Chapter 137: Come Out

/Third Person POV/

-KRRRRNNNNNGGG-!

The sound went on after the impact stopped, metal grinding on metal under Kara’s feet while the whole truck pulled hard to the right. Leo hauled the wheel the other way with both arms while the sedan’s roof came up level with Nora’s window, crushed flat and riding along under the front tire with the truck’s weight on it.

"I’ve got it!" Leo said through his teeth, and he didn’t.

The Ascender ground on for sixty meters past the junction with its nose dragging the wreck beneath it, slewed halfway across the westbound lanes before eventually coming to a stop, and in the same breath a flatbed came out from behind the feed store on the left with its lights off and pulled across the road ahead of them and sat there.

They were boxed in, with a car under Ascender’s wheel and a truck across the road in front, and on that truck’s bed, a man stood with the rifle in his hand already raised high, and within seconds, more and more shapes began to emerge, surrounding the Ascender.

"DOWN!" Kara roared at the top of her lungs before-

Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!...

The windshield spidered white behind the mesh. Norton’s window went in a sheet, and Nora was on the floor of the back seat, while the rounds went into the truck’s skin with the sound of a hammer on a filing cabinet, over and over, from three directions at once.

"Tires and glass!" A man’s voice, big and unhurried, from the flatbed. "Nobody hits the box! I want the truck, and I want them breathing!"

Them, he had said, and Kara heard the word and put it beside the other facts, one more thing to be dealt with, and got down below the sill with the Gen-12 across her thighs and her back against the door.

"Report!" Came Nikki’s voice from the handset on the dash, and the helicopter behind his voice had climbed a full note. "Kara! Who’s hit!?."

"No one! They boxed us!" Kara spoke through gritted teeth, "There’s a car under the front wheel, a truck across the road, nine or ten of them. They’re shooting the tires and the gas!"

"Not the body?"

"Not yet."

"Then they want the truck." He said it fast and flat, a man laying out cards he had already counted. "That’s why you’re alive... Don’t give them one reason to stop wanting it intact... Doors locked. Everybody below the sills. Nobody fires until they come to the doors. Kara, the shotgun is yours inside twenty meters and nothing past it. Leo, single shots at the chest... nobody out there is wearing plates. Mr. Norton, on the floor with the bag. Nora... get the drone out somehow. Try the back window and go up, and give me numbers and clocks..."

"I-" Nora’s voice cracked once, and then her chin came up. "Yes. Okay. Yes."

The rear window was already gone, and the drone went out through the hole in her two hands and lifted into the falling snow with its rotors screaming, and Kara heard it climb and hang, and then Nora was talking.

"Nine! There are nine! Maybe ten! Two behind the gas pumps, that’s our four o’clock. Three at the feed store, seven o’clock. Four at the flatbed, twelve, one of them’s the one shouting... It’s twelve of them!"

"Noted," Nikki said. "Leo... The flatbed... wait for them to stand up to shoot over the cab."

Leo had the Spear up along the dash with its muzzle against the spidered glass, and he waited, and Kara watched the side of his face not move at all while the rounds kept coming in.

-Tish-!

"Miss," Leo said, his eyes gone red, and he fired again.

-Tish-!

The man on the flatbed’s left went down behind the cab and did not stand up again.

"Kara." Nikki again. "Your side. Nora says one’s coming from the pumps... Your door."

She came up off the floor with the shotgun and put it out through the empty frame of her window, and he was there, a big man in a hunting coat with a revolver in one hand, coming crouched and fast across the snow from the pumps toward her door with twelve meters between them and closing.

She fired, and the canopy over the pumps behind him was showered in a sheet of blood.

He was eight meters away and looking straight at her when she had fired, and the shot had taken him in the chest, ripping apart his chest from the collarbone. And as though his strings were cut, he sat down in the snow, and then lay down in it, while his coat went dark all at once.

Her hands were shaking so hard the shotgun’s muzzle was drawing circles in the air, and she brought it back inside the cab and held it against her chest and breathed through her mouth. Her mind buzzing as bullets flew overhead, tearing apart the luxurious interior that she had begun to consider her new home.

And just as she was about to ask Nikki what to do next-

-Thard-!

The bullet tore through the dashboard and hit Leo in the chest.

The sound inside the cab was flat and hard and very close, and all the air went out of him at once as he folded forward over, mouth open, with no sound coming out.

"Leo-!" Kara roared, her face instantly draining of all color. "Fuck- Leo, talk to me, look at me-"

"I’m fine." It came out in pieces, with his face grey and his hand flat on the plate. "I’m fine. It stopped it... I’m fine."

He was not fine. She could see that he wasn’t, and there was nothing she could do about it from where she sat, so she let go of him and got back down below the sill.

Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!...

Norton had Nora by the collar of her field jacket with one hand, keeping her head under the edge of the seat while the drone controller shook in her lap, and when Kara looked back at him, there was blood running down the side of his neck from his ear and one lens of his glasses.

"Sit still," he told Nora while tearing a pressure bandage open with his teeth and pressing it to his own neck with the hand that wasn’t holding her down. "Your whole job is sitting still."

"They’re moving," Nora said. "Two of them, from the feed store, they’ve got- it’s a bar, a crowbar or a- they’re going to the driver’s door, they’re at the- Leo, they’re at your door-"

-CLANG-!

The pry bar went into the seam of the driver’s door, and the whole panel bowed inward beside Leo’s.

Leo turned in his seat with the Spear pointed straight down at the door skin and, through gritted teeth and a chest that no longer worked right, pulled the trigger twice.

-Tish-!-Tish-!

Both rounds went through the door and into the man on the other side of it at arm’s length, and there was one heavy sound against the panel as he fell into it.

Leo did not look at the door. He put the rifle back up along the dash and said nothing, and Kara heard him finally start breathing somewhat normally.

She had three shells left in the magazine, and then she might as well have had none, because the man behind the pumps raised his head twice, and she fired twice and missed both times. The second man from the feed store came around the tail of the truck with a second bar, but the fresh magazine on her carrier would not come out of its pouch, and her hands would not do what she was telling them to do.

Behind her, Nora’s rifle went off once out the back window, and missed the man on her sight entirely.

"Four minutes," Nikki said over the radio. "Four... Just stay low and hold the doors."

And then the sound outside changed.

It came from the north, up the state road, and it came all wrong: deer rifles going off one at a time with the gaps of men working a bolt between them, except the gaps were too long, and a pump gun firing twice and then nothing, and a revolver emptying itself into the sky, and under all of it a woman’s voice screaming at the top of her lungs, "GET OFF THEM! GET OFF THEM, YOU-"

Two pickups came down the state road out of the snow with people standing in the beds, and they stopped short of the junction, crooked, while the people in them started shooting at anything that moved. One of the men at the pumps went down on his face, and a second one at the flatbed grabbed his own leg and folded over right then and there on the road.

"Back!" The big voice from the flatbed had changed key entirely. "Back! Back to the- get him on, get him ON-"

The flatbed’s engine caught, then lurched, and men ran for it, dragging the one with the shot leg, while the pickup behind the feed store tore out of the lot after it. The two of them went south down the state road with rifles firing back out of their windows at nothing, and in the road behind them they left the crushed sedan, a pickup with its doors open at the pumps, and dead men in the snow.

Then there was no sound at all.

Kara sat with her back against her door, the shotgun against her chest, and her blood going cold. After all, whoever those newcomers were, they were certainly stronger than the ones who came before.

"They’re stopping," Nora said, so quietly that Kara barely heard. "The trucks... There are two of them... Six people, and they’ve all got rifles. They’re getting out... They’re walking in, sis. Spread out... They’re looking at us."

"Ninety seconds," Nikki said. "I’m ninety seconds out. Do NOT open that door! Nobody opens anything."

And just then three knocks came on the passenger door, right beside Leo’s ear, knuckles on metal, unhurried.

"Hey." A woman’s voice, close, a little out of breath. "In the truck. You can come out now. It’s safe."

And Leo’s hand went to the latch before he had decided anything about it while-

"Don’t!" Nikki’s roaring voice boomed over the radio.