CHAPTER 20: THE HALF-NAKED ASIAN CHICK
Taking a steadying breath, he jumped up, gun trained on the intruder, and shouted, “Hands in the air! Where I can see them, now!” His finger came so close to pulling the trigger, so close he felt the trigger slide inward…
It was a little girl.
Harvey immediately released tension on the trigger, quickly ducking back behind the snow machine, looking for relatives. Often, in war, unscrupulous adults would use kids as distractions or human shields, catching those soldiers off guard who were too queasy to shoot through a kid to get to the monster behind them. That split-second of hesitation often cost the soldier his life, and even then, Harvey was cursing himself for hesitating. Killearn was dead. This was war.
“Kid!” Harvey shouted, protecting himself as much as possible with the body of the snow machine, “Where are your parents?”
“They’re dead,” the little girl said. She was blinking at him in confusion, probably not even realizing what the thing in his hand actually did, or why it was pointed at her.
“Anyone in there with you?!” he demanded.
She nodded.
“Tell them to come out.” He raised his voice to carry into the cabin behind her. “Get out here or I shoot your kid!” He hated to be a bastard, but he also didn’t want to play games.
The kid nervously looked over her shoulder at something inside. “I don’t think she can move.”
She? Harvey frowned. “What you mean, she?”
“The woman who saved me,” the little girl said. “She’s bleeding on the floor. I don’t think she’s awake.”
It could be a trap, Harvey reasoned. A good one, too. Just get the unsuspecting soldier to wander inside looking to help out a lady, put a couple rounds through his braincase as soon as he was through the door…
“Why’s she bleeding?” he asked, still on high alert for any hint of motion around him. Though, to be fair, if anyone had staked out shooting stations as he approached at full-bore like a moron, he would probably be dead already. Unless they were stupid.
“I don’t know why she’s bleeding,” the little girl said. “She went out to find food and there were gunshots and she came back and she was bleeding.”
Harvey glanced at the dead man in the parking lot behind him. “What about him?”
“What about who?” the little girl asked.
“The dead guy on the ground out here,” he snapped. “Don’t play stupid!”
“What dead guy?” the little girl asked, blinking dumbly. “There wasn’t a guy.”
Harvey frowned. “You mean there wasn’t a guy in there with you? Nobody but her?”
“Uh, no, just her. And, um, look, she told me to keep this place warm and the door’s open and it’s cold and I’m letting out the heat. Do you think you could come inside and talk to me in here?”
And there was the trap. Just stand up, show us your body, let us get you in our sights. Harvey narrowed his eyes. He’d gone through scenes like this in the Middle East, but he’d never thought he would see it in America. “You come out here to me.” Let them take that and chew on it.
“Uh, okay.” The girl started to pull the door shut.
“Leave the door open!” he shouted, not wanting anything to block his limited view of the interior.
The girl hesitated. “Um, I’m really sorry, but I don’t know who you are and my mom told me not to talk to strangers, and you’re acting weird.” Without another word, the little girl went back up the stairs and shut the door behind her. Harvey could have shot her, but didn’t. He just stared at the door, still holding his weapon, trying to piece together what the fuck.
Kid said she’s bleeding, Harvey thought, frowning. She. Who the hell was ‘she’ and why the hell was she up here with a kid that wasn’t hers? And what the fuck happened to Killearn? No she could’ve gotten into a scuffle with Killearn and made it out alive.
Eventually, when no gunmen presented themselves, Harvey, staying low, reluctantly got up and went over to the corpse in the parking lot.
The first thing he noted was the blood. Everywhere. It centered around the boulder, and though there had been some minor ashfall since, it was pretty clear there had been a massive struggle. Frowning, Harvey glanced back at the cabin, but no one had reopened the door or come to the windows.
Still keeping a low profile, he got close enough to determine that it was, indeed, Killearn, and that he’d been beat to shit and shot—repeatedly—with his own gun. Harvey plucked it from the ash and his lips took on a grim line as he tucked the Glock into his belt. So some bitch had ambushed him, maybe got a little friendly to some lonely Army Ranger, then taken his gun and shot him with it.
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…but also beat him to shit in a slugfest on the ground?
That…really didn’t make sense. There had to be someone else. A man. Someone big enough to do that kind of damage.
Very carefully, Harvey crossed back to the front of the cabin and hesitated, hunched by the window, listening. There were small sounds inside, scuffles, as someone moved around. Slowly, he lifted his head to peer inside.
Sure a shit, a half-naked Asian chick was slumped against the bed, blood everywhere, makeshift bandages wrapped around her leg, apparently unconscious. Frowning, Harvey slowly stood, glancing back at Killearn’s body. When nobody jumped from behind a building to shout ‘Surprise!’ with the fiery muzzle of an AK-47, he wandered back across the parking lot to get a better look at Killearn.
He’d been shot several times in the side and back, then twice in the head, basically exploding the right side of his melon into oblivion. Harvey rolled the big man onto his side.
Killearn’s dick, small and puckered and dead, was bunched up along with his balls at the apex of his fly, covered in volcanic ash and blood. Harvy quickly shoved the corpse over the rest of the way, then stood up, his stunned mind taking that in.
Remembering the odd way the woman’s pants had been pulled partway down, he got a sickly-cold feeling in his gut, realizing what this was.
It was the end of the world. Aliens were attacking, bombs were dropping, Killearn was out here alone and nobody would give a shit about some missing Asian chick…
That fucker dragged her up here and raped her, he thought. Shit happened in war, and it was shit like this that made the rest of them—good guys just trying to stay alive and do the right thing—look bad.
He left the corpse and went back up to the cabin. He still had his gun out, but he felt less inclined to use it. Had someone come charging him from around a corner, he would’ve put a couple rounds in their skull, but so far, it was looking like a open-and-closed case of rapee gets one over on rapist. Still, he entered the cabin hard and fast, shouting, “Get your hands up! Up where I can see them,” the shock-and-awe tactic meant to catch bomb-making douchebags off guard, before they could reach for their handy AK-47s.
The little girl looked up warily from the stove, where she was loading more wood onto the fire. The Asian chick never moved.
Once Harvey had determined there was nobody in the loft, he shoved the door shut and pulled the curtains. Then he checked the Asian woman for weapons.
Nothing. He checked her pulse. Alive, but barely.
She’d been stabbed, twice in the leg, then sliced open along the side and abdomen in a long, nasty gash that was still oozing blood onto the wooden floorboards. He could see the white chinks of a couple of her ribs in the base of the gash.
That it had been a knife fight brought a whole ‘nother perspective to the situation.
She got in a fight with him, Harvey thought, stunned. Hand to hand, fist-to-first, she had gotten in a fight with Killearn and came out on top. That, in itself, was eye-opening.
Harvey reluctantly put his gun back in its holster. Turning to the little girl, he said, “So that guy outside brought you guys up here?”
“What guy outside?” the girl asked, still blinking in confusion.
So he ambushed them, Harvey thought. But he hadn’t seen the park vehicle nor any civilian vehicles, so how in the hell had she and the girl gotten here?
Didn’t really matter, he decided. He needed to get this woman sewn up or she was dead. As it was, it looked like a slaughterhouse in here. He pulled her underwear up for modesty, then yanked her pants off and her shirt up, checking for more knife wounds. He only found the three, but they were all bad.
“Hey kid,” Harvey said, “I need you to go find a pan or something, fill it with snow, get some water boiling.”
Immediately, the girl made a face. “There’s aliens out there.”
Harvey, who had just lifted the Asian chick on the bed, froze. Very slowly, he turned around. “Come again?”
“The maggots are aliens. Mean was killing them.” At his baffled look, she added, “Mean’s my cat. She’s not mean, though. Her real name is Mindy. Mean just sounds cooler. We decided to call her Mean because—”
“I don’t give a fuck about your cat,” he snapped, unholstering his gun again. “You said there’s aliens? What kind of aliens?”
The little girl scowled at him. “I’m Kelsey.”
He wanted to tell her he didn’t give a crap about her name, either, but he managed to rein himself in. “Hi Kelsey, I’m Harvey. Tell me about these aliens, okay?”
“They’re maggots,” she said, as if that explained everything. “They’re black and they fall from the sky.”
Harvey immediately glanced up at the roof, expecting to see them there, boring through the tin sheeting.
“Some of them are bigger than others,” she said. “I saw one try to get in the door when I was sitting here with Mandy. I think they’re eating each other.”
Unconsciously, Harvey glanced at the door. There was a small crack, just enough for darkness to show through. Was it his imagination, or did he see just something move on the other side?
“See?” the girl said, pointing at the crack. “One of them just tried to get in. I think they like the light.”
Harvey swallowed hard. He glanced at the woman on the bed, considered letting her die rather than open the door to retrieve the medkit from the Humvee, then thought about the fact that he couldn’t stay holed up without food and water forever. “I’m gonna get water and supplies,” he said. “You stay here and watch Mandy.”
“Watch her do what?”
Stupid kid. “Sleep.”
“Why?”
Harvey opened his mouth to tell the kid why, then stopped halfway. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he muttered. “Don’t leave the cabin.”
“I wasn’t going to,” she said, sounding like she thought he were dumb for even mentioning it.
Harvey thought the girl was probably one of those kids that hadn’t gotten spanked enough as a kid, and decided to remedy that situation just as soon as someone’s life wasn’t on the line. Thus, he was thinking about disciplining the little brat, not guys with AK-47s surprising him from the shadows, when he stepped out onto the porch and took a two-by-four to the side of his head.
It wasn’t complete lights-out, but it was damn close. Harvey slumped forward, to his knees, but couldn’t get back up. Something huge shoved him the rest of the way down.
“Get his hands tied!” the guy who’d ambushed him shouted, the deep voice of someone whose chest was shaped like a barrel and whose spine had a few extra feet in it.
As he was lying there under a Size-20 boot, Harvey confirmed the guy who’d hit him was approximately the same size as Goliath, and his companion who was running to get his hands behind his back was not another guy, but actually a pretty blonde…
Neat. He tried to reach for his gun anyway. But, since it was the second time he’d been hit in the head since the alien exploded the tank, and his noggin had already been tender, Harvey instead felt his eyes roll into the back of his head as he lost consciousness.