Thursday, August 14, 2014

Hollow World Book 4 Chapter 14


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Sam fired shot after shot into the advancing army of Others, but it seemed to make no difference.  For every one that fell, two seemed to come out of the woods to replace them.  Sam tried not to think of the gaping hole in the wall beside him, where until a few moments before, a tall and spindly African American man had sat, firing into the crowd with him, Tama waiting behind him.  That was before something had exploded into the wooden wall, what, Sam had not had time to check.  His left arm was bleeding, bad enough that he thought he needed stitches, but getting sewn up would do him no good if there was no place left in the morning.

“More ammo,”  He called out as the nearby machine gun stopped shooting to reload itself.  He handed the weapon back to his backup and got a replacement and was firing moments before the machine gun started again.  The first explosion of the fuel tankers occurred about then, and a small cheer went up amongst his wall mates as they watched a mass of the attackers destroyed by the blast.  The second tanker was not so lucky, at least from his vantage point, but it did succeed in lighting the woods the enemy was coming out of on fire.  

Face aglow from the spreading flames, Sam took more shots at the Others as they got closer and closer to the wall.  The machine gun stopped firing again long enough for him to hear a whistling sound, following by a loud thwack that shook the section of wall he stood upon.  Once he had regained his balance, Sam looked over the wall and saw a cannonball lodged into the grill of the upturned car below him.  “That was close,” He shouted and looked back over his shoulder, the man behind him smiled. 

“They’re filled with concr-“  The machine gun burst to life again, drowning out the last of what the man had said.  

It was then that the wall on the other side of him exploded, leaving his piece of wooden wall stranded atop the cars, no longer attached to anything. Sam had no time to think as his section of walkway began to topple forward, the wooden wall proving too heavy to balance it without extra support.
“Here!” The man behind him shouted and threw an extra rifle toward Sam.  Somehow he caught it as he tumbled down the outside of the wall and into the waiting arms of a pair of Others who had made it across the killing field relatively unharmed.  He managed to scramble on to his back as they fell upon him.

He thought of Evelyn as he lashed out at them, wondering how she was doing at the cabin all of the children had been taken to.  He was proud of her, in the little time that he had known her, she had saved his life once and, since finding Tama, really started to come out of her shell. 

Tama, he remembered looking back after the first cannonball had ripped through the wall and panicking briefly when he had not seen her, but he had forced the emotion away and returned to the fight.  That panic took ahold of him as he lay there struggling with a pair of Others who were trying to pummel him with the butt of a pistol and their fists.  He brought both hands up in front of his face to try to block their rain of blows when one of their heads exploded.  This proved the needed distraction for him to shove the other ones nose up into its brain and push it off of him.  He had no time to revel in the small victory, as he came out of the tangle of limbs, another man was upon him, but he managed to get a shot from his shotgun off, which at such short range, tore apart his foes kneecap.  Sam risked a glance back at the wall and smiled as he saw his backup laying there, a gun of his own firing at the advancing enemy soldiers.

“Hang on, I’ve got a rope coming,”  The man shouted and Sam swore he would learn the man’s name if he survived.  

“What other choice do I have,”  Sam yelled back, turning his attention back in time to be pistol whipped across his right cheek.  Growling, he swung his shotgun like a baseball bat, connecting with the stomach of the woman who had just assaulted him.  She kept coming though, despite the audible rush of air from her lungs.  He tried to recover the shotgun into some position in which he could fire from but she was too close.  She swung again with the pistol and connected with his temple.  His world started to look fuzzy and he swung the shotgun again, blindly.  He felt it connect and then the weight of the woman was no longer upon him.  He shook his head again, trying to clear the cobwebs, and closed his eyes for a second to try and stop the stars from spinning.  When he opened them again, two more Others, a hispanic man and a tall leggy blonde woman were bearing down upon him with three more close behind them.  He fired the shotgun and one of them, the man, spun away.  He had long enough to pull a knife out of it’s sheath on his hip before the woman was on top of him.  Under drastically different circumstances, he thought for a split second before she dug an elbow into his ribcage.  He slashed at her, slicing open the once white dress she wore and scoring a superficial cut along her midsection.  She snapped her head down, connecting with his temple as he felt the press of more bodies upon him.  The sound of gunfire continued, although it sounded much nearer now, as he blacked out.

He awoke with a start a few seconds later as he felt himself being lifted up.  

“Damn it, I didn’t come down here just to pick up a corpse, did I?”  His backup asked as he wrapped both of his arms around Sam’s torso.


“No sir,”  Sam said, smiling weekly.  

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1 comment:

archnemesis_goldenhair said...

Sam's line about different circumstances feels incomplete.
I can't read book 4 fast enough.

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