It took me about a minute to figure out how to eject the huge magazine. It held twelve rounds. The scope came to life with the push of a button, but it took me a full five minutes to figure out how to get it into night vision mode. This rifle weighed a ton, much more than Max, maybe sixty-five pounds. It’s no wonder no one had taken it when they took all the pistols and shotguns out of the store. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to make it out of this situation with it, but I had one task I had to take care of first, and this monster was just the thing for the job.
Behind the counter there was a doorway to a store room. I pulled the rifle and box of ammo behind me as I crawled in there looking for a roof access ladder. Just inside the door was a ladder up, so I slung the rifle over my shoulder, and started the climb. A stiff back, sixty-five pound gun, thirty pounds of ammunition in a backpack and a ladder with a locked door at the top was a recipe for agony. The fourth key I tried on the key ring opened the hatch. Up went the backpack and the rifle, and I started the second trip for the fifty pound can of ammunition.
Once on the roof with ammunition and rifle, I re-locked the access hatch, I crawled the perimeter of the roofline, looking for an exit. From the rear corner, there was a trash dumpster that was a roughly six foot jump, and then another six feet to the ground. That seemed like my best exit strategy. Back at the rifle, I counted the number of people I could see with the night vision scope; there were a hundred thirty-seven people down there. Two of them were carrying Savage Arms 111F rifles with scopes, but one of them had a bigger scope than mine.
I was angry. I was angry at myself for being careless and overconfident. I was angry at these people. I didn’t see a single slow zombie in the crowd, and I got the feeling from watching them that these were humans. I saw several of them eating out of cans. I’d never seen a zombie eat anything other than people. There may have been one or two smart zombies driving them, I didn’t have enough intel to know for sure. Max was my only sure-fire way of knowing, and I certainly wasn’t going to bring any of them to him.
I searched below me and saw no sign of John’s corpse. I crawled slowly around the entire roof, searching with the night vision scope, and saw nothing. I felt reasonably sure that John had escaped, there were signs of explosions down there, broken trees, etc. There were still corpses down there. I counted fifty-five. I’d done the math; he only had fifty-one bullets. That means he had on several occasions killed more than one person with a bullet. ‘What’s better than never missing your target? Being able to hit two targets with one bullet. Only John,’ I thought to myself.
Feeling relatively certain that John had escaped, I set up the Barrett a few feet back from the edge of the roof, and settled in to watch for my rescue party, or to wait for this crew to find I’d escaped from my room. I wondered who they were, and what they were doing. I wondered if, when the time came, I could hit anything with this monster rifle. I could see people talking down there. I wished I had super hearing. Or super anything for that matter.
My timing was impeccable; I’d been set up for less than thirty minutes when I saw via night vision, John and Leo coming up the trail.
17. Retribution
I could see Leo and John in the scope as they crouched down about a hundred yards back from where John and I had stopped. Out of nowhere I saw three forms appear behind them. They must have been hiding in holes or underbrush for cover, which explains how they’d gotten the drop on us before. The three figures crept through the sparse underbrush towards my two friends, guns outstretched. I slowly inhaled three times before exhaling in a long, smooth breath, and squeezed the trigger on the monster .50 caliber rifle. It bucked against my shoulder, but the rifle itself absorbed most of the recoil. Leo shot off in a green streak at the crack of the rifle. The ghosting of the night vision screen actually made it easier to follow her; she left a trail of green behind her. A shift of the barrel to the left, breathe, squeeze, two down. At my second shot, John burst forward with a pistol in each hand, firing at everything that moved. He was wearing a dark vest against a lighter colored shirt; it looked like my tactical vest.
After my first shot, many of the enemy combatants turned to look for me, but when John started firing, they all spun around looking at the more direct threat. Knowing he would be shooting those closest to him, I dropped the barrel and started firing on the men furthest from John. I burned through my remaining nine shots in the magazine with nine kills.
‘I’m sure John could have taken twelve with nine bullets,’ I thought to myself, as I manually fed a shell into the bolt. I wished I’d been able to find several magazines, but even with single shots, it was still fast and efficient. Breathe, squeeze, bolt, shell, bolt, breathe. I got into a routine; I was a machine taking out the trash. For every one of them I killed, John was killing three. I stopped shooting, and started watching Leo, to make sure none could sneak up on her. Not that that was possible, but three months ago, someone moving so fast you couldn’t see them wasn’t possible either.
There was a small group on the far side of the killing zone, out of John’s line of fire; Leo was heading towards them, while he crouched down reloading magazines. I stood up and yelled, “Leave a couple alive!” When I stood up, on the opposite side of the field, a lone figure stood up out of a hole, raised a rifle and pulled the trigger. Leo and John both looked up at me right as the bullet hit me in the left shoulder, spinning me around and throwing me to the ground. I felt like I’d been hit in the chest by a sledge hammer. I fell with my head hanging off the edge of the roof, and laid there trying to catch my breath. It was as if someone had parked a car on my chest.
Leo became a dervish. She was a green blur of death. Her kukri in her hand, baton in the other, at one point she had three heads removed before the first one hit the ground. She was twisting and whirling and diving and rolling. She was graceful death. She was a river of green flowing between the men who were now running in a panic. Every now and then, almost in slow motion, one of them would stop and raise a gun. None of them ever got their rifles to their shoulders. Her machete hit the first three at the base of the skull; she drove her baton into the eye of another one. Leo switched mid swing from the kukri to the baton, clubbing the final two into unconsciousness.
The array of death and destruction was amazing. It brought to mind post battle scenes from movies about the Revolutionary War. Dead men lay in piles and singles. The difference was, there were no wounded. With the exception of the two unconscious combatants, every one of them was dead from either a hole in their head, or lack of a head. Following the fight, the silence was amazing. The entire fight took less than two minutes.
The second the last corpse fell, Leo ran around the building. I think she must have jumped up onto the dumpster, and then to the roof, because in no time she was at my side. “You dumb, overconfident, son of a bitch you’d better not be dead!” She yelled at me. I groaned as she rolled me over to let her know I was alive. “Hurts like hell!” I said with a smile as her face, red with anger at my stupidity
“Tookes, if you die, I’ll kill you!”