Ring of Fire(127)
Boom! The doors shuddered as something slammed into them. Some of the kids started yelling. Vern, Conrad, and others stood on the lower rows of seats, bats in hand, between them and danger. Ka-boom!
Billy clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering, crouched down, and started sorting through the balls in the bucket, shoving the hardest ones into his pockets and shirt. If . . . when they get through, I can't be stooping down to get these. He just wished he'd thought to go to the bathroom before all this started. He really needed to pee!
Ka-boom! The doors bent inward. More kids started yelling, shoving their way toward the top of the bleachers. Mr. Trout went to stand with Jeff and readied his pistol. Ka-boom! Gena twirled the broom handle, swallowed hard, and stepped down to stand behind Vern and Conrad. Billy gripped a ball and made sure his others were in easy reach.
Ka-boom! Ka-boom-crack! Boom-crack! Crack-slam! The doors splintered and burst. The shouts rose to a triumphant shriek as the Croats poured into the gym.
The racking boom of Jeff's shotgun filled the gym with sound and emptied the front line of Croats with torn and dying bodies. He stepped back to reload and Mr. Trout started firing.
Billy threw at one man on the edge of the crowd—the rest were too close to Jeff and Mr. Trout for a clear throw—but his foot slipped on the slick wood and the ball went wide, bouncing off the wall and rolling into a corner. He swore and grabbed another. This time it flew straight, but bounced off the chest armor of the man it hit. He grabbed a third ball and looked up just in time to see a saber come down on Mr. Trout's head. The next one went into his neck and he fell, blood flying.
Jeff took down that man and many others in a roaring storm of gunfire that ended all too quickly. He turned the shotgun into a club against the Croats' sabers, bashing one in the face as another came at his back. That one caught a major-league-grade fastball square in the head that knocked him flat.
But there was nothing Billy could do about the new group that came howling in through the broken doors, nor the Croat on the other side who sent his saber smashing into Jeff's shoulder and drew back for the killing blow.
Then there was nothing for Billy to do at all but watch in sick fascination as the new group began taking the Croats apart, starting with the one standing over Jeff. The giant in the lead of the new force split the man's head like a cantaloupe, and stood there shouting to his men who quickly drove the Croats into the back corner of the gym, while some made a protective line in front of the students on the bleachers.
And then the slaughter began. It didn't end even when the last two dozen or so Croats threw down their weapons and held up their hands. They just went down to savage cries that sounded like "Hack 'em all!" When the last Croat lay dead on the blood-smeared floor, then it ended. Only then.
And Billy quietly walked over to the end of the bleachers, knelt down looking at some part of the floor that wasn't covered with blood, and was not so quietly sick all over it.
* * *
"What happened?!" Steve stared in wide-eyed horror at their bloody clothes.
"Hey, bro, settle down," Vern said. "It ain't ours. Jeff Higgins got cut really bad, and we had to do first aid on him." He looked down at himself, then closed his shaking hand into a fist. "Damn, I'm glad I took that EMT course!"
"Certainly I would never have known to do most of that," Conrad said wonderingly. "You are sure he will not be crippled from it?"
"Nah, the docs will stitch him up and he'll be fine."
"But Mr. Trout . . ." Billy said hollowly. "God damn those bastards!"
"Mr. Trout?" Steve looked back and forth between them.
Vern nodded heavily. "They killed him."
"They damn-near cut his head off, is what you mean!" Billy said, wiping sudden tears from his eyes.
Steve swallowed hard, then squeezed his eyes shut. "Dammit, I should have been in there with you. I could've done something!"
"No, you didn't want to be there, Steve," Vern said. "Believe me, you didn't!"
"And you wouldn't have been able to do anything," Billy said. "They came in a rush, went right at Jeff and Mr. Trout. You'd have been standing up there with the rest of us, holding nothing better than a bat. I had baseballs, and I couldn't really hit the ones in the middle, and those were the ones that . . . did the damage.
"Then it didn't matter who could've done what, because those other men came in. What's-his-name . . . Captain Gars' men. They shoved the Croats back against the wall and cut them to pieces."