Cochran didn’t have to be told twice. He scrambled up and dove over the fridge through the kitchen doorway. More gunfire blasted through the front windows. Good Christ. It sounded like one of them had a fucking fully automatic assault rifle out there.
Sandy wriggled on her stomach through the broken glass over to the Einhorns’ twenty-six-inch TV on a stand in the corner. She scooted it over the front door and wedged it at an angle under the door handle. The rabbit ear antenna stuck out wildly.
More gunfire, but she couldn’t tell where it was going because the glass was nearly gone from the windows. She wanted to stick her head up and see if Cochran had managed to get out the back door but worried she would catch a bullet in the back of the head. Instead, she propelled herself back across the floor using her elbows and toes and slid into place behind the couch.
She’d given up her only gun, but she still had the Taser X26P on her left hip and wondered how well their fancy bulletproof vests would protect them against 13,000 volts. That is, if they didn’t shoot her first.
She didn’t have to wait long.
A barrage of gunfire erupted and the front door shuddered under the onslaught. Sandy flattened herself into the floor. It sounded like whoever had the assault rifle was emptying the clip into the front door, and sure enough, after a several seconds of mind-numbing gunfire, there were a few moments of relief as he switched magazines.
Sandy got ready.
The man with the machine gun kicked open the front door, knocking the TV aside, and raked the Einhorn living room with automatic gunfire, whipping the gun back and forth, spraying bullets like he wanted to water the flowers but only had a few drops left in the hose.
Sandy closed her eyes and prayed, promising the Universe that she would do whatever she could to raise her son as a decent human being if she lived through this. Splinters of wood and powder from drywall settled over her like remnants from a hurricane. She blinked the dust out of her eyes and watched from under the couch as the man’s feet stepped over the threshold.
He froze, watching and waiting for movement. He was big, and she didn’t think her nifty little spinning and kicking trick with Cochran would work on this guy. Cochran was a lawyer who spent most of his time in a suit and tie; this man was a professional mercenary.
The back door clicked shut.
The man ran for the kitchen and as he reached the couch, Sandy fired the Taser. Twin electric dragons snaked up and chomped hold of his flesh; one snapped at the inside of his thigh, the other hit his left testicle. He made a surprised grunt and toppled over. The assault rifle flew out of his hands and clattered across the refrigerator in the doorway and landed in the kitchen. His forehead cracked into the side of the fridge, throwing his skull at an odd angle as the rest of his body hit the floor.
Sandy hoped he’d broken his neck. She scrambled up, stepped on him, and hopped over the fridge. If he wasn’t dead, she had less than five seconds before he was moving again. She went for the assault rifle and turned around to find the man struggling to his feet.
At some point, sometime after she had shot the first man in the head, she had stopped thinking like a law enforcement officer and now the foremost image in her mind was her son’s face. She had left him behind to respond to an emergency telephone call that had turned out to be a lie. And now she would let nothing stop her from getting back to Kevin. She would take him in her arms again or she would die trying.
The man ripped out the barbs and didn’t make a sound.
Sandy didn’t want to waste any more time with somebody that could pull the end of a fishhook out of his balls without whimpering. She brought the assault rifle around. She wasn’t used to the light trigger, though, and squeezed it too soon. The rifle jumped in her hands and bullets stitched across the doorway, right above the man’s head, as the recoil raised the barrel higher and higher. She released the trigger and readjusted, but it was too late.
A dull click; the rifle was empty.
He wrapped the Taser wire around both fists like a boxer wrapping tape around his knuckles, then put one knee on the fridge, keeping his eyes locked on her the whole time.
Sandy heard gunfire out in the front yard but couldn’t worry about Cochran now.
She dropped the assault rifle, wondering if she had enough time to reload the Taser. She needed something, anything, to use as a weapon, because the man was going to take her apart with his bare hands.
She grabbed the knife block off the counter and cracked him in the skull with all three pounds. Butcher knives spilled all over the floor. The blow dazed him for only a half second. Blood pooled and started spilling into his eye. He blinked, shook his head to clear it, and crawled completely onto the fridge.
Sandy was already scrabbling for the knives. Her fingers curled around a thick handle and she leapt at the man, coming down on him like a lithe little grim reaper. The steak knife sliced the side of his face open from temple to jawbone; the flesh peeled away from the bone like a rotten orange.
A giant fist, bound in Taser wire, came out of nowhere. It caught her on the chin like a one-hundred-mile-an-hour fastball and lifted her off her feet. She landed flat on her back amid the rest of the knives and she heard a deep, wrenching crack from the house itself.
The floor dropped several inches.
Sandy lost her knife and scrambled for the back door as she heard the man roar and leap from the fridge. He landed a few feet behind her kicking legs and she wished she could have seen his expression as the floorboards gave way and he crashed through to the basement in an avalanche of rotten timber, linoleum squares, and knives.
She had just grabbed hold of the back door handle when the floor collapsed, and was able to hang on. She swung it open and caught herself on the threshold. She pulled herself over and glanced back down into the basement.
The man had landed on the mirror and dresser, cracking it with the impact, and rolled off to the floor as debris rained down around him. He stirred, and reached out to grab at his left leg.
Through the cloud of dust, Sandy thought she saw something else moving down there. She caught flashes of what looked like long black centipedes crawling through the wreckage, all drawn to the struggling man. The human fingers followed, crawling over and under the linoleum and splinters, exactly like the spider creatures in the body bag back at Dr. Castle’s office. Then things even bigger crawled out. These had longer tentacles than the insects, moving along with two uneven rows on both sides of the legs of small rodents like rats or squirrels. They cautiously crept out of the septic tank and slithered through what was left of the floor. Sometimes she could see exposed backbones along the tendrils.
They swarmed the man as he rolled and tried to get away, and she saw that his left leg was bent horribly just below the knee. A shard of startlingly white bone jutted out from just under his kneecap. Sandy knew that he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon and rolled away from the kitchen.
The shooting out front had stopped. She stayed low and crept around the south side of the house, keeping the barn to her right. One of the doors was open, but she couldn’t see far into the darkness inside. She slipped into the bushes that had grown wild up the side of the house and crept under their canopy to the front corner of the house, trying to catch a glimpse of the third man or Cochran.
In the driveway, the third man was out in the open. He was dragging his dead comrade, the guy Sandy had shot in the head, back along the walk to the vehicles. Sandy wondered if he was taking the body to their car, removing the evidence. But he opened the cruiser’s back door and rolled the body into the backseat. He slammed the cruiser’s door and went to the rental car’s trunk.