Running with the Horde (9 page)

Chapter 20

“Basement of Doom”

             
I crawled across the room and took cover behind a thick dining room table while I reloaded my gun. From there it was into the kitchen through the French doors moving carefully around the big dead woman lying naked on the floor.

             
The kitchen was designed in an L shape. The long portion for food preparation, storage and clean up, the bottom was a large dining area. Like everything in this house it had been very nice once but was trashed now. There were rats picking through the remains of discarded food and dirty dishes. They scattered back into a large open pantry at my approach.

             
I cleared the room in my familiar TV cop fashion but this time I felt every bit like the amateur I was. I hadn’t had to worry about being shot at before. I jumped around the corner with my gun ready just as the windows above the kitchen sink exploded in a hailstorm of gunfire.

             
I hit the floor in a panic nearly blowing my own head off in the process and I think I even peed in my pants a little. The gunfire wouldn’t let up, they were trying to keep me pinned down while they flanked me.

             
There was a side door exit right in front of me, this led outside or possibly to a garage. On my right was another set of French doors. I assumed they led to a formal dining room or something.

             
The heavy door to my back had to be the basement entrance. I reached behind me and tried the knob but it was locked. They suddenly stopped shooting. In my mind I saw them organizing an assault on the kitchen from multiple angles.

             
I fired around the corner just to keep them guessing and began hammering at the doorknob with the stock of my shotgun. The door was heavy and well made just like everything else in the damn house.

             
After a couple of attempts I gave up and decided to shoot it instead. I backed up almost to the French doors took aim and fired. The shot took a huge bite from the wood but the knob held so I shot it again.

             
Glass and wood exploded in on me from the French doors at my back. A flare of white-hot pain lanced across my right hip. I wheeled awkwardly and fired blindly in that direction before falling backward into the basement door.

             
Someone whimpered beyond the broken doors in the next room. Another voice shushed that person in a harsh whisper. I filed that quickly away in the ‘pleased’ section of my mind as I hammered again at the knob and it finally came out, clattering to the floor.

             
The locked knob was no longer a problem but the door was still solidly shut. It was only then I remembered the pry bar.

             
Wriggling out of my pack, I unzipped it and pulled out the pry bar one handed. I was getting good at using only one arm.

             
The pain in my side was pulsing in time to my beating heart and I thought my leg might be going numb but I was too amped up to worry about it for the moment.

             
I stuck the claw end in the hole and pulled as hard as I could using my right leg for leverage. This action erased any feelings of numbness. My scream surprised me as I am sure it did the others in the house but the door popped open and sent me on ass, the pry bar went flying and my vision wavered.

             
I blinked several times trying to clear my head. I tried to remember how many times I’d fired. I thought I had one shot left. I was so far out of my depth, I just wanted to call a time-out and cry for a few minutes.

             
A commotion could be heard from the main kitchen entrance which escalated into alarmed shouting. With my attention focused towards the kitchen, a man charged in from the French doors and kicked the shotgun from my hand. My final shot discharging harmlessly into the kitchen table and chairs.

             
It was the cowboy hat guy from the guard tower, he looked really pissed. He stood leering over me with murder in his eyes as I rubbed my sore hand where he kicked me. He looked toward the kitchen for a second and I delivered an elbow to the hinge of his knee as hard as I could.

             
I felt his knee buckle and heard him curse, then he was on top of me. What ensued next was one of those life and death wrestling matches that happens to a man on occasion, albeit this was the first time for me. I had been on the wrestling team in high school for a few years but the stakes were never this high.

             
Over the next few seconds we traded awkward, desperate body blows and kicks as we each tried unsuccessfully to leverage some kind of advantage. Time stopped as we teetered on the edge of the stairway. Muscles flexed at full capacity from head to toe as we both desperately refused to give up.

             
His eyes bulged in panic as I gave the final lunge that sent us tumbling down the stairs in a heap.

             
It was a very deep basement. By all rights one or both of us should have broken our necks on the long fall but neither of us did.

             
I pushed off of him and staggered to my feet, warm blood from a cut on my forehead flowed freely into my left eye. He pulled himself up using the basement wall for support as he sized me up.

             
“Who the fuck are you?” he drawled, pulling a large buck knife from a sheath on his leg.

             
When I didn’t answer he spit a gob of blood on the bottom stair to his left and made a lunge for me. His knee buckled and he fell at my feet. I pulled out my gun and flipped off the safety.

             
“I am the angel of death,” I whispered and shot him in the head.

             
I snatched the buck knife from his hand and quickly patted him down looking for anything useful. During my brief search of his person, I had a chance to regret the very lame last line I’d fed him about being the angel of death but the moment was gone. The hole in his head told me there could be no take backs.

             
He had no other weapons on him but I did find a set of keys and stuffed them into my pocket.

             
I listened intently at the base of the stairs but all was quiet from above. My pack was up there with all my shit in it along with Dave’s shotgun. But they were waiting for me to come for it, I could feel it. I did not want to leave my stuff but I had no choice, to go back upstairs was to die. I wasn’t quite ready for the whole angel of death thing myself for all my big talk.

             
The cowboy hat guy had a blue bandana folded up neatly in his shirt pocket. It seemed reasonably clean so I tied it around my head to keep the blood out of my eyes. I started down the dimly lit hallway in search of those illusive prisoners.

             
The hallway led to another great room in the unfinished basement. It was packed to the gills with goods of all kinds, like a Costco had exploded. Oil-burning lamps affixed to the cement walls lit up the room, illuminating a storehouse of goods that put mine to shame.

             
My hip was throbbing as I passed from food and toiletries into the guns and ammo section. The group had been armed to the teeth. If I hadn’t attacked them completely by surprise I would be dead now for sure.

             
Finally the crates and supplies came to an end and I emerged at the very rear of the large room.

             
A large steel door like the kind found on walk-in freezers was bolted to the wall and padlocked shut. The area in front of the door was clear aside from two lounge chairs and a little card table. On the table were two half-finished wine glasses and an open bottle, a box of Cheese-its and several magazines. I could see old issues of People, an US Weekly and a Vogue.

             
I knew these people were into some weird shit but I just couldn’t see the cowboy hat guy sitting at the table while he sipped chardonnay and paged through People Magazine.

             
Whoever had been guarding that door was gone now, upstairs chasing zombies I hoped.

             
A large heavy curtain hung along one wall. I felt a draft and noticed the curtain gently moving with the airflow. I chalked it up to something that happened in cavernous basements. Having never owned a house so large, I just assumed it came with the territory. Among the many lessons I would take from that night, probably the most important was never to assume anything.

             
A gun went off from somewhere behind me or upstairs and I knew my time was short. Pulling the ring of keys from my pocket, I approached the freezer door. Halfway through several keys that didn’t fit, I froze as two hard shapes pressed on the back of my skull from both sides.

             
The shapes felt eerily like the ends of gun barrels, this suspicion was confirmed when both guns were cocked simultaneously. There is something terrible about that sound, that rhythmic click-click-click. Something that tightens the sphincter and heightens the senses. I smelled perfume and body order but it wasn’t altogether unpleasant.

             
“Drop the keys,” said a sweet feminine voice behind my right ear.

             
I complied with the order as a hand eased my gun from the holster on my hip, I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from flinching at the pain.

             
“Looks like he’s bleeding, Rosie,” said an identical voice to my left.

             
I felt the buck knife I’d slipped into my belt disappear and hit the floor. Between the action upstairs and this debacle I was now completely unarmed.

             
“Raise your hands high above your head and turn around slowly,” the first voice said.

             
I did as I was told until I was fully facing my two captors.

             
Twins.

             
Two strikingly beautiful, brown-haired, blue-eyed twins. I judged them to be a year or two younger than me as I looked from one to the other.

             
Both were wearing jeans, hiking boots and matching sweaters. Both had long thick braids trailing down their backs.

             
I risked a bullet to the head, “Do either of you have any gum?” I discovered that night that among other things, I spout stupid one-liners when I get really stressed out. I also puke a lot but I digress.

             
They did not shoot me but the one on my right giggled like she was missing a few game pieces.

             
“I like this one, Rosie!” she said.

             
“Hush now, Daisy!” Rosie replied. “Daddy is going to want to talk to you mister. What are you doing down here? You don’t belong down here,” Rosie said in a slightly accusatory tone.

             
Thoughts were spinning through my head.

             
Was I dealing with two very stupid twin ladies?

             
Was I dealing with two very crazy twin ladies?

             
Could it be both?

             
Was there some Stockholm syndrome at play here?

             
I rolled the dice.

             
“Your daddy sent me down here, he wants company tonight,” I nodded back toward the freezer door.

             
Daisy squealed with delight at the notion of her ‘daddy’ wanting company from the freezer. Her gun wavering haphazardly up and down while Rosie just stared hard at me. She was going to be the tough sell.

             
“I’ve never seen you before. Are you one of Lance’s men? I don’t think so, I would remember. Why are you wearing his scarf?” she asked slowly. “My father wouldn’t want company from in there,” she nodded suspiciously toward the freezer as she took a step away from me and brought her gun up a little higher.

             
I was getting nervous, “Rosie! You do know me! I’m with Lance. Let me get the keys back and do what your father wants. You know how he gets when he’s angry!”

             
I was taking some serious gambles here, if I was even a little bit off, she seemed crazy enough to shoot me just to make her head stop spinning.

             
“How do you know my name?” she demanded, her voice increasing in volume.

             
“Rosie, why are you doing this?” I asked in reproachful tone.

             
In ordinary circumstances I might have added that she should be ashamed of herself but I didn’t want to push it.

             
She started shaking, tears poking out from the corners of her sparkling blue eyes. She really was very pretty.