the one on the left, seeing him fall. Swinging right, she fired but missed her right-side target as he dove forward. A moment later he was out of sight behind the barn.
Using the reprieve, she grabbed Owen’s wheelchair and rolled the crying boy into the house. She saw that Big Jim seemed aware, if badly injured. She kicked the half-conscious SS officer in the side of the head again to make sure he wouldn’t cause any more trouble, and then relieved him of his belt that carried several leather cases, like a police officer would wear.
One case held handcuffs, with which she expertly cuffed the officer’s hands behind his back. Another held a walkie radio, which she slipped into a pocket. Then she extracted two magazines and retrieved the fallen man’s pistol from the floor, pressing the weapon and ammo into Big Jim’s hands.
“I have to go finish them off,” Jill said to her surrogate father.
Big Jim nodded, taking the weapon. “Go,” he grunted hoarsely. “Kill the bastards.”
Jill nodded, though she wasn’t going to follow his wishes; at least, not intentionally. The rumored virtue effect must be damping down her sense of outrage and desire for revenge. It didn’t matter: leaving them alive and infected would be vengeance enough. That would consign them to being abused by the very system to which they had sold themselves.
Swapping in a full magazine, she set her assault rifle for three-round bursts. Now that her enemies were fully warned and waiting, firepower mattered more than surprise. Nearly as effective as fully automatic, this setting was far more controllable and gave her an easy way to track her ammo expenditure. She only had to count to ten as she fired off each thirty-rounder by threes, then drop the empty and insert the full one.
A look out the door showed movement in the trees to the right and left of the barn, but no clear targets. Intermittent firing continued, sounding like half a dozen weapons, maximum. Because Jane was somewhere to her left, she went out the back door and rightward, counterclockwise along the edge of the farm, hoping to flank and roll up the enemy.
Hang in there, Jimmy, I’m coming. Jill sprinted up the rows of vegetables, quickly entering the tree line, then turned left, resuming her gun-up tactical advance. Her thigh burned like fire, but it appeared only slightly impaired and already the bleeding had stopped. She’d also avoided the worst of the shock she should be feeling: Eden Plague again.
She mentally thanked her instructors for making her one of the best; these men, though competent enough, fought hardly better than the half-trained insurgents in the sandbox.
As Jill approached the barn she spotted two targets. One fired his rifle into the wall of the barn near one of the small loft windows. It appeared he had no target, but was just providing harassing fire. The other faced her direction, a very young man, eyes searching, and he spotted her movement just an instant later than she saw him.
She revised her estimate upward slightly – at least they were keeping rear security – even as she lined up on his lower torso and fired a burst. Her bullets dropped him and his weapon stuttered skyward on full auto. Twigs and leaves dropped around her as a dozen rounds sliced through the foliage above Jill’s head.
The other SS man was a veteran, she guessed; at least he did what it took to survive, dropping forward to the ground, out of sight in the bushes. Jill fired several bursts into the scrub to the left and right of his position as she cautiously advanced. He would have been smarter to keep watch himself, she thought, and let the kid fire into the barn.
Jill swung wider to her right, away from the barn, instinctively believing her opponent would not scramble toward that building with his other enemy inside. With her weapon at the left oblique she tried to anticipate his position, circling, circling…
There. A flash of dark movement. She expended the rest of her magazine and dropped down on one knee to reload, then resumed her advance. In a moment a leg came into view, moving slowly, painfully. Jill quickly swept her weapon through three hundred sixty degrees, checking around her, before rushing forward to see the wounded veteran, a man of perhaps thirty, pull a pistol from his thigh rig and try to point it in her direction.
Her cop instincts took over and she hissed, “Freeze!” When he failed to comply, she put a shot through his forearm, and the handgun jerked and fell into the dirt. He moaned and his head dropped back. It appeared he had been hit three or four times even before her last shot, and she mentally saluted him.
Tough bastard.
Rubbing the sticky blood around her healing thigh wound, she shoved some of it in the man’s mouth. In other circumstances she’d have bandaged him, tried to save him, but gunfire still stuttered from the barn and she had to come to Jimmy’s aid. This instinct was confirmed when the boom of a shotgun replaced the hard crack of the .308.
They must be getting close to him.
Reloading again, she hurried for the back of the barn, skirting the hog pen. A hole had been knocked in the heavy boards, and it appeared empty; mama pig must have gone berserk with the firing and smell of blood, and broken out with her yearlings.
One man stood in the back door of the barn, looking inward, and she shot him in the kidney. He dropped like a stone. Charging inside, she was just in time to witness a flurry of automatic fire from two men on the ground floor as another climbed the ladder.
Jill picked the man off the top of the rungs, then turned to blast the other two. She took down one before the other shot her in the chest, knocking her off her feet. Her assault rifle went flying. She felt like a mule had kicked her, her vision grayed, and she felt unable to breathe. Lung shot, she thought as she lay on her side, and, this is shock for sure. Apparently there were limits to what the Eden Plague could do, and she’d just found them.
She lay still, watching the remaining trooper approach her with rifle aimed at her head. Her only chance at this point was to seem nonthreatening, too wounded to fight back. “Hello,” she croaked, trying to put some femininity into her voice. “How’s the security business?”
Maybe he won’t shoot a woman, or at least he’ll underestimate me. Come on, Jimmy, now would be a good time to use that shotgun.
The hoped-for blast didn’t come. The SS trooper kicker her in the belly, then in the head, breaking the helmet strap and sending it flying. Her hair came loose of its bobby pins, but it didn’t seem as if the man cared about her gender. He kicked her again, and this time, she blacked out.
***
So close, she thought as she came to. One, maybe two guys left. Opening her eyes, she saw she was still in the barn, with her wrists fastened painfully to one of the supporting posts. The baling wired that confined her also cut off her circulation, and both hands seemed completely numb. It felt like the .45 in the back of her belt had been taken away, but at least she could breathe now. The Plague had done its work.
Whoever had tied her up must have thought she was not going anywhere, lung-shot and concussed. He would be coming back for her and the rest for sure, with reinforcements.
She also felt as if she was starving. Fortunately she had put on some fat during her enforced inactivity, but she felt it draining away as her body scoured itself for available materials and calories.
That was a secondary issue, though, compared to survival.
Jill began working at the wire, moving her arms and body in an attempt to bend the metal. Unlike rope, steel would fatigue if she could work it back and forth, twist it enough times. It would be a long tough job, but she knew she could eventually do it.
If she had enough time. She wondered where the last man had gone.
Someone appeared in the doorway. Jill tried to focus on whoever it was, and then realized she must be concussed, because her vision blurred and it appeared she was looking at an angel.
Then the figure stepped closer and out of the sunlight. “Jane,” Jill said with relief. “Get this wire off me. What happened to the rest of the security men?”
“A healthy one drug a couple wounded men into the smaller truck and drove hell-for-leather on down the road.” Jane dropped to her knees and began to unwrap the steel wire. “Even if they have a radio, we should still have at least fifteen minutes before anyone can get here, thirty if they don’t.”
“Unless they have helicopters. We have to get everyone away, up to the caves.”
Jane looked at her in surprise. “You know about them?”
“Jimmy showed me today. Good thing, too. Come on, hurry up.” As soon as she was free, she laboriously climbed the ladder with her feet and elbows, already knowing what she would find. If Jimmy had been able, he would have been the one setting her free.
Jill’s faint hope she would find him alive but incapacitated was dashed when she saw the young man’s head shattered on the loft floor like a dropped melon. One of the hundreds of bullets that had been fired blindly into the upper room had taken him down. It was just bad luck, and she let loose with a stream of profanity worthy of a drunken sailor, to cover the anguish she felt at his loss.
“Jill!” Jane cried. “What…is it Jimmy?” She began to climb the ladder, but Jill pushed her back down.
“Yes, and you don’t want to see. He’s dead for sure.” Jill stepped off the ladder and hugged the girl. “Leave him there as a testament, to show these people the price they’re going to pay for what they’re doing. Besides,” she said, picking up her fallen assault rifle, “there’s no time to mourn. We have to go now.”
The two ran across the yard, past the lone truck. Dead and wounded men littered the area, and Jill felt sick with reaction and the killing, more so than she had after similar firefights with insurgents. “Go see to your family, Jane. I tried to infect them with the Eden Plague.”
As Jane ran to the house, Jill took out her knife and gashed her left index finger’s tip, then methodically dripped blood into every man’s mouth she thought had a prayer of living. Though several were conscious, none resisted, watching her like mice in fear of a snake. “If you’re lucky, the Plague will take hold and you will live,” she announced loudly, “but I wouldn’t go self-reporting as Sickos if I were you.” She could think of no better punishment.
Jill turned toward the house, to see the McConleys emerging from it. Big Jim and Sarah stood and walked without difficulty it seemed, and Owen…did too. His eyes and his expression seemed clearer, and full of wonder. His parents each tightly held a hand, and the smiles on their faces contrasted strangely with their current plight.
“He’s getting better already, praise the Lord,” Sarah called when she saw the realization come over Jill.
“That’s great, Sarah,” she replied, “but we have to go to the caves, now. Get some walking shoes on and we have to get going.”
“She’s right,” Big Jim rumbled. “Jane, watch Owen. We’ll go in two minutes, out the back door.”
He led them inside, where he grabbed an old canvas bag and began throwing items into it – fresh food, a blanket, clothing, shoes and sundries. Sarah did the same with a pillowcase, handing one to Jill. Soon they all were laden with as much as they could carry.
“Let’s go,” Big Jim said, seeming stronger by the minute.
“What about Jimmy?” Sarah asked sharply. “Where is he?”
Jill and Big Jim exchanged saddened glances. She knew the big man had already figured it out. “Jimmy’s gone, Sarah darlin’,” Big Jim said gently, wrapping his wife up in his arms. “Him and Miss Jill done the best they could, but now we got to go.”
Silent tears leaked from Sarah’s eyes, but she nodded and picked up her load. “All right. I’m ready.”
“Then let’s get goin’. We’ll eat as soon as we’re out of sight.”
This reminded Jill of the sharp pain in her belly as her need for food made itself felt. She picked up the pitcher of lemonade that stood by the sink and drank as much as she could hold, easing the problem somewhat. She passed it around.
Owen spoke, suddenly. “Klutz,” he said, pointing at the faithful canine lying on the rough wooden floor, then sinking to his knees to cradle the dog’s head. His four-footed friend ran his tongue over the boy’s hand one final time, then he went slack with a sigh.
“I’m sorry,” Jill said, her voice cracking. “I guess the Plague doesn’t work on animals.” Owen began to cry softly. “We have to go,” she said. “We don’t have time. Whoever comes here will take care of Klutz.”
Jane pulled Owen away, speaking softly in his ear, and then they left out the back.
“Can’t we take a pickup?” Sarah asked.
“No,” Jill answered before Big Jim could. “They’ll follow fresh tire tracks, and if they get a helicopter up here they may find it. Much better to go on foot.”
Into the tree line they hiked, retracing Jill’s route as she flanked the barn. She detoured to take a look at the two men she’d shot there, finding the younger one staring sightlessly at the tree branches above. The older one, the veteran, was not where she’d left him, and she lifted her assault rifle, looking around. Hopefully he’d run off, or been one of the ones that got away.
“Stop,” she heard a man’s voice from behind her say.
Damn. Slowly she crouched and laid the assault rifle and the stuffed pillowcase on the ground, and then held her hands out to her sides before she turned.
The man sat propped against a tree, with brush on either side of him. She’d walked right past him, for he’d chosen his spot well. He held a rifle trained on her, braced on his knee.
The man looked to be in bad shape, Plague or no Plague, but his grip on the weapon was steady. “What did you do to me?” he asked. “I should be dead.”
“Would you rather be?” she retorted. “I gave you the Plague to save your life. You’re a Sicko now. An Eden. We’re the same, you and me. I am…I was a Marine. You’re a combat veteran; I can tell. Do you like what your country has become?”
“I’m not a traitor,” he ground out.
“Then shoot me. What’s stopping you? And then when your buddies return, they’ll lock you away, because they won’t see you anymore. All they’ll see is a Sicko. Just like every time this ever happens – Japs, Jews, blacks, Bosnians, ragheads – dehumanize the enemy, then round him up and murder him. Well I’m still human, and so are you.”
His mouth worked, then he turned the weapon away from her. “You got a point. So what now?”
“Right now you can let us go and take your chances, or you can com
e with us.”
“Jill!” Sarah said from behind her, where she and the rest of the McConleys had been watching the tableau. “We can’t trust him. And he killed my boy.” She burst into tears, falling to her knees with her pillowcase sack.
“Miss Jill is right,” Big Jim said to her as he squatted down. “Everyone with the Plague is now on our side. We’re all runaways together. We lost Jimmy. Maybe this man can help fill his shoes.” The older man stood up and stepped forward, dropping his sack and shifting his shotgun to his left hand. “What’s your name, sir?”
“Clayton, sir. John Clayton.” He rolled painfully to his feet, supporting himself on the tree he had been resting against, and stuck out his hand. “And I’m powerful sorry for my part in this. I know it’s no excuse, but…well, when the shooting starts, you shoot back at the guy shooting at you.”
Big Jim wiped his hand on his trousers for a moment, then set his jaw. “I understand, John. I forgive you.” He glanced at Sarah. “Jimmy’s mother’s gonna have a mite harder time, though.”
“I want him with us. Someone go get him,” Sarah wailed.
“We’ll do what we can,” Jill broke in. “We really have to go. Clayton, can you walk?”
“Not very well yet.” Clayton looked around. “Are there any more of us alive and infected?”
“Yes, back by the truck there are two or three.”
“I have to help them.”
“Dammit, we don’t have time,” Jill said.
“Just tell me where to go. We’ll follow after you.”
Jill cursed again, but fully understood the man’s loyalty to his brothers in arms. Turning to Big Jim, she said, “Go ahead. Jimmy showed me the cave. I’ll stay here with these men and lead them in. And we’ll take care of Jimmy.”
Big Jim nodded to her. “Give me that sack. You gather all the guns and ammo you can and bring everything with you, hear?”
“Got it, boss.” Jill agreed, grimly satisfied now that everyone’s goals aligned. She watched for a moment as the McConleys started the hike up to the caves, then turned to Clayton. “Come on, John. You got any rations in that truck? You’re gonna get damn hungry soon.”
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