The Last Orchard (Book 1): The Last Orchard

by Hunt, James

  Spit flew from the terrorist’s lips, and his eyes bulged from his skull. His cheeks reddened, then turned a shade of purple, and he violently squirmed beneath him, trying to fling Charlie off, but he was too small and Charlie was too big. Charlie offered one final squeeze and then heard the harsh crack of the man’s windpipe.

  Snot dribbled from Charlie’s face, and he heaved breaths, choking on his own saliva. His face was red and sweaty, and he couldn’t look away from the pair of bulging and lifeless eyes that stared up and into the blank sky above.

  Another round of gunfire erupted into the air, and Charlie snapped from the murderous daze that had taken control of his faculties. He quickly picked up his rifle and then stumbled toward the hospital.

  Charlie shouldered open the side entrance and gagged at the stench of the dead bodies that had another day to roast and rot. His heel slipped on blood and guts, smearing it into the already-stained tile floor of the hallways.

  “Dad! Doug!” he shouted, no longer caring if he was heard and hoping that they would answer to make his journey shorter. “DAD!” He kept his rifle up and aimed, ready to fire at anything that turned a sharp corner or stepped out of one of the many doors.

  He made it all the way to the front of the building where the ER lobby was located without a single trace of his father. He lowered the weapon slightly. “Shit.” He spun around in circles, at a loss what to do next. “DAD!” He screamed, his voice cracking from the anxious strain.

  The muscles in his shoulders burned as he struggled to keep the rifle raised. He weaved through the halls, stepping over bodies, the gunfire outside growing louder. When he made it to the east side of the building, searching for the stairs, he glanced out a window.

  The scene outside was something out of a movie. The soldiers that Charlie had arrived with were pushing toward the power plant facility, their progress slow but steady.

  The terrorists were slow on their retreat but left behind their fallen comrades almost too eagerly. Sunlight highlighted the patches of red that stained the green grass fields that surrounded the plant, and Charlie wondered how long all of this would last.

  A door slammed open down the hall, and Charlie spun around, raising the rifle and poised to shoot. He moved toward the door of the room as the footsteps grew louder, the breathing frantic. Charlie remained hidden by the door, poised to strike the moment the figure darted across the hallway.

  An arm came into view, and Charlie charged into the hall, slamming the runner up against the wall. Charlie pinned him using the rifle that he wedged on his throat. The terrorist kicked his legs, battering Charlie’s body with the hard toe of his boots, but Charlie didn’t relinquish his hold.

  A hard kick to Charlie’s groin sent him stumbling backwards, and while the terrorist had no gun, he brandished a knife that he slashed wildly toward Charlie’s chest, tearing his shirt.

  The next slash came down toward his face, and Charlie was a second too late in his reaction as he leaned back. The tip of the blade sliced open his cheek. The sting was short-lived, and Charlie grabbed hold of the terrorist’s wrist, cracking it violently against the wall. The knife crashed to the tile.

  The enemy threw three quick rabbit punches, pushing Charlie backward, and then sprinted down the hall. But the punches only pushed him closer to his rifle, and Charlie picked it up off the floor and aimed for the terrorist’s back.

  Charlie squeezed the trigger, and the gunshot thundered in the halls. The bullet missed, so he chambered another round, then readjusted his aim. He fired again. The terrorist’s limbs flung outward right before he hit the tile where he lay motionless.

  Charlie turned back toward the direction where the terrorist had run and saw the entrance to the staircase. He hurried up the steps, passing more dead bodies, his senses dulled to the gruesome sights and smells.

  “DAD! DOUG!”

  He shouted up and down the halls of each floor he passed, but heard nothing, as he ascended higher and higher toward the top floor. He passed over the bodies then scanned the rooms with windows that faced the power plant.

  “DAD!” Charlie’s voice grew more and more frantic as he neared the end of the hallway’s hospital. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe his father hadn’t come up here. Maybe their plan had changed. But with only three rooms left, Charlie found what he feared to discover.

  “DAD!” Charlie dropped the rifle from his hands and hurried to his father’s side, who was collapsed on the ground, his weapon lying next to him. He turned his father on his back and revealed the chest wound and blood that had soaked the front portion of his shirt. “Christ.”

  “Char-lie,” Harold choked the words out, a pool of blood forming in his mouth, his teeth almost pink from the blood.

  “It’s all right, Dad,” Charlie said, trying to keep his voice calm, but failing miserably. “I’ll get you some help, I’ll—” He looked around the room for anything that could stop the bleeding. He yanked the sheets off the hospital bed and then pressed them against the wound.

  His father was too big to move on his own. He might be able to get him on a cot, but he didn’t know how he’d get them down the stairs.

  Looking around the room, Charlie saw Doug lying in a pool of his own blood, lifeless.

  Harold lifted his hand from his side and grabbed hold of his son’s shoulder. Charlie grabbed it and held it with his own. His father’s strength had disappeared.

  “Your mother,” Harold said, his body trembling as he tried to spit out the last few words he had left. “Tell her I lo—” He shut his eyes, pain flashing across his face, and he bared his teeth.

  But Charlie nodded, squeezed his father’s hand so he knew he was still there. “She knows, Dad, but I’ll tell her. I promise.” He rocked forward and back, the tears falling from his face, the echoes of war beyond the walls of the hospital the background of his final moments with his father.

  Harold opened his eyes, which scanned the ceiling in confusion. His breaths shortened and became sharper. When his eyes finally landed on his son, the confusion heightened. He worked his mouth, trying to speak, his eyes bulging from his skull.

  “What is it, Dad?” Charlie asked.

  Gargled gasps of air bubbled from the depths of Harold’s innards, but he couldn’t speak. His upper back arched in a spasm, and then landed flat, and he lay still.

  “Dad?” Charlie asked, giving his father’s hand a gentle shake.

  But Harold didn’t respond. His chest lay still. His eyes were vacant and empty as they remained staring at the ceiling.

  Charlie’s cries were silent, the tears streaming down his face as he lowered his head onto his father’s shoulder. And as he drew in a sharp breath, he exhaled a guttural cry that bellowed up from that deep, hidden place inside him.

  Charlie lifted his head toward the ceiling. Gunshots drew his attention toward the window. He stood and saw the fight still raging outside. A fight that his father had died for. Charlie clenched his fists, squeezing his hands so tight that his knuckles cracked.

  The men below had taken everything from him. His home. His land. And now his father. If he was meant to be surrounded by death, then Charlie decided it was better to be the killer than the victim. He knelt by his father’s side and then closed his eyes.

  14

  The gunfire was muffled by the hospital walls and windows and the height from Charlie’s position on the top floor. But despite the violent war raging outside, Charlie couldn’t pull his eyes away from the blood that stained his hands.

  He studied the different shades of claret and its thickness as it traveled along the grooves of his palms and fingers. Every time he wiggled his fingers the blood shimmered, coming alive on his hands. But Charlie Decker was as far away from life as he could get.

  Charlie peeled his eyes off of his palms and glanced down at his father, who was dead and bloodied on his back, face turned up toward the ceiling and his eyes glaring lifelessly at the blank canvas of white above them.

  The space be
tween Charlie and his father’s body was slowly filled with the words that were left unsaid, and then filled the room, and eventually the entire floor. And the words became combustible from the rage and anger that filled the spaces between.

  Charlie glanced down to his left where the rifle lay, its black color popping against the white tile. The gun was his lighter, and the moment he picked it up, he would ignite the world around him. It was a fire that his father would have ignited.

  Hell, it was a fire that his father did ignite. It was the reason he was lying dead on the top floor of a hospital building. He chose to fight. He did what Charlie couldn’t, but that didn’t mean Charlie couldn’t change his path.

  Charlie picked up the rifle, the metal and composite thick and heavy in his hands. Standing, he had a better view out the window and the fight below. Lieutenant Dixon and his men had the enemy surrounded, almost ready to infiltrate the power plant.

  Charlie’s reflection in the window threw him off guard, the man standing with the rifle unrecognizable to him. Hesitation and uncertainty was replaced with the steadfastness of purpose. And with the foreign enemy crawling over the town where he grew up, Charlie knew exactly how to fulfill that purpose.

  He moved quickly from the room and back toward the staircase. His movements were efficient, not a single motion wasted, and before he even realized it, he was back on the first floor and heading toward the nearest exit, which happened to be in the rear of the building.

  The cacophony of war blasted Charlie’s senses the moment he stepped out of the hospital. He turned quickly, rifle raised and aimed forward.

  After one quick overall scan of the field in front of him, marking the position of his American comrades, his vision tunneled to the end of his sight and the rest of the world faded into the gunshots and screams.

  Charlie marched toward the front lines, keeping north of the line of soldiers pushing closer and closer toward the power plant’s entrance. All Charlie needed to do was keep out of their way and avoid any friendly fire.

  He crouched to a knee and aided in the assault on the plant’s entrance where the terrorists had bottlenecked themselves in retreat.

  “Forward! Forward! Forward!”

  The order triggered motion from the line as the unit continued its assault, and Charlie’s heart pounded with the drums of war. His finger worked deftly over the trigger, his aim steady and true.

  Through the scope on the rifle, Charlie watched his first kill drop. Blood spurted from the man’s chest, exploding out of him like a geyser, his body jerking backward from the bullet’s force, and he collapsed to the ground, another corpse added to the pile.

  With his target down, Charlie shifted his aim to the next one, his crosshairs lining up over a man’s skull. Nothing but the whites of his eyes were visible, his mouth covered with black cloth, and his head wrapped in a similar bandana.

  Still marching forward, Charlie’s muscles seized up, growing still and calm in the same tenth of a second that he pulled the trigger, which sent his bullet screaming toward his next target, connecting with the left eye.

  The bullet exploded out of the back of his skull, snapping the terrorist’s head backward before the body dropped to the ground.

  Charlie searched for the next target but found the entrance clear save for the pile of corpses that had collected on the ground.

  “FORWARD!”

  The steady pace of the line exploded into a sprint toward the factory. Charlie hurried alongside the soldiers, the heat of battle so hot and high that none of them noticed the man in jeans, dirty t-shirt, and boots that stood out among the wave of camouflage crashing into the entrance.

  Charlie steered clear of the rest of the soldiers, focused only on killing as many more terrorists as he could bring into the view of his scope.

  The world darkened when he stepped through the entrance, which opened into a large foyer, candlelight dancing along the walls, shifting the shadows of the men that had entered along the rust-stained metal walls.

  Charlie stood off to the side, letting the soldiers file toward the door, still going unnoticed by the military unit.

  “Breach, breach, breach.” The lead soldier swung the door open, and the soldiers behind him flooded through the gap like a hole in a dam.

  Charlie was the last man sucked in, the sporadic pop of gunfire echoing ahead. The hallways and rooms they passed were clear before he even had an opportunity to tick one more notch onto his kill count.

  But when the unit passed a hallway, ignoring the darkened path to wherever it led, Charlie stopped. He squinted into the darkness, an eerie calm plaguing him, and an itch to be swallowed up in it.

  The military unit went ahead of him, and Charlie slowly inched down the hallway. The farther he walked, the more his eyes adjusted to the darkness ahead. The hallway walls were smooth and barren and stretched high above to an industrial ceiling that was nothing but vent ducts, wires, and tubes.

  The hallway curved right, the bend long, keeping Charlie on his toes. When he rounded the other side, he looked behind him, that sensation of someone following him in the darkness unshakeable. It crawled up the back of his neck like an unsuspecting shiver that evoked a tremble that he wasn’t willing to give, but his body didn’t grant him his request.

  The farther Charlie penetrated the darkness and the clearer the images became in that darkened void, the more his paranoia grew.

  He became sure that someone was following him.

  Charlie kept his head on a swivel, and every turn and scuff of his heels sent the noises echoing into the ceiling. His breathing and heartrate quickened. His fingers tightened their grip on the rifle in his hands, trying to squeeze the metal and crush it in his bare hands.

  Doors appeared on either side of him, each of them closed. Charlie glanced ahead and found more that dotted the hall in sporadic intervals. He checked each of them, finding all of them locked.

  But still Charlie pressed forward, checking each door, thorough in his search to find more of the bastards to kill. And his diligence was finally rewarded seven doors down, when the handle he pressed down gave way.

  Aiming the barrel of his rifle into the crack of the door, he swung it inward, the harsh bang of the door on the wall startling the huddled lump in the corner that threw their hands up in the air.

  “Please! Please.” The English was accented but spoken clearly.

  Charlie stepped forward and pressed the barrel of his rifle against the cowering figure’s forehead. The trembling fear running off the man vibrated the weapon in Charlie’s hands.

  “I don’t want to be here, please!”

  Charlie frowned. There was something about the figure’s voice that threw him off, and with the terrorist’s head wrapped in dark cloth that concealed their mouth and their head, leaving only the whites of their eyes visible, he couldn’t be sure.

  “Let me see your face,” Charlie said, gun still aimed at the terrorist’s head.

  The figure tilted their eyes up from the floor.

  “Now!” Charlie barked the order, and the figure flinched from the harsh lash of his tongue.

  Slowly, the enemy complied with Charlie’s order, removing the cloth. And as the layers dropped to the floor, Charlie felt the aim of his rifle dip with them.

  It was hard to see the details of her features in the darkness, but the terrorist huddled in the corner of the room was clearly a woman. And it was a turn of events that Charlie hadn’t expected.

  “Up.” Charlie followed the order with a quick tilt of his rifle, and this time the woman obeyed without question. “Who else is down here?”

  “Just me.” She stared at the floor, keeping her hands raised harmlessly in the air beside her head.

  They were alone. The soldiers that Charlie had entered with were gone, and the men that she had fought beside were dead or on the run. He could kill her, and no one would care, no one might ever even know.

  But killing a woman, even an enemy, brought forth a conflict th
at he didn’t anticipate facing. He thought of the men he ran into when he first left Seattle, after he was separated from his group. They had taken the women in the group, tried to do acts on them that was worse than death.

  Charlie did a quick check of the floor and the walls, finding no weapon. “Spin around. Hands on the wall.”

  She complied, and then Charlie patted her down, searching for knives or a pistol hidden in her waist, pockets, or boots. But he found nothing. She was clean.

  Angry, Charlie spun her back around and then shoved the tip of his barrel closer to her face. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  The woman shivered, unsure if she should answer, until Charlie pressed the barrel against her cheek.

  “I-I came with my brother. He smuggled me out and was hoping we could start over here after-” She swallowed, catching her train of thought, no doubt choosing her words carefully. “After all of this was over.”

  “You know how many people your brother and his friends killed?” Charlie asked. “Do you know what they did to my home? My family?”

  The woman cowered, crying. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Charlie still hadn’t taken his finger off the trigger. All he had to do was squeeze. But for whatever reason, Charlie just couldn’t do it.

  Charlie stepped back and then motioned toward the door. “Keep your hands up and walk slow. Move. Now.”

  The woman exhaled in relief and nodded quickly as she complied with Charlie’s demands. He followed her into the hall, keeping his weapon aimed at her, still ready to pull the trigger should she try anything. A part of him desperately wished that she would try something. But she did nothing.

  Charlie directed her out the doors and past the carnage of the dead bodies of her fellow countrymen, and she sobbed harder as she stepped over all the death.

  She started speaking in her native tongue, the whispers fast and almost prayer-like as Charlie nudged her along, whenever she stopped and gawked at the death that littered the floor.