Survivors (26 page)

With rising gusto, the people of Abraham fired at their attackers until, almost as if it had been synchronized, to a man the force turned and beat a hasty retreat. With a cheer, the people gave leisurely chase, more concerned with patching the holes in their fences than with meting out any kind of justice.

The cheers and jeers continued until the first house exploded.

“What the hell is all this?” Wes asked as he and the Sheriff ran from the station. “Who were those guys? How did they—”

“Wes!” Keaton barked, his eyes on the fireball somehow rising up in the now-torrential downpour. “Keep moving. Look up, look for shiny things.”

Wes’s footsteps halted as he tried to process this order. “Look up?”

The Sheriff, who was doing just that, tackled Wes and drove him down as rounds chopped the wet grass to the side of them, thudding into the dirt at around eight hundred rounds a minute. Keaton looked up, seeing the muzzle flash as the gun spat bullets through the air.

“Look
up,
” he said, pointing. He rolled to a long-parked car and hoped that whatever the gunner was using wouldn’t punch through an engine block. Wes was right behind him, gripping his AK-47 and looking lost.

“Did you see him?” Keaton asked. Wes nodded quickly, his wits seeming to return. “Okay. When I count to three, I want you to get your ass up here and get his attention with that.” He pointed at the Russian-made firearm. “Don’t get killed, but I need you to throw a lot of rounds at him. All right?”

Wes nodded again, his eyes closed as he leaned against the car. The Sheriff duck-walked to the other end of the car and hoped that this would work. He knew the AK-47 wasn’t made for long-distance sniping; it was made to put a lot of bullets in a given area and to do it quickly, whether the gun was covered in mud, sand, or tar, or was fresh out of the box.

“All right, Wes . . . now!”

Wes turned and rested against the hood of the car, shooting bursts at the tower the gunman was firing from. As he did this, Keaton crept over the lip of the trunk and sighted in. He saw the long barrel swivel back and shouted for Wes to get down.

As long as I don’t move, I’ll be all right.

The iron sights of the AK-47 rested on the dark area the muzzle flash was coming from. After a moment, there was a gleam as the barrel moved again.

“One more, Wes . . . now!”

The deputy swung over the hood and fired again. Keaton kept his eyes on the gunner . . . there! The man fired back at Wes, and Keaton had him. He let loose a single round and watched as the spurt of flame from the automatic weapon described an arc up and away from the front of the car they hid behind. He whooped and yelled to Wes.

“We got him! Did you see that? We—”

The Sheriff stopped as he looked over at his partner, his friend.

Bleeding.

“Ah, Wes.”

Keaton dropped and crawled to his deputy and rolled him up. It wasn’t a bullet that had got him; Wes’s face and neck were covered in blood pouring from a ragged wound that started under his jaw and wrapped around the right side of his face to dart up between the unfocused eyes. A shard of metal, the same shade brown as the car they’d taken shelter behind, protruded from the deputy’s face, its broken end sticking out, wicked edges shining in the wan light of the burning buildings.

The rain pelting his face, Keaton reached down and took the flashlight from Wes’s pocket. “I’ll be back with this,” he said. “I promise.”

The perceived route of the intruders turned into a massacre as the people of Abraham chased the figures in black, only to find they’d been led into fiery traps. As each contingent of townsfolk reached the point of no return, the houses on all sides of them exploded, detonated remotely by Agent Sawyer at the control panel. He was taking reports from the teams in the field and humming as he snapped switches that turned other human beings into broken sacks of meat.

Beside him, Lutz and his small crew watched through binoculars as miniature rag dolls were thrown wide by the sudden blasts. The retreating teams made radio contact as they cleared the perimeter.

“And the Sheriff?” Sawyer asked.

Lutz didn’t hear the response, but he knew it wasn’t a good one from the way Sawyer slammed his hand down next to the control panel.

“Are you fucking kidding me? He’s a hick sheriff, with maybe a deputy at his side. One, two men. You couldn’t bag him?”

A pause.

“Out the back, right. And then what?”

Another pause.

“He
what
? How? With an AK-47?”

Sawyer whistled.

“All right. Hold on a minute.”

Sawyer flipped up the covers on all the munitions and swept his hands across the board. The night rocked with the mass of explosions from the center of Abraham all the way to the edges, houses and commercial buildings going up in balls of fire that would eventually be beaten down by the unrelenting rain.

“Okay. Everyone back in. Shoot everyone but the Sheriff. And the doctor, he might have something from Demilio. But everyone else is a target, copy?”

Sawyer yanked the headset from his ear. “Lutz! You and your boys might have something to do anyway. Grab some gear and get in a Hummer.”

He stalked away, clearly in a foul mood but excited by the prospect of the chase. Ritter looked at Blue and twirled his forefinger by his temple.

Lutz nodded. “Yeah. He’s crazy. So crazy, we better do what he says. Grab some gear, then.”

The raiders armed themselves from the cache of weapons left behind by the assault teams; Lutz got an M-4 with an attached grenade launcher, Ritter and Patton came away with two Browning Hi-Powers each and Blue and Jenkins armed up with SPAS-12 shotguns.

With a wicked smile, Lutz recognized his knife in the tire well of a truck, sitting balanced on the rubber. He grabbed it and stuck it in his waistband, then turned to the raiders.

“All right,” he said. “See if we can’t bag us a sheriff.”

Ritter and Blue looked at the contingent of soldiers that were packing the equipment for moving out, then at each other. Something passed between them; Patton noticed it, Lutz had not. He was so full of himself at that moment, Patton knew his eyes were full of Sheriff Keaton’s big death scene and nothing else.

Patton, who knew the men better than either of the Lutz brothers ever had, knew that, whatever the outcome of the day, they’d be walking away from Abraham with two fewer raiders than when they started.

Hmm. Maybe four less, if Coke didn’t catch up to Charlie. I wonder how that went?

“Open the door!” Coke yelled. “Open the fucking door, Charlie!”

He ran at the head of a disorganized pyramid of sprinters, all with their arms out, reaching for his back and howling as they ran. It had been this way for the past mile, and the rain wasn’t helping any. Coke had taken one misstep and almost lost everything when a sprinter grabbed the trucker cap off his head, and with it the light that was clipped to the bill. Even with all the time he’d spent on the treadmill, Coke knew that if he didn’t get into the truck, that was it for him. Dimly, he could see Charlie in the driver’s seat, his chin tucked down on his chest and fast asleep.

Not slowing his stride any, Coke bent down and picked up a stone as he ran, scooping and throwing in one motion. The small rock bounced off the side of the truck, startling Charlie awake.

“Open! The! Door!”

Charlie’s eyes went wide as he saw what was coming his way. He unlocked and opened his door, moving over as Coke’s hurtling form shot into the truck at high speed. The door slammed behind him, and so did the forms of three sprinters, moving too fast to check their speed as they collided with the metal of the truck and each other.

“Did I miss it?” Charlie asked, wiping the sleep from his eyes.

“Shut up,” Coke breathed at him, trying to catch his breath. “Water.”

“Yeah, yeah. Here,” Charlie said, holding out a bottle. Coke snatched it from his hand and tore the top off, upending the plastic container over his face and drinking deep.

“Whoo!” he yelled as the empty bottle hit the inside of the windshield. “I am
never
doing that again.”

“Do what? Did I miss something?”

Coke thumped Charlie in the arm. “Fuck yeah, you did. You missed getting goddamn killed.”

“But what about—”

Charlie’s question was cut off by the first explosion from Abraham. The pair of raiders were entranced by the billowing fireball, and then it was joined by another . . . and another . . . and another.

“Jesus, God,” Charlie said. “Sawyer is not fucking around with these people.”

Coke looked over and punched Charlie again. “And you, you son of a bitch!” He punched him again. “I ran all this way, in the
dark,
being chased by those dead fuckers, so I could stop you, and you were
asleep
!”

Charlie rubbed his arm and shoulder where the punches were landing. “Th-those aren’t the dead ones. They move too—”

“Ah,” Coke said, waving him off. “You know what I mean. Goddamn. There’s my hat.”

He pointed out the window to one of the shamblers massed against the truck among the sprinters; the fiend in red that had grabbed his cap. The infected waved its arms up and down as it tried to get through its companions to the truck, the little flashlight cutting swaths through the darkness of the rainy night.

“Anyway. Lutz says to hang back. Says he’ll try to signal us when the convoy moves out, so we can follow behind, and we’ll try our surprise another day. It’s not like they care, anyway,” he said, hooking his thumb back to the full garbage bed, where a mix of sprinters and shamblers bumped around against each other.

Charlie put a pair of binoculars up to his face and clicked his tongue ring against his teeth. He let out a quiet whistle. “Take a look at that. Gunfire around the flames.”

“Yep,” Coke nodded. “You should see the hardware they got in that camp. You think we had some nice stuff? Pfft.” He looked back out the window at the throng of carriers clawing at the steel door. His eyes were drawn back to his hat and flashlight.

“Pop the top, Charlie. I’m going to get my hat.”