The screen she’d been watching went black.
Meanwhile, the men approaching from the houses across the street had made their way up to the vehicles lined up in front of the building and had taken cover behind and around them, adding fire to the intense barrage the pump station was already taking. Suddenly Ava saw a flash of light from behind one of them, and moments later, an explosion rocked the front door.
She ran downstairs. Jake was there along with Johnny Switchblade. Smoke was billowing in from around the door, but it appeared to have held against the blast.
“I don’t think it’ll take another shot like that,” Switchblade yelled.
“Get some of your men over here to cover the front door,” Jake called back.
Switchblade hustled off to collect a couple addicts that he lined up behind sandbag barriers they’d created in the hallway just inside the front door.
Ava hustled back upstairs to her gunners. Just as she made it to the top of the stairs, there was another intense explosion. As she entered the lounge area in which she had been just moments before, and ran across to the right side of the building, she saw that the area had been obliterated. The window at which her machine gunner had been stationed was now just a gapping hole. Pieces of her gunner were strewn around the room. She saw his torso lying on the center of the floor. The machinegun lay near where the window used to be. She dashed inside the room. Bullets were zipping off the bricks outside and some were plugging themselves into the room’s plaster walls. She dove onto the floor, grabbed the machinegun, and slithered back to the room’s entry doorway. From her position, she could see more pickup trucks with mounted machineguns pulling up outside. She guessed that it was the second wave of the assault. They just had to hold out a bit longer. Things were going pretty much as she had expected. She had guessed that the families would send in a light attack force first to probe for weaknesses and feel out where the heaviest defensive firepower was positioned. Once they had those areas pinpointed, they would start focusing on them as they just had by taking out her machine gunner. She figured that once they felt they’d softened the place up enough, they’d bring in their third wave and really start letting them have it, finishing them off quickly. This was what she was counting on and was why she had held off on bringing all their forces to bear right at the beginning of the fight.
With the arrival of the pickups, she figured that it was close to time for the final assault. She knew that they were risking being overrun if they waited too long. A rocket propelled grenade exploded near where she’d stationed Blondie in the next room over. She couldn’t see the damage but she could feel its impact from the shudder that ran through the building after the grenade hit. She had no idea whether Blondie was okay or not and didn’t have time to check. Another grenade hit downstairs a second later, knocking the building’s thick steel entry door off its hinges. Ava could hear Johnny Switchblade and Jake shouting and then the men they had covering the front entrance open fire.
It was time to open up the rooftop.
Ava dropped the heavy machinegun she was carrying and dashed up the stairs to where the Kill King and her third heavy machine gunner were crouched waiting behind their sandbag emplacements. “FIRE!” she yelled.
The machine gunner let loose with a sickening barrage that immediately ripped through three men who were making a dash for the front entrance. Meanwhile, the Kill King started doing some damage of his own. First he took out the guy with the grenade launcher. He drew a breath, held it, aimed, squeezed the trigger, exhaled, and watched. A bullet ripped through the guy’s head, dropping him to the ground, and along with him, the launcher. The King didn’t like to aim for the chest if at all possible due to many of the Families’ men wearing body armor. He preferred a sure shot to the head whenever he could get it.
One of the grenade launcher guy’s buddies scrambled from behind the cover of a nearby vehicle to try to recover the weapon. Just as he reached it, the Kill King took him out with a single shot too. Then the King turned his attention to the SUV inside the pump station perimeter which presented the most immediate danger to the building being overrun. With nearly a 360 degree view around the building, the King could pretty much have his choice of targets as long as they weren’t too close to the side of the structure. But he had to act quickly before the attackers got a read on his position or before they got inside the pump station itself. Bullets were already starting to pound into his defensive sandbags, and he could feel the heat of the attack turning towards him and the gunner laying down heavy fire beside him.
Through the SUV’s passenger-side window, he could see the head of one of the attackers crouched behind its open door. He drew a breath, held it, aimed, squeezed the trigger, exhaled, and watched. The SUV window shattered and the head disappeared from sight. A second later, a body tumbled out from behind the door and lay motionless on the ground.
The King angled his rifle’s scope slightly to the right. He couldn’t see another head anywhere, but underneath the driver’s side door he saw a knee planted in the ground as one of the defenders crouched for cover. He drew a breath, held it, aimed, squeezed the trigger, exhaled, and watched. His bullet ripped into the exposed knee. A second later, a man sprawled out into the open from behind the door, writhing in pain. Realizing that he was in danger, the man immediately began scrambling back to the cover of the SUV, but it was too late. The King squeezed the trigger again, sending a round into the middle of the man’s neck, killing him instantly.
Suddenly an explosion erupted just below the King. A grenade round had hit the building just below his position. The heat from the blast rolled upward, burning his face, and the smoke temporarily blinded his one and only eye as he ducked for cover behind his sandbag emplacement. He looked over beside him. The machine gunner was staring at him with lifeless eyes, a hole in the side of his face.
King blinked hard and fished from his pocket a clean cloth he carried with him at all times to wipe his eye. As he recovered his vision, he saw someone next to him push the body of the gunner aside and start firing the machinegun.
It was Ava.
“Didn’t expect to see you here!” he yelled over the machinegun’s chatter, putting his rifle’s scope back to his eye.
“You know where that round came from?” Ava yelled, pausing her fire just long enough for King to yell back to her, “No!”
“Give me cover and I’ll find him though!” the King called.
Ava swept the vehicles in the street with gunfire, momentarily quelling the amount of return fire they were taking and giving the King the chance he needed to locate his target.
While he’d been focused on the SUV, someone had retrieved the grenade launcher from the dead man he’d dispatched just a minute earlier. The guy was taking cover behind the first car that had been destroyed by one of Jake’s land mines. The Kill King zeroed in on the man just as he stood to fire another round. He drew a breath, held it, squeezed the trigger, exhaled, and watched as a flash issued from the grenade launcher at the exact instant he fired his own shot.
The man with the grenade launcher dropped to the ground, dead. At the same time, there was a deafening explosion as the Kill King’s rifle was ripped from his hands. Instantaneously, he was on his back and buried under sandbags. There was grit in his mouth, his nose, his ears, and his eye. He gasped for breath, choking on the dust and debris. The weight of the dirt and sand in the bags momentarily pinned him in place and he struggled to free himself.
Suddenly he felt hands upon him, hands digging in the dirt and sand around him, and the pressure being relieved as someone pushed sandbags off him. As he blinked to clear his eye, he could see Ava – blood on her face and a cut below her right eye – working to extract him. He pulled his right arm from beneath a sandbag and Ava helped him to his feet. She pulled him along with her off the rooftop to the stairwell.
The Kill King could see the right arm beneath Ava’s torn and tattered jacket was oozing blood from a deep gash.
She nodded, “I’ll live. You?”
“I think so,” he said. He blinked hard, “Got something in my eye. But I think it’ll be okay. Can’t afford to lose that one too,” he shook his head as he cleared the debris from his eye.
“Come on, let’s get downstairs,” Ava said, leading him along.
They helped one another back down to the first floor where Ava guided them into the office. King was limping from where one of the heavy sandbags had fallen awkwardly on his knee and Ava still seemed somewhat dazed. The King collapsed into a chair while Ava fumbled on the desk for the radio.
She found it, turned it on, and squeezed the talk button. “Go!” was all she said before she collapsed to the floor.
Chapter 19
Four days had gone by since we’d discovered the garden invasion, and with each passing day, we felt a little bit better about the situation. There had been no recurrence of the trespassers in the garden, nor any sign of their reappearance anywhere else around town.
Ray and I had recently been back to the pond to refill the pickup’s tanks with water, and while I had noted some fresh tracks in the dirt around it, and the water level noticeably decreased, our water-hauling work proceeded without incident.
Over the ensuing days, we decided to harvest as much as we could from our plantings just to be on the safe side and to avoid leaving any tempting fruit on the vine so to speak. We collected any ripe – or near ripe – tomatoes so that they could finish the ripening process safely indoors. We collected carrots, cucumbers, corn, and more. We also temporarily transferred our water from the back of the pickup into any remaining available containers we could lay our hands on and sent an armed party out to load the tubs full of apples and peaches so that Sharron could set to work cooking, canning, and using them in baking in an effort to help bolster our food supplies. Paul, Sarah, Emily, Pam, and dad helped Sharron unload the fruit and then assisted with peeling, cutting, and dicing, as well as preparing containers and boiling water.
On the fifth day, we felt reasonably secure with our food stocks bolstered, our garden picked clean of harvestable items, and all the fruit we could handle pulled from the peach and apple trees.
That evening, it was again time for me and Claire to take over the night watch. I let her take the first stint from 6 p.m. to midnight since it was the easiest to cover. By this point in the summer, it didn’t even get dark until after nine, so it really didn’t feel like there was much of a night shift to cover until the second portion of the evening was in full effect.
While this was nice for the person covering the early portion of the night, since they could go to bed afterwards, it kind of stunk for the person who had the second half, as it made it difficult to get any rest ahead of their shift due to the still-lit evening sky.
This was the case for me tonight. It seemed like I had just dozed off when I felt Claire’s gentle touch wake me.
“Ugh,” I moaned groggily. “Already?”
“Yep…already. Sorry hon’,” she said as she slipped into bed beside me and I slowly slid my way out.
“See you in the morning,” I groaned.
“Uh huh,” she answered drowsily.
I was envious of her, but I knew that duty called and that it was only once or twice a week I had to endure this hardship. It was a small sacrifice to make to ensure the safety of our group and its resources.
In the darkness, I located my blue jeans draped over a nearby chair and wriggled into them. I found a t-shirt on the same chair and slipped it over my head. Then I located my .44 on the shelf I’d mounted on the wall beside the bed that allowed me to store our firearms within easy reach for Claire and me but out of reach of Jason’s tiny hands. I shoved the weapon into my waistband. And finally, I retrieved the automatic rifle from a wall-mounted rack above the bed where Claire had placed it upon returning from her watch.
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes with the thumb and middle finger of my left hand and headed downstairs.
The first thing I did once outside was make a quick check of the garden. Finding that all was quiet on the backyard front, I moved around the store to take up my post on the front porch.
Everyone had their own watch routine, which I actually liked since it made it harder for anyone who might be observing us to get a feel for regular patterns to our shifts. My personal preference was to break up each hour into two mini-shifts. The first half hour I’d spend watching the front of the store, and then I’d circle around back to spend a half hour there. However, whenever I got bored or began feeling sleepy, I’d make an unplanned circuit or two around the store to help wake me up and pass the time. This also helped keep the watch more interesting, and more importantly, keep any prospective intruders off guard.
That was my theory at least.
Ray had told the group that it was good to change things up to keep us from falling into a monotonous routine. He had said that routine was the enemy on numerous fronts. Not only did it make our patterns easier to spot to outsiders, but it lulled us into a sense of complacency where we began to see and do the same things in habitual ways. Instead, he had said, we should vary our watch patterns as it would keep our eyes “fresh” and help us stay more alert. Changing things up helped our minds stay more active because it acted to “reset” them as we moved from place to place. He noted a study that had been referenced in his FBI training in which people had been given a simple list of five items to remember in one room of a house – the living room for example – and then asked to recall that same list as soon as they moved into another area of the house. The list might have contained things like eggs, butter, vacuum cleaner, mop, and toothpaste. They’d often easily be able to recount the items over and over again in the room in which they’d been presented with the list, but once asked to recite it just a few seconds after entering another room, very few of the study participants had been able to recount the full list with any regularity. Ray told us that it was because of a sort of reset our brains did as we moved into a new location. In a kitchen we began thinking about things like food, cooking, and eating. In a bathroom we began thinking about shaving, using the toilet, taking a soothing bath or shower, etc. This new train of thought caused our brains to loose focus on what we had been thinking about just moments before and focus on the things presented to us in a completely new environment. This, he said, was the reason why we might have noticed ourselves occasionally entering a room of our home for a certain reason or purpose only to realize once we got there that we couldn’t remember exactly why or what we’d gone there for, which we all agreed had happened to us in the past.
It made sense once he’d laid it all out for us, but I didn’t think I would ever have thought about it otherwise. And so, this was the approach I adopted in an effort to make my shift as interesting as possible while keeping myself relatively alert and aware as I changed locations regularly.
I kept a pack of gum handy since the cigarettes had run out long ago, and this helped keep me busy too, chomping away and blowing bubbles. I’d found that making mental lists of things we needed to do or prepare for the approaching fall and winter months also helped the time pass faster.
Tonight, I was thinking largely about water. I wasn’t as worried as I had been since we’d soon be done harvesting our crops, which would alleviate much of the strain upon our water supply. And I figured it had to rain sometime. I didn’t have much hope for the remainder of August, but I was praying that the rain gods would be kinder to us in September.
As a hedge against the gods overlooking my oft-made requests, we’d managed to build up a reserve supply of several hundred gallons of clean water kept in the basement. This way, even if the pond dried up completely, we’d have something to keep us going for at least a couple of weeks, and maybe longer if we used it solely for drinking and little else.
The night air felt surpr
isingly cool, cooler than it’d felt in weeks. It was nice, and it made it almost enjoyable to be out at this time of night. I listened to the soft chirping of the crickets. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote yipped. I sat on the front porch steps thinking. Fall would arrive soon, and then winter. I was worried about our food stocks…our meat supply more than anything. Poor Paul could only snag so many squirrels, and he was currently on hunting probation since our meeting last week. And as a group of eleven, ten of whom ate meat, we needed more than an occasional paltry few ounces of squirrel flesh to keep us fed.
I knew that Sharron would do her best to pinpoint trees for nuts as another source of protein, but again, the energy expended harvesting and shelling the nuts for their tiny bits of flesh was almost more than they replenished.
There was a soft breeze blowing tonight, and paired with the cool evening air, it made me shiver. I heard a bang somewhere in the distance down by the town’s sprinkling of houses, but it didn’t concern me. Several of the homes were in a severe state of disrepair and were well into the process of breaking down and falling apart. One of the trailers had some loose roofing that would flap around in the wind, and I guessed that this was what was responsible for the noise tonight.
FORSAKEN: THE SYSTEMIC SERIES Page 18