A Time to Die (29 page)

Fifty yards out and they were coming fast. Everyone was firing as quickly as they could. Kathy’s magazine went empty. She fumbled for the release before finding it, the metal box clattering to the floor among the spent brass as she turned the smoking gun sideways so she could fit another in the mag well. There were eight more on the once ornate dressing table next to her. She slapped the slide release, just like Tobey showed her, and the gun charged. Forty yards out as she started firing. A hundred or more were down, and they weren’t slowing. She felt her pulse pounding in her ears like a big kettle drum. Her eyes wide with fear. All around the scope, her vision was red and nothing else was visible. It was like looking down a tunnel. Shoot, move, shoot.

“Fuck, fuck fuck!” she screamed. They were running past the corpses from the earlier attack, only yards from the house when the machinegun opened up with a long “Brrraaaap!”

Tobey worked the M-240 down along the line of packed crazies. The .223 rounds chewed through flesh and bone, often penetrating through one body and into another at the close range. The belt fed smoothly form the huge pile on the floor. He’d emptied three boxes, linking the belts together to give him 750 rounds. Against every instinct he just held the trigger and gave them a continuous string of death.

Bright white lines of tracers every three rounds told him where to aim from the captain’s walk high on the house. He used the ornate ironwork to support the gun. It would have been a horribly exposed position against an armed attack. Against unarmed lunatics, it was ideal.

He didn’t aim for the vanguard. Instead he picked the mass clumped up behind them. Those slowly slightly by the bodies on the ground. They were a concentrated wall of targets that he methodically chewed into hamburger with the chattering gun. He could see smoke rising from the barrel as the first belt of 250 marker went by and he kept working it from side to side. “Wooohooo!” he yelled as he unloaded belt-fed death.

The first of them hit the porch and threw themselves at the doors. They crashed into the heavy wood with bone shattering force. Many broke arms, shoulders, even skulls as they smashed against the ancient oaken door. Ten, twenty, fifty of them plowed in behind until the porch was so full it groaned under the weight.

Tobey stopped firing long enough to lean out over the side and look down to see the traffic jam. The crowd crushed dozens of their number to hideous screaming death as they continued to bear down on the doorway until it gave, spilling their number into the huge front room and entry area. He waited for a long five count as they rushed in and found every exit bared and nailed shut. The stairs were stuffed with every piece of furniture that would fit. “NOW ENRICO!” he screamed.

Down on the second floor landing Enrico just barely heard the missive from high above. He nodded his head, picked up the thing Tobey had called a ‘clacker’, and just as he’d been shown, smacked his hand down on the spoon once, twice, three times.

When Kathy had taken the M-240 and the ammo for it, she’d had a little room left on the trailer so she’d gabbed a final crate without even looking at what it said. When Tobey unloaded and moved the machinegun inside, using the villagers to help haul the gun and ammo up to the captain’s walk, they’d brought that box to him in confusion. When he saw it he laughed so hard they thought he was going insane.

He’d taken the contents and set up them all up. Half in the living room and by the front door, the other half all around the front of the porch. When Enrico hit the detonator three times, he set off all twenty Claymore mines at once. Each one unleashed seven hundred steel ball bearings propelled by a half a kilogram of high explosives set in a convex shaped charge that created an inconceivable zone of death.

The daisy chain of explosions tore at Kathy’s hearing, making her scream and drop the rifle to its sling as she instinctively put her hands over her ears. The Claymore’s ball bearings tore through flesh and bone, eviscerating and shredding bodies five or six deep as it killed hundreds. All around the house bodies flew apart like they were made of cobwebs hit by a wind machine. An arc of killing fifty meters deep spread gore in all directions as the house thundered and shook from the impact, almost completely shredding the first floor which was empty of all but the enfermo. One second later, it was a grisly slaughterhouse.

None survived in the overlapping fields of fire inside the house or on the porch. Outside where Tobey had set them up with less overlap, there were some still alive. All were wounded though, some missing arms and legs, others with huge holes punched through their torsos as they staggered or crawled about rapidly bleeding out.

For a second there was stunned silence, then a deafening cheer went up from the house. Kathy stared at the scene of death with a mixture of elation and horror. It looked like the floor of a slaughterhouse she’d once visited in Kansas City for a story on Mad Cow Disease. Only it wasn’t parts of cows that writhed on the ground, it was men, women, and some children. This time she did puke, though there was little more than yellow slime that came out.

She wiped her mouth on her already filthy shirt and spit to clear her mouth, then went back to her rifle. “More out there!” she yelled through her half deafened ears.

“I see them, hold fire,” Tobey replied from above.

Dozen, hundreds more came up and this time they stopped to feed. “Oh Christ,” Kathy moaned as she watched a girl of eight or nine pick up a severed arm and start to tear at the flesh like it was a chicken drumstick.

The uninjured descended on the dead and dying to feast. In only minutes Kathy realized their victory was no victory at all. She’d thought Tobey’s mines and machinegun fire had slaughtered most of them. She saw just how wrong she was.

“More from behind!” Tobey called above her.

Kathy picked up the rifle, careful to avoid the red hot barrel, and ran to the back of the house. Women and children cried out in alarm where they were packed into the upstairs spaces. By the time she reached the back room that had been set up as a firing position she could see them clearly running through the grove of trees. “Got it!” she yelled. “Shoot!”

“Yes!” he answered as his machine gun began chattering. He’d had quite a job manhandling the overheated gun and almost four hundred rounds of ammo to the rear of the captain’s walk. He’d almost fallen over the side once.  He’d also hoped for a few minutes respite to let the weapon cool. The barrel was designed for sustained fire, but this took it to an extreme! As he resumed firing he could see the occasional sparks from the barrel. Not good, not good at all.

Luckily the combined fire of himself and Kathy below stopped the rearward group. Confused by so much death from their other numbers, they stopped their assault and crouched behind trees and under bushes. “Cease fire,” Tobey yelled, “Cease fire!” He lifted the gun off the railing and set it on its bipod on the walk’s deck. As he did he noted that the railing where he’d rested the barrel was smoking.

He made sure the barrel wasn’t touching anything flammable and swung in through the captain’s walk window and down the stairs. It took a minute to push through the crowd of panicked people to reach the back bedroom. He found Kathy sitting there, the rifle propped up between her knees and held by the foregrip with both hands. It almost looked like she was praying. “Are you okay?”

She looked up in surprise, then calmed when she saw who it was. “Yeah,” she said, even though he noticed the puddle of puke at her feet. “You think that licked them?”

“No,” he admitted. “I don’t think they’re smart enough to get beat.” He pulled out his canteen and took a long drink of the lukewarm water before handing it to her. She took a little drink and swished it around before spitting out the window, then a much bigger one which she swallowed. Next he fished into his pack and came out with a couple foil pouches. “Here,” he said and handed one to her. “Protein bar.” She ripped it open and immediately started eating.

“What’s our chances of getting out of here?” she asked when the bar was devoured.

“Depends on how many of them there are.”

“And if its thousands?”

“I’d say close to zero. I went through about a third of the M-240 ammo, and that was all the Claymores. Our Mexican allies shot through half their ammo as well. Unless we can get some help…” he let the last part just hang there.

“Where’s my bag?” she wondered. He got up and brought it to her from where it had been stuffed into a closet. She fished around and brought her laptop out again. Still over 80% power. Good thing too, since her solar charger was with her condoms. She swallowed and tried not to think about it. She settled down with the computer and her box of SD cards and began dumping them into the computer as backup. Tobey watched her for a time then headed off to do something else. She knew she should be doing something too, but what else was there but to wait and see if the enfermo left them alone?

The computer’s USB3 allowed her to upload the many gigabytes in only minutes, even when she got out her hub and had three cards dumping at once. The machine possessed a four terabyte drive. There were files from a dozen stories archived there and room for a dozen more after she was done.

Once that was done she started sorting. First they went into a file folder she titled Enfermo. It just seemed apropos. The files were all time stamped so she knew immediately which ones went into the archive and which ones to review. The laptop had a power video editing suite that allowed her to rapidly move through a video by just sliding her finger along the glide point. By marking one point with a mouse click then another she could drop a clip into a new video file, or save it in a background clipboard. It took only a few minutes to have twenty minutes of footage assembled representing her trip.

It started with her talking to the camera as she set the mount on her ATV a few miles from Tobey’s farm. “This is Kathy Clifford in Texas, and I’m about to break the law to try and find out the truth.” Her self-interview had been short. She pulled out her little Bluetooth mic and headphones, slipping on the set she began adding commentary as the story quickly came together. Just after starting her career she’d spent two years as a stringer producer. She’d been good at it. So good a major network had offered her a job. She’d passed. Reporting was her passion.

The story progressed with some shots of rugged desert. Next the border fence, rusted and broken, she easily found a place to ride through. “Now I’m in Mexico,” she said into the mic, dubbing it over the sound of the ATV motor, “the truth is just ahead.” Another minute of rugged arroyos, dry creek beds and distant mountains. Then the road, signs of civilization.

“There’s nothing as far as the eye can see,” she dubbed. “Everything I come across is abandoned. Even this gas station.” And there she is pulling into the station. The camera catches her going inside. She cuts and shows herself coming back out, arms laden with supplies. “I left payment, even though no one was there. It’s an eerie scene that brings to mind Pompeii. The grill in the little restaurant attached to the station is still hot.” Then the camera shows the Army truck approaching. “I’m relieved to find signs of life, but my relief is short lived.”

Here she mulled what to show several times. The bike had been parked in just the right location to catch it all. The Mexican officer going for her throat, and then being blown apart by the big machine gun. It was brutal in a way that would have made her violently ill only a day ago. Now, she mechanically edited the footage into the story. “This is my first encounter with what the Mexican people call the Enfermo. If these soldiers hadn’t been there, I would have certainly been seriously injured or died.”

The men began mounting up and their commander asked her to come along and she refused. This was off camera. She left it untouched because it showed her decision while the visual showed more army trucks coming into view. Soldiers went by with arms loaded with energy drinks and snacks. Then the bike roared to life and she turned down the road.

“I’d seen what I came to see, now I needed to get out of there alive. That would prove harder than I thought it would.” Next came her desperate flight from the enfermo. And the battle on the hill. Her panic as they began overtaking her. She was shocked to see it all play out in only a couple hours. It had felt like a lifetime. Then it had ended with Tobey riding in like the storied cavalry. “Major Tobey Pendleton, US Army, retired,” she said. “A friend I’d made before crossing into Mexico had decided to follow me. Either out of attraction or curiosity, it didn’t matter. For the second time in as many days, my life was saved by a US soldier.”

A few cuts of them riding, some recorded while she slept, and their arrival at the house. “These are some of the no doubt millions of refugees fleeing out of Mexico ahead of a veritable human wave of horror.” They meet and talk to Enrico and his son Manuel. “They didn’t come to break the law like many before them, they came just trying to survive. The house is on a property belonging to Mr. Pendleton. He offered them his hospitality.” She cut in a scene inside the house just showing the vast number of people. Then she began the interviews.

“I had the opportunity to talk with these brave people about their experiences fleeing the enfermo.”

“It was my cousin,” a woman said in broken English, “he went enfermo while we were eating dinner. Went to the bathroom and when he came back…he bit his own baby on the neck!”

“My wife tried to kill us,” a man said, “my son hit her with a shovel and we ran.” Tears were streaming down his cheek as he spoke. “I never saw her again.”