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“Arrow. Leg. Close the door. They’re outside… in the woods.” Dianne spoke haltingly as she struggled to remain calm. Her pant leg was slick and heavy with blood and she ground her teeth together as she rolled over, handing her rifle to Mark as she kicked the door shut with her right leg. Mark furiously scrabbled with the latches before turning and sprinting for the kitchen, calling out for Tina in a loud stage whisper.
“Dianne, what the—holy hell, what happened to you?!” Tina ran into the foyer and stared at Dianne lying on the floor for a few seconds before jumping into action. She reached down and helped Dianne up and onto the nearby bench, then knelt down to examine her leg. “How’d you take an arrow through your leg?”
Dianne waved Tina off, shaking her head. “No time. They’re outside. They shot out the cameras with arrows as a distraction.”
“They shot them out… with arrows?” Tina’s eyes grew wide.
“They’ve got to be trying something; maybe trying to break in, or something else. Where are Jacob and Josie?”
“In the kitchen with Jason. Sarah’s watching out the back door, but—” A scream from the other side of the house cut through Tina’s words, chilling Dianne to the bone and momentarily making her forget all about her pain. Before she or Dianne could react, though, there was the sound of several gunshots followed by Sarah’s panicked shouting.
“They’re on the back porch! They’re coming in!”
Dianne lunged for her rifle, toppling from the bench in the process, while Tina snatched at the pistol on her waistband and charged back toward the kitchen and living room. “Get them downstairs, hurry!” Tina shouted at Jason, who was already up and out of his seat at the dining room table, getting his rifle ready to fire across the living room at the back door. Sarah, meanwhile, was backpedaling from the door, firing her rifle at it in random spots, trying to stop the men who had suddenly appeared on the porch from advancing any farther.
As Jason started to squeeze the trigger on his rifle to put more blind fire through the back door, Tina swatted at the rifle, forcing it down to the ground as she shouted at him again. “Get them out right now, Jason!” Jason hesitated, glancing at Jacob and Josie who were cowering in their chairs from the nearby gunshots, then relented. He threw his rifle over his shoulder and grabbed at both Jacob and Josie as Tina threw open the door to the basement.
While the basement door was still being thrown open by Tina, the back door to the house suddenly exploded inward, showering the living room with shards of glass and wood. An intense flash of light and an overwhelmingly loud bang accompanied the explosion, making it impossible for anyone in the living or dining room to see what was going on.
While Dianne was stuck in the front of the house in severe pain, trying to hobble around through the small side room and through to the living room from the opposite side of the kitchen, she was too late to be of any use. With blood dripping steadily onto the wood floor as she pulled herself forward, she too was blinded by the flash and the ringing in her ears kept her from hearing anything. She thought about blind-firing into the living room, weighing the risk of hitting Sarah with potentially taking out one or more of the intruders, but the risk was too great and the reward was middling. She had no idea how many invaders were about to pour into her house, and didn’t even know if she could aim in the general direction of the back door.
Several seconds later, the battle for the Waters’ homestead was over. Seven heavily armed men poured through the back door, their muddy, booted feet clomping as they ran through the living and dining room throwing weapons to the ground, kicking the feet out from under the survivors and swiftly securing them with zip-ties.
“Is that all of them?” The voice thundered through the house, coming from a man looking in through the back door. As Dianne’s vision slowly returned to her she looked in his direction, realizing with no small amount of horror that he was the same man in the red shirt that she had seen in the gas station compound, the de facto leader of the group.
He was of average height and build and sported a thick beard and a short-cropped haircut that gave him a scruffy but militant appearance. He wore thick tan canvas pants, the same red t-shirt she had seen on him before and an unzipped dark green jacket, also made of canvas. The slight bit of exposed skin she could see harbored thick layers of dirt, grease and grime and both he and his men smelled like they had never showered—even before the apocalypse. Unlike the others, though, he didn’t carry a rifle, but he did have an oversized holster strapped to his leg containing a large, silver revolver whose barrel was sticking out through the bottom.
“How many were there supposed to be, Michael?” One of the men turned to the man in the red shirt, who promptly rolled his eyes and sighed.
“Bunch of useless idiots. Stand aside, dammit!” He barged in through the door, pushing his men aside and stared at the group of tied-up prisoners lying on the carpet. Dianne stared up at him through wide, unblinking eyes, finally knowing the name of the leader of the group that had antagonized her, her family and her friends since the event took place.
“No, that’s not all of ‘em. You got two women and a couple of kids. Wasn’t there a man here, too? The one we shot but who got away? And what about that woman they took from us?” Michael turned and looked around, his eyes finally settling on Jason’s wife. “You. Where’s the other man and woman?”
Dianne shifted her stare to Sarah before glancing around the room, realizing that there were actually three people missing. Mark, Tina and Jason were nowhere to be seen, and the door to the basement was closed tight. She looked back at Sarah and pleaded silently with her eyes, hoping that Sarah would be quick enough to think up something believable.
“My husband’s dead.” Sarah replied flatly, sneering at the man. “He died after we got him back. Severe infection from the gunshot you bas—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Michael waved her off, “save it. What about the woman, the one you all took from the station?”
Sarah shrugged and let her head sag back to the ground as she closed her eyes. “She left. You killed her husband, too. She swore she’d find a way to get revenge for it.”
“Ha.” Michael snorted out a dry laugh and looked down at Jacob and Josie. Dianne saw his gaze shift toward them and struggled to move, but the pain in her leg from the still-embedded arrow and the fact that her hands were tied behind her back kept her from going anywhere. Michael, however, caught her movement and took a step over to her and crouched down next to her face.
“And you… I think my men know you pretty well. They’ve described you well enough for me. The ones who’ve survived, anyway. These your little brats?”
“Stay the hell away from them.” Dianne’s response came out like a viper’s venom, unlike the relatively detached reply that Sarah had given. Jacob and Josie were both being surprisingly quiet, but Dianne could see that they were in shock, their eyes wide with fear.
Michael laughed and stood back up, looking around at his men. “Check the house top to bottom. Once it’s clear, we head out.” He looked back at Dianne and smiled cruelly, exposing rows of pearly white teeth. “Time to replace some of that labor we lost.”
Dianne and Sarah shouted at the men as Jacob and Josie were roughly picked up and tossed over shoulders, but their screams of protest were drowned out by the laughter of the triumphant horde. They ransacked the house as they searched for other survivors, taking food, water, medical supplies and any ammunition and we
apons that weren’t at least casually concealed. Dianne did her best to fight against the men, but her blood loss was continuing to accelerate and she found herself growing too weak to even stand up on her own. Throughout the process, though, and even as she, Sarah, Jacob and Josie were being dragged down the driveway to be thrown into vehicles, Dianne didn’t see any sign of Mark, Tina or Jason.
They had, quite astonishingly, vanished.
Chapter 16
ISS, International Space Station
