His fist slammed into the side of her face.
Now her shoulder.
She couldn’t overpower him.
Now he was going for the Glock.
Her hand still held it, but the muzzle was pointed harmlessly off to the side.
Both his hands grabbed the gun, and he pulled hard.
She held onto it, but her wrist twisted and she yelled in pain.
She didn’t have many options.
Any second now he’d wrench the Glock free from her hands.
She had to think of something.
She had to outsmart him. Outmaneuver him.
27
Jim fell into the corpse. Pain flared through his back.
The corpse broke his fall.
His hand was still around his Ruger, clutching it tightly.
Blood from the corpse was all over him.
There was a grunt behind him. Sounded like a man.
Jim shifted his weight as hard as he could, spinning himself around.
The ground was wet and slippery with blood.
Finally, he saw the face of his attacker.
The man was coming at him with a piece of some kind of tubing. Probably metal, by the way it had felt.
The light was dim. The flashlight had been dropped to the floor, illuminating some useless corner.
Jim pulled the trigger. The gun kicked.
The bullet struck the man in the stomach. He grunted in pain, but didn’t scream.
And he didn’t drop to the ground.
But it gave Jim the time he needed. He rose up, his boots slick on the bloody floor. But he got to his feet. Unsteady from the pain. His vision shaky and slightly blurred.
Jim didn’t have endless rounds for the Ruger.
The man would bleed out like that. He’d die a horrendous death.
The man staggered forward, towards Jim, who took a step to the side. The man swung the pipe again, but it missed wildly. His eyes were wide and he looked startled, fearful, and intensely angry. His eyes seemed to bore into Jim with nothing but hatred.
The man didn’t seem human.
He seemed like an animal. Ready to take someone else down with him, knowing that he was going to die and not caring anymore what the fight was for or what it was about.
Jim stepped to the side again, easily avoiding the next swing of the pipe.
Jim had to put him out of his misery. Otherwise it meant hours of agony. Intense agony.
But he didn’t want to waste another round.
The right thing to do wasn’t easy anymore. Now that society had fallen, the right thing to do meant something different than it had.
Jim reached into his pocket for his knife, took it out and flicked it open in a single, swift motion.
Jim knew he owed this man nothing. If Jim let him, the man would kill him without hesitation.
But there was something human left in the man. Not long ago, he’d been a member of society on some level. He’d been someone with a name, a social security number, probably a credit card or two.
Jim knew that he himself wasn’t that far away from falling into it all himself, letting the animal survival instinct takeover. A few weeks without food and he’d be just as deranged.
Jim needed to hang onto his humanity.
In whatever way he knew how.
And in this case, it meant slitting this man’s throat to put him out of his misery, to give him, if not a painless death, at least a swift one.
Jim holstered his Ruger and moved fast, springing forward despite the pain.
In mere seconds, he was behind the man, his knife arm around the man’s throat in a semi chokehold.
Jim drew the knife across the man’s neck in one swift motion, pulling back hard on the knife.
The cut was good and deep.
Jim expected the man to drop down, to crumple right to ground.
But that didn’t happen.
The man didn’t die instantly.
Hot blood covered Jim’s hands and the knife. Jim withdrew his hands and took a couple quick steps back.
The man was coughing. But the cough sounded like it was coming through water. He was gargling on his own blood.
The man was gasping, sputtering. He sank to his knees. Blood was everywhere.
Thirty seconds later, the gruesome scene was over, and the man collapsed. Dead.
Jim made a mental note that it hadn’t happened like in the movies.
But it still worked.
Jim looked around him, wiped the blood from his hands onto his pants. He checked his pockets for the penicillin, which was still there. He wiped off his knife and closed it. He examined his Ruger. He opened the cylinder and began to reload it with spare rounds from his pocket.
He needed to get out of there. Who knew what might happen next.
He opened the back door cautiously, leading with his revolver.
The sun, even hidden behind the clouds was bright, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust.
There seemed to be no one out there.
He went around the other side of the pharmacy, heading towards his Subaru in the parking lot.
He was half expecting the Subaru to be missing, or for it to have been ransacked. Or for someone to be waiting underneath it, or even waiting inside it.
But there was no one.
The parking and the nearby road were both deathly silent.
Inside the vehicle with the doors locked and the windows up, Jim got out a map. He was hoping to find a way back to the lake house without passing that intersection where he’d been ambushed by that van.
But there was no other way back.
He’d have to figure out something.
He cranked the engine, put the Subaru into first, and got back on the main road.
Even though everything was the same, it all looked different to Jim than when he’d come into town.
The stopped cars were still in the street. The houses and businesses were still silent. There was still no one in the street.
Jim had known the dangers when coming in. He’d understood the situation mentally.
But now he had a visceral, intensely real, situation to make it all seem different. More frightening. More unreal.
Jim’s clothes were covered in spots of blood and his back hurt so much he couldn’t sit completely upright in the driver’s seat.
The way back seemed shorter than the way in. Before he knew it, he was quickly approaching the intersection where he’d almost been shot.
Some may have stopped the vehicle and paused for a few moments to think. Some may have hesitated.
But not Jim.
Instead, he sped up, heading right towards where he knew the van would be.
He didn’t have a plan.
There was no point in making a plan when he didn’t know what would happen.
28
Jessica was holding her Glock as tightly as she could. The man’s strong hands were trying to wrench it free from her grip.
Her mind was racing a mile a minute, trying to come up with something.
Suddenly, she had it.
She jerked her head sharply, turning it to face the opposite direction.
She let out a fake gasp of surprise. “Rob!” she called out, even though Rob wasn’t anywhere in sight.
It was a classic trick. One that worked in cartoons and movies. And in real life, too.
He turned to look as well, thinking that she’d spotted her friend.
It was all the time Jessica needed.
She leaned her neck forward, opened her mouth wide, and bit down hard on his ear. She tightened her jaws. Hard.
He screamed out in pain.
She tasted hot blood.
His hands let up on the Glock.
Despite her wrist pain, Jessica yanked the Glock hard out of his two hands. Now she had it.
She pushed the Glock’s muzzle right into his torso.
She pulled the trigger.