I guess they caught up to the dog.
Sorry, dog.
Ana stood perfectly still, barely breathing, as a suffocating silence returned to the building around her. In front and to her left, Chris had come fully awake and sat without moving. Like her, the girl was waiting for something to happen. The poor kid looked like she could use another day’s sleep—
Clack-clack! as the doorknob jiggled next to her.
Ana spun back to the security window as a masked face peered through the glass, gray eyes shifting left and right in search of something inside the room. The doorknob continued to move as the man tried to open it, before suddenly giving up.
The face also disappeared from the window.
What…?
Ana exchanged a quick glance with Chris, who had stood up, her back pressed against the wall. Even with hardly any lights in the room, it was easy to tell that the teenager was trembling in the darkness.
Ana slowly, very slowly, eased back the hammer on the SIG Sauer with her thumb. She waited to hear the soft click as the hammer was cocked all the way back, and when it finally came it was lost in the sudden—
Bam! of something smashing into the doorknob on the other side. The metal object buckled instantly and flew across the room like a projectile. It disappeared into a patch of shadows where she could hear it rolling around loudly on the floor.
I guess they found us!
Chris scrambled into one of the corners near the back of the room, and Ana didn’t have the heart to tell her that that wasn’t going to do any bit of good. But she didn’t, and instead remained focused on the door even as another bam! shook it.
Again: Bam!
And again: Bam!
There were flickers of movement through the security window and through the hole where the doorknob used to be every time the Raggedy Man threw his body into the door. Each time he assaulted the frame, the desk pinned against it would slide half an inch back, then another half inch…
Oh, shit!
She had no choice. Ana came out of hiding and moved around the desk until she was in front of it. She grabbed the edge with both hands and shoved the heavy furniture forward with a heave. The desk hadn’t thumped! against the door for more than a second before she saw a pair of eyes glaring in at her through the piece of security glass.
They locked eyes for one second, before Ana picked up the gun she’d placed on top of the desk and fired. The security window exploded, and the face on the other side disappeared in a shower of glass.
The gunshot echoed throughout the building and Ana thought, Well, now you’ve done it. Now you’ve gone and done it!
It didn’t take long before she heard the same pounding boots that had chased the dog up the hallway earlier. Except this time they were coming toward her, and she knew that because they were getting louder and louder.
Ana checked on Chris. The girl seemed to be trying desperately to squeeze her tiny frame into the corner, to escape from the classroom. They exchanged a glance, and Ana wondered if her own face mirrored the teenager’s terrified expression. It was probably close, even though she told herself to put on a brave face for the girl’s sake.
Ana turned back to the door just as a face—a new one—appeared in the rectangular opening where the security window used to be. Green eyes, surrounded by pulsating veins, the white cloth covering the face seeming to glow in the hallway darkness.
She lifted the gun to fire again, but the figure disappeared first, just before something crashed into the door.
Bam!
Her legs were pressed against the desk when that happened, and Ana felt the heavy object moving slightly against the attack.
Another bam! and she felt it again, along with the desk sliding back slightly.
“Chris!” Ana shouted. “I need—”
Chris was there before she could finish. The kid shoved herself against the desk next to her and pushed with everything she had.
Bam!
Filthy and torn clothing flashed across the security window and the round hole where the doorknob used to be as more figures appeared in the hallway and began throwing themselves with wild abandon into the door.
Bam!
One after another, after another...
Bam!
Then, before Ana and Chris even had the opportunity to push the desk back into place—
Bam!
The assault was coming harder and faster, like sledgehammers raining against the door, each pounding attack pushing the desk back an inch.
Bam!
Then another inch…
Bam!
And another…
BAM!
Eighteen
BAM!
BAM!
BAM!
She told herself it wasn’t possible that each crash against the door was louder than the last. It couldn’t have been reality, unless there was a new and stronger Raggedy Man every time. Which was impossible.
Wasn’t it?
It didn’t sound like it, though, and Ana struggled to keep the large desk pinned against the door even with Chris’s help. The girl was already halfway to the floor, with her back turned against the desk while her legs pushed backward, grimacing each time the bam! moved the door into the classroom another inch.
At least it was always just an inch and not a foot, and they could always shove the barricade back into place after every impact. It became a battle of how long the Raggedy Men could keep smashing into the door with their bodies and how long she and the teenager could keep pushing back. Ana didn’t have to tell Chris what to do. She knew instinctively.
Bam!
Push!
Bam!
Push!
Ana glimpsed harried movements on the other side of the broken security window and through the hole where the doorknob used to be with every collision. There was also the flurry of torn and fraying fabrics—red and white and black and brown and green and sometimes even pink—flickering against the darkness. The large figures were taking turns violently throwing themselves into the slab of wood, sending an unending torrent of unyielding bodies against them.
Over and over…
Bam!
Push!
And over and over…
Bam!
Push!
But the door, thank God, wasn’t any closer to opening and letting them in, even if vertical and horizontal and diagonal cracks were beginning to form up and down its length. She could see them appearing one by one—first along the top, then the middle, and finally near the bottom. The Raggedy Men might not be able to push their way in, but they were going to destroy the door trying.
And then what? What were she and the girl going to do then?
Bam!
Push!
What could they do? They were trapped inside the classroom. There was only one way in and out, and it was surrounded by Raggedy Men. The only way to safety was through the dark hulks trying to get in.
Bam!
Push!
There was the window, but they weren’t going to be able to climb up there. It was too high and too small, and even if she could boost Chris up somehow—
Bam!
Push!
Chris was grunting, pain washing across the girl’s face every time she dug against the floor with her boots to once again shove the desk into place. Ana’s own hands were starting to tire and become numb from the constant back and forth. She had put the SIG Sauer away in her jacket pocket to make both hands available, but she was very aware of its weight. The knife, too, in her left sleeve.
Bam!
Push!
Chris looked up and over at her. Fear, pain, and a dozen other emotions raced across the girl’s face.
“Keep pushing!” Ana shouted, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. The only other thought that crossed her mind was, “We’re probably going to die, Chris!”
Yeah, that’s not going to do either one of us any good.
Chris nodded in response
and braced herself on the slippery tiled floor and pushed back as—
A ferocious bam!, but instead of just the door rocking backward against the desk like all the other times, this time it dislodged a large section of wood that snapped loose and shot past Ana and Chris and landed on the other side of the classroom. If it had hit one of them, Ana was pretty sure they would be more than a little dazed, if not on the floor bleeding.
Jesus, that was close!
A face covered in black clothes except for the eyes appeared in the gaping hole in the middle of the door. Blue eyes seemingly glowing in sync to the spidery veins around them peered in at her in the brief second or two the Raggedy Men paused their assault.
Then the face disappeared, and bam!
Push!
Bam!
Push!
More chunks of the door came loose as new cracks began appearing at even faster intervals than before. Dangerously sharp splinters flicked past Ana’s face, others pelting the glossy desk countertop in front of her. One or two might have almost struck Chris in the back of the head, though the girl didn’t seem to notice.
This is it. This is it…
The Raggedy Men weren’t going to be able to open the door—not with her and Chris refusing to yield—but they weren’t going to have to, because very soon there wouldn’t be a door to separate them.
How long was “soon?”
One minute, if she was lucky.
Less than that, if she wasn’t.
Bam! as the top half of the door came unglued and shattered, leaving behind a gaping hole that revealed the outlines of four coated figures in the hallway beyond. They stared in at her, chests heaving, while the veins that surrounded their eyes glowed unnaturally in the darkness that surrounded them. At that very instant, they looked more like monsters than men.
Maybe that’s not too far from the truth…
“Chris,” Ana said as she began backing away.
The teenager turned, saw what had happened, and scrambled to her feet and did the same. “Oh, God…”
“Get ready to run.”
“What?”
“Get ready to run,” Ana repeated. Her voice came through surprisingly calm for some reason. She wasn’t sure why or how, but the panic she had expected wasn’t there. She was in control even as she slipped her hand into her jacket pocket and took out the gun.
Chris looked over at her, her eyes impossibly wide. “I don’t—” she began, but didn’t get the chance to finish before the first Raggedy Man threw himself through the hole in the door, breaking free more parts of the wooden frame before landing on the desk with a clumsy whump!
Ana shot him in the chest—the biggest part of him that she could be sure she would hit—as he was picking himself up. He seemed to pause, as if unsure what had just happened. She fired again, this time striking him in the neck. He grabbed at the wound even as he attempted to crawl across the splintered-covered countertop, only to fall off the edge and collapse to the floor in a pile of torn black and brown fabrics.
Ana stumbled farther back, Chris mirroring her actions step by step. “Get ready, Chris,” Ana said.
“What?” the girl said. “Get ready for what?”
“Get ready.”
“Ana. Get ready for wha—”
A Raggedy Man smashed his way through what was left of the door, his arms swinging wildly at jagged remains of the frame and creating an even bigger opening. If he even cared at all that Ana had just shot one of his own, it didn’t show in what little of his face that she could see.
The man was on the desk and climbing over it when Ana shot him, too, hitting him in the shoulder. She had been aiming for his chest, but the shot went slightly off-target because he was moving too frantically. It was enough, though, to make the Raggedy Man twist slightly, and only for half a second before he launched himself like a human missile over the desk.
Chris’s gasps as the Raggedy Man landed on the floor between them and the desk were almost as loud as Ana’s own. Ana had seen nightcrawlers doing anything to get to their prey, but she’d never seen a human do the same. Were these Raggedy Men even still human?
Oh, shut up and shoot him! Shoot him now!
The Raggedy Man was straightening up in front of her, barely three feet away, when Ana lifted the gun with both hands, aimed for the spot between his visible eyes, and pulled the trigger. His head snapped back, blood spraying the moonlit desktop behind him in slivers of dark red streaks.
There was no time for Ana to feel anything even resembling triumph, because even before the Raggedy Man could fall down, the other two were already through the door. While one leaped onto the desk, the other one raced around it.
Ana shot the one that was flying through the air at her—and missed!
No! her mind shouted just before the man crashed into her, knocking her back and into a waiting student desk and upending it and everything else in the immediate area. Ana would have screamed as the sharp edge of something—possibly the desk, or maybe a knife?—speared a part of her spine, but she was too busy falling while trying desperately to maintain her grip on the gun at the same time.
Don’t lose the gun! Don’t lose the gun!
Her lungs exploded when she finally slammed against what must have been a brick wall covered in jagged spikes. Somehow, somehow, she still had the gun in her hand when the Raggedy Man jumped on top of her like some kind of goddamn toad. A large, massive man-size toad whose weight crushed her further into the hard classroom floor as if he were trying to pulverize her into nothingness.
Someone screamed (Chris!), but Ana didn’t have the precious seconds it would have taken to check on the girl. She was too busy trying not to die, because that was exactly what would happen if the owner of the pair of piercing black eyes perched on top of her had his way.
No way in hell. No way it ends here!
She lifted the gun, pointed it at the man’s face from almost point-blank range, and pulled the trigger.
The Raggedy Man’s head twisted slightly as the bullet tore through his left cheek underneath the rags (No! No, dammit, no!) and struck the ceiling above and behind him. Blood spurted out of the gash, but it wasn’t a killing shot, and Ana knew it as soon as the man grabbed her wrist—the same one holding the gun—and pounded it down against the cold, hard tiled floor.
There was pain, but it was more the shock of having missed from so close (No, dammit!) and realizing she wasn’t going to get a follow-up shot to make up for it that numbed every inch of her. She let out a scream anyway; not that it halted the Raggedy Man, who lifted her hand and brought it down again, and again, and again.
She figured out why he was doing that quickly: because she refused to let go of the gun.
Hold onto it! her mind screamed. Don’t let go!
But she was losing the battle, and each blow against the unyielding floor sent flurries of pain through the entire length of her arm. Her attacker didn’t stop until her fingers finally (No!) let go of the SIG—she was almost entirely sure every bone in all five fingers were broken by now—and the gun clattered away.
Another scream came from behind the Raggedy Man sitting on top of her.
Chris!
Ana could barely make out the forms, but there were two of them—one with the other thrown over its shoulder—as they disappeared out of her peripheral vision. She knew the smaller of the two was Chris just from the screaming. The teenager continued to cry out even when they were in the hallway, then moving away…
No.
No, no, no!
But Ana couldn’t do anything for the teenager. She could barely do anything for herself. She had lost all sensation in her right hand, which she should probably be grateful for, because it kept her from feeling the pain. Which pain? All of the pain. The one surging through her right arm and the one still pulsing up and down her spine, to name just two. There was more. There was so, so much more.
If she thought the Raggedy Man would go easy on her now that she had lost
the gun, she was very wrong. He grabbed her throat with his other hand and lifted her off the floor even as he climbed off her. He raised her up as if she weighed nothing, as if she wasn’t fighting and struggling against his grip and punching at his arm every inch of the way.
No, no, no!
Not like this. Not like this!
The Raggedy Man holding her life in his hand was an unnatural monstrosity. She hadn’t realized it before, but there was something abnormal about his size. All of their sizes. Every Raggedy Man had been huge, well over six feet tall, and wide. It was almost as if a pro football team had decided to dress up in leftover clothing and covered up their faces in the aftermath of The Purge.
It was all surreal and confusing, but maybe that had a little something to do with her inability to catch her breath. The man’s fingers were around her throat, choking her inch by inch, and all she could manage were desperate wheezing sounds.
She gave up trying to fight the Raggedy Man’s monstrous strength and momentarily forced herself to forget that every finger on her right hand was probably broken. She pushed all of that away—far, far into the back of her mind—and reached for the handle of the knife in her left jacket sleeve.
There. There!
The Raggedy Man’s eyes shifted from her face and went downward at the very moment that she stabbed at his neck.
Go for the neck! Always go for the neck!
He threw her.
What?
She didn’t know how he did it, but he flung her as if she were little more than a bug just as she was about to push the point of the knife into the side of his throat.
No! her mind screamed even as she sailed through the air and crashed into another student desk. The furniture broke underneath her as Ana spilled back to the floor, clutching the knife as if her life depended on it.
Get up! Get up now, or you’re going to die!
She scrambled to her knees, her vision blurring the entire time even as the pain that was rampaging through every joint and appendage reached the unbearable stage. She turned her head—slowly, way too slowly—when she heard him coming. He was loud and devoid of grace, like a bull caught in a stampede. Or leading it.
After The Purge: Vendetta Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 40