It was unnerving that there was a possibility they could be just around the corner.
"It's not that far," she said, eyeing the tall house where all her food was sitting on the kitchen table. "I just have to be careful."
For her, careful meant slinking so low that she was practically crawling. The zombies were not on the street, she found them in the backyard pulling up flowers and leafy plants and stuffing them into their mouths. Amazed and horrified, she watched them feed until their teeth and fingers were green.
She knew she couldn't stay there crouched against the side of the garage so when she thought they were all turned away, she darted across to the first house and locked the door behind her. Taking her backpack she sped to the top floor and shut herself in a bedroom. Once she barricaded the door with a dresser she leaned back against it listening for any signs that the zombies were after her.
Minutes passed with her leaning her ear against the door and just when she was starting to relax she heard the distant rumble of diesel engines. "Shit!" she hissed, rushing to a north facing window, squinting her eyes to make out any movement. Just at the range of her vision she saw three vehicles moving in a line, heading down the same road the women had used earlier that morning. They were kicking up dust behind them which she assumed meant they were going fast. Forgetting the backpack and the sleeping bag, Deanna shoved the dresser aside, grabbed her shotgun and pelted down three flights of stairs and, after the barest pause where she looked up and down the street for zombies, she raced for the church.
Her early assessment of her physical prowess proved true. Winded and dizzy she stumbled into the church and yelled, "They're coming! Put out that fire quick!"
"Who's coming?" Melanie asked. No one else budged.
"Soldiers," Deanna gasped in one sharp breath. "You can see the smoke from our fire from far away."
Melanie, Veronica and a few others got up and stared at the fire. "How do we…do we use water?"
"Hold on," Joslyn said. "She might be lying. This might be her way of taking control."
"Don't listen to her!" Deanna cried. "They are coming. I saw them. Now, smother that fire, damn it. Lisa and Jackie, help me barricade the door." The urgency in her voice acted on the women. A dozen of them began hefting pews toward the double doors in the lobby while most of the others tried to extinguish the fire. They succeeded but in the process of smothering it they sent even greater clouds of smoke up through the broken window.
The sight made Deanna's heart hammer. "Try to cover the window with something, maybe those robes. And…and…I need a look out. Jos, you're the smallest. Go up to the belfry and yell if you see anything."
Joslyn began hurrying to the front where stairs led up to the balcony and then up to the belfry. She turned and walking backwards said, "If this is some sort of trick…"
Deanna dismissed her with a wave of her hand. "Just go! The rest of you I need more pews blocking the front."
"What about the back door?" Melanie asked. "Shouldn't we block that one, too?"
"Yeah, use the pews to block that too. There are more than enough…"
Joslyn's sudden scream interrupted her. "They're coming!" She came sprinting down the stairs and cried, "I saw them. They're on the road right outside!"
"Can we make it to the truck in time?" Veronica asked. Joslyn began to nod, however the roar of speeding Humvees suggested otherwise. Veronica turned to Deanna and asked, "What do we do?"
"We go out the back," she said after a second of hesitation. The women started to race for the back door, all except Kay and Melanie who had stooped to take hold of Mindy's arms and legs. "Leave her," Deanna told them. "You'll never make it carting her around like that."
Deanna figured she would be in for another argument from the two, however relief flooded their faces and they laid Mindy down as quick as they could without simply dropping her. Then the three of them sprinted for the rear door only to be stopped by sudden screaming from the other women.
Veronica came racing back. "We're trapped!"
A gun began firing from outside and then more screams split the dark afternoon and then came the rush of feet as the women raced back the way they had come.
They cried over and over, "We're trapped!"
"What do we do?" Joslyn asked, and it was a second before Deanna realized she was talking to her.
"We only have two choices: surrender or fight," She told them.
"But they'll hang us if we surrender," Joslyn said in misery.
"Then I say we fight," Deanna said.
Chapter 20
Deanna Russell
Southern Illinois
Fighting was such a horrendously bad option that only the guarantee of being hung over a river filled with zombies made it seem at all palatable. For weaponry, they had all of four guns and if that wasn't bad enough they only had thirty-nine bullets between them. Deanna looked over the women she had to work with for the coming battle—every last one of them stood cowering, even the women who were armed.
"Connie, cover the front doors. Only shoot if you have to. Everyone else, get up to the balcony and don't forget Mindy. Yvette, you can cover us from up there." Deanna had only just finished speaking when there came a crash from the back of the church as the rear door was kicked inwards. "Get up there, quick!" Deanna ordered.
The women sprinted for the supposed safety of the balcony as Deanna peeked her head around the corner and stared down the hall. Three men were moving forward, their weapons up to their shoulders, there steps light and easy.
"Searching," one of them said as they came to the first of the four offices. All three stopped. Two focused on the door while the third kept his weapon trained down the hall. The church was dark: inside a pall of smoke hung like a mist while outside a thunderstorm threatened to break loose at any second; this allowed Deanna to remain unseen. She watched from the shadows as one man kicked in the office door while the other covered him.
"Clear," the man said after a quick search of the room. The soldier who had been pointing his gun down the hall in her direction turned to say something, giving Deanna a full second and a half to bring her shotgun around to shoot. Fear stopped her. She saw the opportunity, but she hesitated as her hands suddenly went slick with sweat and her heart began to bound. She knew it was the perfect time to shoot, only she couldn't seem to budge her muscles into action.
Then the moment passed and the three men went to the next closest door. The situation repeated itself except this time the man didn't look away. It was just as well since Deanna was now beginning to tremble and hyperventilate. The air rushed in and out of her so loudly that she thought the soldiers had to have heard her breathing.
They went to the third door and the soldier pointing the gun her way again turned. Her breathing stopped as again she saw an opportunity. All she had to do was swing around the corner and shoot…but just as before she hesitated, this time out of fear that her shotgun was on safe. If it was then she would be exposing herself for nothing. Again her moment passed as the man swung back to stare down the hall. While one of the men searched the office, Deanna looked down at the shotgun and her hyperventilating picked up again; the shotgun had been on safe after all. She clicked it over to fire with hands that shook.
When she looked back up the men were very close, maybe fifteen feet away. She knew she would have to shoot now or run back to the balcony, only her body seemed locked in place by fear, unable to kill or run. It could only quiver in a growing terror.
Suddenly, from the other end of the church Connie shot her AR-15: bam…bam…bam! The shots echoed in the building and sounded like someone hammering on metal as hard as they could.
Deanna's first thought was: Don't waste ammo! She didn't have time for a second thought. Her body unexpectedly came alive as if her mental orders from a minute before were on a time delay. She sprung out from around the corner and fired her shotgun all in one move. The soldier in front fell backwards but not before firing his own gun. Bullets
whizzed by so close that she felt the air shudder. Her body spasmed in reaction and her finger jerked back on the trigger a second time. Her first shot had barely registered on her ears, but the second sounded like an bomb had gone off and a fraction of a second later someone yelled.
Then she was running for her life. She dashed through the church at a full sprint. Ahead of her, Connie was crouched down by the stairs, aiming her AR toward the lobby.
"Go!" Deanna cried. "Get upstairs."
Just then, something caught Deanna's eye. Above, on the balcony, arms were outstretched and pointing back the way she had come. She didn't need the warning screams that erupted a second later. Instinctively, she dove to the ground and rolled as once more the whip-crack of bullets split the air just above her. She began crawling on her stomach through the pews, desperately trying to keep her butt down fearing it was presenting a huge target. Bullets splintered the wood around her for a few seconds but then there came a shot from a different direction: from above.
Yvette peeked over the balcony and took one wild shot at the soldiers at the other end of the church. Immediately, they returned fire and the balcony was riddled with bullets. Deanna didn't look up to see what was happening, she kept crawling until she ran out of room to crawl. At the last pew she found a stretch of open floor ten feet in length between her and the stairs. Beyond the stairs was the front door with its useless pew barricades and even as she watched, men on the other side were shifting them away to make a path.
Deanna had been dragging the shotgun by its strap, now she pulled it up to her shoulder and waited for an opening to shoot through. One came seconds later. With a grunt, a soldier she knew all too well turned aside one of the stacked pews. It was Sergeant Robinski the man who had raped her, and bullied her, and demeaned her, and had slapped the shit out of her only the night before. He had made himself a path to cross through and Deanna saw that a path big enough to walk through was one certainly big enough to shoot through.
The trigger seemed to pull itself with an eagerness that bordered on ecstasy. This time Deanna didn't feel the recoil or hear the ear shattering explosion of the shotgun. The only thing she experienced was the joy of seeing Robinski erupt blood and fly backwards.
Then she felt an utter calm where her mind was as free and open as a child's. She could smell the strangely curious odor guns made when they were fired, and she could hear people shooting and feel the floor vibrate. She knew the shotgun was empty and knew that if she didn't jump up in the next second, a soldier would fire through the pew opening and most certainly hit her.
She also knew she and the other women were all doomed, but that didn't seem to matter because she knew the utter perfection of a vengeance she had never in a million years had expected to exact. It gave her the most euphoric sensation. She practically floated up to her feet and was in a full sprint in two strides. Splinters of wood struck her face as bullets tore up the wall inches from her head. She should've been afraid but she wasn't in the least.
A second later she was at the stairs; they were steep and narrow. At a meager little landing they turned a sharp corner to the next flight up. "Is everyone ok?" she asked when she got to the balcony. Twenty one women were cowering on the floor as far from the balcony rail as they could get.
"Get down," Veronica hissed. "They can get you."
Deanna dropped to one knee and began to reload the shotgun. "I got at least two of them," she said with a smile on her lips. "One was Robinski! He was right in the front door pulling back a pew and I just went into this zone and blew his face right off. It was great!"
"What a fantastic fucking story," Joslyn said, sarcastically. "Killing one of them won't do us much good. We have to kill all of them and that's impossible."
"Then give up," Deanna said. She turned her back on Joslyn and crouched against the wall next to the stairs. There were words being hissed back and forth in the foyer below. Deanna decided to lie down to make herself less of a target; she then shouldered the shotgun, pointing it down the stairs and tried to be patient. It was difficult with the women behind her, bitching back and forth about whose fault all of this was.
The blame mostly fell on Joslyn which was surprising. "You wouldn't let Dee put out the fire when she wanted to," Kay accused. "They saw the smoke from miles away!"
"And you wouldn't let her move the truck," Melanie said. "That was on her list." The other women all agreed.
This had Deanna chuckling. She sobered quickly when she heard the first stair squeak below her. Someone…some soldier was coming up. Whoever it was on the stairs was big. He was trying to be sneaky but failed, his tread was just too pronounced. Too bad for you, Deanna thought maliciously as she started to gently pull back on the trigger.
It was her hope that he would come around the corner slow and stupid, however he didn't show himself at all; only his gun showed. He stuck his AR-15 around the corner and began firing without looking. Deanna squinched her face into a grimace, hunched her shoulders and dropped her chin down as bullets cut up the stair right in front of her. The man had misjudged the angle.
He pulled back his gun and waited for a full three seconds before darting his head around the corner to see what effect his shooting had. Before Deanna could pull the shotgun's trigger he leaned back again. A moment later the gun showed itself once more, but this time Deanna fired first. Blazing hot pellets from the shotgun's shell tore down the length of the AR and ripped into the man's wrist.
"Fuck!" he raged, pulling his hand back. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"
"Serves you right, asshole!" Deanna yelled. "Who's next? I got me a whole mess of bullets."
"Fuck you, bitch!"
Deanna snorted, "Good come back. Very witty." As she was speaking she reached into her pocket for another shell and slipped it into the loading port. She then pulled out the pistol from her pocket, checked that the safety was off and set it to the side.
Below her there was a scuffling as the injured man stumbled down the stairs. All the women could hear him go outside where his cursing grew louder. "Who's my next victim?" Deanna asked. "Give me a name so I can make this personal, because I owe all you raping shitbags!"
Another foot on the stair, this one more sly in sound than the first. "This is Major Grant, who am I talking to?" Grant said from just around the corner of the stairs.
Deanna knew the name well enough, though she hadn't ever been assaulted by him. He was considered relatively benign compared to most and yet he wasn't free from sin either. He went through women every other month or so, sending his castoffs to be knowingly brutalized by the platoons. Rachel, the first person Deanna had killed in the back of the truck, had been his last "girl friend."
"This is Rachel, Major," Deanna said. "You don't recognize my voice?"
He chuckled. "You're not Rachel. Maybe I should talk to her, she's much more reasonable."
"I wish you could but your men shot her to death. She's out in a ditch somewhere on the side of the road."
"Oh, that's too bad. You know, I am truly sorry that she died, but do you actually expect any sympathy from me? Two men were murdered when you escaped. Why didn't you just ask to leave? You know you could have gone at any time."
Deanna snorted angry laughter. "Right. Sure that would have happened. We both know the truth; we would have been forced to leave empty handed and naked."
"Is that truly any worse than the predicament you find yourself in now?" he asked.
Deanna hadn't thought of that. "Yeah I would say it was worse. At least now we have guns to defend ourselves. I'd rather…wait. Are you stalling?"
"No, not stalling. I'm trying to get a feel for who I'm dealing with. Unfortunately you don't seem reasonable, which might rule out negotiations. I hope that's not the case."
"Does he want to talk?" Joslyn asked from the group of cowering women. "Is that all?"
Deanna waved her hand at her to shut up and said to Grant, "I'm willing to hear how you plan on leaving us in peace. Other than that you'll be
just wasting your breath."
"That's too bad for you," Grant replied with faux sadness. "You ever see what a hand grenade does to a person?"
"No," Deanna said. She meant for the word to come out strong but her body shivered as gory images raced through her head and the word was only a whisper.
"It's not pretty. It'll turn your insides to jelly and your outsides will be shredded beyond recognition. I've seen a man with his skin turned inside out because of a grenade. Grossest thing I ever saw. That's what's going to happen to you if you don't lay down your weapons and come out peacefully. All we want are the leaders of the group, everyone else will be free to go."
The women behind her began to whisper. Deanna was disappointed to hear hope in their voices. "You hear that, Dee?" Veronica said. "They just want Mindy."
"She's practically dead anyway," Kay remarked.
"He's lying," Deanna said. "You think the Colonel will settle for one half-dead girl after all of this?"
"Don't listen to her," Major Grant said, raising his voice. "We just want the leaders. I promise that we'll let the rest of you go."
"You see?" Joslyn asked. "We don't need to fight. No one else needs to die."
Deanna didn't want to die, she wanted to walk out of that church, knowing she was free from pursuit and prosecution. With all her soul and the soul of the baby inside her she wanted to believe Grant, however the major's words seemed so….so impossible. Everyone knew the Colonel was blood thirsty and never let a slight go unchallenged.
"Let me see the grenade," Deanna said, suddenly. After thinking about it, the idea of getting blown up by a grenade didn't really bother her. If she was going to die it seemed like a quick death at least. At the same time, if the soldiers had grenades the fight would be over so quick that it would be foolish to bother resisting, especially if there was even the slightest chance they could go free. The grenade would make her mind up for her.
"Trust me," Major Grant said. "I've got all the grenades I need to blow up this whole church."
The Apocalypse Fugitives Page 19