Rebecca’s eyes were crazy. “He raped me,” she said. “Give me that pistol or I’ll kill you, too.”
“Let her go,” Patty said. “You need something to wear, clothes.”
Bell let go of Rebecca’s shoulders. She rolled out from under him angrily. The elevator doors remained open, the doors jerking as they tried to close.
“You better unlock the elevator, or they’ll know something’s wrong,” Bell said.
Patty ducked into the elevator, unlocked it and stepped out. The door slid closed.
They trooped down the hall, Patty scouting empty rooms for clothes for Rebecca to wear. Bell, behind them, tried not to look at the naked girl. The raw and ugly new black tattoo—CG— on her right ass cheek terrified him.
CHAPTER 27
They’d noticed that Howlers were learning to use simple tools. The Howlers had worked together to muster battering rams. Groups of the things had started dragging trees they’d pulled down in the forest. Twenty or more, holding a tree, would run toward the cabin’s front door. Each time, the cabin’s defenders cut the Howlers down before they could reach the porch.
It was this new aspect, their learning to use tools, which had unnerved Summers. The second time they’d tried it he’d panicked and run down into the bunker, leaving his weapon on the floor, sure the Howlers would succeed in breaking in and kill them. He’d closed the safety door separating the lower bunker from the cabin, trapping the rest of them upstairs. No one had noticed.
The five remaining upstairs—Quentin, Lacy, Marvin, Miles and Dillon—were shocked and exhausted from the second battle. The numbers of Howlers that had attacked the cabin was something they’d never anticipated, or would ever forget. Thousands had attacked in wave after wave. Howlers of every kind, many obviously from cities—more black and brown Howlers now—rushed up the snow-covered road toward the tiny cabin. The five of them had stood by their gunports, firing their automatic weapons straight toward the horde. The sound of five automatic weapons, the barrels heating up so they were sometimes glowing red, had filled the tiny cabin. They had had no respite, no time for screaming, no time for crying, or for even drinking water. They had slaughtered thousands of Howlers, who now lay in heaps outside the cabin again. The beautiful snowy field had turned into an ugly battlefield reminiscent of the Somme or Gettysburg, carpeted with corpses.
The battle had taken place over three hours in the dead of night, making it even more terrifying. By dawn, the floor of the cabin was covered with thousands of shell casings from the assault rifles. The sickening smell of cordite clung to their clothes and to the walls. Their trigger fingers were blistered and they had burns on their hands from handling their overheated weapons while reloading.
The dawn had come and they were drinking coffee in silence. An occasional pounding on the door of the cabin signaled that one of the many wounded Howlers had dragged itself over the corpses of the dead onto the smoldering charred porch and continued to attack, even bullet-torn and half-dead. They were still intent on breaking down the door and killing them all.
It all seemed impossible and yet they had seen it, and lived it. They’d managed to clear the field of fire from the mounds of dead Howlers stacked up in the kill zone one more time and in preparation for the next attack. Already more Howlers were gathering below on the road, calling out for more to join them. But the worst had been the sight of them carrying trees and running with them toward the cabin. It was their learning to work together that had terrified them more than anything. If they were learning to use tools, they soon might learn to use firearms.
“Where is the kid?” Dillon asked at last, his face haggard. A dark shadow of beard had grown over his face in the last forty-eight hours.
“He’s hiding,” Marvin said.
“The door to the bunker is locked,” Lacy said. “He’s locked it!” She stood over the open trap door, trying to slide back the iron plate.
They all looked at each other.
“There’s only one way down there,” Dillon said.
Marvin nodded.
“All the extra ammunition is down there,” Quentin said. His shirt had been burnt from the flame thrower they’d used during the battle. Some of the gel had dripped onto him and caught fire as he’d tried to turn off the weapon. Lacy had smothered the fire out with her own body.
No one had noticed Summers sneaking off during the battle. They had no way even to communicate with him. The trap door was covered with a two-inch thick steel plate, set in place from below.
Lacy, first to see the plate, had immediately realized what Summers had done. During the battle, she’d seen him frozen with fear when it looked as if they would be overrun and the front door breached. But she’d been forced to concentrate on her firing and she’d forgotten about Summers, lost in her own manic killing and reloading.
“Motherfucker!” Dillon said. He took a sip of coffee. “I guess this Phelps guy never figured on a coward fucking everyone like that.”
“There’s only a couple of boxes of ammunition left up here,” Marvin said.
A loud, steady banging started on the cabin’s door. Coffee in hand, Marvin walked slowly to the gunport with a view of the porch. He saw a teenage Howler with a sledgehammer. The thing was using deliberate, careful swings, hitting the cabin’s reinforced door. Marvin watched the hinges jump, intrigued by the Howler’s use of the tool.
“They’re learning fast. He’s got a sledgehammer,” Marvin said, not bothering to turn around. He stuck the barrel of the FAL through the gunport, fired a burst at the kid’s head and returned to the table. Killing Howlers had become routine.
During the worst moments of the battle it had been the doctor who made sure everyone had ammunition: running to the back of the cabin and the gun locker and bringing boxes of ammunition to each of them, sometimes sitting on the ground, his back to the wall, his blood stained sheep-skin coat open, reloading their empty clips himself with a gadget from Phelps’s gun locker. Never once had Marvin looked frightened or even worried, even at the very worst moments when Summers had stopped firing and started screaming like a child, having snapped.
At their worst moment, when a horde of Howlers gained the porch, dozens of the creatures beating on the thick plastic window, their faces big, their spit hitting the window, their dirty palms pressed against the bullet-proof plastic—some of them shoving hands through the open gunports—even then, when it seemed they would all die soon, Marvin had worked with the same dull look on his face, almost as if he’d become one of them.
It was then, while Summers pissed himself and fell on the floor screaming like a child, that Quentin ran for Phelps’s homemade flamethrower. Quentin manned the awkward thing, attached to a jerrycan by a plastic hose, itself attached to an air compressor. He’d pulled the compressor’s starter and the flamethrower jumped to life, building pressure in the jerrycan, pushing a gel-like substance that Chuck had designed to mimic the Napalm he’d seen used in Vietnam.
The homemade flamethrower began to spit hunks of gel from its nozzle. Quentin screamed for people to get away from the gunports and lit the end of the flamethrower. Dripping flame, he poked the flamethrower’s head out of one of the cabin’s gunports and pulled the trigger. The nozzle shot flaming gel at the attackers, covering them in flames.