It was Miles who had taken it on himself during the battle to bring each of them fresh ammunition. All of them were firing the same weapon, the FAL assault rifle. At the end of the battle, the Howlers piled up in front of the porch, five feet high, were giving the others a wall of dead bodies to hide behind. Some Howlers, especially children, would fling themselves off the heap and land on the porch, sometimes heading head-first into the bulletproof window in an attempt to smash it. Others would crawl up the stairs behind the dead and crawl, on all fours, toward the door.
At one point, one of the crawling ones grabbed Lacy’s rifle barrel and tried to yank it out through the gunport. She screamed for help. Marvin jumped up and helped her pull the butt of her rifle back. He managed to pour fire onto the Howler, splitting its face open.
Lacy sagged to the floor, exhausted. She turned and looked at her father firing, the sweat pouring from his face. He emptied a clip and caught her eye while turning to pick up one at his feet. For the first time in her life, Lacy thought she saw fear on her father’s face. He went back to killing.
At dawn it stopped. At dawn the snow fell lightly on two thousand dead bodies lying out on the field. Inside the cabin it was quiet. They were all past exhausted.
It was Marvin who walked outside first. He stood at the doorway, cold air pouring in looking at the nightmarish scene: dead Howlers piled in heaps in front of the cabin’s porch. Bodies were everywhere, all types of people. Some were obviously city people, judging from their dress.
Marvin looked at the pile in the nearest kill zone, twenty yards or so in front of the cabin. It was an abattoir: bodies piled on bodies, blood, guts, brain matter. He walked out into the field. He put down his rifle and began to pull bodies down from the pile and move them out of the way. He pulled a fat man whose head was gone, yanking him down from the top of the pile. He watched the thing slide down the scrum-like pile of bodies and land at his feet.
Marvin heard a shot ring out and simultaneously felt the crack of a bullet pass very near his head. A Howler, hiding behind the pile, had jumped at him and was in midair when Dillon shot him from the porch. The Howler, a teenage boy, landed at Marvin’s feet, its body twitching not quite dead. Marvin looked up at the porch and saw Dillon covering him. He went back to work without saying a word, dragging bodies from the pile and hauling them out of the way of their kill zone. His boots created a sludge of guts and blood and snow as he worked. The others came out of the cabin joining him in the ugly work, all of them realizing that the kill zone had to be cleared, or they would all die.
CHAPTER 26
“She’s in the bathroom,” Bell said, tossing the black man his penknife.
The man, catching the closed knife, looked at the thing dismissively. “Keep it, Lieutenant. They want you downstairs. Are you in or out?” the man said.
“Count me in,” Bell said and smiled.
“Good,” the black man said. He turned around. Bell saw he was holding an automatic in his right hand, the hammer down, but “hot” and ready to fire, he guessed.
“She was about to piss herself,” Bell said. “She’s in the can. I freed her hands. I couldn’t say no.”
The black man walked toward the closed bathroom door, turning his back on Bell. Raising his pistol slightly, he opened the door with his free hand. Bell could see Patty was sitting on the toilet, her pants down at her ankles. She looked up at the man, obviously terrified. Bell could hear her piss hitting the water in the toilet.
“Get the fuck up! You’re to be tattooed. You’re going to be a CG, like the other girl,” the man said, looking at her.
Bell walked toward the bathroom. He sprang on the man from behind. The man turned, but was too late to stop Bell from getting his left arm wrapped around his neck. Bell, taller, got his right arm—clamped at the man’s throat—locked into the crook of his left arm, then wrapped his left hand up and behind the black man’s head, forcing his head down, and against the arm at his throat. Once Bell felt his two arms lock, the way he’d been taught in Survival School, it would be almost impossible to break his hold. The man would stop breathing very soon, his trachea crushed. But it was like riding a bull; the black man, very strong, tried to buck Bell off his back, swinging Bell’s legs first left, then right.
Bell, managing to keep his arms locked, watched as the man brought his pistol over his left shoulder, intending to shoot Bell in the head. He fired over his shoulder, aiming his shot where he thought Bell’s head should be. The sound of the gunshot exploded through the tiled bathroom. But Bell, anticipating the shot, had dropped his own head behind the man’s, and the shot missed him, hitting the shower-stall glass door. Bell managed to force the man’s head down and toward the floor, making it impossible for him to fire at him again effectively.
The man managed to lift Bell completely off the floor, hitting out at the lieutenant with his elbow repeatedly after the shot failed. All the while the black man’s free left hand continued to try and pry Bell’s death-lock loose. He aimed his pistol at the girl, but Bell jerked the man to his left just as he fired at her and the shot went wild.
Missing her, the bullet hit the toilet’s tank and smashed it. Water leaked out of the cracked porcelain now. Bell heard the man’s pistol clatter to the tile floor. The man’s legs gave out, weakened from the lack of air.
Bell, his feet back on the floor, cranked down on the man’s neck with every ounce of strength his hundred-and-seventy pounds could muster. his whole body contracted with the effort as he tried to break the man’s neck. Airless and frantic, the man brought both hands up to the arms around his throat in a lame attempt to break Bell’s grip, but it was too late.
Bell felt the man’s windpipe collapse, finally crushed. The man’s strength left him completely. His two hands dropped away from Bell’s arms. He fell forward with Bell on top of him, still choking him for all he was worth. Bell, on his knees, heard himself grunt as he continued to try and snap the man’s neck, twisting it violently one way, and then another.
Patty had sprung up from the toilet, a toothbrush she’d picked up from the floor in her right hand. She rammed the green plastic handle straight into the man’s right eyeball, driving it into his brain, pushing it with her palm until it stopped moving. She’d sent the entire length into his head.
The man, in agony, managed to buck crazily from the pain, not dead yet. Bell rode him toward the wall by the toilet. Despite the toothbrush shoved into his brain and a crushed trachea, the man managed to struggle again. But Bell locked up with all his might a second time. The man finally slumped dead, his chest rammed up against the rim of the toilet.
The lieutenant stood on the man’s back and cranked his head back, feeling the neck snap. Patty grabbed the dead man by the back of his head and slammed his face down as hard as she could onto of the edge of the toilet bowl, splitting his skull open.
Bell, exhausted, rolled off and watched Patty drag the body up and put the man’s face into the piss-filled toilet bowl, holding it under water with her knee. She walked her knees up on the man’s neck, holding him down until she realized he was dead. She watched the last few bubbles of air from the dead man’s lungs came up out of the piss water. Bell could see the white of Patty’s naked thighs, her pants still around her ankles, as she knelt on the man’s submerged head, toilet water leaking onto the floor.
“Dead,” Bell whispered.
She finally climbed off the man’s back and away from the body. She bent down and pulled up her wet pants. Bell put his index finger up to his lips in a signal for quiet. He picked up the pistol from the wet floor, sure one of the guards would come in after hearing the shots.
Patty finished buckling her belt. It was quiet, with only the sound of the water leaking from the toilet. Bell walked out to the room, planning to step outside and shoot it out with the guard.
Patty came to his side and grabbed his shoulder, stopping him. “No. Wait.”
“We can’t wait,” Bell said. “We’ve got to get out of here. Someone must have heard those shots.”
“Let me go first. They’ve seen me. They won’t react to me, maybe.”
Bell looked at her. “Okay,” he said.
“I’ll walk out. If more than one is out there, I’ll tell them they’d better come and check on their friend.”
They heard howling outside the hotel, coming from the pool area. Bell walked to the window overlooking the pool and saw several Howlers standing around the verge of the pool. Their ugly faces were lit by the pool’s underwater light.
The group was cut down in a hail of automatic-weapons fire. The guards in the hall had left to deal with the Howler attack, he realized.
“I have to find Ryder,” Bell said. “We need to find out where that helicopter is.”
“What about the girl—Rebecca?” Patty said.
“Okay,” Bell said. “We find her first.”
“She’s just down the hall,” Patty said. “We were kept together.” Bell nodded.
Patty walked out of the room. She ducked back inside almost immediately and motioned for him to follow her. The hallway was empty, but he felt sure they wouldn’t make it more than a few yards before being cut down.
Patty stopped in front of a room several doors down. She tried to open the door, but it was locked. She knocked softly but got no answer. She turned to look at Bell. He leaned against the wall, motioning her aside, and kicked the door in.