Getting Home

25

Max had a man in his sights. He didn’t hesitate. There wasn’t any time.

He pulled the trigger. The rifle kicked.

The man fell.

A good clean shot. Right to the heart.

But they were still coming. Seemingly from all sides.

“There are too many of them,” shouted John.

“Shut up and keep shooting,” shouted Cynthia right back at him.

Time seemed to have slowed down. Every second seemed to stretch into an eternity.

The landscape seemed to have changed along with the distortion in time. The colors of the trees and the ground, of the tent and the van, they all seemed more vibrant than ever.

Max knew it was just the adrenaline. The thrill of the fight, in a sense.

His body was doing everything it could to keep him alive.

The sounds of the guns seemed continuous. It had dulled to a roar that seemed just like part of the background, as if it had always been there.

John had abandoned his rifle for one of the guns he and Cynthia had brought along. Some kind of AK-47 knockoff. Even cheaper and cruder than the original, but it seemed to do the job.

John’s face was contorted in intensity and rage. His mouth had formed into a snarl.

John looked completely different than he had as a kid. Or even as an adult, before the EMP. He’d been clean-cut. He’d had good clothes.

Now, his beard was getting long and his hair was unruly. There was dirt and grime on his face. He’d grown gaunter. Leaner. And more muscular.

He looked like a different man altogether.

Cynthia was sorting through the guns and ammunition, handing out weapons to everyone in the group.

The initial split of the group, with some of them going in one direction, and others in another, had lasted all of ten minutes. They’d quickly had to fall back into a small group, huddled around the van.

Not many of the mob members seemed to have guns. But that didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous.

Max’s group was mowing them down now, shooting them at a distance.

But with each passing minute, the mob, which was coming from all sides, was getting closer. Individuals were starting to break through the invisible line that separated them from the group.

A wild-looking man was rushing at them. He was sprinting right towards Max.

He was ten feet away.

Now five.

Max could see his face and eyes clearly. He could see the rage and the contempt, and the savageness that had broken through to the surface, that had taken him over completely.

A gunshot rang out. One that Max heard clearly, distinct from the others.

A spot of blood appeared on the wild man’s forehead. He seemed to remain upright for far too long before collapsing, almost right at Max’s feet.

“They’re getting closer!” someone shouted.

A group of two or three people had broken through the line of carnage.

They leaped over the bodies of their fallen comrades, if you could call them that. They sprinted towards Max’s group.

Max tossed his rifle aside and Cynthia handed him something else. He barely looked at it.

It was a semi-automatic. He opened fire, pulling the trigger in rapid succession. He hit one of them, a woman with long hair that streamed behind her. But the shot didn’t take her down. She kept running, her face a mixture of pain and anger.

“Behind you!” shouted Georgia.

Max spun around.

A dozen or so had broken through.

Everyone was shooting. Even Sadie, who was fighting with determination, not breaking into panic.

Mandy was at Max’s side. Close. Her elbow knocked into him occasionally. Her hair had come undone. Her forehead was beaded with sweat. But she’d never looked more beautiful.

This might be the last time he saw her alive. The thought ran through Max’s mind like an icepick, piercing him, causing him pain.

James was on the ground on his belly, his rifle positioned perfectly, just like his mother had taught him. He remained calm and worked like a flawless machine. He took aim, pulled the trigger, did it again. He reloaded like it was second nature, like the gun was part of him.

They were all doing their best. They’d learned a lot. All of them. Max included.

But it wasn’t enough.

John was firing in the opposite direction. Mandy was pointed that way too.

Max had taken three of the breakthrough group out. Their bodies lay forgotten on the campground. But the rest were closing in fast.

They were close. Too close.

One wielded an axe. Another, a saw.

One had a metal baseball bat.

Another, nothing more than a piece of dead wood, probably picked up from the forest floor.

But it didn’t matter. If they got close enough, if they broke through, they could cause enough damage with whatever blunt or sharp instrument they had.

The mob didn’t care about dying. They were too filled with rage and desperation to think about their own mortality. It simply didn’t matter to them. They were like insects, protecting their hive, ready to die. Except that the mob had no hive and nothing to protect. In that way, they were more dangerous.

Max’s group was barely holding it off as it was. If Max got hit in the head with a baseball bat, the group’s effectiveness would plummet. Even if he could shake it off, that one brief moment would be enough to start their downfall snowballing.

It’d be those little moments, those small injuries, that would bring them down.

As he was firing, Max’s thoughts drifted to the members of his group. He couldn’t help himself. It felt as if he was looking at them for the last time. Their faces seemed frozen in time. Maybe that’d be the last time they’d be seen by anyone before they became dismembered corpses. Probably eaten raw later on by men and women who had become barely human, or maybe all too human, depending on how you looked at it.

Max wanted to do something. He’d sacrifice himself if it would do any good.

He’d be willing to run head-first into the mob, guns blazing, if it would have made the slightest difference.

But there was nothing he could do. There was no grand gesture. No last minute play.

And they were surrounded. Max couldn’t have broken free if he’d wanted to. Not that sneaking around the side would have done any good.

No strategy would save them.

Through the gunshots, Max heard another noise. It came through the roaring of the mob, somehow cutting through.

It was a machine. An engine.

His brain struggled to attach meaning to the noise. He felt scrambled. Like he couldn’t think.

His finger had been pumping the trigger. The gun was hot.

The smell of death was in the air.

Blood was everywhere.

Some of the men and women had made it all the way there.

Max shot one of them in the chest at close range. Nearly point blank.

Someone behind him turned around and fired. Georgia or John. He wasn’t sure.

It was happening so fast, despite the adrenaline-fueled slow motion.

Something slammed into his head. Something hard. His vision shook for a second, the world seemingly tilting on its axis.

The gun was pulled from Max’s hands. No matter how hard he gripped, it wasn’t enough. There were four or five or six hands on the gun.

Something slammed into Max’s shoulder.

A fist slammed into his stomach, knocking the breath out of him.

He gasped for air. His head felt like it was on fire.

They were all around him.

Max’s hand went for his knife. Somehow, he found it.

He gripped it tightly and brought his hand up swiftly, swinging with his arm viciously.

He caught someone in the neck. A long, slicing cut. But deep.

Hot blood was all over. Max tasted it in his mouth. He felt it on his face.

That strange sound of the engine was coming back, rising above the din of the battle at hand.

Yes, it was an engine. Max’s mind focused in on it, like a camera lens.

The engine roared. It was close now.

Max looked up. He was on his knees, with a body lying on the ground in front of him.

Somehow, those who’d broken through had been killed.

But those were just the first.

More were coming. At least another dozen.

The roar of the engine was closer. Coming from the south side, where Max faced.

Max saw the flash of a chrome bumper first.

It was a car. His exhausted brain registered on it and categorized it.

A car that was speeding through the rushing mob. It was something like an old Chrysler, decades out of date. It jumped and careened over the uneven terrain, mowing down countless mob members as it did.

The car left a tangle of bodies in its wake. It bounced over some of them. One careened off the bumper and landed on the windshield, cracking it.

Some of the mob had jumped out of the way successfully. Max didn’t waste any time. He seized his gun from where it lay in the dirt. He caught them in his sights and pulled the trigger in rapid succession.

The car kept coming. Someone, alive or dead, lay on the windshield.

It went right over the shallow ditch, the car barely buckling as it did so. So much for that plan with the ditch. It hadn’t stopped more than a couple of the mob members. It might have turned an ankle or two, and some of the spikes might have torn someone’s skin, but that was about it.

Could the driver even see out?

The car slammed to a stop mere feet from Max.

The door flew open.

A large man stepped out, holding what looked like an AR-15.

“Max?” he said, flashing a lopsided grin that looked more like a grimace than anything else.

Max didn’t know who the man was, or how he knew his name. But there wasn’t time to get into it. As far as he could tell, the man was on his side.

Max just nodded.

Inside the car, there was a woman and a teenage boy.

The kid, holding a handgun, was already halfway out the back door.

The mob was still coming. The car hadn’t stopped nearly enough of them.

But it had made an impact.

All around them, the fighting continued.

“More coming from the north,” shouted Georgia, over the gunshots that never seemed to stop.

But before Max could even turn, there was another rush from the mob coming from the south.

They screamed as they ran. Max tried to keep it together as much as he could, knowing that his aim would be better. He focused on his breathing, and taking the time to aim properly.

Shooting at random wouldn’t accomplish anything. And at this point, every bullet needed to count.

The car would serve as a sort of barrier. The big man with the AR-15 was already crouching down behind the hood, shooting over it.

The kid with the handgun was unloading it into the crowd.

“Help!” shouted someone.

“Help!”

Max couldn’t turn. If he looked away for a moment, they’d be overrun. They’d just have to hold out as best they could on the other side.