Crossing the Line (27 page)

A young dog ran from the shadows and
landed on the staircase a few feet above one of the gunmen. He dropped down, wrapping his legs around the man’s shoulders. The gunman tried to turn the weapon up at his attacker, but did not have time to fire before intense pain sounded in his head. The young dog jammed a finger in either of his eyes, driving them deep into his cranium. The man fell to the ground pulling the trigger wildly. More rounds struck the van and the remains of the walls around it.

The young dog pulled his fingers free and grabbed the man by the hair. He lifted the head until the spinal cord snapped in the man’s neck. In a flurry of movement that belied his humanity the dog beat the man’s head into a pulp against the floor, cracking the hardwood with his fury.

The third man turned his gun onto the young dog and pulled the trigger. The boy yelped with pain as his body was shredded by the fast-firing rounds. He scrambled off his victim only to suffer a headshot the next moment.

The gunman’s chest exploded open and he was thrown from his feet. Ivy cocked the shotgun a second time and shot him in the head as he lay twitching on the floor.

Juggernaut grabbed his victim up from the floor and tossed him through the air. The man smashed through a glass case of photographs. He did not even attempt to move as the hunkering form fell upon him. Juggernaut punched his hand into the flesh of the man’s lower back. He tightened his grasp around the man’s spine and jerked with all of his might. The spine came free all of the way up to his shoulder blades.

He howled with agony, but did not die. Juggernaut lifted him from the ground by the back of the neck and
punched him in the mouth. Almost all of his teeth broke off at the gums with the single blow. The second punch flattened his nose against his face. The third crushed his cheek bones and drove the upper plate of his mouth back into his brain. Juggernaut dropped the corpse and stomped on the head just to watch it collapse.

He turned to the burning vehicle and walked over, the gunshots finally causing him to slow his pace. Blood ran freely from the half dozen wounds riddling his body. He winced as he reached the burning vehicle and pushed past the crushed front end. The driver’s door was hanging by a single hinge. He pulled it off and tossed it aside.

Anna was sitting in the pilot’s chair with blood running from a wound in her cheek and another in her chest. Juggernaut grabbed her and pulled her free with such might that the nylon seat belt snapped. He carried her away from the vehicle and laid her down on a clear spot on the floor.

Ivy came to her side and tears ran from the corners of her eyes. “How you feeling, Anna?” she asked. She knew it was a stupid question, but she didn’t know how else to approach the situation.

“I’m ready to kick some ass,” Anna said. She sat up and clutched the wound on her chest. “Tit for tat, right?”

Juggernaut helped her stand. She limped toward the door to the hallway.
Ivy and Tracy met her and appraised her wounds. Dogs rushed past the carnage and began scrambling up the stairs. They seemed to move at a speed that would be impossible for a person. While most of them scrambled on all-fours up the stairs they still reached the top landing within seconds of beginning the ascent.

Juggernaut and Brute came together in front of the girls. “You stay here now,” Juggernaut said. “Too many dangers upstairs. We finish this.”

“Fuck that,” Anna said. She pushed away from the walls and her friends. “We owe these bastards for what they did to us and you. I want to help kill them all.”

Brute gently took her hand and kissed it. “You stay and we come back with Deloris. You help kill.”

Anna was so shocked by the repetition of her act of comforting from earlier that she allowed herself to succumb to her pain. She collapsed to the floor and Ivy and Tracy dropped down next to her.

Brute and Juggernaut were the last to climb the stairs. Their enormous forms blocked out the light coming from the second floor landing. In the dark shadow that fell over the women they were somehow all brought to full awareness of their current conditions. They sobbed as they moved to a more secure location. Once they were comfortable that they wouldn’t be ambushed they huddled together and sobbed. Anna held a dish towel over the wound on her chest. Tracy held a second towel over her torn cheek.

40

“They haven’t come back yet,” Ethan whispered. He sat with his eyes glued to the barricaded door. “All of that crashing and banging. Those girls must have done something really insane down there.”

“Fuck it,” Gene said. “We’ve got enough guns in here to bring down an army of trained soldiers. They’re not going to get in here without dying.”

Deloris sat with a sawed off shotgun laid across her lap. She had loaded it with buckshot. One shell could potentially kill two or three of the dogs if they all rushed in at the same time. She hoped that it wouldn’t come to that, though. She didn’t want to have to shoot the children that she had raised. Some would say that her form of parenting was cruel and unusual punishment, but in her own way she had loved each and every one of the boys that she turned into animals.

The others rambled on and on. The three young bucks rushing out of the room had been a foolish move. There were now only the nine of them; Oswald, Leigh, Drake, Ethan, Gene, Norton, Leila, Jessica and Deloris herself.
Leila and Jessica were probably the best shots in the room. They were the ones that actually went out and did the hunting. Their low-brow husbands were usually too busy getting drunk and fishing to care about learning the art of war.

Regardless, even with the two fairly decent marks men and Deloris, who had killed many in her day, they were going to have to rely completely on instinct and brute force. When the dogs broke through the barricade they were going to have to light the place up like July 4
th
if they wanted to live.

Deloris focused on the door with the rest of them, so when the attack came from a different direction none of them were prepared. After the furious sounds of warfare coming from downstairs a flurry of movement had come from the other side of the door as the dogs searched the second floor. It had been minutes— minutes that seemed like days— since there had been any noise.

When the wall to Deloris’s left burst open she nearly fell out of her seat with fright. A split second later the wall to her right followed suit. None of the people in the room had time to think, they turned their guns on the walls and opened fire. Shells fell to the floor so rapidly that they seemed to be cymbals adding to the percussion of the gunfire.

Deloris was the only one in the room to withhold firing her weapon. She looked at the knocked down portions of the walls and knew that the dogs had used dressers to cause them. They had rammed the heavy antiques through the walls to draw attention away from where they actually planned to attack. She turned her eyes back to the door and watched for any sign of the barricade being moved.

After their clips were empty the others began reloading their weapons and looking around the room like rats in a snake’s cage. Sweat dripped from their brows and every one of them had loud ringing in their ears. The room was thick with gun smoke and it burnt at their noses and clouded their vision.

“Fucking morons,” Deloris said, wiping tears from her eyes as well as the sting of the smoke. “They’re just feeling us out. Don’t fire until you see them!”

Her employees nodded. Drake coughed at the thickness of the air. It smelled like a fireworks display in the room. He had always hated the smell of burnt gunpowder. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, but all it managed to do was leave the scent of gun oil to combine with the gunpowder. He coughed roughly enough that he nearly gagged.

“For fuck’s sake, Drake, grow a pair,” Jessica snapped.

The wall to the right shook again, knocking dozens of shotguns down from their mounts. A heartbeat later a huge hole was punched through the left wall. Despite their orders everyone opened fire on the walls again. Plaster exploded from the bullet holes and clung in the air like the little white flakes in a snow globe. By the time their second clips were empty they had but been deafened and blinded by their acts of cowardice.

Deloris narrowed her eyes at the barricaded door. She could vaguely hear the sound of her idiot employees reloading their weapons. Drake leaned over and puked out his supper onto the floor by his feet. He made no gesture of apology as he stood up straight and aimed his gun at the wall of shotguns.

The barricade moved slightly. Deloris fired a single round at the gun lockers they had set up in front of the door. The steel was speckled with little dots as the buckshot exploded on contact. Norton cried out in shocked pain when one of the pellets ricocheted off of the lockers and tore a hot hole through the bottom of his earlobe.

The rest of the employees opened fire on the gun lockers. The doors dented and buckled inward as they were repeatedly struck by the au
tomatic firing of the weapons. Now that the rounds were hitting metal the sound was intensified. The deafening effect intensified.

By the time they emptied their third round of clips the room was so thick with gunpowder that it seemed like the house was on fire. They reloaded their weapons and screamed orders at each other that none of them could understand.

Norton was busying himself tying a handkerchief around his head to stop his ear’s bleeding. Drake stumbled over to the window and grabbed at the boards that were covering it. He began pulling them away and throwing them aside in a desperate attempt to get some oxygen moving through the room.

More plaster fell like snow. It seemed to waft lazily down through the thick air, occasionally catching a swirl of smoke and changing directions.

As the last board came off of the window Drake threw it open and stuck his head out. He once again emptied the contents of his belly, this time down the siding on the farm house. He gasped several times, allowing the cool night air to fill his lungs.

He wiped bile from his chin. The fresh air made his eyes sting even worse. He felt like he had been swimming in an over-chlorinated pool. Even with his dulled senses and smoke-filled lungs he noticed the piece of siding as it fell from above him.

He looked up and saw Chewy, his personal favorite of the young dogs, clinging to the side of the house. Above Chewy the attic window stood open. He was about to lean in and announce the news when the dog let go of his grasp on the side of the house.

The force that the body hit Drake with caused his ribcage to shatter against the windowsill. Blood sprayed from between his lips
along with a sound like a tire popping. The dog bounced when it hit his back, but it sank its long nails into Drake’s sides and used his battered body as leverage to pull itself back up. When their faces were within inches of each other Chewy bit deep into flesh of Drake’s right cheek. His sharpened teeth shredded through the flesh with ease. He shook his head from side to side and strips of the man’s face came off in his mouth. He spat the gore out and continued to bite while his legs wrapped around Drake’s waist.

After the right cheek had all but dissolved in a mess of bite marks Chewy began gnawing at his nose and forehead. The added weight and his injuries made it impossible for Drake to move and when he tried to scream Chewy’s mouth closed over his. In a malicious form of a French kiss Chewy sucked Drake’s tongue into his mouth and bit it off.

Drake— knowing that he had lost the battle and not wanting to go down alone— used the last of his strength to throw himself and the dog from the window. They crashed down on the earth below. Drake’s weight crushed Chewy against the soft earth, but it did not kill the dog. Instead it only seemed to fuel his rage. He bit chunks of flesh from Drake’s forehead, nose and left cheek while his claws tore deep gouges out of the meat of his sides and back.

The fall might not have been instantaneous death for either of the men, but it had caused his broken ribs to stab into Drake’s lungs.
Just as one of his eyeballs was
sucked out of the socket he choked to death on his own blood.

Deloris seemed to be the only one aware that Drake had leapt to his doom. She didn’t dare go to the window to investigate, nor was she foolish enough to shoot. If she had squeezed off a single round her panicked subordinates would have turned the outside wall of the house into Swiss cheese. Instead she moved her eyes from the open window and back to the barricaded door.

Another attack on the walls caused the same reaction from the terrified people locked in the small confines of the extra bedroom. The gun smoke wafted toward the open window, but it still remained thick in the air. The ringing in their ears became completely deafening. None of them could hear anything other than the high-pitched wail of their wounded eardrums.

Plaster was everywhere in the air now. What little protection the walls had held against the horde of angry killers had been ruined by the dozens of gunshots. The armory was nothing more than a holding cell on death row now. And worst of all none of them knew where the actual attack was going to come from.

They reloaded once more. They were reduced to using h
and signals to communicate. The only sound that any of them could hear was the beating of their hearts. Deloris saw the barricade at the door shift inward. Both walls were attacked at the same time. In her terror even she emptied her gun this time around.