WILLA, стр. 28
I did my best not to jump when something crashed to the floor, but that kind of control was hard to have over yourself when you were scared shitless. The only thing that helped calm my nerves was my confusion over why the five of them felt the need to demolish the house just because it was empty and didn’t have what they wanted. I never understood such barbaric behavior when I saw it on television.
“Fuck,” Sam said when the group reached the basement door.
I thought Chase was going to piss himself as one of the men first twisted the doorknob before shaking the entire thing nearly off its hinges. Hell, who am I kidding? If we’d had much to drink that day, I probably would’ve peed all over our mattress.
Once the door stopped shaking, we heard one of the men say stand back, and then we heard someone kicking at the door.
The three of us hurried further against the wall. I became acutely aware that the closet didn’t have a lock, and Uncle Jamie hadn’t put anything in front of the door to barricade us inside. Not that the group wouldn’t have been able to move whatever he would’ve put in front of the door and knocked down the flimsy door.
“Get ready,” Sam said in a low voice as we heard the door fly down the steps and crash onto the floor.
“Hurry up and look around,” a woman said. “We’ve made plenty of noise. The zombies will be here soon.”
“You heard the woman,” a man said, “spread out and make this quick.”
“Someone’s been living down here,” another man said.
“They didn’t leave much in the way of food,” a woman said.
By the sound of it, she found our meager stash.
“Someone had locked from the inside,” the first man said. “They’re still down here. Find them.”
Of course, it didn’t take them thirty-seconds to spot the closet door and jerk it open.
As the door flew wide, all three of us fired. Sam managed to shoot one of the men in the gut when he opened the door of our closet. Chase shot a woman in the leg. My shot went wild. The rest of their people ducked out of sight, but for whatever reason, the group of intruders didn’t shoot back.
The man that Sam shot in the stomach flew across the room, screaming. The woman yelped and leaped out of sight.
The first man, who’d hid behind a pillar, called out, “If you shoot again, we’ll have to open fire inside that closet and kill you all.
Sam fired another shot at the pillar.
The man shot into the closet, but his bullet went wide and went into the wall. I stared up at the hole in amazement. Had he purposefully aimed that high?
“Listen, kids. We aren’t going to hurt...”
“Bullshit,” Sam called back.
“No bullshit. We were simply looking for survivors and food.”
“Then why were you making so much noise up there?”
“To draw the zombies to the house.”
“And why the hell would you do that?”
“To get them out of the city. The stores there have supplies, but we can’t get to them with so many zombies lingering in town. We try to draw them out into the country. That makes them easier to kill, and it empties the city.”
The man sounded reasonable enough. Though, if he were smarter, he would realize that he should keep the countryside empty so that come spring, we could start planting the land. However, he was a city man who’d probably never set foot on a farm and hadn’t thought about farming. He was most likely still waiting for the government to save him.
The gut-shot man screamed, making us all jump.
“We’re coming in to get you and are going to try to help our friend. No more shooting, all right,” the first man said.
Chase and I looked to Sam for direction.
He shrugged his shoulders and lowered his weapon. I could see in Sam’s eyes that he didn’t trust the group, but if we had any hope of getting out of the basement alive, we had to do as they said for now.
“Okay,” Sam said, looking from me to Chase to the open closet door.
“Thank God,” the man said.
“Dana, check on Roy and Liz. Wayne, help me with the kids,” the man said, coming from behind the pillar.
Wayne moved into our line of sight and motioned for us to stand.
“Set your guns aside,” Wayne said.
Again, Chase and I looked to Sam.
Sam nodded and placed his gun on the bed behind him. Chase and I did the same before following Sam out of the closet.
The man named Wayne ordered us to the sofa, and the first man, no one had said his name yet, came around to stand in front of us. Before he could say anything, the man with the bleeding stomach, Roy, screamed again.
“Do you have a first aid kit?” the first man asked us.
“In one of the packs in the corner. It isn’t much of one. I don’t know if it’ll help that man or not,” Sam said.
“Anything is better than nothing,” Dana said. “I can’t slow the flow of blood.”
Wayne went to the packs and searched through them until he found the red box. He looked at it dubiously before taking it to Dana. She pulled out a roll of gauze and wrap and told him to bind Liz’s leg. The bullet had exited and not hit any major arteries. She would live.
As I watched the people, I realized that they were ordinary folks. What they’d done still didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t understand the destruction. I guess the first man saw the look on my face because he turned his attention back to us.
“We didn’t come here looking for you to hurt you. We came to help anyone who survived,” the man said.
“How is destroying this house helping us or anyone for that matter,” Sam asked.
“I told you,