Vampire Apocalypse: Fallout (Book 3) (26 page)

Sandra didn’t stop to think
about the hundred yards that separated her from the thralls. She
grinned as she heard Joshua mutter “Crazy bitch,” and then she was
up and running toward the trucks. She didn’t worry that the other
two would follow; they all knew that each of them had to watch the
others’ backs. She felt exhilarated, her heart pounding in her
chest as she ran blindly toward the thralls. The dust obscured most
of the road but she could still see vague shapes moving about as
thralls shifted positions to avoid the errant truck.

She was very exposed where she
was, but she prayed that the thralls didn’t look in her direction
for just another few moments. Even with the dust cover they
couldn’t fail to see her running toward them. She suppressed the
urge to fire; any bullets that she fired while running might as
well be ejected unfired for all the good they would do anyway.
Carlos and Al were still keeping the thralls busy on the other side
but there were only two of them and there were a lot of
thralls.

The truck finally came to a
shuddering halt and the engine coughed and died. The thralls,
seeing that their companions had things covered on the far side of
the road, turned their attention back toward her. She was still too
far away to see clearly through the dust but she dropped to one
knee immediately and began to pour carefully spaced fire toward
those shapes she could see. She hit the first thrall in the chest
and he was flung back out of sight. The second moved quickly and
she only managed to wing him before he rolled away and disappeared
into the gloom. The first thrall she had hit had already pulled
himself back to his feet and was bringing his weapon to bear on her
again. The buggers were really hard to kill with their
vampire-enhanced healing and they really had to be hit hard if you
wanted them out of the fight.

She heard another deep boom and
the thrall she had hit slumped to the ground and remained still
this time. They might have an incredible healing factor but when
Warkowski hit them with a .50 calibre bullet there really wasn’t a
lot left to work with. Sandra’s weapon clicked empty and she calmly
ejected it and pulled another clip from the bag at her waist.
Bullets slammed into the ground around her but she ignored them.
There was no cover anyway and moving about would only make her
easier to see so she continued loading.

She was too busy to look at the
colour strip they always applied to the clips to mark which
contained normal and which contained the coated bullets and slammed
the first clip she found home. Her first shot hit one of the
thralls and he spun back as the bullet slammed into his
shoulder.

Even through the gloom she could
see the thrall recover quickly and he turned back in her direction.
He took a moment to line up his sights and then began to pump fire
toward her. Sandra saw the line of bullets stitch across the dry
earth as the bullets sought her out. Her mind shouted at her to
move but the approaching bullets were moving too quickly. She
tensed as she prepared for the impact when the barrage suddenly
swerved violently and split the air far to her left. She looked
toward the thrall and saw that he had stopped firing. In fact, the
thrall was shrieking in agony and seemed to be tearing at the point
where her previous bullet had struck him. She watched the thrall
throw down his weapon and tear at his clothes as if they were on
fire.

She must have loaded the wrong
clip, she realised, as the thrall tore at himself and thrashed
about in agony. Pat Smyth’s ‘magic bullets’ were too scarce to use
on thralls, especially now that they were no longer part of the
community. They just didn’t have the resources to make them in the
quantities they required. Besides, the thralls did die with normal
bullets, it just took a few more rounds, so they tended to use high
velocity rounds and hope that they hit them often enough to keep
them down.

Harris had reported that when he
had used the bullets on a raid two months ago that the thralls had
taken far fewer rounds to take out, but he had said nothing about
such an extreme reaction. Maybe his shots had been more accurate
than hers and he had killed them outright. Smyth’s bullets were
coated with a liquid that was deadly to the vampires, but each one
had to be coated individually and they never had enough of them.
They had decided long ago to keep as many as possible stockpiled in
case the vampires ever found them.

Their experience in the Cave had
brought home to them just how many rounds were needed to fight off
a concerted vampire attack. She wasn’t sure if these thralls were
wearing armoured jackets or not, but either way, she’d have to be
more accurate if they wanted to survive the day.

Joshua and April finally caught
up with her and added their firepower to hers, but Sandra’s
attention was still on the thrall she had hit. The thrall had
fallen to the ground at this point and his screams were audible
even over the thunder of the surrounding gunfire and the roaring of
the trucks. She was mesmerised. Bullets still flew around her but
now even some of the thralls had noticed something wasn’t right and
had stopped firing as they looked to their colleague to see what
had caused such an extreme reaction.

Sandra shook herself and sent
another three-round burst toward the thralls, striking one of them
in the leg. The thrall ignored the wound and continued to fire and
Sandra was forced to dive to her left as bullets whizzed past her.
It only took about a minute, though, before he too began to scream
and thrash about as he tore at his wound. By this time the first
thrall had stopped struggling and lay in a contorted heap on the
ground. The screams from the second thrall began to unnerve the
other thralls and their rate of fire began to dwindle.

The occasional deep boom
followed by another thrall pitching forward dead, along with the
crossfire from Carlos and Al on the other side of the road finally
began to take its toll on the thralls. With no cover, and with
their numbers dwindling alarmingly, the thralls began to panic. The
commander tried to rally his men, but another deep boom from above
took his head from his shoulders, and the thralls were isolated and
vulnerable. When another of their colleagues fell to what looked
like a minor wound and began to tear at his own flesh as if trying
to rip something from the wound, they finally broke and threw down
their weapons and surrendered.

Chapter 16

Ricks rolled away from Delilah
as bullets slammed into the ground around them. He heard her grunt
in pain but there was no time to check on her. He rolled into a
crouch and returned fire into the swirling dust, spraying blindly
and hoping that he would hit at least one of his assailants. The
fire coming from the dust didn’t seem to slacken at all, though,
and Ricks suddenly found that his XM8 was empty.

Shit!
In his panic he had
made a basic mistake and kept his finger on the trigger instead of
firing in three-round bursts as he had been trained. He cursed
himself for being so stupid and groped for another clip as he saw
figures begin to emerge from the dust as if they were suddenly
materialising from nowhere.

He was caught. The thralls
emerged from the dust too quickly and saw him almost immediately.
Nature seemed to conspire against him and a sudden gust of wind
cleared the dust away and left him completely exposed and
vulnerable. Ricks was still loading when the first of the bullets
slammed into him and he fell back as darkness rushed around him and
sucked him down.

Delilah felt pain burst up her
shoulder as she slammed into the ground. Something had crashed into
her and her feet had been taken from under her. She was vaguely
aware that someone was struggling to disentangle themselves from
her, and then her head grazed a rock on the ground and she slumped
forward. She was still conscious and could hear the howl of the
wind around her but she couldn’t move. Panic gripped her as she
thought she might be paralysed. She cried out in fear and
frustration as bullets tore through the air around her but she
couldn’t do anything and merely lay helpless in the middle of the
fire fight.

She had never
been in a real battle before and the sheer volume of the machine
guns booming around her was terrifying. The noises seemed to come
from everywhere at once and the cacophony seemed to
physically assault her. Her head still ached
from where it had struck the rock and her stomach heaved with
nausea as she struggled to focus. She was desperate to move, to
somehow get to safety away from the madness of the dust-obscured
battlefield, but her body was still sluggish to respond.

A sustained burst of fire
suddenly erupted to her left and the noise sent a painful throbbing
through her skull. Strangely, at one level, her mind recognised the
high-pitched,
phut
noise of the XM8 machine gun. She had
trained relentlessly with the weapon herself and its distinctive
noise was almost comforting in the mayhem around her. Her mind
continued to analyse everything around her as her body struggled to
recover.

If the XM8
was to her left then that would be Ricks, she realised, so it must
have been him who had crashed into her. She lay there frantically
trying to get her body to move while her mind continued to analyse
the sounds around her. She noted that the rate of fire was far too
long and she heard Harris’s voice in her mind as he reminded her to
fire three-round bursts just befo
re the
noise suddenly stopped and the weapon ran out of
ammunition.

Fire erupted
to her right now and she heard a cry to her left as someone was
hit. Shit, that would be Ricks, she realised. She had to move, to
help, anything but remain helpless here. It felt as though her body
was moving through glue at first, but, finally, she managed to roll
over on to her back and had to suppress a sudden gasp of shock as
she saw three thralls loom above her. They hadn’t seen her as they
had passed because their attention was directed toward where the
cry had come from. She had been so still they had probably thought
her dead.

The thralls
continued forward and one of them raised his weapon as he seemed to
see something. Delilah snapped her head toward where the thrall
pointed his weapon and saw her brother try to raise himself before
slumping forward. The thrall steadied his weapon and prepared to
fire and Delilah suddenly screamed. The scream attracted all three
of the thralls’ attentions and they snapped their heads toward her.
The scream had also galvanised her own body as adrenaline surged
through her and she brought up her XM8 and began to pump the
trigger in perfect three-round bursts as she swept the weapon from
target to target. Delilah was still screaming long after the
thralls had fallen to the ground and she lay heaving for breath as
her brain began to catch up on events.

She had done
it. All three thralls were slumped on the ground and none of them
moved. She felt her body tremble as the adrenaline began to wear
off and she felt suddenly cold. It was some time later that she was
finally able to pull herself to her feet. When she did, she crossed
first to check each thrall to make sure they were dead as she had
been trained to do, and only then did she allow herself to check on
Ben and Ricks.

Denis Jackson awoke to a
splitting headache. He tried to open his eyes but the pain
increased so he lay for a second as he tried to gather his
thoughts. Everything was so quiet
Was he dead?
No, he was in
far too much pain for that. Maybe the battle was over. The question
now was: who had won?

He remembered
running into the dust and firing at anything that moved. He thought
he had seen a figure stumble and fall but then something had hit
his head with such force that he hadn’t even felt any pain. He had
felt the impact
sure enough but he had no
memory past that. And then the next thing he knew he had woken up
with this blinding headache.

“
It’s all
right, you’re safe.” He heard the words as if they had been spoken
from far away and then felt a something damp press against his
forehead before he passed out again.

Delilah saw Jackson’s body relax
as he passed out again. A bullet had creased the side of his head
and had torn a deep furrow along his skull. She had cleaned the
wound and tied some gauze tightly around it, but it was still
seeping blood at an alarming rate and she didn’t really know what
else to do. She looked down at her brother. She had pulled him over
beside Jackson once she had checked that they were all alive. She
tried to smile but she was just too tired.

Ben had taken
a bullet to the shoulder.
She had
strapped up the wound as well but the bullet was still lodged
somewhere in his shoulder and he was in a lot of pain despite his
best efforts to smile at her. They would have to get that bullet
out or the wound would become septic, but she had no idea how to do
that. Warkowski’s wife was the closest thing they had to a nurse
but she was back at the Cave. It would be a long trip back, longer
still with the wounded, and she wasn’t sure how long they had
before infection would set in.

She was most
worried about Ricks, though. She was fairly certain that Jackson
and Ben would be fine until they got back but Ricks was barely
alive. Two bullets had struck him in the chest, one high on the
left side that had torn through him and taken a chunk of flesh with
it as it had exited just under his shoulder blade. The other one
had gone in just under his rib on the right side and had torn
through and excited messily just under his shoulder. She was no
doctor but the wound was seeping blood rather than spurting so she
hoped that that was a good sign. Another bullet had taken a chunk
out of his thigh, but it was the amount of blood he was losing that
worried her most.