Instantly, Winnie turned her attention to a huge male forty feet away. Pulling in a breath and holding it, she willed herself still. She squeezed the trigger. A round discharged and hit the assailant, but the impact only made the man flinch. The body armor, concealed under a heavy parka, stopped the bullet. It flattened and was deflected. A second shot, striking within an inch of the first, buckled the man’s knees. He could not keep his feet and fell into the snow. In that second, Winnie sprinted into the main hall to another window to get closer to her target. She jumped over the small human form on the floor and reached an opening where glass and window frame had been seconds earlier.
The woman raised her arms, sighted her handgun and commenced firing anew as the beast outside shifted to his knees, raised his gun once again and began squeezing off more rounds.
The interior of the main hall was a space imploded. Milky dust shut down visibility. Debris flying at tornado velocity rocketed across the room. Bullets passed out of the west side of the structure and were lost to the snow, ash and forest.
One to the head, now:: she processed the situation automatically, coldly, as she had been taught. A third 45-caliber round struck the man’s rifle, deforming it, as he raised it towards his chin. The firearm spun crazily away from the man’s grip and slammed into his face. The blow sent the hulking man sprawling down into the snow and ash. Wood from the rifle’s stock disintegrated into shrapnel and whistled away into the atmosphere, but not before peppering the right side of the man’s face.
Frantic, thin rivulets of blood leaking from his chin, check, forehead and ear, the man scrambled for the firearm. He reached it, clawed it from the snow, pulled it up to look at it and stood breathless before the now-useless weapon.
As the man fumbled, Winnie sprang from the floor of the room and through an eviscerated window. Vaulting five feet to the ground, she ran at the huge male. The demon pulled the weapon apart. It cleaved into several pieces. Winnie saw the gesture, the crippled firearm, and stopped, her handgun pointed at the heart of the man. Her entire being shook, as if caught in an earthquake.
“Chickenshit,” the sprawling man choked, gulping down air and wiping the blood oozing into his eyes and down his cheek
Winnie mumbled something indistinct.
“Gonna shoot me like my dog, eh, bitch?”
“No, mister, no more killing.”
The words settled on the massive being and seemed to embolden him. Andrew Regas rolled up onto his knees, stood and faced his adversary, staring, his tongue protruding from his lips. In a wide arch, he shuffled around the woman, eyes locked onto hers.
“You won’t ride that snowmobile, mister.” Winnie trailed him, staying at a discreet distance, always with the Beretta directed at his chest.
“I’ll walk, then.”
“Yes, you will.”
Regas turned his back on Winnie and trudged to the north end of the ruined community center, its interior vibrating with the screams of terrified and wounded souls. The man went for his snowmobile—a test—to see what the woman would do. She braced herself against the corner of the community center and purposely fired the gun once again at the man’s body armor. He careened away from the snow machine. The punch of the bullet fired at close range bludgeoned the wind from him.
“What are you doing, bitch?” his words labored.
“Herding a bull!”
Regas snickered, a dark laugh of uncertainty. He took flight, stumbling toward the access lane to the greenhouses. Winnie jogged around to the man’s right. He turned west to crest the bluff ridge and descend toward the lake. She followed over his right shoulder, keeping him between her person and Big Stone Lake in its basin beneath the bluffs.
As the stone archway entrance to the community’s food storage and mushroom cultivation caves came into view, Regas made for the door. Before he could get to the entryway, Winnie took aim at a tree within feet of her quarry and fired off another round. The bullet shattered and blew out wood and bark fragments directly into the flesh and scalp of the man.
Winnie’s face flushed white, expressionless, as Regas toppled over, clutching his head. Her mind blazing with lightning impulses, Winnie entered a state of consciousness she had never before experienced. Wholly focused on the scoundrel and the dark lake waters beyond, she resolved to move him, shepherd him downhill, using the gun as a prod. She wanted him to push westward, ever westward, to the lake.
The pounding had a traumatizing effect on Regas. He was caught in a cruel game of predator/prey. He had never faced a female who was not intimidated by, even terrified of him. This woman was a leopard, shadowing him with evil intent. He was afraid of her, his fear cresting and rolling, blinding him to her demonic plan.
Within feet of Big Stone Lake, the monster slowed and stopped. He could barely see now with wood fragments and blood in his eyes.
“You get off on this shit, bitch?”
“No. Walk!”
“I can’t. I’ll be in the goddamn lake, one more step.”
“That’s right.”
“Fuck this.” Regas lunged toward her.
The 45-caliber pistol flared again and again. Regas recoiled from the impact of the rounds on the body armor plates, turned in panic, and lost his footing on slick soils. He stumbled amid lakeside rocks and toppled backward into the steaming black fluid surface of the thirty-mile finger lake, the wind-driven chop an icy thirty-four degrees. The shock of the bitter bath overwhelmed the big male. He frantically struggled to his feet, flailing, roared in agony, and took a step to run out of the lake.
Winnie squeezed the trigger, repeating the same maneuver and getting the same result, only this time Regas submerged deeper into the flooded shallows.
In a panic to clear his vision and find his feet again, despite water saturating his heavy garments and the weight of the vest, the man screamed out. “What are you trying to do, drown me?”
“No, not drown.”
“What then?”
“I won’t kill you.”
Winnie watched the man’s body convulse violently with cold and terror. She sensed that immersion in freezing water must be akin to 10,000 stabbing knives to the flesh.
“Hypothermia.” In an almost hypnotic state, Winnie accentuated slowly each and every syllable. “Hy-po-ther-mi-a.”
“What? Ahh!” Regas’ voice warbled, teeth chattering loudly, uncontrollably. “I can’t see, here!”
“Hypothermia exhibits a number of distinct stages, mister. That’s what my trainers taught me. Do you understand?”
Winnie was unemotional marble carved to take on human form. “A body loses the ability to keep warm; it drains heat from the extremities to keep the body core alive. Once the core temperature falls below ninety-five degrees, the brain can’t adequately process information. Victims begin to act irrationally.”
“Ahh,” Regas bellowed.
“In the final stages, mister, the body pushes heat back to the extremities again in one final last desperate gasp to try to salvage itself. You see, people have been known to strip off their clothes even in temperatures below zero. Death follows almost immediately. Am I making sense?”
“Ahh. Mad, you.”
“No, oh no, not mad.”
The man’s flailing slowed, whimpering noises dripping from his nasal passages.
“Hypothermia, mister, hypothermia. Do you understand? I’m not going to kill you.”
Struggling to free himself from his heavy coat and body armor, Andrew Regas fell forward face first into the water. His arms thrashed at the lake surface, but the saturated clothing was an effective anchor. Unable to resist gravity’s inexorable force, he sank, the black fluid closing over his head.