“The hard way it is then,” Boden said and took aim with the crossbow.
They really didn’t expect him to fire. I didn’t know why not, except that they’d probably been able to prey on the kindness of strangers before. With so few survivors left, it was easy to want to stick together.
But people like Hayley and her crew had made it impossible for that happen.
Louis ran at Boden. Maybe he thought he could get to him before Boden pulled the trigger, but he didn’t. He’d barely made it two steps when the arrow pierced through his neck.
“You son of a bitch!” Hayley screamed.
While Louis clawed at his throat, I made my move. I figured I’d leave the giant for Serg and Boden to take care of, but I could get Hayley out of the way.
I raced over to the fireplace and grabbed a poker. Hayley was rushing towards Boden, who was reloading the crossbow with the quills he’d jammed into his back pocket. That left Serg trying to distract Bruce, who lumbered toward him.
I ran forward and landed on the back of the couch, knocking it back to the ground. Hayley was a few steps away from me, so I swung out wide with the poker. It connected with her back, and she cried out before falling forward on the floor.
Serg chucked a kitchen stool at Bruce, but he smacked it away and it crashed into the banister. Fortunately, Boden had finally reloaded the crossbow, and he fired at Bruce. It went through his ample bicep, but it didn’t really seem to slow him down.
“Why in the hell did you grab a crossbow?” Serg shouted in frustration.
“Cause we had more quills than we had bullets,” Boden said, once again struggling to reload. “It seemed logical!”
Hayley rolled onto her back, and I stood over her. I slammed the poker into her arm, and I could actually hear the bone snapping.
Serg had climbed up on the kitchen counter and grabbed the last kitchen stool. When Bruce came after him, trying to grab him, Serg tried beating him back with the stool. He swung it as hard as he could, and he landed a few good blows on Bruce’s head and arms.
Bruce was undaunted, though. He grabbed the stool and ripped it from Serg’s hands.
“Boden!” Serg yelled, backing up as far as he could go. “Fucking shoot him in the head!”
Bruce had grabbed onto Serg, one massive hand on each of his arms, and he’d begun squeezing him, crushing Serg with his bare hands.
Boden stood behind Bruce and aimed the crossbow up at the back of his head. It was nearly pointblank from that range, and when Boden pulled the trigger, the quill shot right into his head. It didn’t go all the way through, so the point was imbedded somewhere deep in Bruce’s brain.
It worked, though. Bruce let go of Serg, stumbled back, and then fell to floor so hard, the whole house shook.
“Please.” Hayley cradled her arm and scooted back away from me with tears in her eyes. “Please, don’t kill me.”
“Fine.” I lowered the poker. It didn’t seem right to attack her when she was defenseless like that. “Get your shit and get out of here.”
“Thank you,” she said and struggled to get to her feet. “Thank you.”
She went over to gather her bag, as well as Louis’s, but since she only had one arm, that was a bit of a problem. As she fumbled around with the straps, I turned back to see how Serg was doing.
He sat on the counter, rubbing his arms. “Don’t ever grab the crossbow again,” Serg told Boden. “Use it for hunting, sure, but if we’re fighting zombies or something, no crossbow.”
“Sorry,” Boden said. “I didn’t think I’d actually have to shoot anybody with it, though. I thought that just bringing it out would be enough to scare them off.”
“We all survived,” I said. “And that’s what counts.”
“Yeah.” Boden had been looking at Serg, but then he turned toward me and his eyes widened with fear. “Remy!”
Then it was slow motion. I was turning around to see what was behind me, and the gun was going off, a loud shot that echoed through the room.
I lifted my arm, thinking I needed to shield myself from something, but I saw Hayley with a hole blown in her chest, falling back to the floor. When she landed, a knife clattered out of her hand.
She’d gotten a knife from her bag and was running up behind me to kill me.
I didn’t understand the gunshot until I looked at the top of the stairs. Max was lying on the floor, his feet hanging over the top step, with a shotgun lying next to him.
“Max!” I yelled and ran up the steps to him.
“Did I get her?” Max asked and sat up.
“Yeah, you got her.” I sat down next to him and brushed the hair back from his eyes. “What were you doing?”
“I heard you fighting, so I got the gun out from your room,” Max explained. I kept a loaded shotgun under the bed, in case zombies broke in during the night. “Then I saw her coming at you, so I shot her.”