“Maybe,” she said.
“We should go out and help them.”
“Wait…”
“Why?”
“Just wait.”
“But why?” Greg asked as he lifted the nail gun slightly and tightened his fingers around the grip.
Greg was right. The kids weren’t going to make it. The psycho was faster, and he was catching up with every passing heartbeat. The man was barely ten feet away from the girl, the slower of the two, when the boy slowed down again and turned slightly, and fired again.
Denim jerked one shoulder back (Nice shot, kid! Emily thought) before he resumed his pursuit. More red droplets pelted the sidewalk, these new ones coming from his left shoulder. Getting shot had slowed the man down for maybe half a second, but it hadn’t done anything to stop him.
The boy knew it too because he turned around and, still running, shouted, “Faster! We gotta go faster! He’s not gonna stop!”
The girl didn’t say anything back, but she did throw a quick glance over her shoulder. When she looked forward again, Emily saw raw fear on her face. Her eyes were bulging, her cheeks turning cherry red. And the poor kid was starting to slow down, even as every inch of her seemed to be straining harder and harder…
She’s not going to make it.
If the girl didn’t make it, then the boy wouldn’t, either. There was almost no chance he was going to abandon her. They were either boyfriend and girlfriend or siblings. Either way, if she was caught, then so was he.
Shit, Emily thought when she saw the boy trying desperately to reload the gun. No wonder he hadn’t fired again, because he couldn’t; the pistol was empty.
“What’s he doing?” Greg asked.
“He’s trying to reload the gun,” Emily said.
She hadn’t gotten gun out, when she saw the magazine falling out of the mag well as the boy was trying to force it in, and clanging off the pavement behind him. The look of horror on the boy’s face told Emily everything she needed to know: That was either his last magazine or…
No, that was it. The kid, while trying to reload, had just dropped his last magazine, and now he was dead meat. They both were.
Oh, kid. That was stupid. That was really stupid.
“We have to help—” Greg was saying.
She didn’t hear the rest of it because Emily was too busy snatching the nail gun out of Greg’s hand and running to the door. The contractor was so shocked that it didn’t take very much effort to pry the construction tool from him.
“Emily!” Greg shouted.
She barely heard her name as she pulled the deadbolt back and jerked the door open and ran outside almost all in the same motion. She flexed her fingers around the grip of the bright orange nail gun as she pounded down the concrete walkway. It’d been a long time since she held something that could even be considered a weapon in her hands.
“Hey!” Emily shouted. “Get inside!”
Emily was waving her free arm to get their attention, not that she really needed to. The teens were almost at her driveway when she burst outside, and they would have spotted her even if they hadn’t heard her.
Without hesitation, the girl made a sharp right turn up Emily’s driveway, the boy doing the same behind her. But even as he made the turn, Denim was almost directly on top of the boy. Bright sunlight glinted off the very sharp and bloodied edge of the ax in the man’s hand.
The kid’s not going to make it. Shit. He’s not going to make it!
“Get down!” she shouted.
Thank God the kid listened to her. Except he didn’t just drop to the hard concrete, but instead threw himself sideways and into the grass. He landed on his chest and face just as the ax sliced the air where his head had been only a heartbeat ago.
Finally, Emily got the confirmation she’d been seeking: Denim’s bloodshot eyes, thin strips of blood flowing down the corners, and his heaving chest. He was like Don Taylor. Like Barnes. George Benson. And Mrs. Landry.
Psycho.
A quick flash of clothing as the girl was almost on top of her.
“Get inside!” Emily shouted at her.
She wasn’t sure if the girl even heard her, but the teenager didn’t stop and ran past Emily and into the house.
“Greg!” Emily shouted.
“I got her!” the contractor shouted back from somewhere behind her.
Emily lifted the nail gun, took aim, and squeezed the trigger.
Pfft!
She hit Denim in the chest with the first two-inch nail.
Pfft!
And missed entirely with the second.
Pfft!
But sent the third one into the side of the man’s neck purely by accident. She’d been aiming for the biggest part of him—his chest.
Better lucky than good!
Not that two nails stopped the psycho when the boy’s gunshots hadn’t. Denim kept coming, but not at her. He was moving, single-mindedly, toward the boy, who was crawling on the yard between them.
“Pete!” The girl, shouting from behind Emily.
The boy, Pete, was scrambling on all fours, and it took Emily a moment to figure out why: He was crawling toward the fallen gun that he’d dropped, buried about five yards among the grass in front of him. If he was aware of Denim stalking him from behind, he didn’t show it. She didn’t know if that was bravery or stupidity on the kid’s part.
Either way, she couldn’t let him die.
Emily squeezed the trigger on the nail gun again and sent five more rounds at Denim.
Pfft-pfft-pfft-pfft-pfft!
She struck him two more times in the chest, hit him in the left shoulder with a third (almost at the same place where Pete had shot him earlier), but missed with the rest.
And still, Denim ignored her and focused on catching up to Pete.
The man was raising the ax again, preparing to deliver the killing blow, when Emily took very careful aim this time. She used the last eight shots as reference and squeezed the trigger for the ninth time.
Pfft!
She hit Denim in the forehead, right between the eyes, and he snapped his head back and fell to the ground. Sunlight glinted off the nails embedded in his body, but it was that one nail in his forehead that had done the trick—
Or not, because the man started to get back up.
Sonofabitch, die already! Emily thought as she calmly walked toward him and fired again, and again, and again.
She sent three more into his forehead.
Pfft-pfft-pfft!
She could feel the clip getting lighter but didn’t stop pulling the trigger.
Pfft-pfft-pfft-pfft-pfft!
Until, finally, the man fell down.
And this time, he didn’t get back up.
“Get back inside!” a voice shouted from behind her. Greg.
She glanced back and saw Greg pulling the girl and Pete, who had retrieved his gun, into the house.
“Come on, Emily!” the big man shouted.
She didn’t head back right away. Instead, she hurried down the driveway and onto the sidewalk, then grabbed the magazine that the boy had dropped earlier. There was blood on it, but she wiped it away—
Movement out of the corner of her eyes made her stop and look across the street.
Don Taylor was standing in the open doorway of Mrs. Landry’s house, that bloody gardening hoe/ninja weapon hanging loosely, almost nonchalantly, in his right hand. He looked across the street back at her, as if wanting her to know that he’d seen her.
Then he smiled.
Sonofabitch, Emily thought as she locked eyes with her former neighbor. The nail gun felt heavy again in her hand, and she thought about launching a few nails in his direction, but it wouldn’t have done any good. Don was hopelessly beyond the construction tool’s range.
Don seemed to know that too, and kept his distance.
Crazy, but not stupid.
The mild-mannered forty-something that Emily was used to seeing puttering around his yards
was gone, replaced by this…psycho. And he wasn’t a stupid psycho, either, because he hadn’t charged across the street and put himself into her line of fire. Instead, he’d held back, watching, and smiling.
And waiting.
Waiting for what?
For her to let her guard down.
For the right time to attack.
Don Taylor had become a predator.
Then the man turned around and went back inside Mrs. Landry’s house, closing the door softly—impossibly softly—behind him.
The hairs on the back of Emily’s neck spiked as she did the same. But instead of walking calmly back to her own house, where Greg was holding the door open for her with an almost shocked look on his face, Emily picked up her pace and just barely managed not to run inside.
Chapter 8
“How many left?” Greg asked.
She held up the nail gun and counted the nails inside the clip, visible through a slit along the side. “About a dozen.”
“You really shot that guy up.”
Emily couldn’t tell if that was amazement or horror on Greg’s face as he said it.
She said, “He kept coming; I had to make sure.”
“I know, it’s just that…”
“What?”
“Man, you really shot that guy up,” Greg said again.
“Sometimes that’s what it takes.”
His eyebrows raised slightly in a And how do you know that? expression, but the words themselves didn’t come out.
She looked over at the two kids while Greg went to check that the door was locked. Pete was sitting on one of the chairs in the dining room while the girl, Savannah, used a roll of paper to wipe blood off his scraped elbows, chin, and forehead. Emily hadn’t seen it earlier, but before he even took the spill on her front lawn and tore up parts of his face, Pete already had bloody elbows and forearms, and his shirt was partially torn.
Emily put the nail gun down on the table and picked up the automatic Pete had been using. It was a 1911 model SIG Sauer, and it felt very light unloaded.
“Where did you get this?” she asked the teenagers.
“It’s my dad’s,” Pete said.
Emily took out the magazine she’d salvaged, that Pete had dropped.
“You know how to put it in?” he asked her.
She smiled. “I think I can manage.”
She slid the mag into the gun and chambered one of the .45 caliber ACP rounds.
“I guess you do,” Pete said.
Greg walked back to them. “What were you guys doing out there, anyway?” he asked the teenagers.
“We were making a run for the gate,” Pete said.
“On foot?”
“In my Honda.”
“But the gate was closed,” Savannah said. “We, uh, forgot that you needed electricity to open it.”
“By the time we realized our mistake, they were all over us,” Pete said.
“‘They?’” Emily asked.
“There were three of them. The guy in the denim was just one. They came out of nowhere, like they’d been waiting at the gate all this time for someone to try to open it.”
“What happened to the other two?” Greg asked.
“It was nuts,” Pete said, shaking his head. “The two of us were trying to push the gate open, and here they come, racing out from three different buildings. I thought it was some kind of organized ambush, but two of them just changed directions at the last minute and went at each other. They were chopping each other up. Except for the one in the denim. He came after us.”
“Why didn’t you get back into the car?”
“I panicked and ran,” Savannah said, looking away embarrassingly.
“It’s not your fault,” Pete said. He put his hand over hers and squeezed it. “The guy in the denim,” he continued, “he was almost on top of us anyway. It would have taken too long to run back to the car, get in, and reverse outta there.”
Pete was putting on a good face, but Emily didn’t believe him. She recognized a young man trying to help his girlfriend out.
“Where’s your house?” Emily asked.
“211. On the other side.” Pete looked at her, then at Greg. “You guys live here?”
“She does,” Greg said. “I was just working here yesterday when everything happened.”
“What did happen?”
“We tried looking for news on the TV when everyone went crazy, but there wasn’t anything,” Savannah said.
“Is it happening everywhere?” Pete asked.
Emily shook her head. “We don’t know, but…”
“But what?”
“We think so. Whatever it is, it’s happening in other parts of the city, too.”
“What is ‘it?’” Pete asked.
“We don’t know,” Greg said. “That’s the problem.”
“Their eyes,” Savannah said. “Something’s wrong with their eyes. The man out there, and Pete’s neighbor when he attacked us. They were all bleeding out of their eyes.”
“Psychos,” Greg said.
“Psychos?”
“That’s what I call them.”
“Sounds appropriate, I guess,” Pete said.
“Where are your parents?” Emily asked the teenagers.
“Mine was at work,” Pete said.
“Mine, too,” Savannah said.
“Do you guys know what happened to these psychos? Why they became like that? Like Savannah said, they were bleeding out of their eyes. It’s like they became possessed or something.”
Or something, Emily thought.
She said, “You said your neighbor attacked you, Pete?”
The boy nodded. “Benny. He goes to the same school as us. He started banging on the door, but I saw his eyes through the peephole, and I didn’t open it. After that, he attacked Mrs. Bailer across the street. Killed her with his bare hands.”
“I almost threw up,” Savannah said.
“When that happened, we locked everything and hid in my room upstairs. We stayed there all day and all night. We saw the others outside, roaming around. Sometimes attacking one another. They were all like Benny and that other guy. Psychos.”
“And their eyes,” Savannah said again. Emily wasn’t sure if she was telling them what she’d seen or trying to convince herself. “Their eyes…”
Pete leaned over and put his arm around her shoulder, and the two teenagers smiled at each other. Or tried to, anyway.
Ah, true love.
Or very young love, anyway.
Emily hadn’t given Pete back his gun and was surprised the kid hadn’t asked for it. She held the pistol up now. “I’m going to keep this, okay?”
“Um, what?” Pete said.
“Your dad probably taught you how to shoot. Is that right?”
Pete nodded. “He did. How’d you know?”
“Lucky guess. Your dad taught you, but I was in the Army. After that, I was in private security. I spent half of your lifetime learning how to handle weapons and the other half using them in high-risk life and death situations. I think I should keep the gun.”
“Pete, she should probably keep the gun,” Savannah said.
“Yeah, you should probably keep the gun,” Pete said.
She was a new woman now that she had a weapon that could fire more than just nails over a short distance. Greg took over the nail gun while keeping the golf club holstered like a sword along his belt. Pete grabbed another one of Cole’s clubs while Savannah declined to arm herself.
Savannah was a slight girl, something Emily hadn’t noticed until the teenager was standing in front of her. The kid was a few inches shorter and pretty enough, and though she would never dream of saying it out loud, Savannah was probably out of Pete’s league. Then again, she had seen the boy handle himself out there, and even if he had failed to connect with seven of his eight shots, he had done enough to keep his girlfriend alive. He wasn’t Cole by any stretch, but then, most people weren’t.
She had woken
up to the sound of Pete’s gunshots at around eight in the morning, and it was ten when they gathered inside her master bedroom on the second floor, around the window that faced the street. They looked out at Arrow Bay and its surroundings and listened to the pervading quiet. It was eerie, mostly because all four of them knew there were psychos like Don still out there.
Hiding. Waiting. Biding their time.
Crazy, but not stupid, she reminded herself. And patient.
That patience made them even more dangerous. Not that wilding maniacs weren’t dangerous, but ones that had the capacity to think and strategize were even more so.
She remembered the look on Don’s face—that smile (or was that a smirk?)—as he watched her from across the street. He had known exactly what he was doing: Staying away so she couldn’t hit him with the nail gun, the way she’d taken out Denim.
There was little life outside the window and even less along Dove Sand, the subdivision across the lake to the right of them. It was the same with Pebble Creek on the left, which was visible from another one of the bedrooms. Both subdivisions, like Arrow Bay, were private gated communities. People didn’t just pay for the serenity of living within a stone’s throw from a lake; they also enjoyed the benefit of being twenty miles from the city—and all of its problems—by highway.
“It’s like we’re the last people alive,” Savannah was saying quietly. “It can’t be, can it?”
“Can’t be,” Pete said. He shook his head, maybe to convince himself. “Can’t be.”
The young man had his arm around his girlfriend’s waist while Savannah rested her head on his shoulder.
“Should we make a run for it?” Greg asked. “The gate. I know there isn’t any power, but the two of us,” he added, looking at Pete, “could probably open it.” Then, turning to Emily, “And we have the gun for protection now.”
“It might work,” Pete said. “Both of us could definitely muscle that gate open. Do you guys have a car?”
“I have a van.”
“The white one outside?”
“That’s it.” He nodded at Emily. “Her car is closer. It’s in the garage.”
“That’s perfect,” Pete said. “I think we can make—”
“No,” Emily said, cutting him off.
“Why not?” Greg said. He sounded slightly annoyed.
Fall of Man | Book 2 | Homefront Page 7