WebWorld (1.9)

She threaded her way through the crowd, trying not to push, but hearing my voice and hearing its desperation, which added to her own fear when she’d lost sight of me. And then our eyes met, muddied for sure by the intervening bodies. But still. Both of us alive. Or at least so she told me later.

I was only aware at the time of seeing her shape, taking a few moments to comprehend that it was hers and then just wanting to break down with relief.

“Are you hurt?” I asked her.

She shook her head, “but you are.”

I guessed I was. I hadn’t thought about it, but yeah, that fist to the face was a concussion in the making. My mouth was bloody, so were my hands. I said, “you should see the other guy.”

“Lunatic!” she snapped.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I wasn’t up the front. I only got to throw marbles and cheese graters. I’m fine.”

If she was envious, she had no cause to be. I was beginning to feel the throb of those massive bruises forming under my skin. And she was going to get her chance to get a lot more up close and personal very, very soon. I said, “stay close to me, okay? We have to stay close. I need to protect you, okay? I need it.”

“We protect each other,” she said. She was stubborn.

“Okay. Just stay close. Just stay right next to me, okay?”

“Okay.”

In the meantime, they were working on breaking through to us, and were doing a pretty reasonable job. I could hear the beating sounds against wood, and I could see the hinges bouncing, the centre of the door bulging in in heartbeats, like a bounced-on trampoline. It wasn’t going to hold. And once the guy with the chainsaw got to the front: it really wasn’t going to hold.

I looked around at what we had to work with. I’m not sure if I was immediately buoyed by the extra numbers or stricken by the fact that these were ordinary people. Not just that, but there were old people, and a couple more kids. We were a big mass of people-who-should-so-not-be-here-doing-this, but we were all there was.

Jeff was still okay. He didn’t even look like he was on the brink of collapsing into a state of screaming, animal panic. He was still organising people into some sort of order, checking on them individually, trying to stir up some courage. “Guys, they’re going to break through, they are. But look, they weren’t expecting any sort of concerted effort, any real attempt to throw them back. They’re bullies: you know how this goes. They want the easy fight; they have nothing to prove by getting themselves hurt or killed. So, we can drive them off, we can make this not worth their while. We got the numbers now; we outnumber them at least two to one. I did a couple of stints in the army, I’ve been in battle, so I tell you: numbers count.”

And the calibre of weapons had risen a bit. There a few more fluorescent, plastic assault weapons: well, I was never going to question their efficacy in a fight ever again. There was a guy with an actual crossbow who was cradling it like he knew it intimately and was pleased by the opportunity to make proper use of it. And it turned out that somebody in our building did in fact collect swords. I promise never to think of that as a stupid and pretentious hobby ever again.

Jeff asked me if I was okay.

“Yeah sure. Battle?”

“Okay, paintball.”

I smirked because there was really no other way to react.

“Principle’s the same.”

“Video games,” I said helpfully.

“Hm, we have an army then. Those GTA boys over there actually look confident.”

“Well, in case we’re all dead before this is over, thanks. You’re the guy who stepped up and held us together.”

“Nate, we all stepped up. Shit, look at these guys.”

Maybe they’ll feel too bad about slaughtering such helpless… yeah, probably not.

“Hang in there,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah got that.”

Nobody had ‘got’ anything. But I held the spare iron bar that somebody had given me when they saw me weaponless, and I said something in my head that was sort of like a little prayer. And then the door burst open and they came running on through.

Jeff held us a back. Meeting them at the chokepoint of the door would lessen the advantage of our numbers. We were best to try and surround them, to outflank them. And it sounded good. It did. But of course, as soon as the melee kicked in there was no artifice, and no planning, there was just the free-for-all of us fighting for our lives.

It got chaotic quickly. I’m not sure I can say who I fought with, or what weapon I deployed against them. I just remember a sea of black-swathed faces rushing in on me, I remember trying to beat them back. I remember the battering of fists and blunt edges. I remember being struck across the face, and feeling for sure as if my nose had been broken, as if my whole face had. I remember the sight of the guy with the chainsaw, of him using it, of the nameless guy-in-his-twenties who was cut down by it, the blade slicing into his hip and blood spurting everywhere, the whirring blade biting deeper, cutting into this groin, slicing most of the way through his thigh before it popped out again. The guy fell, his body haloed in blood.

And I know there was a moment when I lost sight of Zara, and when I saw her again, and I saw a man – head and shoulders taller than her – throwing her against a wall. He grabbed her by her hair and smashed her head so hard into the wallpaper, that I was sure in that elasticated second that he must have killed her. But she was somehow ducking out of his grip and was stabbing at him with the knife. His jacket was heavy leather – maybe lined with oven-tray, I really don’t know – and her knife was designed to cut vegetables. She managed a deep undercut that was aimed at his belly - and might have been nice and lethal, roaming around in there, except that the leather fended it off. He was thankfully unarmed, but he immediately punched her in the face. He went full-force about it. Blood sprayed.

And in the next second I was over there. He was focused on her, and didn’t see me as I brought the iron bar down on his head. It was only enough to stun him a little, but that second or two that was bought for me, I used to swing it again, and then to swing it again, and with the seconds multiplying I just kept swinging, until he was sprawled on the ground, the back of his head mashed, Zara pulling me away. Had I been screaming? I don’t even know. I know what was going through my head: so, this is how it feels to kill somebody. But it didn’t really feel like anything at the time. It was going to hit me later. It was going to be cold and brutal and leave me shaking and keep me from getting any sleep for days; but in the moment, it was just something that was. Something that happened in the swell of battle.

I was grabbing Zara by the face, “Are you okay? Are you?”

“I…I don’t know,” she stammered, “I think, I guess…”

“Stay with me.”

“I was. I tried.”

There was something like a few moments of respite, because we did have the numbers, and with our guy down, there was a wall of bodies between us and the thick of the fight. From this distance I could see the shape of the battle. Unbelievably, we weren’t being overrun, we were actually holding them back. But that was only going to work if we kept at it, if we all did. So, I took a breath, I looked at Zara: “Ready?”

She laughed in my face.

“Well, you know, ready-ish?”

“Sure.”

“Fuck, this isn’t easy.”

“Tell me about it.”

But we rushed back into the fray. And we did lose each other for moments at a time. We didn’t mean to, there was just so much going on. After a few seconds we’d catch a glimpse of each other, and we knew we were both still alive. There were sprawled, unmoving figures of our neighbours lying on the floor, but there were some of these black-clad bandits as well. We were incongruously holding our own.

They weren’t green accounts clerks and supermarket workers, these were tough guys, there was no rout. But they did make a fighting retreat, made easier by the fact that we were all very much in favour of them retreating. People rushed to barricade the door as they left. We rushed to windows in north-facing apartments to see them spill out the main door and over the white street. I only hoped the rumour would get around that this building was no easy target, better left alone.

We’d been more lucky in most ways than tough or trained or prepared. But here we were, alive. I had enough adrenaline still going on to not be feeling the pain. But the scene around me was beginning to sink in. There were bodies. The guy who’d been cut with the chainsaw was dead. His eyes were staring widely at the ceiling, as if he hadn’t seen this coming and only now wanted to protest at the unfairness of it. One of the water-pistoleers was bleeding badly. An older woman knelt at his side, staunching the bleeding as best she could, but there was going to be no ambulance. There was going to be no flurry of sirens, all rushing to our rescue. Also, no cops to explain ourselves to – and my eyes kept finding the guy whose brains I’d smashed in. Hard to believe that I had really done that, that I’d had it in me to make his skull into this concave mess of rubble and bone. Red, bloodied meat. This dead thing that had once been a person.

He was attacking my girl. He was hurting my girl. What was I supposed to do?

Zara looked okay. Her lip and her nose were bleeding, and there was some blood in her hair. But she was calm and dry-eyed and standing upright. There were plenty of others not doing as well as that.

Jeff stayed true to form, he organised the first aid effort, and he was sorting people into groups, getting details: he was preparing for the next attack.

I knew that downstairs would be awful. We would have to go and check that out, with extreme care, in fear of round two, and expecting to see some really ugly sights. Jeff was beginning to organise us into teams for that as well.

I never want to meet that guy at the wrong end of a paintball gun.

I hugged Zara close to me. Her face told me that I was looking pretty messed up as well. But we’d survived this. Against most of the odds. Jeff came up to us and said, “hey, you guys up for this?”

I gestured through the floor at the next level down.

He nodded grimly.

“We gotta,” Zara answered.

We weren’t exactly a close bunch of neighbours. No rooftop barbecues. No Neighbourhood Watch. But we kept tabs on each other, in our own way. And so I shouldered my new iron bar, and steeled myself for the scene directly below me.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work