“Do it, son,” said Butler. “Let’s kill these bastards and then move onto Garden City and kill the rest of ‘em.”
Thomas kept his eyes on George’s, knowing that he had done what he could for his family and for everybody that had helped him along the way since the EMP, and that he was going out still strong right up to the end.
George cocked the hammers on the Peacemaker and the 1911 at the same time. Randall and Thomas stared down the cold, dark bores of both weapons.
And yet George hesitated again. Both guns were cocked and his fingers were on the triggers, but for whatever reason, he just stood there motionlessly and silently.
“Do it, son!” Butler screamed. “What are you waiting for?! These men killed your brothers! Shoot them now!”
George still hesitated, ignoring his father’s commands. Then, to everyone’s surprise, he actually began to lower both weapons again.
“I don’t believe this shit,” Butler hissed.
He cocked the hammer on his SIG and aimed it at Randall and Thomas.
“This is your last chance to get revenge on your brothers’ murderers, George!” Butler exclaimed. “Kill them now, or else I will!”
Suddenly, a single gunshot pierced through the air!
Blood exploded from George’s throat, and he spun wildly, sending Thomas’s Peacemaker flying in the air. Before anybody could react, another volley of shots shattered the silence and dropped several more of Butler’s men, including Phil who took a bullet to the thigh and immediately hugged the dirt when he landed.
“NO!” Butler screamed as he watched his last remaining son fall, before another bullet sung through the air and snapped the SIG out of his hands in a burst of sparks.
Randall wasted no time and quickly dove for George’s body, recovering the 1911 and Walther that had been taken from him when he’d been captured. He tried to get Thomas’s attention so he could throw him one of the guns, but the situation was so chaotic that he didn’t have more than an eye blink to try to find his brother before he had to get himself to cover.
Dual wielding the pistols, Randall scrambled to get out of the middle of the fray, and fired both weapons multiple times at close-range into the mass of Butler’s men, dropping two more of them.
After taking a moment to comprehend that his last son had just been killed and with his .45 shot from his hands, Butler snapped out of his disbelief and drew the backup hammerless Smith & Wesson .38 snubnose revolver he kept in his vest pocket. He instantly squeezed off two shots at Randall, who dived for cover behind a log to avoid the bullets.
Meanwhile, Thomas wasn’t completely helpless himself. When he and Randall had bid their father farewell, he’d taken Marcus’ Glock 22 .40 in a concealed carry holster from the nightstand, and tucked it into the rear waistband of his pants under his jacket. The guy that had searched him hadn’t done a proper frisk, and missed it entirely.
By the time he got himself to cover behind a cedar tree, he realized that he and Randall had each bolted in opposite directions. From his unique vantage point, downhill of Butler’s militia while Randall and their rescue force were above them, he saw more of the Compound’s men led by Mitchum climbing up from the road to join the fight.
Thomas aimed the Glock and began firing at them.
* * *
Jane didn’t give herself any time to appreciate her clean kill of George. Her cousins were on their knees in the middle of at least a dozen of Butler’s men. She immediately went to work finding new targets while trying to keep track of where Thomas and Randall were.
Next to her, Marcus, Bruce, Sam, and more than two dozen Garden City residents were lined up with her, laying down a hail of blistering fire over Butler’s forces and steadily advancing. All of them were armed with bolt action or lever action hunting rifles, with the exception of Jane and Marcus who each had an AR-15 to deliver a faster rate of fire.
Jane recognized Thomas’s voice broke through the loud din: “Reinforcements! Reinforcements coming up the hill!”
She broke her focus away from the ground immediately below her, and looked farther down. Sure enough, it looked like the men that had come up the road had broken off that route and were now coming up to aid Butler’s force.
If Randall’s theory were correct, the rescue would be the smaller force, but that didn’t make them a small threat. For as much as Thomas’s warning had helped her and the people fighting beside her, it also seemed to bolster the spirits of the main force, and they started to pull together and return fire. She heard the sickening sound of a bullet ripping through the head of somebody just a couple feet from her, and involuntarily buried her face in the dirt.
“Roll right, roll right!” Bruce said, slapping her hard on the shoulder.
Jane automatically did as she was told, and found herself behind a tree with her uncle. Seeing him safe and unharmed let her shake off the shock.
“You’re doing great,” said Bruce, as he worked the bolt on his .30-06 Springfield. “ I’ll cover, you get behind that rock and get ready to cover me.”
* * *
Once his Glock had clicked empty, all Thomas could do was throw himself to the ground and stay still as bullets whizzed back and forth over him.
Jane, Marcus, Bruce, Sam, and the Garden City force were moving steadily downhill while firing, but the Compound’s men led by Mitchum from below were simultaneously fighting their way uphill against them, while also trying to reconnect with the small handful of Butler’s men that were left.
Despite being under a hail of gunfire and with several of his men falling dead around him, Mitchum kept his cool. He carefully aimed and then fired his SKS as he led the advance, dropping a Garden City fighter and sending him rolling dead down the slope.
“Link up with Butler!” Mitchum shouted, reloading his weapon.
“Don’t worry about me!” Butler shouted back from around thirty yards way with his remaining men around him. “Just push back! We still outnumber ‘em! We can win this thing!”
One Garden City fighter sprinted ahead of the rest towards Butler’s position. Butler aimed his .38 snubnose and squeezed off two more shots. Despite the gun’s short barrel, hours of practice on the range had turned Butler into a decent shot with the small weapon. Sure enough, both shots connected with the running man. He stumbled forward and then dropped dead.
Butler swung open the cylinder of his revolver to see he had just one bullet left. He snapped the cylinder shut and observed the furious battle going on before him.
Bullets were flying everywhere, from all directions, and nobody was formally uniformed. Almost everyone on both sides were dressed in either hunting camouflage or military surplus clothes, so the only real indication of who was friend or foe seemed to be that Randall, Jane, Bruce, Marcus, and the Garden City residents were uphill and Butler, Mitchum, and the Compound’s forces were beneath them.
And Thomas was pretty much dead center of it all. To make things worse, he’d used up all the rounds in his Glock, and his hunting knife had been taken. He was unarmed and in the middle of a fierce shootout with a seemingly infinite number of bullets whizzing past his head and hitting the dirt and the trees mere inches from his body.
While he lay there, praying he wouldn’t take a stray round before the battle was over, he heard heavy footsteps rapidly approaching. He glanced up and saw Mitchum at a dead run on a trajectory that would bring him within arm’s reach. Thomas waited until the last possible moment, and kicked his leg up suddenly, tripping Mitchum and sending him tumbling to the ground.
Crossfire be damned, Thomas wasn’t going to let Mitchum escape. He was up and on the man before he could grab his SKS to defend himself.
The two men fell right into throwing a flurry of punches at each other. Thomas landed a few good bell-ringers to Mitchum’s head, but for every blow he landed, Mitchum got him two or three times solid to the body. The last one just about knocked Thomas’s wind out entirely. He was worried that one more would break his ribs.<
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Thomas recognized that Mitchum’s punishing blows came from in close, so he kept throwing long jabs to try and keep his opponent farther away while he tried to figure out what to do. Mercifully, whether by chance or because nobody knew exactly who was who, nobody seemed to be shooting towards them at least.
Finally, a desperate opportunity presented itself, in the form of a downed pine. Thomas maneuvered a bit and made a huge gamble. He charged full-force into Mitchum, fast enough that Mitchum didn’t have time to react with anything other than another punch to the ribs. The force of the blow hurt, but it didn’t break anything. Nor did it stop Thomas’s momentum as he crashed into Mitchum.
Thomas had come from downhill, which let him get under Mitchum’s center of balance. He got him briefly off the ground, long enough to completely unbalance him, and then ran Mitchum into the fallen pine, right onto the jagged end of a long, broken branch!
Thomas heard the wet crunching sound of the sharp end of wood piercing Mitchum’s back and bursting through his abdomen. Mitchum started convulsing and coughing, the branch having impaled him cleanly through.
Mitchum looked down at the bloodied, pointed end of the branch sticking out from his gut. He looked back up at Thomas in disbelief.
“You…. you… killed me…” he managed to gasp out as the convulsing got worse.
Thomas turned away as Mitchum expired and went limp.
On the ground, not ten feet away, was his Colt Peacemaker. Thomas picked it up and found a target. He fired once, twice, thrice. He missed with the first shot, but the second and third shots connected and dropped the target.
Then out of the corner of his eye, Thomas saw somebody running away from the battle. As he swung around to engage he recognized it as his brother, sprinting uphill. Whatever or whoever Randall was following, Thomas wanted to be there to back him up. He took as deep a breath as he could after the severe beating his chest had taken, and started putting one foot in front of the other.
* * *
Randall wasn’t running away from the direction of the battle because he was a coward. Rather, he had seen one of Butler’s men running from the battle and resolved not to let him get away.
He fired his Walther 9mm at the man when he turned to engage him. The man’s head snapped back in a spray of blood and he fell dead, but the slide of the Walther locked open to signal to Randall that it was now empty.
Instinctively, Randall’s hand went for his belt, only to be reminded that his spare magazines had been taken along with his guns when he’d been captured. He glanced down at the Colt 1911, but didn’t have time to check the magazine to see how many rounds he had left, because he had finally caught sight of Butler.
Butler had seen that the battle was turning against him. He had spotted the impaled Mitchum resting motionless if not dead against the tree, and the wounded Phil and a couple other of his injured men already had their hands raised in surrender as the Garden City force steadily advanced as a cohesive and well organized unit.
Cowardly bastards, Butler thought to himself, knowing that trying to rally his forces at this point was borderline useless. Mitchum’s reinforcements had certainly helped keep the battle’s outcome in doubt for a while, but despite being numerically superior, the fact that they were downhill of the Garden City force and fighting their way uphill under a blistering hail of bullets and taking casualties left and right meant they could only advance so far before becoming pinned down like they now were.
Rather than surrender, Butler stayed low to escape the melee, and was now climbing up the ridge to get away.
Randall looked up, and saw the ridge Butler was climbing was at least a few hundred feet up. If he remembered the map right, the other side was a cliff that dropped away precipitously hundreds of feet into a deep and narrow river valley.
Near the top of the ridge, Butler paused to look behind him. He saw Randall coming for him in a hurry.
“Damn you!” Butler cursed him and started climbing again.
The days that Randall had spent on foot since the EMP really built his strength and endurance, and he easily gained ground. He got to the crest of the hill just after Butler went over it and jumped.
Having seen his quarry look around before jumping, Randall took a leap of faith, trusting there was something for him to land on.
Thankfully, there was a broad, flat expanse of bare rock about eight feet below on a slope in front of the cliff. Once he landed on his feet, Randall popped right up, looking around for Butler.
A quick scan showed only one tree clinging tenaciously near the edge of the cliff. Randall raised his 1911 and aimed for the tree, waiting for Butler to show himself.
Sure enough, less than two seconds later, Butler swung around to take a shot at Randall with his .38.
BANG! BANG!
The two men had fired almost simultaneously… and both had missed: Randall’s bullet smacked into the trunk of the tree, while Butler’s whizzed right past Randall’s head.
Randall automatically adjusted his aim to take a second shot only to find the slide had locked open for want of ammunition. He dropped his Colt on the rock and charged the tree, wondering how far he’d make it before Butler got another shot off, only to see Butler discard his .38 for lack of ammunition as well.
The two men collided. Randall pinned Butler’s arms to his side and rammed his knee up into the other man’s midsection. He then got a few good punches in to Butler’s gut and face before Butler managed to throw him off and send him tumbling to the ground.
Butler stumbled forward, clearly more worn out by the race up the ridge and aching badly from his wounded shoulder where Bruce had shot him days before, while Randall quickly sprang back up to his feet.
What Butler lacked in energy, though, he more than made up with in skill and pure killer instinct. If Randall hadn’t been much lighter on his feet, Butler would have made short work of him, instead of having to wear him down. But wear him down he did. Butler handily parried or dodged every one of Randall’s punches, and conserved his energy, counterattacking only when he knew he had a sure shot.
Over and over again, Randall found his attacks just opening him up to a crushing hook to the temple, then a massive undercut to the stomach, and then a brutal punch to the ribs. But the young man fought valiantly on against his more experienced opponent.
Another hard punch to the face left Randall dazed and stumbling back, and Butler seized the advantage, hammering away with four more meaty punches to the gut and face that dropped Randall to the ground.
Butler reached down, grabbed the collar of Randall’s jacket to pick him back up, and then held him still for another blow to the face that sent a burst of blood from Randall’s mouth flying into Butler’s face.
Randall’s legs turned to jelly and Butler let him collapse this time. He laid there sprawled out on the ground before Butler, his face beaten to a bloody and unrecognizable pulp, his body completely and utterly drained of energy.
Butler stood victoriously but panting heavily. Randall had been an easier opponent than he had anticipated. He pulled out his knife from its sheath, bent over, and held the point of the blade to Randall’s throat.
“This is how you did Gale, isn’t it?” he asked, looming over Randall, holding the knife tightly in his fingers. “You stabbed him to death. Not once or twice even, you just kept on stabbing and stabbing. I think I’ll do the same to you, starting with your throat.”
But to Randall’s surprise, Butler didn’t stab him. Instead, after a moment, he pulled the knife away.
“No,” Butler shook his head. “Too easy.”
He grabbed Randall’s jacket collar and stood up, dragging him towards the edge of the cliff. Randall mustered the last bit of strength he had and tried to get himself to his feet.
As Randall struggled and tried to get up, Butler raised his foot and brought it crashing down over Randall’s ribs, knocking the wind out of him again. Randall went still again from the pain and Butler continued
on hauling him to the edge of the cliff. When he reached the end, he crouched down to get a more solid grip on Randall.
“Good riddance,” grimaced Butler as he prepared to throw Randall over to his death.
Randall closed his eyes. Butler had won and there was nothing more that he could do to resist. Butler was going to throw him over into the rapids hundreds of feet below and that would be it —
— BANG!
Randall opened his eyes to see Thomas standing there holding his Peacemaker, gunsmoke coming out of the end of the barrel!
Then he looked up at Butler to see a gaping hole had opened up in his chest with copious amounts of blood pouring out and spilling over the ground.
With Butler mortally wounded and distracted, Randall managed to roll himself up.
“Yeah, good riddance,” Randall sneered.
With his last reserve of energy and a yell, Randall hurled himself against Butler and pushed him right over the edge of the cliff!
Randall heard only a long scream later punctuated by a large but distant splash.
Thomas ran up to join Randall, and together they stepped over right to the edge of the cliff, where they saw Butler’s body floating down towards some rapids, before finally disappearing into the torrent of white water.
At long last, Lewis Butler was gone.
“Thanks,” Randall managed to say, still panting heavily.
“You rescued me from Butler before,” Thomas grinned as he holstered the Peacemaker. “So I thought I should repay the favor.”
It was only then that Randall realized there was no longer any gunfire coming from the other side of the ridge. Was the battle over?
Sure enough, Jane, Marcus, Bruce, Sam, and the surviving Garden City fighters soon appeared over the ridge and stepped down to join them. Sam’s bleeding shoulder had a makeshift cloth bandage wrapped around it from a bullet he had taken, but Jane, Marcus, and Bruce were each unscathed.
“Well?” Randall asked. “Is it over?”
Marcus nodded.
“It’s over.”
Our Survival: A Collection of Post Apocalyptic EMP Survival Thrillers Page 47