Zero day code, p.37
Zero Day Code, page 37
part #1 of End of Days Series
They were heading for the front door when James saw the dog. A black Labrador. And he just couldn't help himself; he was a dog guy. He was bending over to say hello to this good boy or girl when the glass windows looking out over Harris Teeter’s parking lot exploded.
It was Michelle who saved him. Michelle and that dog, he thought later. If he hadn't bent down to say hello to the lab he might have been cut down by the burst of fire. Michelle tackled him and kept pressing him all the way down, until they were both on the floor.
Most people did not drop. Most people screamed and ran and fell over each other. One guy tripped over James's leg. A shrink-wrapped palette of bottled water crashed down next to his head. He rolled towards Michelle and tried to cover her with his body. She was going to get trampled. The screaming and chaos grew louder.
He heard more shots. And then shouting. Not screaming and shrieking and the animal sounds of panic, but shouted orders.
"GET THE FUCK DOWN. STAY THE FUCK DOWN. YOU PUT YOUR HEAD UP WE GONNA BLOW IT OFF."
A single booming shot underlined the threat.
"SHUT THE FUCK UP. JUST SHUT UP AND GET DOWN, ALL OF YOU."
Still covering Michelle, who was swearing loudly beneath him, James chanced a glance up. His heart lurched. A man was crawling towards him with a knife in his hand. Not a kitchen knife. A killing knife. But nothing as mundane as a bayonet. It was a curved fighting blade, exotic and rare like a special forces soldier might carry. The man's eyes had a faraway look. They were an ocean at night. Dark and cold. Utterly fathomless. James tightened his grip on Michelle. And then he realised the dog was coming too. The Labrador. And a woman. She had coffee coloured skin and brown ringlets with blonde highlights. She was advancing across the floor towards him in a fashion similar to the man with the knife. They looked like they knew what they were doing. Even the dog.
James rolled out of the way and they passed him by. The strange little band snaked around a wooden stand displaying a few sad brown onions. He heard the voice again. A man's voice. It was closer now, inside the store.
"Everybody stay down and stay calm, and nobody else gets hurt."
Nobody else?
Fuck, what was happening? He felt Michelle pushing against him and he adjusted a little to let her escape from beneath his bulk.
"Sorry," he whispered into her ear. The chaos and panic covered his words.
Somebody yelled, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
"It's okay," she said very quietly. "Come on we have to get out of here, now."
She started to back away from the front of the store, staying down on her belly, moving like the man and the woman had, but in reverse.
"You! BITCH! Stay the fuck where you are."
James looked up again. The man was pointing a shot gun at Michelle.
"Stop," James urged.
She did.
It seemed to satisfy the man with the gun. Apart from the weapon, and the fact that he was standing when everybody else was on the ground cowering, he seemed unremarkable. He wasn't a Viking berserker, a brigand, an outlaw motorcycle rider, a gangster. He was just a guy with a gun. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. The T-shirt looked old and dirty, one knee of the Levi’s had worn through, and he wore heavy Carhart work boots. More men came in behind him. Four of them.
They looked like guys who might clean out gutters, or install drywalling, badly, for cash. Some were tattooed, but not as extravagantly as Michelle. One wore a beard, but it wasn’t sculpted. A couple of baseball caps. Sunglasses. But no masks. They didn't seem to think they had to bother disguising themselves.
"We'll just collect our groceries folks, and take your money, and then we’ll be on our way," said the first man through the door. The one who’d pointed the big ass Remington at Michelle. The others appeared to defer to him.
James felt a desperate need to take a piss. He was carrying all of their cash with him. He hadn't wanted to leave it back in the truck where it might not be safe. The men fanned out through the shop. They nudged people with the muzzles of their rifles, demanding cash and occasionally a piece of jewellery. One man had to give up his watch. A woman cried as she removed a necklace.
And they took food. The largest of the group, the balding bearded one in a pair of bib overalls and a sweat stained blue T-shirt, gathered up people’s shopping bags, eventually collecting so many that he started dropping stuff on the floor.
"Take it out to the truck, Darrell," said the guy in charge.
Darrell. They were using names and they weren't bothering to hide their faces. James did not have a good feeling about this.
“Hey you, college boy, what's in the bag?"
James didn't realise they were talking to him until a Carhart boot kicked him in the ribs. Not hard, it didn't break anything. But it hurt like hell. He nearly lost control of his bladder.
"All Bran, and olive oil," he grunted. "And potatoes."
"Holy shit," the man chuckled. "We got us areal Iron Chef over here. Gimme the potatoes, Wolfgang Puck.”
James pushed the bag across the floor towards to the boss, that James instinctively thought of as ‘Carhart’ inside his head. He had never felt so powerless in his entire life.
“And your wallet."
"I lost my wallet."
That earned him another hard-booted kick from ‘Carhart’.
"Bullshit. Your wallet, loser. "
James had been lying face down, trying to shield Michelle. She grabbed at him as he slowly rolled over showing his open palms and his face to the man with the gun. When he spoke, his voice shook.
"Seriously, dude. I lost my wallet. My cash is in my front pocket. I can reach in and get it. But I don't have a wallet."
The man levelled the shotgun at his face. James felt as though frozen eels were slithering through his guts.
He reached into his front pocket with a shaking hand, the fingers too numb for fine motor control. He had trouble getting the money. A couple of hundred dollars and a handful of coins eventually spilled out and he gathered them up and passed them up to the gunman.
A dog started barking somewhere in the store.
It distracted the man. He looked annoyed.
"Leroy, go shut that mutt up. You know I hate that fucking sound."
One of the other men picked his way through all of the people lying on the floor, moving towards the back of the market. James suddenly felt terrified for the dog. It had to be the Labrador he had seen before. The man called Leroy was carrying some sort of assault rifle. It looked like the type of weapon which could kill everybody in this store as quickly as he could pull the trigger.
Michelle squirmed closer to him and he fitted his body around her, knowing that it would not protect her from a gun like that. He might just shield her from a shotgun blast, however. He could feel her body trembling in terror, like a small animal.
Having taken his food and what he thought was all of James’s money, Carhart lost interest in him, moving on to pick over the other hostages, or captives, or whatever the hell they were.
The dog barked again.
"Leroy, I told you," the man shouted.
James felt all of the muscles in his body clenching, waiting for the shot. It didn't come. Not right away. The bandits continued to gather supplies and loot the money and possessions of everybody on the floor. James was starting to shake from the tension, when he finally heard the rifle crack. But something inexplicable happened. One of the gunmen cried out and fell to ground. James jumped at the shot, and his bladder let loose. Michelle screamed. Everyone screamed. And the firing continued.
Three shots. Crack! Crack! Crack!
The screaming only grew worse.
Carhart dropped to the floor next to him, but not wounded. He was hiding. Taking cover. His face wore a twisting, shape-shifting rictus of rage and horror. It was a mask slipping from a man who had thought himself in control and suddenly discovered he was not. Suddenly he was no longer the hunter.
He was the prey.
James saw Carhart’s hands gripping and kneading at the stock and slide of his shotgun. A pump action model similar to the Remington James’s old man had at home. Carhart was searching inside himself, finding the courage to move, to return fire.
James didn’t know what the hell was happening. Just that this guy who’d stood over hundreds of people less than a minute ago had been forced to cower. And his partners, his henchmen, weren’t standing up anymore. They were down. They’d been shot.
The front doors of the market rumbled open and the big guy, the bearded giant in the overalls, came running through.
Two shots stopped him, so closely grouped that they almost sounded like one.
The ballistic crack was loud, but the sickening wet thud and pop of supersonic ammunition striking a human body was also loud and close, and terrible to hear. The big man who’d been running in with his gun raised, continued moving forward, but his momentum was arcing down now. His strings had been cut. His body going loose. His mass collapsed towards the floor where he fell into a shopping trolley, knocking it over with a bright metallic crash.
Carhart roared and started to climb to his feet. Lifting the shotgun, pumping the slide, ready to spray his shot deep into the crowd.
James didn’t realise that he was moving until he moved, launching himself at the man, his arms wide to gather him up in a tackle. He slammed into Carhart. The gun roared and searing white heat burned the inside of one arm. They went down, slamming to the ground and James tried to land on him with as much force as possible, to drive out his air, to wind him. But he was not a heavy man and he was not a trained fighter, and he knew in less than a second that he was in trouble. Deadly trouble.
The gunman wrestled and squirmed and even sank his teeth into James’s bicep, biting down hard. He screamed in pain, in violation, but he couldn’t let go. He couldn’t escape. He couldn’t let the man get free access to the weapon. They rolled and struggled, and James found himself caught underneath the other man. An elbow to James’s temple stunned him, nearly blacking him out, filling the world with a bright, sparkling meteor shower. A knee or maybe another elbow slammed into his ribs. He started to gas out, to lose breath.
CRACK!
This shot was loudest of all. And the effect was the most dramatic.
Half of Carhart’s skull disintegrated and blew away on an evil wind that carried blood and bone and all manner of dark corruption with it.
James didn’t so much shudder as he spasmed with a deep-body convulsion of horror.
The corpse of the Carhart boot wearing gunman was toppling toward him, threatening to spill its freshly liberated contents all over James’s face. Into his eyes and mouth.
A boot shot past him, thudded into the dead man’s chest and the body fell away from James O’Donnell.
He felt that he had gone insane.
He was unmoored from reality.
He could understand nothing.
But he could see Michelle staring wide-eyed at him. And he could see the man who had just saved his life. It was the guy with the Labrador. Holding an assault rifle.
A strange thing happened when the shooting started.
Rick Boreham relaxed.
It was as though he’d been holding himself so tight for so long, waiting for the bad thing to happen, that he had wrenched himself and his soul into a grotesque homunculus trying to fit back into the world. But all of a sudden the world shaped itself around this dark inner deformity and he could… relax.
Thinking about it later, Rick was sure he remembered starting to drop and take cover before the big plate glass windows exploded into the store.
Perhaps he’d picked something up in his peripheral vision. Maybe one of the thugs popped a shot off half a second before they hosed the front of the store with semi-automatic fire.
It didn’t matter.
He was suddenly back in that place he’d spent so long trying to escape. And it felt like going home.
He would have pulled Mel into cover with him, but she was already dropping and rolling. Nomi, trained to comfort him when thunder broke or cars backfired, followed closely, nuzzling him with her snout. Letting him know everything would be okay.
And it would. As soon as he exfiltrated.
He was no longer a soldier and Mel was no longer a cop. Heavily armed attackers were assaulting the building. The only thing for it was to escape under the cover of the panic and madness. They crawled quickly away from the front of the store. Stayed on their bellies as they crept towards the aisles at the rear. A few other customers followed their example, or simply knew what to do. But most did not. Most people cried out in terror and went to pieces. Rick kept going. At some point, without even thinking about it, he’d drawn the fighting knife he always carried. It wasn't much good for anything beyond quickly slashing open the major bleeders and he was never going to get close enough to anybody with a shot gun or an AR-15 to do that. But getting out was more important. He kept crawling forward with the sharpened steel talon gripped in his right hand.
They almost made it out, too. Got all the way to the rear of the store where they should have been able to exit, except that somebody had blocked off that route. Closed the exit. He cursed. Nomi barked. And they heard the leader of the gunmen order one of his soldiers, Leroy, to “go shut that mutt up”.
Rick stopped. There was no way he was letting anybody hurt his dog. They had reached the end of the aisle where he first met Melissa. The pet food section in front of the frozen goods cabinets. He hand-signed to her to get out of the aisle and take cover at the end of the shelving unit. He could see Mel was frightened but functional. She moved as directed. Nomi came to heel next to him on the other side of the aisle.
He heard somebody coming, the one called Leroy. He could see the man’s reflection in the glass doors of the freezer unit. He advanced cautiously but steadily, but he stopped about halfway down, leaning forward, peering intently to make out what might be waiting for him.
Rick did not want him reversing and flanking them.
He held up one finger to Nomi. An old game.
How many?
She barked once.
"Leroy, I told you," a male voice shouted. He sounded pissed off.
Leroy resumed his careful advance down the aisle.
Nomi remained perfectly still and silent.
Rick held up his knife to so that Mel could see it. He pointed at her and then at his ear. Miming a clapping gesture. She nodded, looking sick.
Leroy moved very carefully, the last few feet of the aisle. Rick nodded to Mel and she deliberately knocked a bottle of dishwashing liquid to the ground before stepping back and going to the floor in the next aisle over. Leroy hurried forward, his gun pointed at where she had been standing. When he cleared the end of the aisle, Rick stepped up behind him, grabbed a handful of thick, greasy hair and yanked his head back with swift and sudden force, exposing the carotid and the windpipe. He cut both, as he kicked out the back of Leroy’s knee. The man went down pawing frantically at the gouts of blood gushing from his wounds. Rick snapped his neck, stripped his weapon from him, inspected it quickly, and moved back down the aisle. Murder in his eyes.
He emerged into the main body of the market and made three targets. He dropped two of them with head shots, but missed the third who was moving, dropping into cover.
The renewed gunfire set off panic among the captives, and his third target disappeared as people screamed and some tried again to flee.
Another armed man, a giant dressed like a cartoon farmer, charged in through the shattered doors. Rick killed him with a double tap to the centre mass.
He moved quickly.
The man appeared a few feet to the right of where he expected him to emerge from cover. Rick was adjusting his aim, realising he might not make the shot before the guy got one off. He was caught at the neurological crossroads of fight and flight. Take the shot or take cover?
He never got to make the choice.
Before the shooter could pull the trigger, a civilian tackled him.
They both dropped out of sight as mayhem swept over the store again. Rick ran forward, his muzzle down but ready.
He found the men wresting behind an empty vegetable stand. The shooter had fought his way into a mount and was about to start clubbing the other man.
Rick Boreham shot him in the face.
35
Stage Four Collapse
An hour later and no cops had turned up. James wasn’t surprised. One ambulance had come and gone, taking away four people with serious injuries. The dead, they left behind. Rick Boreham—the guy James had possibly saved by tackling the last gunman—helped triage and treat the wounded. His girlfriend Mel helped too. An army veteran and a former London policewoman, they knew what to do, including for James. Mel cleaned and bound the wounds on his arm, a burn mark from the barrel of the shotgun, and a bite wound from the man he had tackled. James had no first-aid skills and felt utterly useless. He was also dreadfully aware of having wet his pants. Nobody mentioned it. Somebody gave him a Coke. It was cold and they said it would help with the shock. He didn't know whether that was true or not. But it tasted fantastic. He shared it with Michelle, who sat with him on the floor of the ruined market while other people tried to bring some sort of order to the chaos.
After an hour, when it became obvious there might not be any more first responders on the way, Boreham and his partner joined James and Michelle in the manager's office out the back of Harris Teeter. Phil, the manager, looked like he was five minutes away from a heart attack. He had earlier pleaded with them to stay until the police arrived, but when Boreham returned to the office, he said it looked like Phil had gone too.
"Most people have left. There's nobody out there, man."
James and Michelle followed them back out to the main part of the store. His pants were sticky and chafing, and they smelled bad. All of the produce was gone. Most of the shelves were empty. A dozen or so people still drifted around as though in shock. It was a bizarre, otherworldly scene. Like something out of a movie.
