The Effacing (Book 1.5): Valley's End (6 page)

   The smoke cleared, but the rainwater bucketed down.

   “Wait a minute.” Maria said, steering her head around the corner of the dupe. She turned back to Rebekah, eyes wide.  “Sworn’s men.” she said.

   “How many,” Rebekah asked.             

   “Four. But there has to be others nearby, maybe surrounding us now.”

   Rebekah pulled the poncho’s hood over her head, moved into Maria’s position and peeped around the corner, turned back to Maria. “Okay. I’ll take care of it.”

   Ann was behind Maria. She said, “What do you mean,
take care of it?
Just let them do their rounds and then—”

   “Can’t do that,” Rebekah said. “They’re baiting them in.” She looked to Maria. “When I give you the signal, get everyone up the street as fast as you can. Keep your eyes open in the rear for Trackers. They’re around here somewhere, which mean Bleeders are too.”  

   Maria nodded, and with a wave of her hand, motioned for Baker.

   Ann said, “We’ve seen this before. They spread out in three groups of four. Their vans must be nearby.”

   Rebekah looked to Ann’s hunting knife. “Can I hold that for a while?”

   “Sure.”

   Ann handed Rebekah the blade. She put it in her lower-back, looked to the group.

   It could have been a block party the way they filled the streets. It was either that or a reenactment of
The Gangs of New York
, the contemporary version,
Before the Battle
. Hell, it was both. A new age party gang before the battle. The China Cabinet Boys held a tire iron each, an average built guy wearing a soaked Oakland Athletics jersey two sizes too big – with even bigger blue jeans – gripped a Louisville Slugger in both hands. Some young trendy kid in a green and yellow striped shirt, tight, red denim jeans and a dog chain hanging from his belt loop, down his thigh, going back up into his back pocket, carried a fire axe. Even the girl in the parka – her face shielded by its furry hood – held a ridged 12’ kitchen knife. Jim and Girder stood just behind Ann, game face on, guns gripped, ready to do the damn thing. Others had rusty pipes or bricks, hammers and saws, blunt objects and such. And the few that held firearms were pulling up in the rear of their fortified regiment, from revolver pistols to banned fully-automatics.

   And Baker, running through the crowd, smelling like everything the garbage regurgitated, informing the mob of their new objective and possible threat.

   Then, Rebekah hit the corner.

   Ann tapped Maria’s shoulder, lifted a brow. “What’s the signal?”

   Maria, stunned, said, “I guess we’ll find out,” and stuck her head around the corner.

   Rebekah walked center street, hands high. The heavy rain outlined her clothes in a mystique, highlighted, protective aqua colored aura. Three of the marks – all four, black fatigues and reinforced vests – raised their MTAR 21s, and with their flashlight attachments, held her under a three-man spotlight.

   “Hold it right there, miss!” one exclaimed, advancing on her position.

   She kept walking toward them.

   “Ma’am,” he enforced. “Stop where you are. Are you infected?”

   The other two, beaming their flashlights, followed. The fourth stayed behind with the bag, reaching at his ear to hit the talk button on his communicator.

   “No.” Rebekah answered, however, moving forward, hands still rose. “But—”

   “But… nothing. Miss, on the ground! Now!” he ordered, still advancing.

   The other two caught up. Now, the three of them stood side-by-side, close enough to creating a six foot spread in front of her, guns targeted at her face and breasts. The fourth, twenty feet back, observed. Rebekah instantly assumed she could silently take the three in front of her, and then the fourth without a problem. In four seconds tops.

   She knelt to the asphalt on her right knee. Two of them released their assault rifles to dangle on their straps behind them, the lead, in the center, still aimed. Rebekah quickly reached up with her open right hand, rammed her palm into the lead’s lower-chin with all her force. His jawbone fractured, teeth slammed together, and the force of the blow shifted his brain just a fraction of a millimeter, sending him on a free-fall toward the wet macadam.

   Her left hand went in her lower-back, body inclined to the left. Her right foot, under the chin of her opponent to the right as her left arm extended – Ann’s hunting knife in hand – to the guard on the left, through his esophagus. Both men, simultaneously, began to fall in place. The first hit the ground.

   Her adversary with the bag, twenty feet out, pressed a finger to his earpiece. Rebekah, still holding the blade, hit a 360 degree spin from the left as the blade slipped out of the guard’s throat, and released it at the end of her turn. The two bodies splashed onto the soaked pavement, the blade flung twenty feet out, directly into the final marks chatter box before he could get a word out. And he lay where he once stood.

   Three motions, the old one-two-one take-out method in 3.7 seconds. To be executed by professionals only.

   Rebekah looked back to the duplex, shrugged her shoulders to Maria, who’d witnessed the incident, walked toward the corpse twenty feet out, retracted Ann’s blade from his mouth and snatched up the earpiece. Picked up his MTAR 21 and slung the strap across her neck. Maria flagged the mob to follow and they all rushed toward Rebekah.

   “I take it that was the signal?” Maria said, once the group caught up.

   Rebekah didn’t entertain her question. “We should get to the others before Sworn finds out we hit his men,” and placed the communicator in her ear. Her eyes widened.

   “What is it?” Ann questioned.

   “I can’t make out what they’re saying.” She pressed her palm against her ear. “Just a lot of rambling.” Then she looked up the street, and back to Maria. “Where are the others?”

   “On the next street…” she replied, with a point of the finger.

   “Get everyone there. I’m going to check on the resistance.”

   “
What?!
Hell no,” Ann objected. “You only took out one group, and there’re two more out there.”

   “Okay. Sounds like fun. I don’t want to risk losing anyone else, so I’ll go by myself. Plus we need to find out where that blast came from.” Rebekah finished.

   “No,” Ann retorted. “I’ll go with you.”

   Maria interjected, “Hell no.”

   “It’s my decision, cuzo.”

   “No, it’s mine,” Rebekah objected, “and you need to stay with the group.”

   “What?” Ann quizzed. “After what we just wen—”

   “Yes,” Rebekah cut Ann’s wisdom. “After all that just happened, you should be with the group, the more the merrier, right. I’m a big girl, I can handle myself.”

   “Rebek—”

   “We don’t have time to argue!” Rebekah believed, reaching for the enemy’s bag of bait at her feet. “You need to get going now... all of you.”

   “But—” Ann started before she was cut off again.

   “But what… you catching feelings?” Rebekah asked, not wanting a response, smirked. “You did enough, Ann.” She held the earpiece, heard static and nodded toward the downed man. “And I’m sure he called it in. So you should hurry before it’s too late. They think I’m alone.”

   And without another word, Rebekah grabbed the hefty bag and began walking in between the alleyway headed south, toward Maison.

   She tossed the heavy bag into a fenced back yard three blocks down and continued to search for the remaining soldiers on patrol, maybe spot their transport and make good use of it. Another four blocks up, she looked west, found the next four bad guys, their flashlights danced up the street. She figured they wouldn’t be an immediate threat to the group and kept moving south, along the backside of badly beaten condominiums, in the shadows and through the surprisingly deserted alley. Surprisingly, meaning the sick would normally stalk the cuts, lying in wait until something drew their attention – and something must have already alerted their senses.

   Three blocks later, Rebekah turned and moved along the east side of the condo’s debris-filled sidewalk, against the wall. The streets were dark. boogying streetlights here and there, a couple of lightly burning vehicles, urgently evacuated by their owners – bullet-riddled doors open, car hoods lifted, trunks popped –  scattered along the cluttered one-way backstreet.

   The parkway was divided from the neighborhood by a reflective barrier. She spotted the shadow of a dog – the Akita – sniffling along the wet street pavement. It sniffed across the one-way street, in between a couple of cars; moved along until it was out of sight, up Eger Dell Street.

   She focused upon the Parkway as she traveled. Two blocks up, on Maison, she witnessed the taillights of a large, black shiny truck, the rear door partially open, between two black armored jeeps with mounted 50 calibers. The large truck resembled more of an urban assault tank without the cannon at the top; the Knight XV. Huge, like something the President or an A-list celebrity with a hate club – like Justin Beiber – should be protected in. All three vehicles, deserted.

  
The resistance
, she thought.

   But where could they be? And yet it was close to 50 men that she remembered had stayed back with the original group. Unless a majority of them failed. But where were they? 

   Then, from below street level, ahead of the deserted convoy, four of Sworn’s men, all average height and weight, emerged through the darkness.

   At that moment she’d realized that she gazed upon Sworn’s implosion sight, the origin of that dreadful blast in which abetted in the takedown of
The End
. It was three blocks further from where Maria kept the survivors, ten blocks back, as she jotted the memo into her memory bank.

   From a hundred feet away, on the other side of the implosion, a set of headlights blinked three times, and a guard from her side of the crater reached inside one of the jeeps, hit the lights and blinked back. She followed them with her eyes as they began walking toward the barrier, crossing over to the backstreet and up Eger Dell… trailing behind the Akita.

   Rebekah hustled up the next street, Sardis Road. Instantly, she caught a glimpse of two corpses at the edge of a driveway to her right, slowed down to view the bodies. It was a man and his wife, their figures lying together. He was on top of her, as if protecting her when it occurred. His back had been savagely ripped through, spinal cord, cracked and exposed. One of his running shoes was missing, while the blood-stained sock drooped from his foot, half on, half off. The wife’s face was hidden beneath his chest, but her arms, visible, and gnawed to the bone; legs alike. Pieces of insides were scattered around both their bodies in chewed portions – let's assume someone’s flesh was bad meat.

   After a brief survey of the two, Rebekah’s eyes investigated a set of bloody paw prints to the door which led her to gaze her sights toward their home. Through the front window, a barking blaze spreading through the living room, as if this had all just taken place not too long ago. And with no time for a further inspection, she pressed forward.

   The rest of the road was lit by one frolicking streetlamp overtop a set of two black bullet-riddled 74 Impalas on flat twenty inch rims, sitting parallel to one another. The antiques blocked off the street from oncoming traffic. Another parallel set, almost identical – except for the smoke tinted windows – jammed the other end of the street, bullet holed up as you would expect. It looked like whoever it was had an old fashioned use-your-car-like-a-barricade shootout, but the corpses, missing. Both sides had been run off by something else – maybe by the owner of the bloody paw prints.

   A further ways up, flames rose from a beat up, black suede couch by a dumpster.
I’m definitely not alone
, she thought.
But neither are they… any of them.

   She cut between a set of yards on the second block up, spotted the enemy and sidestepped behind a Rubbermaid trash bin on the side of a partially dried pink house surrounded by groups of lengthy pine trees that haven’t yet begun to shed. The soldiers stopped center street, another group of four met up with them almost like clockwork – they must have been the north side group.

  
All
Eight of them
, she thought, excited.
This’ll be risky
.
But
the rain will make a good ally.

   She patiently waited in the cover of darkness – behind the bin – for her chance to strike, thinking of a way she could get in and out quietly. Eight versus one, the odds weren’t in her favor. The old one-two-one method wouldn’t work in this situation, and there was no such maneuver called the two-four-two. In fact, there wasn’t a one-two-one; she’d made it up as the opportunity presented itself. She looked around for anything useful, and then she thought of a way to cause a distraction that would, hopefully, divert a few of them away from the others.