Hard Rain Falling (Walking in the Rain Book 3) (14 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

We ate breakfast from the MREs I’d picked up from the dead DHS agents. Pretty much tasteless as usual, but none of us used the food as anything more than to fuel our bodies with the calories. Our stomachs, still shrunken from months of short rations, were also sensitive to anything that pretended to be spicy. So we ate small portions of bland food and were happy to get it. Afterwards, I spent some time topping off our ammunition stores from the cases stacked in the back of the truck, reloading all my magazines and checking the loads.

Unlike my usual practice, I didn’t try to search the dead or claim salvage rights earlier from those we gunned down. With the armory and the Guard having suffered so many casualties and after being an asshole about the Suburban, I was willing to pass up the pickings. Plus, we had way more firearms than people already; enough so that I asked the girls to make up multiple ammo rigs for the different weapons. For the girls, it was between the M4s or the UMP45 submachine guns. The ARs I’d gifted each with went into storage. For me, it was the CETME or M4. Technically one of the UMP45s was mine, but I never carried it.

We rolled out a little after 9am, and were carrying a pair of unexpected passengers. Mr. Parker and his grandson had stayed the night in the armory and thus were present for the attack. The two had joined a group of other civilians manning a stretch of trenches but didn’t see any actual fighting, Toby complained. Mr. Parker said a couple of the mortar rounds landed close enough to send shrapnel their way, but no one in their group was hit.

“Well, that was terrifying, and we were much further away,” I admitted, and Toby, sitting next to his grandfather in the middle room of seats, gave me an astonished look.

“But I heard you had people shooting at you, all of you. Why should a little explosion scare you?” he asked.

“Because you don’t know where to go or what to do about bombs that start falling out of the sky,” Amy said, stealing the words right out of my mouth.

Lori, who was driving again today, announced we were approaching the Guard outpost yet again and started to slow down. One of the soldiers saw us and waved, his tired expression splitting into little grin as he recognized the SUV. The other soldier gave us thumbs up as we rolled by.

“What was that about?” I asked, looking over my shoulder. I wasn’t accustomed to seeing people smile or look happy—I mean, unless they were trying to kill me—it just seemed wrong these days.

“Dude,” Toby piped up, his voice rising, “You guys are like heroes to those soldiers. Y'all saved that soldier Murphy at the prison, then pitched in last night and held a whole section of the fence line by yourselves. Plus, you know, figuring out those trucks I saw were scouting the ammo plant; I live here and didn’t even think about that until you brought it up.”

“Cool,” I said in a neutral voice, and both of our guests looked at me curiously.

“Luke doesn’t like getting noticed all that much. Says it makes us a target,” Summer explained helpfully. “He also doesn’t feel safe with three of us girls along for the ride, even though he wouldn’t say anything to us about it. He’s a gentleman that way.”

I just sat there with my jaw on the floor. How could she figure that out? Women. Even the pint sized variety just made my head spin sometimes. Yes, I was painfully aware of our vulnerability in this screwed up world. I’d begun to click with the two Thompson girls but I would be happy to get them home to their families and continue on our trip to Texas.

This time when we reached the civilian barricade near Mr. Parker’s home, we stopped well back and allowed the older gentleman and his grandson to emerge first. Mr. Parker waved to his men like a returning celebrity and he was mobbed by nearly a dozen hardy looking gentlemen dressed in similar camo hunting outfits. I realized that was their uniform and not just a fashion statement of the times.

“Luke, come on out son. Got some people I want you to meet,” Mr. Parker called, and I cautiously obliged him. Hey, he’d trusted me when I said we needed to get to the Guard folks, so I decided to return the trust. The old man had earned it.

“Luke, this here is the Krebs Ave. Irregulars,” he said, gesturing.

He then began reeling off a list of names I knew I would never retain. That was okay. I nodded and shook hands all around as Mr. Parker gave his folks a summary of what had happened at the armory and what he’d heard about the ammo plant. He also didn’t try to soften the news that the bad guys seemed to have been aided by apparent elements of the Department of Homeland Security.

“What the hell, Andy?” one of the older men exclaimed. “We at war with our own government now?”

Mr. Parker held up his hands, and I listened as he described his meeting with the captain the day before. The state government was hurt but not gone, and the Oklahoma National Guard along with law enforcement throughout the state was working together to try to help where possible. He didn’t pull any punches and said that some cities, including the capital, were little better than smoking ruins. He even mentioned Camp Gruber, outside Muscogee, and how some thought the bedeviling raids and attacks started, or at least received support, from there.

At that point, seeing me still standing politely nearby, Mr. Parker brought his briefing to a temporary halt and asked if some of the boys would clear us a path. He did go on to briefly explain, to my chagrin, how he owed his life and that of his grandson Toby to me and my friends.

“Luke held the line, the back fence, almost single-handedly all night. I heard one soldier say his four man team killed nearly thirty of the gang members trying to storm the armory.”

I tried to keep my face from coloring as Mr. Parker heaped on the praise. He laughed at my discomfort.

“Luke’s in a hurry to go check on some of his people over near Hartshorne. Haileyville, right?”

“Yessir. But the Guard did the fighting, sir. We just pulled a turkey shoot last night.”

That got a grim laugh from the growing crowd. They didn’t have to say it, but I got the feeling these people might have had their own run-ins before with the gang crowd.

Soon we found ourselves on the other side of the barricades and proceeding down Krebs until it linked back up with Highway 270 once again. Lori was quiet, no doubt contemplating what we might find. Other than the small enclave on Krebs Ave., we saw no signs of cooperation in the communities we passed through. In fact, quite the opposite was obvious in the burned-out homes and small stores; not to mention the bodies we spotted here and there in the street.

Summer seemed oblivious to the carnage around us even as Lori steered around dead cars and equally dead pedestrians. All looked stripped and rifled for salvage, including the corpses. I looked back and gave Amy a warning lift of my eyebrows. From her wink, Amy got the message. She would sit on Summer if necessary.

“How close are we, Lori?” I asked softly. My head was on a swivel as I scanned the wrecked neighborhood for trouble. These were older homes, built in the late 1970s or early 1980s I guessed, and looked more substantial than the newer cookie cutter models we’d passed earlier on approaching the community. They featured big yards and mature trees, though the grass was patchy with no watering and the tree leaves had that premature browning you saw in drought conditions.

“Just the next block up, on Hybernia Court,” she replied. Her eyes looked as big as saucers as she took in the widespread damage.

We’d seen it before, all of us had. For the Thompson girls, it was Bentonville and Fayetteville and all the smaller towns in between. For Amy, it was those hellholes plus the ruined towns of Harrison and even as far back as when we first met. Broken out windows and torn down front doors; the signs of violence and bloodshed visible for all to see. I’ve seen it so many times the names and places have run together. I realized that places like the armory here, or the Keller farm, were the exception rather than the rule. An oasis in the middle of Hell.

And now this was Lori’s neighborhood. She likely knew people that once lived in those houses. Now those smiley-faced friends and neighbors were corpses buried in shallow pits out back, if at all; dead through violence perhaps but also from starvation or bad water. Or not being able to get their heart medication or antipsychotic drugs.

“Everybody make sure you have a round chambered, but leave those safeties on,” I instructed, and to my relief saw my three companions, Lori included, stop to check their weapon. I held a hand on the steering wheel for the older of the Thompson girls as she quickly checked her state of preparedness.

Then the big SUV turned the corner, and Lori started to pick up speed. Maybe letting her drive was a bad idea, I thought with crystal clear hindsight.

“What side of the street?” I asked Lori, and she muttered ‘left’ with numb lips. We saw no signs of active habitation, but plenty of signs indicating successive waves of looters had hit the area. Here again I saw houses burned to the foundations, a gap in the row of structures like a meth head’s missing teeth. Disturbing, but not unexpected.

Then Lori jerked the wheel and turned in to the driveway of a decent sized ranch style home, the tall grass and boarded up windows giving the place the air of another abandoned dwelling. Summer’s door popped open suddenly, the small girl-shape bailing out of the seat and onto the concrete drive before the Suburban could come to a halt in front of the two closed garage doors.

“Mom, Dad! Mom, Dad!” she shouted with her desperate, high pitched shriek. I was out but Amy was faster, conscious of her failure in controlling the young girl. Amy was past me as my front passenger side door swung open. And then the shooting started.

Frantically, I whirled, jumping to place my body between her and the shooters across the street, but even as I moved, I saw her hit, flinch from the impact, and flinch again before sliding bonelessly to the ground. Amy was shot, at least twice, and lay there unmoving on the hard concrete.

Bullets slapped into the garage door in front of me as I took in the scene. Amy was down, and blood was beginning to gather around her head. Summer, trapped under her body, was still squirming for now, but I didn’t know if she was injured as well.

All I saw was the blood pooling like a scarlet halo around her head, darkening her straw colored hair.

I heard someone call my name but nothing registered except the bullets that continued to whizz past me in maddening frequency. I turned and walked to the rear of the Suburban, popping the rear door latch and reaching inside for a second pack of gear.

I grunted as a bullet struck me in the back, but I didn’t stop or even acknowledge the pain as I slung the extra bag over my shoulder. I was in that dark place beyond once again, and the beast that lived inside my chest burst free. I turned on my boot heel and took off at a dead sprint down the sidewalk. In those agonizing few seconds, I forgot about Lori and Summer and everything else that made me human.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

When you don’t give a fuck if you live or die, you can do amazing and horrifying things. I discovered that dark fact in the driveway of a house on Hybernia Court as I ran for the far side of the street angling away from the main source of the fire still directed at me and at my people I’d left behind.

The house across the street was a mess, with bullet holes riddling the brick façade and a few rotting corpses. Hefting the M4 by its pistol grip, I dumped a magazine into the windows of the destroyed structure, hosing all thirty rounds back and forth in a long figure eight pattern. I wasn’t going to hit much, but the hail of gunfire would hopefully set the shooters back on their heels. I executed a quick magazine change as soon as the last round spat out my hate.

I jumped over a gutted corpse in the side yard and hit the wooden security fence with a thud, then slid down the way until reaching a gate. I didn’t want try the entrance to the back yard of the house, but I figured the now recovered gunmen in the house would be looking for me that way. Instead, I hotfooted over to a window and knelt, trying to channel the ice cold anger pouring through my veins in place of blood. They all had to die, I told myself. These ones would die, and then I would start on their families…

Reaching into the bag with my left hand, I drew out one of the grenades I’d stashed there and carefully withdrew the pin. I still knew nothing about grenades, but Sergeant Jenkins assured me these were fragmentation grenades, not smoke. Good to know. The DHS thugs I’d engaged up on the highway the day before had a box of the things. Never thought I would be using one, but then I never thought I see Amy die before my eyes.

Pulling the pin was actually satisfyingly difficult; meaning the others in the bag likely wouldn’t go off by accident. That also was nice. I actually didn’t want to die until my vengeance was complete. I dropped the grenade through a gap in the boards over the window and stepped back, squatting down.

I half expected somebody to see the grenade or hear it hit the floor and top it back out in my lap. I’d heard the expression ‘cooking off’ a grenade, or letting the fuse burn for a second or two to prevent that, but I didn’t trust myself to do that. So I waited the five seconds and the grenade exploded inside. The earlier shooting had died down, leaving a lull in the morning air. Now the quiet was once again shattered, first by the loud bang, and then by the screams.

Giving it another second, I lowered my shoulder and crashed forward, driving the nails in the boards out of the wall inside and allowing me to half fall into the room I’d just bombed. Driving with my legs, I completed my entry, and found myself in a dimly lit room that had been converted into a butcher shop.

No, it wasn’t cannibals, but the grenade had made a mess. I brought my carbine up quickly and started shooting. If it was on the floor and screaming, I left it be and focused on the ones still up and not chopped up by shrapnel. One, two, three went down and joined their shrieking brethren on the tiled floor, except for the one who caught a round square in the noggin. He fell like the skinny bag of shit he was and didn’t move again.

Rolling across a pile of guts that still seemed connected to a wide-eyed body; I avoided return fire at ten feet and sprayed again with the M4. I felt another flare of pain, this time in my right abdomen, and knew I’d taken another hit. Whether the body armor stopped penetration I didn’t know, and I dismissed the pain as anger kept me rolling. I emptied the magazine again, dug out another fresh reload, and saw the pile of guts move as the dying man reached out with his one functioning arm. He held a pistol, but his palsied movements warned me before the barrel lined up with my head.

“Die already,” I said conversationally, shooting him in the face before he finished the motion. He squeezed the trigger in reflex and the loud bang close to my ear left me deafened on that side of my head. I didn’t let it worry me. Soon I wouldn’t care.

Rolling off the now really dead body, I came to my knees and sensed movement in the next room. It wasn’t sound or scent that warned me, but something in the primitive part of my brain that now seemed to be running the mission for me. That was good because rational thought seemed to be much too painful at the moment.

Looking around, I decided the room I was now in had once been the living room and the open floor plan led into a dining room then, I presumed, a kitchen out of sight around a corner. I counted three bodies—or pieces of bodies—here with me in the living room and assumed the other two had succumbed to their wounds from the grenade.

Sliding to my knees, I slowly crawled over past the rotting sofa and got a clear look into the dining room. The table here seemed to have been converted into bracings on the two large windows, blocking most of the sunlight filtering in, but the chairs had still been in use until I crashed their party.  Those blocked windows probably corresponded to the firing positions used to gun down… I tried to think of something else and remembered what drew me in this direction in the first place.

I counted four down in the dining room, either hit by shrapnel or dead from the brief exchange of gunfire earlier. One was still feebly kicking away, but the wound in his throat bled so much I knew his remaining lifespan could be measured in seconds. My urge to kill him warred with my desire for him to suffer as long as possible. I considered applying a bandage and saving him so I could have the pleasure of killing him slowly later, after I finished cleaning out this house.

That none of these assholes actually lived here before was evident in the filthy condition of the place, but from the smell of shit and piss in the air, someone had been squatting here anyway. It was an old smell, over and above the stink of recently released bowels and bladders. Yes, I’d been around enough death to tell the difference.

“You in the kitchen,” I called out, my voice surprising me. “If you try to go out the back door, my men will shoot you in the legs and we will torture you to death. If you come out now, I’ll promise you a quick end. I’ve got a schedule to keep, and you assholes are slowing up progress.”

Yes, I sounded insane, even to my own ears. A quick death was all I could promise? What other men? Surely the attackers had seen what they were facing when they gunned down two little girls; shooting them in the back. I decided I was being too lenient with the promise of a quick death after all. I wanted these fuckers to hurt and scream for a mercy I would not give them. I was just about to say something when a hoarse voice replied.

“Why? Why are you doing this? We were just trying to survive. You got no right.”

She was older, I could tell from the voice, but that was all I could determine. Rich or poor before the lights went out, PTA mom or drug dealing whore, I could not say.

“Why? You started shooting as soon as we got out of the car. I’ve got two, maybe three dead from you assholes. And I’m beginning to lose my patience, woman.”

“You were going to go after the house, that’s all. That’s our food in there. We bled enough to make our claim. Then you were just going to go in and take it all.”

They gave no warning as the three of them came charging out of the kitchen, guns blazing. They were starved, emaciated like shrunken mummies in a museum, but some awful vitality kept them moving. I’d moved since speaking last, shifting further back into the living room and kneeling; the shards of light coming through the gaps in the window coverings and casting white spears of illumination into the dining room.

Two men and a woman. The men had shotguns and the woman, I guessed she was the speaker, was brandishing a chrome revolver that she fired where she thought I would be standing. It was a miscalculation that cost all three in the end.

I emptied another magazine into the trio, nearly cutting the nearest man in half with the automatic fire. Dropping the M4 to hang from its sling, I darted past the three dying raiders to see a man heading out the back door. I drew and fired, the Glock jumping in my hands as I shot him repeatedly in the back, not stopping until he was flat on the floor, falling out the broken door, and lying half outside on the patio.

Satisfied these were all down for good; I reloaded the M4 and the pistol, and then set about clearing the rest of the house. I found no more living, and by my final count I came to eleven dead here. I was pretty sure we’d received additional fire from one more of the houses, the one next to us on the north side.

I went around and made sure each was dead, methodically firing one round into each of their heads. None would play possum or escape my wrath. I wanted to kill the world in my blinding anger, my righteous rage, but I would settle for these assholes for now. Since they didn’t seem able to kill me, I would go on and visit that other house. Surely I would find more assholes suitable for killing.

That was really all I had left. Killing assholes. Making them all pay.