Biohazard

9

The Hatchet Clans came not thirty minutes later.

Just when you think things can’t much worse, they usually do.

I decided to let the old man and the girl go. We didn’t need them and I was pretty sure they didn’t need us. I didn’t know what to do with the old man. I did my best splinting his leg. He looked like he wanted to tear my throat out the entire time.

Carl cut them loose and the girl ran off. The old man looked at us one last time, spit at my feet, and out the door he went, hobbling off with a broken broomstick for a crutch. He looked almost casually at the corpses of his posse and then went on his way. He didn’t make it half a block before he screamed.

Carl and I were just dragging Morse’s corpse out the door…and I saw three Clansmen hacking on the old guy. Scouts. That meant the main body was coming. I got back inside and told the others to hide. And just in time. For rolling down the streets like a storm, the main body was coming. Screaming, breaking windows, they had arrived.

I watched them storm past the front of the diner in their filthy, ragged olive drab overcoats and gas masks, scalp locks greased, axes and pikes, chains and clubs in their hands. Several carried decapitated human heads. They swung them by the hair. They found the bodies of Morse and the teenagers and set on them in a pack, more pressing in all the time like swarms of insects. They scalped the teenagers. They eviscerated them, dismembered them. They took Morse’s head with them.

We were in unbelievable danger.

If it came to it, we could kill quite a few, but I knew that in the end they’d overwhelm us with sheer numbers. They mulled about for about an hour, marching around and hissing to one another through their masks. None of them came into the diner. I figured that was a real spot of luck.

I thought we were going to make it.

Then twenty of them charged. They weren’t as stupid as I thought. They knew where we were and they played us, let us relax, let our guard go down slightly-because with the Clans in the street it never went down completely-then they attacked.

We killed at least ten of them, ducked into the back room and went out the rear door into the alley. Right into a nest of those assholes. We started shooting and dropped quite a few, but it was close-quarters combat and they came from every direction.

I saw Carl go down beneath a tangle of five or six of them.

And Texas Slim shouted: “Nash! On your left!”

I turned and shot another that was bearing down on me with an axe. And then Texas knocked me to the pavement and took a spear in the belly for it. He’d saved my life but sacrificed his own. They kicked my rifle away and beat me down with clubs. They had Texas down. He was screaming as he was jabbed repeatedly with five or six spears.

I fought to my feet and something collided with the back of my head. The last thing I saw was them hacking on Texas and Janie being dragged away down the alley.