“Go ahead.”
“Jack, Sullivan says we’re about to be overwhelmed. He says we should all finish it now.”
“How does he know?”
“He’s unconscious but his exact words were ‘finish it now, too many to hold off.’”
“Can he make it?”
“No.”
“Go ahead and establish your own protocol there, Sean. We’re going to hold out here to the last possible moment. Tell T and E that I did my best, will ya?”
“They know that, Jack. We all know.”
“Wish I did, goddamnit. Godspeed, Sean.”
“What’s going on?” Taylor asked, panic in her eyes, her voice trembling.
“Go on in the back with the kids, sweetheart. I’ll be back to join you in a minute.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked, starting to cry. “Sean, what are you going to do?”
“Price?”
“Come on, honey,” Price said gently, helping Taylor to her feet.
“Don’t, Sean. Please…”
West took one of the titanium vials from his jacket pocket and twisted off the lid, shaking the glass capsule into his hand. “God,” he said quietly, slipping the capsule between Sullivan’s molars. “Allow me to commend this man’s spirit into your good hands.”
He pressed upward on Sullivan’s jaw to crush the capsule between his teeth. Sullivan’s body tensed for an instant and then relaxed. West stood up and went into the back room.
“Erin,” he said gently. “We need to see about Wayne.”
“No, Sean!” Erin said, holding the baby in her arms and beginning to cry. “You’re not allowed. He’s my husband!”
“I won’t do anything without your permission, honey, but it’s time to make some decisions. We may only have seconds left.”
The other mothers were crying as well, their hands trembling as they took the vials from their pockets. By now the children realized the true purpose of the astronaut medicine and they were all crying as well.
“This is bullshit!” Lynette said in disgust. “To get this close—”
“Lynny…” Price said quietly.
West sat down with his kids and took Taylor’s hand. “There’s no reason for us to be afraid. We’re in God’s hands. Now everyone put a capsule under your tongue and join hands.”
Everyone did as he said.
“Will it hurt?” one of the little ones asked, sobbing.
“No, baby doll. You’ll just go to sleep and wake right back up in heaven with God. I promise.”
Erin couldn’t hold anyone’s hand, however; she would need them both for pinching capsules into the mouths of her husband and infant daughter. Jenny offered to help her but she refused.
“Can we all agree to wait until they come into the building?” Taylor asked through her tears. “Can we do that? I love you all so much!”
“I like that idea,” Michelle said, gripping her son’s hand. “Okay, baby? We’re all going to heaven at the same time, so make sure you wait for Mommy.”
“Okay, Mom,” the little boy said, seemingly unafraid.
West began to recite from the Twenty-third Psalm: “‘The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in—’”
Without warning Lynette let go of her husband’s hand and sprang to her feet, dashing for the front of the store, gripping a flashlight.
West let go of Taylor’s hand and jumped up to chase after her, but Price all but tackled him in the doorway.
“Price, what the hell are you doing?”
“You can’t catch her,” Price said, hearing Lynette scampering over the barricade. “Your place is here, Sean. She’s my wife…”
Lynette ran down the street and froze at the corner, shining the flashlight on a disbelieving horde of barbarous-looking men, who for a moment might have believed they were seeing an angel with flowing blond hair, were it not for the grenade she gripped in the opposite hand.
“Catch!” she said, lobbing it into the air over their heads and turning to run back toward the pharmacy.
“Fuckin’ bitch!” one of the men shouted as they scattered in the dark, none of them having any idea where the grenade would land. When it did land it rolled beneath a car where two men had taken cover, wounding them both upon detonation and prompting their comrades to move in and finish them off quickly in accordance with the laws of the wild.
Lynette stumbled in her dash for the pharmacy and was caught from behind by her hair and shoved into a lamppost, knocking the flashlight from her hand. She struggled to keep her feet, tussling in the blackness with a surprisingly weak and apparently shorter man, gnashing her teeth lest she accidentally spit out the capsule of cyanide she still kept in her mouth. She slashed with her fingers, found the soft gelatinous orb of the attacker’s eyeball and grabbed him close, thrusting her thumb into the socket to claw it out. The man screamed and reeled away, but as she turned to run once more, she was struck by a vicious uppercut from an unseen fist that fractured her jaw, dropping her to her knees. She was not even remotely aware of the broken slivers of glass in her tongue as she fell forward onto her face.
Her body was lifted in the darkness as four men attempted to haul her off across the street, all of them thinking she was merely unconscious, but Price shot them down from behind then turned the carbine on the rest of the mob, which had reformed and was on the move. He was struck by a hail of bullets, the men trampling his body in their renewed assault on the pharmacy, kicking and pounding at the barricade to get inside.
“Not yet!” West told the women, breaking away from their prayers, his instinct for survival overriding all common sense as he grabbed his carbine and leapt into the doorway, firing into the mob at forty feet.
The attackers screamed and pulled back onto the walk, returning his fire.
Outside, the street erupted in a fusillade of automatic weapons fire and the attackers fell back from the pharmacy in confusion. West stood listening as the gunfire reached a crescendo, then he slammed the storeroom door and moved to cover the bodies of his wife and children with his own, shouting for everyone to spit out their capsules of cyanide.
Seconds later there was a cacophony of rapid 40mm cannon fire followed by the roaring sound of an 850 horse power Motoren-und Turbinen-Union diesel motor as it went rumbling past the building toward the corner.
“In here!” they heard Marty shout from the front of the store. “They’re in here!”
“Who brought the forty mike mike?” Danzig mumbled through a fog of morphine, his head resting in Jessie’s lap where they hid behind the counter in the porn shop.
“Jack!” Veronica shouted toward the front of the store. “What’s going on?”
Forrest climbed painfully up into the showcase and stole a quick glance west toward the corner. “Jesus Christ!” he said jumping back down and landing painfully on his bad ankle. “Everybody spit those fucking capsules out! Melissa!”
“I already did!”
“Is it the goddamn Marines or what?” Kane asked, sticking his head down from a crawl space in the ceiling. He and Forrest had decided that he would be the last one left alive, surviving them all just long enough to rain their last six grenades down upon their attackers after the shop had finally fallen and filled up with the enemy, an enemy that might rape the bodies of the women.
“Everybody stay ready,” Forrest cautioned, girding himself for the next onslaught, an old instinct telling him the fight was not yet over. “Kane, get down here!” he said, dropping to a crouch and shouldering his carbine.
A mob of men came pouring from three different apartments across the street, maybe twenty in all, hurling a grenade at the shop front.