“No,” John answered. “Just regular people like you, trying to survive.”
The man rose to his feet. “Jerry Fowler,” he told them. “And I owe you my life.”
The shrill whistle blast that cut through the air a moment later was followed by the echoing boom of gunshots and deer rifles and John was suddenly certain that whoever had tied Jerry to that shower was coming to do the same to them.
Chapter 16
“They’re all dead,” Jerry shouted at John, who was checking the other captives for signs of life.
The rattling of AK fire reverberated from every direction. Efficiency had dictated that his men spread out to search for the items they’d come to retrieve. Now they were divided and maybe even cut off.
John and Reese hurried toward the gunfire closest to them, Jerry close behind.
The end of the aisle was just up ahead and John swung his AR up, squaring his shoulders into a universal fighting position. Behind him, Reese with his .45 was covering the flank, a single hand on John’s shoulder, a clear sign he’d been trained in close-quarters battle.
A shriek of pain in the distance told John someone had been hit. Were they one of his?
They were rounding the corner when a round ricocheted off the metal shelving near John’s head, sending a burst of sparks into the air. Thirty feet ahead were two figures. Sliding his finger over the trigger, John squeezed off four rounds, two for each of them. The first one dropped and stopped moving. The second must have been hit in the shoulder because he spun a full one hundred and eighty degrees, staggered back and tried to dart out of the way.
A shot from Reese’s pistol went wide and thudded into a bag of cement. Powdered dust puffed out. John followed up with a final round to the torso. The attacker fell dead.
“How’d you know he wasn’t one of ours?” Reese asked.
“It’s simple. Our light won’t attract fire from our own men. The real question is why you missed that shot. I thought you were a sniper.”
“Funny,” Reese replied, scanning the darkness. “And I thought you were a general contractor.”
Through a break in the gunfire, one of his men shouted in the distance. They were falling back to the front entrance, blowing their whistles as they ran. Like all hardware stores in the chain, the place was laid out in a grid with long aisles stretching from front to back. This made each two-man team with a light particularly vulnerable. On the one hand they needed the lights to see, but that also meant the enemy could target them.
Double-timing it back down the aisle toward the front entrance, John and Reese came up behind a group of their men, taking cover and firing into the darkness. A handful of others had cleared the open space and were kneeling behind a set of washing machines.
“They’ve got the entrance covered,” Barry said, his voice rising to a panic.
“Relax and take a breath,” John ordered him, as he muffled the light. “Who are we missing?”
Barry looked around. “We were trying to carry their bodies out.” Barry wasn’t answering the question.
“I count eight of us alive, John,” Reese said from behind him.
“They ours?” John asked, pointing at the two lifeless bodies by the washing machines.
Barry nodded. “Craig Johnston and Graham Sanders.”
“There’s a back door,” Jerry said. “If we head that way and hook left along the break through the middle of the store, we might be able to make it.”
John shook his head. “We’re not running away with our tails between our legs. Two of our men are dead. Two of theirs are dead too. So right now it’s a fair fight. Running away is more likely to get us shot in the back.”
He pointed at Barry and two other men hunkered down across the aisle behind the washing machines. “You three stay here and keep them busy. The rest of us are going to move up this aisle and around to catch them in a crossfire.”
Barry looked on with doe eyes. John shook him by the shoulder. “Can you do that?”
Nodding, Barry whispered that he could, but the look on his face said all he wanted was for this to be over. Combat might not be the only test of a man, but when the bullets started flying, it was certainly the quickest way to find out what you were made of.
John turned to Jerry and winked. “Stay here and keep the enemy’s heads down.”
Beside them was a display with clear shower curtains. John removed his BK9 knife and cut off a square piece. In his pouch was an elastic which he used to secure it over the end of his flashlight.
“What’s that for?” Barry asked, mystified.
“Homemade flashlight diffuser. I’ll leave the light off, but if we need it to see, we won’t be sticking out like a sore thumb. As soon as we leave, I want you guys to open fire. Keep it sustained and make sure you don’t run out of ammo, so pace yourselves.”
Barry nodded.
After that, John, Reese and the three men going with them backtracked away from Barry and the group who were taking cover behind the washing machines. As ordered, those who remained opened fire, drawing the attention of the men guarding the exit.
Since John knew where all his men were, he let his finger slide down over the trigger. They were inching forward in near darkness, each person behind him gripping the shoulder of the man in front for reference. It was the blind leading the blind in an otherwise textbook flanking maneuver. His old CO would have had a fit, a thought which might have made John laugh if he wasn’t so focused on the darkness ahead. Crazy as it was, extreme circumstances required adaptability. In their own way, the thieves and murderers who now called this hardware store their home had done exactly that. It was too bad they’d made the choice to become vultures, preying upon the weak and the unsuspecting.
John’s disdain for that kind of predatory behavior was part of why he’d opted to stay and fight instead of cutting and running. What would happen to the next Jerry Fowler who stumbled in here looking for supplies? If the country survived the current crisis, it would need to be rebuilt from the bottom up and in John’s mind, this store and the bandits inside of it were about as close to ground zero as you could come.
John and the others reached the main intersection which cut the store in two and made their first right. They weren’t more than a few feet along, sporadic gunfire to their right as Barry and the others kept up the distraction. Suddenly, a shadow loomed out of the darkness. The rough outline of a man’s face appeared a split second before John pulled the trigger on his AR. The round tore through the first man at point-blank range and continued into the next one standing behind him. Both collapsed dead.
Then came the deafening noise from Reese’s .45 as he fired over John’s left shoulder. The flash illuminated the space before them, revealing a group of nearly ten men, armed mostly with pistols, a hunting rifle and an odd assortment of brutal-looking homemade weapons. Their faces were painted coal black, accentuating the whites of their eyes. The thought of how barbaric they looked occurred to him at about the same time as the thugs before him raised their weapons.
Chapter 17
Gunfire exploded as the rest of John’s men opened up. Staccato images of death punctuated the darkness as rounds impacted the attackers. The enemy only had enough time to get off a single shot, but John could see that they’d made the most of it. A Mossberg 500 pump-action had struck the man next to Reese in the chest, killing him instantly. Seemed that each side had set out to flank the other and it was a good thing John’s side had been able to squeeze the trigger first. Tenths of a second, that was what most gun fights came down to.