Everyone instinctively turned toward where the woman pointed. The blast was loud, and several were hit with fragments, but they weren’t inside the kill zone.
Sam took out two men with four shots. Brodie was three for three but used three, three round bursts. The four men dropped near where they stood. The lone woman hesitated with her mouth and eyes wide open, pivoted on her good leg, then fell and slid on the porch boards in her own blood as she attempted to run inside.
Inside the house, Riley heard the blast followed by shots, ran to the door, and saw his girlfriend spraddled on the porch in a pool of blood. Past her he saw four bodies sprawled in the gravel. His jaw dropped, then he bellowed a high-pitched, earsplitting scream. In a run, he stopped beside JR and kicked her thigh to wake her as he dug in his pants pocket for the key to the lock on her rope at the wall. The lock and rope dropped in the dim light, and he grabbed JR by the hair and pulled her to her feet. She kept her blanket around her shoulders with her left hand, so it covered the broken bottle in her right hand, The cut piece of rope hung beside her leg.
Riley pushed through the other two women near the door while pulling a semiauto from a thigh holster. He propelled JR through the door roughly and onto the porch. His gun was at the back of her head as he pushed her down three steps to the blood spattered gravel. He stayed behind her at the edge of the four bloody corpses. “You up there,” he yelled. Come down here unarmed, or I’ll put a bullet in your woman’s head.”
JR prayed Riley would get sloppy and her opportunity would come. She was determined Riley wouldn’t live to rape anyone else or murder Sam.
“Now what?” Sam whispered without looking at Brodie.
“Leave your guns here and walk down at medium speed. But stay out of my line of fire. Apparently, he thinks you’re alone and his only threat.”
“I’m putting my trust in you. But above all see JR comes out of this even if he gets me.” He turned to Smokey and whispered. “Stay Smokey, stay here with Brodie.”
Riley was impatient and yelled his threat again.
Sam backed down the ridge, scurried twenty feet to his right, then stood and started down the gentle, weed-covered slope with his arms held high. Smokey whined softly until Brodie scratched behind the dog’s ear then laid his palm securely on Smokey’s coat.
JR still held the threadbare blanket around her. It slipped off her left shoulder and she clutched it in front of her. When Sam was at the bottom of the hill and still thirty feet away, she yelled, “Run Sam!” then dropped the blanket and latched onto Riley’s shirt front as she kicked both feet out in front of her and dropped to the ground on her bare butt dragging Riley down with her.
A woman on the porch screamed at JR’s move and raised a revolver.
Brodie was sighted on Riley’s head, but his target bent at the waist as JR dragged him over. She heard Sam yell as he ran toward her. JR had a death grip on the bottle neck in her right hand as she stared in Riley’s eyes. She jabbed the jagged, makeshift weapon upward into Riley’s neck and twisted it back and forth as blood flowed. His expression showed shock and disbelief as he dropped to his knees. JR said, “I shot your oldest brother’s dick and then killed the asshole.” Riley was off balance leaning forward with both hands against the gravel. He his lips formed a snarl as he shifted to raise his right hand with the gun in it as he raised his head and twisted sideways to evade her painful attack. As the gun raised above the gravel, his head exploded from the impact of three .223 caliber bullets. He collapsed onto JR and momentarily pinned her to the ground.
The woman with the revolver had it pointed it toward JR when Mona crashed through the screen door and raked the bottom portion of the broken bottle upward along her back, then jabbed it into the side of her neck to attack the right carotid artery. Both fell off the porch and onto the packed gravel in a tangle of arms and legs amid five dead bodies. Mona rolled to her right and stopped on her hands and knees in a crouched position. The woman she’d hit deftly scrambled to her feet and stared in awe feeling a river of blood flowing down her chest as her gun swung toward Mona and wavered. Mona thought her death was imminent when a burst of bullets ripped through her antagonist back and exited from her chest. The woman’s arm dropped as she stared unbelieving at blood spreading down her chest from six, quarter inch holes. Mona exhaled the breath she’d held and cried.
The third woman stood on the steps with her arms raised and yelled up the hill. “I’m unarmed. I didn’t have anything to do with any of this. I was a prisoner too.”
JR was pinned on her right side with Riley draped across her. She wiggled out from under the corpse and rose to her knees as Sam stopped beside her. She spotted Riley’s semiauto beside her in the gravel. With it in her bloody right hand, she aimed at the lone woman on the steps. “Prisoner my ass. You helped them strip us and rape us and laughed about it.” She pulled the trigger four times until the woman was driven backwards onto the porch deck on top of Riley’s girlfriend’s bloody form.
Mona grabbed JR’s tattered blanket from the ground and wrapped it around herself. “Jesus H. Christ! I don’t know who’s up there
