“You reload here,” VanGelder said, dryly, pointing to the slot on the underside and handing him the ejected round. “I’ll let you figure out the sights.” He dropped a box of ammunition on the floor and then walked back into one of the rooms.
Weaver slid the round back into the shotgun and poked the barrel through the hole just in time to see one of the doglike creatures creeping up the stairs. It seemed to have trouble with the concept, raising its feet too high and missing the steps. He gave it a blast from the shotgun which knocked it off its feet. As it tumbled to the ground, howling, he shot it in the side. The load of double-ought buck put a hole in its side he could put two fists through. It twitched and then was still but by that time another was ascending the stairs. He shot it and this time it didn’t fall but just kept climbing, belly down on the stairs. He shot twice more and the last round apparently found something vital because it stopped and rolled into a ball, biting at its belly. He shot it again and then the shotgun clicked on an empty chamber.
He loaded more rounds feverishly but no more were on the stairs when he looked. He leaned his head on the barricade and, just for a second, contemplated that this was a really stupid place for a physicist to die. When he opened his eyes again there were three of the things on the stairs, nosing at the dead monsters.
He shot one that was broadside, dropping it, then the other two clumsily charged upwards. He got one, somehow, but the third was scrabbling at the barricade and he was out of rounds. He dropped the shotgun and picked up the pistol, emptying it at point blank range into the belly of the monster. That stopped it, but its claws pulled the barricade partially down. More were on the steps now and he dropped out the magazine and started firing at them as fast as he could.
He was pretty sure he was done for when there came a burst of firing from outside the house. Shotguns, rifles, a heavy “BLAM-BLAM-BLAM” that sounded sort of like the big machine gun that had been on the truck and another louder boom that he couldn’t place. The monsters were clawing at the barricade, though, so he kept reloading and firing. Then, suddenly, Sanson was at his side. He had a different rifle and he picked his shots, dropping the monsters one by one.
“What’s happening outside?” Weaver shouted. All the firing had made him half deaf he realized.
“I think the cavalry got here,” Sanson said.
Jim Holley had never had what most people called “a real job” in his life. After getting out of the Army he’d moved back to his hometown of Eustis and drifted from one job to another. He’d sold magazines, headed up a couple of charities, played at politics and spent a good bit of time working in retail. But what he mostly did was play with guns.
All of his limited free money went to his gun collection and it had, over the years, become quite extensive. He was well known to all the gun stores in the Eustis area and could be found every weekend that there wasn’t a local gun show on one range or another firing a wide variety of weapons.
He’d been hanging out in Big Bob’s Bait, Tackle and Armaments, wrangling amiably about the difference in quality between the British .303 and the .30-06, when they both heard the call from the SWAT team for any available unit to respond. If the National Guard couldn’t handle it and the SWAT team couldn’t handle it it had to be bad.
Big Bob had rolled his cigar from one side of his mouth to another and shook his head.
“I think it’s time to break out the big guns, Jimbo, what say you?”
Jim had just nodded and they both walked into the back room of the store.
Now, Jim had quite a collection but Bob Taylor was in the business of supplying whatever a customer might desire. And his idea of what customers might desire was pretty eclectic. The back room of his store, which was only open to the right sort of individual, was the gun collector’s dream. He had two Barretts, M-82A1 and M-95, semi-automatic and bolt respectively. There were Armalites, MP-5s, Garands, Thompsons, Sten, Steyn AUGs and hanging in pride of place a .477 Tyrannosaur. On the floor was a huge gun with a stock and a bipod that was a Finnish Lahti m/39 20mm “man portable” engine of destruction.
By the time they had the back door open and were loading ammunition the shop had started to fill up. Some of them were “help me” customers who, hearing what was happening had decided that this was the day to come in and purchase a weapon. But the vast majority were the usual crowd of hangers on. The latter filed into the back room and set to work unloading the room and loading the weapons.
In no more than fifteen minutes they had two pickups filled with enough weapons and ammo to arm a very eclectic company of infantry, and a convoy of half a dozen battered pickups, cars and SUVs was headed down the road to Jules Court.
They ran into the first monster nearly a block away. It was savaging a little girl’s bike, said little girl being up a tree, screaming.
Jim was in the back of Bob’s pickup truck and he let the monster have it in the side with a burst of 185 grain rounds from the vintage BAR he had laid across the roof. Even driving along at fifteen miles an hour he managed to put three rounds in the side of the thing, which dropped in its tracks.
“Time to unass,” Bob yelled.
“No,” Jim yelled back. “Drive closer. Less distance to hump this shit!”
But by the time Jules Court was in view, they could see that they were going to have to go tactical. Monsters were spilling onto the street. Some of them were like the first, the size of large dogs and covered in spikes. Others were bipedal and seemed to be firing something out of their snouts. Jim shot one of them with the BAR and then held on as Bob slammed to a stop.
“I’ve got just the thing for those bastards,” Jim said, clambering over the tailgate and picking up the 20mm. He managed to get it set up on the roof and then slid in a magazine. “Eat Finnish hot-lead you alien freaks!”
The rounds from the 20mm were not, in fact, lead bullets but exploding shells. As each of them punched into one of the larger beasts it exploded sending bits of the monsters in every direction and covering the area in green gore.
The rest of the ad hoc militiamen had unloaded from the trucks and were laying down a base of fire, engaging the smaller beasts and letting the heavy weapons handle the larger ones. One of the requirements to be a “regular” at Big Bob’s Bait, Tackle and Armaments was that you had to “know what you were doing.” That meant you couldn’t just argue the relative merits of a Sharps Buffalo gun, you had to know what it was used for. Bob preferred people like Jim, somebody with real military experience. Cops were okay, but only if they knew how to shoot for shit and most cops, in Bob’s experience, didn’t measure up to his criterion.
Most of the regulars, therefore, had a more than adequate idea of what to do in a situation where demons were invading the earth through a gate into hell. That is: lay down as much lead as necessary to push them back.
Jim emptied the BAR magazine and reached back only to have another shoved into his hand. He slipped that one in and engaged another of the bipedal beasts, ripping a three-round burst into its torso that nearly severed it. There seemed to be about one of them for every ten or twenty of the smaller beasts. And the guys on either side with rifles and shotguns were clearing up the smaller ones.
It was only when the last of the bipedal beasts in view were down that he noticed there was firing from the second story of one of the houses. And at the far end of the road there was a group of soldiers in desert camouflage who had been holding a fall-back line.
“Bob, we got to move it in,” he said. “Push them back to that gate, wherever it is.”
“Yeah,” the gunshop owner said, reflectively. He waved at an arm that had been thrust out of the second story window. There was firing from inside the house, too. “Everybody head for the house!” he yelled. “Get in and drive, I’m going to stay on the 20mm.”