Серебро ночи. Секундо. Книга 3

valley and they’d come family by family, and now in a mad rush, to take that food.
It would do them no good. They could consume every last calorie from the Homestead and Oakwood Heights and by this time tomorrow, they would be hungry again. Their numbers were far too great. The brutal math of modern urbanization offered no mercy when it came to calories. By a hundred-to-one deficit, Salt Lake City and every city in America would starve. The just-in-time inventory in stores and the dead ships, rusting containers and silent trucks guaranteed that nine-in-ten American families would suffer the long goodbye of famine. Nothing could be done about it. The die had been cast when the nuclear bomb had gone off in Los Angeles and the panic had run amok.
All Jeff and his friends could do was to preserve this last knot of civilization, perched precariously on the hillside like a stone temple to the memory of America. Even though he knew these pillagers were just hungry people, they were also insatiable beasts; the would-be murderers of his wife and sons.
He would fight them like the Taliban, like Al Queda. He would kill them with fresh hate, like he had the enemies of America in places around the world. Countrymen or not, this mob had come to bury his children, and he would kill them.
Jeff stomped on the gas and plowed his OHV into the mob massed at the Homestead gates. Bodies thumped under and over the hood of the OHV. The weight of human flesh eventually slogged the the vehicle to a halt.
He drew his tomahawk, jumped from the vehicle and faced a grimy, crazed man brandishing a crowbar. Jeff whipped his tomahawk up and drove it down with tremendous force, splitting the front of the man’s skull down to the neck meat. The crowbar thunked into a snow pile and disappeared.
Jeff struggled to free the blade while a woman charged him. She screamed and swiped at him with a kitchen knife. He abandoned the tomahawk, stepped inside her swing and punched her hard in the wrist. The wrist snapped like a dry branch and her blade fell. He brought his left hand around and chopped her where the neck met her shoulder. Her shrieks of pain died mid-gasp, and she dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Reining in his adrenaline, Jeff yanked the tomahawk free from the grimy man’s skull. He scooped up the woman’s kitchen knife, slipped it in his belt and rushed inside the gate to join the fight—but recognition passed between he and the next man—a Homesteader named Gayland. Jeff grabbed Gayland’s shoulder and stepped past him, pulling him back-to-back.
“On me! On me!” Jeff shouted as he waded into the mob, fighting steadily toward the big house and toward his family.
Jeff brought all his martial arts training to bear. Focused violence was the key—then methodical thinking—followed by more focused violence. Above all, he must keep breathing. His barely-healed gut wound and weakened system would kill him just as fast as the sword of his enemy.
Calm—then focused violence. Calm—then focused violence. Above all, breathe.
He repeated the mantra in his head as he launched himself forward into the churning crowd.
The intruders carried crude weapons; tire irons, knives, clubs and baseball bats. The mob had blown through its ammunition in the first moments of the attack, leaving them to fight like medieval peasants, with whatever weapons they’d scrounged.
The Homesteaders had ample ammunition, but it wouldn’t save them. Jeff fought his way past women and men laying waste to the intruders with Homestead handguns and MAC-10 submachine guns. They played loose with their firearm discipline, but Jeff had bigger problems.
Hundreds, maybe a thousand starving intruders had breached the gates of the Homestead. This was a mob incursion, without battle lines and without anywhere to fall back. Within ten minutes, almost all ammunition on both sides was gone and the scene went from battle to slaughterhouse.
Even after hundreds of gunfights in his career, Jeff had never witnessed hand-to-hand combat on this scale. As he fought, he struggled to understand. It looked like a medieval battlefield. Men with training, strength and confidence, like knights of old, laid waste to lesser men. But the numbers in the mob were beyond comprehension. At some point, not even knights could defeat this many peasants.
He’d been training the Homestead forces for two months, and they practiced hand-to-hand combat and knife fighting more than anything. With over a thousand enemy against two-hundred Homesteaders, that training appeared to be their only hope.
Weakening steadily from his four stomach surgeries, Jeff chopped and parried his way through one enemy after another, taking most of them down with a single, well-placed blow from his tomahawk or fist. Jeff and his wingman fought their way methodically toward the Homestead bunkhouse—toward their children.
A wild-eyed intruder waving a large hunting knife, confronted him. Jeff took advantage of the easiest play in the book and raked his razor-sharp tomahawk across the man’s knife hand, opening the knuckles in a gout of blood.
The man shrieked as blood gushed from the bone-deep wounds. He dropped the knife and seized his ruined hand in shock. Jeff pommel struck the man in the throat, dumping him in a whimpering heap.
Gayland struggled to keep up as they dodged from one knot of men to another, taking advantage of attackers with their backs turned. Jeff’s defenders fought in mutually-supportive knots as Jeff had taught them, leaving the backs of the intruders exposed to a “rover” like him.
One after another, Jeff worked his way around the phalanxes of his fighters, hitting men from behind and severing enemies’ Achille’s tendons and hamstrings with chops from his ‘hawk. Rather than commit a coup de grace and tie up his tomahawk in gristle, Jeff opted for shallow, crippling, strikes.
It didn’t take much to incapacitate a starving man, and Jeff hacked, parried and moved with liquid calm, leaving behind him a wake of enemy on the ground flopping like fish.
It was total