by Sam Sisavath
“You’re pretty, Lara,” he said. “I can see why Roy gets all hot and bothered whenever he’s around you.”
He touched her hair, then caressed her cheek, before sliding his fingers under her chin. She forced herself not to flinch. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, even if the touch of another man’s hand other than Will’s brought back bad memories.
May you forever burn in hell, John Sunday.
“This boyfriend of yours,” West said. “What’s his name?”
“Will.”
“What do you think he’d do if he found out what I’m thinking about doing to you right this moment?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Big tough guy, huh?”
“Big and tough enough.”
“Ah, hell, I’m not gonna do anything.” He let out a frustrated sigh. “I like my woman with more meat on her bones anyway. Now Bonnie… Damn, that woman. I always knew she might be the death of me. The way she—”
He stopped suddenly when they both heard footsteps moving down the hallway outside the room. West turned his head toward the door on instinct—
Now!
—and Lara launched herself off the bed and tackled him, catching him mostly in the ribs. He grunted with pain as she jolted his still fresh wound, and her momentum drove them into the closet door. He smashed into it, cratering the door and stumbling to the floor, putting up so little fight for a man of his size that she was momentarily stunned.
But he was still moving, and he still had the gun.
Lara reached for the closest weapon she could find—the radio clipped to her hip—and pulled it free. She swung it as hard as she could and hit West across the side of the head. He fired the Glock in her direction—or where he thought she was—but he hadn’t turned his head and was shooting blind.
He missed her by a good solid foot.
Before he could squeeze the trigger again, she smashed the radio into the side of his head a second time—then a third time, and finally, a fourth time.
West’s gun hand dropped weakly to the floor and she wrestled the Glock from his pliant fingers, then used her feet to turn him onto his back and pulled the other Glock out of his waistband. He was bleeding again, blood seeping through the front of his shirt, and his temple was a bloody mess. He groaned on the floor, eyes closed in obvious pain.
Her door burst open and Maddie and Carly ran inside, their guns drawn.
“Holy shit!” Maddie said, seeing West on the floor.
Lara tossed one of the Glocks on the bed and holstered the other one. She picked up the remains of her radio. Most of them were sprinkled along the floor around her.
“I need a new radio,” she said quietly.
“Damn, girl, that’s the understatement of the century,” Carly said, and started laughing.
After a moment, Lara started laughing with her, and then Maddie joined in.
CHAPTER 16
WILL
HEAT. PAIN. AND Lara in his mind’s eye.
Her blonde hair, so bright under the sun. Crystal-blue eyes like the clear water of Beaufont Lake. The early morning walks on the beach, and all their private moments, even before the others woke up. Listening to her soft heartbeat against his, a reminder of why he lived, fought so hard, and strived to always come through alive. The taste of her lips, sweet and addictive. Her smell, like roses. The feel of her skin, soft and delicate.
Lara.
He opened his eyes to twisted and smoking wrecks around, below, and above him. He knew he was bleeding (again) without having to actually see it. His face throbbed, and he could feel the bruises and cuts without having to see them. Predictably, every inch of him hurt like a sonofabitch.
He grunted through the aches and tried to move his arms and legs. There was a sharp stabbing pain from his right leg, but his left seemed fine. The operative word being seemed. His arms were mostly okay, and happily, the bullet wound from this afternoon had numbed, probably because the rest of his body was making up for it.
He was still fastened to the passenger seat by the seatbelt, which was a minor miracle. Rays of sunlight filtered in through the cracked windshield, so that was a good sign. Sunlight meant day, and day meant time. He lifted his left arm, shards of glass and tiny pieces of steel and aluminum falling free every time he moved any part of his body.
3:14 P.M.
A couple of hours since the helicopter had come down. That explained the lack of roaring flames around him, except for those still lingering over pieces of wreckage scattered about the hard concrete highway. The other good news was that he couldn’t smell burning flesh or singed hair, which meant he wasn’t currently roasting to death inside the carcass of the destroyed helicopter.
The bad news was everything else.
He couldn’t see behind him, so he didn’t know where the others were, or if they were even still inside with him. He couldn’t hear anyone other than himself moving, and despite the stillness of the city, the only breathing he could detect was his own. Jen was nowhere to be found, and her pilot’s seat was raised at an odd angle; it had probably overturned during the crash. The seatbelt hung upside down and was slashed near the middle. There were thick patches of blood against her side of the windshield. That wasn’t good.
The air around him was hot despite the cooling September breeze. The cockpit passenger door was gone, leaving a big, gaping hole exposing the sight of overturned vehicles piled on top of one another. The result was something akin to a makeshift tunnel extending from the open door to freedom, with broken glass and sharp metal lining his path.
He turned his head slightly to the left. When he couldn’t turn just his head far enough, he twisted his body slowly, carefully, in case he was impaled on something. Fortunately, he was able to turn a solid sixty degrees to look into the backseats. He wished he hadn’t.
Amy was still fastened to her seat, with the boy clinging to her chest, his arms around her neck. Her head was slumped forward, and Will was glad he couldn’t see the boy’s face because there was a large slab of metal jutting out from his back. He thought at first it was a piece of the rotor, but no, it was too jagged, too rough around the edges. The metal had pierced the boy first, then continued into Amy and exited the back of her seat. A large pool of blood gathered under them on the seat and the floor. The metal must have missed him by mere inches.
There were no signs of Gaby or Benny, though he spotted an AR-15 (Benny’s) lying on the floor, the barrel bent, with metal shrapnel sticking out of the side between the ejection port and magazine slot. More blood on the seats, but not enough to convince him Gaby or Benny were bleeding to death somewhere. They had either been thrown clear in the crash, or they had crawled out.
Will turned back around, pain shooting up from his right leg, where he had felt the first stinging sensation earlier. He finally looked down, saw a piece of glass—probably from the cracked windshield—three inches of it visible above the fabric of his pant leg. He guessed there were another two inches under there, embedded just deep enough that he felt it every time he moved a little bit. It hadn’t hit anything vital, he was sure of that, and it had missed the bone entirely.
“Will,” a voice said from outside.
Will looked to his right and saw Gaby kneeling on the other end of the vehicle cocoon. There was a nasty gash across her forehead, covered in a thick layer of drying ointment. Her chin and cheeks were scratched up, and her neck was purple and bruised.
“You gonna sit there all day, or you want us to pull you out?” Gaby asked.
“‘Us’?”
“Benny’s out here with me.”
“You guys okay?”
“I’ve looked better. Benny’s limping around a bit.” She frowned at the shard of glass sticking out of him. “How bad?”
“It didn’t puncture anything major. I should be fine.”
“Right. Fine. When aren’t you fine?”
He ignored her comment, said, “Jen?”
Gab
y shook her head. “You don’t want to know.”
“That bad?”
“Worse.”
“Shit.”
They were both silent for a moment.
Then Gaby asked, “Can you move?”
He looked down at the glass. “I’m going to have to remove it first.”
Gaby winced. “Are you sure?”
“I can’t crawl out with this, Gaby.”
She nodded. “The medical supplies are all across the highway. We gathered up as much as we could find. Found your pack, though, with all the ammo still in it.”
“I need a first aid kit. Or if you can’t find one, a towel, water, gauze, duct tape, and antiseptic.”
“I’ll be back,” Gaby said, and disappeared.
Alone again, Will took inventory.
His left arm was fine. Well, not fine, exactly, but workable. The wound was bleeding again, but it wasn’t too bad. Eventually, he would have to suture it to make sure he didn’t bleed to death later. His legs weren’t broken, which was very good news. He wouldn’t have gone very far with broken legs. It was a simple matter of removing the glass shard, then cleaning the wound in his right leg. Disinfectant would keep out infection, and he could stitch it the same time he did his arm.
Doable.
He freed himself from the seatbelt, then reached down and touched the glass with a finger and tried pushing on it. Stabbing pain. He grimaced through it.
Gaby came back, knees scraping against the highway. “Ready?”
He nodded.
Gaby rolled the water bottle first. Then a fresh rag, the edges taped into the middle. He opened it, taking out a white packet, gauze in shrink wrapping, and a roll of gray duct tape.
“You sure you don’t need a hand?” she asked.
“I’ll manage.”
Will slid the cross-knife out of its sheath and sliced his pant leg open around the embedded glass, careful not to cut too wide, but enough to see—and eventually get at—the wound underneath. Surprisingly very little blood, but that was going to change when he pulled the glass out.
He laid down the knife and opened the water bottle, then set it back down. He picked up the rag with one hand, took hold of the shard of glass with the other. He didn’t think about it, just pulled it out with a grunt. Blood spurted and he quickly shoved the rag down against the opening, pressing down hard.
“How’s Benny?” he asked.
“Hobbling around,” Gaby said. Her eyes were glued to his leg.
“Any threats out there?”
“None that I could see. The Humvee that we saw earlier is gone. What was that, some kind of rocket launcher?”
“M72 Law anti-tank rocket launcher, yeah. I guess it works just as well on helicopters. We were lucky.”
“You call this lucky?”
“The M72 is unguided. If he had something more sophisticated, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“Where the hell did they get something like that, anyway?”
“Army base would be my guess. Louisiana has plenty of them around. They probably looted them about the same time they picked up the Humvees and all those M4s. Those are military grade stuff.”
Will lifted the rag and peeked at the wound before pouring water over it. The warmth helped him with the pain. He wiped at the wet blood, clearing it from the opening, then used his teeth to tear the package and squeezed out the antiseptic ointment that he then spread liberally over the hole.
“Weapons?” he asked.
Gaby didn’t answer right away. She was too busy staring at the blood.
“Gaby, weapons?” he asked again.
“I still have my M4, and another one the others took from Mike. Also, all the magazines in my pack and yours. Found mine about twenty yards up the highway.”
Will pressed the gauze over the wound, careful to position it under the pant leg, then wrapped the whole thing with two revolutions of duct tape.
“Did you find my rifle?” he asked.
“It’s behind you. I remember stepping on it when I was climbing out earlier.”
“Catch,” Will said, and tossed the duct tape back to her. Then he drank what was left in the water bottle and sat back for a moment to catch his breath.
“You okay?” Gaby asked.
“I’ll be fine. Get ready to move.”
She nodded and disappeared from the opening again.
Will turned around in his seat and saw the barrel of his M4A1 behind him, amazingly still in one piece. From Afghanistan, to Harris County SWAT, to the end of the world. And now to this.
Will wasn’t a superstitious man, but if he were…
*
THERE WAS A certain order to the destruction when viewed from inside the wreckage. It was a much different story on the outside.
Pieces of the helicopter were strewn across nearly a 200-meter length and along both sides of the highway. Two of the rotor blades were buried in the thick concrete not far from the main bulk of what was left of the fuselage. The landing skids, in four sections, had ripped through a dozen cars and impaled a minivan’s engine block. There were little impact craters everywhere.
Will climbed down from the police cruiser, wincing a bit as his right leg touched down.
Benny had seen better days, too. The kid’s face, like his and Gaby’s, was bruised and cut, and he had a large scar across one cheek that he had treated. All the first aid they had wasn’t much help for a broken leg that made him limp everywhere, though Gaby had made a splint for him using two pieces of wooden sticks cinched in place with duct tape. He remembered teaching her that during one of those two weeks they had spent together in the woods back on the island.
Benny stood gazing off at the highway, Mike’s M4 and a bag only half full with the medical supplies they had managed to salvage slung over his shoulders. He moved with the help of a makeshift crutch—a wooden baseball bat with the headrest from a car seat duct taped to the top. Again, another impromptu creation by Gaby.
It had taken Will longer to crawl out of the wreckage than he had anticipated. It was already 4:11 P.M. by the time he emerged and looked up at the sky. Late September in Louisiana meant 7:00 P.M. sunsets, give or take.
Gaby walked over to him, carrying her pack and rifle. “Do we go after them?”
Will shook his head. “We’ll never catch them on foot. Not in our condition.”
“What about the kids?” Benny asked.
Will didn’t answer right away. He looked up the highway, in the direction the Humvees had gone. Then glanced back at Benny, limping on a makeshift crutch, and at Gaby, her face a mess of bruises and cuts. All three of them looked like hell, and there wasn’t an inch of him that wasn’t in pain at the moment.
“We can’t do anything for them now,” Will said after a while. “Right now, we need to find shelter. We have three hours before it gets dark.”
“The closest off-ramp is back there,” Gaby said.
“Take point.”
She headed west, and they followed on foot. There wasn’t any need to weave around vehicles abandoned eleven months ago because the Humvees had done such an efficient job of clearing everything to the sides, creating a single, almost-perfect lane to drive—or walk—through.
Will found that if he focused on something else, like Lara’s image in his head, or the lake breeze around the island, he could almost ignore the stabbing pain in his right leg. Thank God for the numbness in his left arm. He wasn’t sure if he could fight through both wounds at the moment.
He caught up with Gaby, who was moving slowly—on purpose for their benefit, he guessed. “How far?”
“Half a mile,” she said.
“That’s too far.” He glanced at his watch, then looked up at the sun for confirmation. “We need to pick it up.”
“Your leg and Benny’s…”
“We’ll be fine. It’ll be worse if we’re caught out here at night.”
She nodded and began moving faster.
Will
waited for Benny to catch up. “Lean on me, Benny.”
Will took his crutch and slipped his left arm around Benny’s waist. He used the crutch for himself, and surprisingly, with Benny on one side and the crutch on the other, he walked relatively pain-free.
Or at least, that’s what he told himself. The trick to ignoring pain was conviction.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
*
IT TOOK THEM nearly thirty minutes to reach the off-ramp, which was much too long. They stuck to the shoulder to maneuver around the parked vehicles frozen in their lanes, dried blood clinging to dashboards and steering wheels and seats baking in the sun.
With the help of gravity, it didn’t take them nearly as long to reach the bottom of the off-ramp. As they were walking down, Will scanned the feeder road, looking for buildings they could use. Gas stations, strip malls—nothing that made him happy. There was a motel about half a kilometer up the street, but just walking there would easily take them another half an hour. They didn’t have that much time.
“Gaby,” he said, “the gas station.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “It doesn’t look that safe.”
“We just need one room that can be defended.”
She jogged on ahead toward a Valero gas station, and Will followed with Benny. They passed a red Chevy waiting in line at the pump, and Will skirted around a white, overturned Bronco in the parking lot.
The Valero, like most gas stations, had glass windows, so he could see into the store before they ever reached the front doors.
“Silver ammo?” he asked Gaby.
She nodded back. “Nothing but.”
“Give me a moment.” Will sat Benny down on the curb outside the store. “Stay here. We’ll clear the store, then come back for you.”
“Take your time,” Benny said. He looked over at Gaby. “Grab me a bag of Funyuns, will ya?”
“They’re probably all stale by now,” Gaby said.
“Just as good.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Will unslung his M4A1 and walked over to Gaby, who was already waiting for him at the doors. He nodded, and she pulled the door open. Will slipped inside first, rifle raised. He glimpsed the aisles, then stopped and listened for noises. There was very little chance the ghouls would be using the gas station as a nest. It was too small and too inconvenient; they preferred bigger places with thick walls (like Mercy Hospital).