A/N - Content Warning: If you are faint-of-heart, please read this chapter with careful diligence. You have been warned.
"Behold the knight,
In solemn black manner.
With a skull on his crest,
And blood on his banner." - Garnier von Susteren
The secretary office's door handle was turned ever so slowly downward, and with a muffled crink, was it opened the slightest. A gentle force pushed the door farther open, and the barrel of a gun poked from the crevasse, giving way to a clutching hand and arm, and then a face.
Chloe swung her semi-auto rifle towards the direction opposite the opening door, looking down to the intersection, and gestured to the inside of the room with a wave of her free hand. It was answered as one by one, the girls filed out of the office, weapons at the ready or pointed high to avoid one another. They filled the space of the hall, guns looking both directions for any of Prescott's hounds.
The clatter of their vests along with Juliet and Alyssa's backpacks was kept to a quiet minimum as they shifted towards the corner of the intersection, Chloe taking point and waiting impatiently for the rest to stack up behind her. Max, having made the mistake of being among the last up the steps, was now trying to squeeze her way from her spot down the column, and, anxious that Chloe wouldn't heed her, made haste to reach her best friend. Yet her luck betrayed her, and with one wrong foot in front of the other she tripped and dropped like a hammer on the tile, the vest and her rifle in her hand clashing on the linoleum.
Clang
It was horribly loud in that quiet hall, echoing in the silence, and Caulfield raised her head in a panic. Everyone glanced at her worriedly, as she silently beckoned Chloe to stop, and then froze over a sudden baritone cry, "Lars, the fuck was that?"
Chloe cursed Max with a silent, terrible frown, before she readied her assault rifle. The other girls hunched themselves, awaiting.
"It sounded like it came from the hall—Matt, is that you?" came a hushed cry from around the corner of the wall, "Matt? Sav? You guys there?"
Silence.
"Yo, get on the radio—" and Price snapped around the corner, lining her sights on some boy wedged between the opposite wall and the side of the doors, and quickly squeezed the trigger.
BANG-BANBANBANG
The first round hit his jaw at an angle and viscously tore half the mandible from its place, as the rest of the shots buried themselves into center mass. The carcass jerked with each impact, then slumped down to the floor. Ears ringing despite the earmuffs, Chloe turned for the other corner, seeing the sheer fright on the dead boy's comrade for a split second before her gun's muzzle flashed again with an equally thunderous roar.
A torrent of lead from outside suddenly shattered the glass windows of the red exit doors and the punk recoiled, being pulled by Max's reach out of harm's way and swearing like a sailor. The other girls cried out too as the snap of bullets impacting concrete walls and wooden doors rung loudly inside the hallway.
"Back, we gotta fall back, we can't stay here!" Max shouted over the madness, and the girls clumsily huddled and made their way down the hall of the south wing, driven not by the order but by their own movement. In the madness, they bunched close to each other and guided themselves through frantic swaying of arms and scurrying of boots.
The door to the stairs at the end of the south hall burst open and a lone hound of Nathan's ilk came barreling towards them, shouting incomprehensibly over the gunfire as he noticed the armed group of girls.
"What the fuck—!"
Taylor was the first to raise her rifle and squeeze the trigger, the round missed and clanged off the metal frame of the doors behind him. Kate instantly followed up with a shot from her Mauser, scoring a hit to the hound's right shoulder. He twirled from the force, his own assault rifle spitting its fury into the ceiling as he collapsed, shrieking. His howling was silenced as Alyssa's Mini-14 barked one—two— three shots into his writhing form, and he then stayed down, writhing as his nerves slowly gave out.
"Go, Go, Go! Don't stop, move!" Chase bellowed, and the pixie blonde led the charge for the stairway, bounding over the bleeding corpse and slamming her way past the wooden door. In front of her, offset from the threshold, were the stairs leading up to the second floor and to her immediate left was the perpendicular hallway of the south wing, with more classrooms and lockers. The eleven girls barged their way through the door, huddling into the tight corners and along the walls as they awaited their next horrendous encounter with the hounds. Above them and more faintly from outside, gunshots rang like tremors, wild and random in their horrid pitch.
"Jesus, Jesus Christ—!" Taylor sputtered, trembling, taking the moment to cycle the bolt of her Mauser.
"What the fuck do we do now!? Vic?" Courtney shouted, still deafened by the ringing.
"Fuck this shit! Max, let's kill these bastards!" Price growled, next to her Alyssa and Juliet had the same murderous grimaces adorning their features. Adrenaline coursed through their veins; the terror had faded, and in its place was a burning agitation.
"Chloe, Victoria, Dana, Juliet, follow me—we're going up," Max beckoned them with a wave of her hand as she climbed the steps, "the rest of you, dig in and keep an eye out for anyone coming from the hall!"
Caulfield passed the first flight of stairs before she readied her Mauser, aiming at the railing obscuring her sight of the second story threshold. Footfalls curved around her as Price and the others joined the leading brunette, weapons trained on the doorway as they inched up the second flight. They stacked up, Chloe took her spot on the door's right side and the rest stacked to its left. The gunfire they heard from outside was more prominent on their ears, rising and falling in a tremulous melody.
"Dana, set up in front of the door," Max ordered, and the cheerleader was toying with the bipod as she turned to the others, "I'm gonna open this door when the gunfire swells, and we'll catch them by surprise," Ward now laid prone in front of the door, her mounted R75A aimed and ready.
"T-This is a bad idea, Max," Chase sputtered, then more brashly, "we should be focusing on getting out of here, not fucking with the hornet's nest—"
"Shut your fucking trap," Price hissed, angry, "they'll tear us to pieces just like I said, we should kill them before they kill us!"
"We should be getting the fuck out of here, not tossing the dice with Death—"
"Guys," Max hushed them both, and the two resorted to glaring at each other.
"Ready, Dana?" the gunfire was monotonous, a straggle of pops and cracks. Beside the mousy brunette, Juliet set the safety all the way to the left, clutching her rifle in a tight grip, eyes dilated and locked onto the foes beyond the threshold. The volley of fire then grew into a crescendo, and Max tugged the handle and pulled the door open.
As Dana looked down the iron sights of her automatic rifle, she could see the precise second when the eyes of the closest fiend looked in her direction, the rest of his face obscured in a balaclava. Him and a half-dozen of his comrades were all lined up behind a hastily constructed barricade, turned over desks and lopsided chairs reinforced against each other as cover. Their guns faced down into what would be the front of the school, towards the expanse of the quad and the street farther beyond it. Ward hesitated, as those beady eyes of the foe dilated with fright, and his voice carried from behind the black mask with a shrill cry to his fellows to displace and run.
"Open fire!" Chloe screamed into her ears, and the auburnette blinked, then squeezed the trigger.
BABABABABANG—
The first burst tore into that closest hound's frame, and like a puppet bereft of its strings he flailed before swiftly crumbling. His comrades were lucky, they had heeded their comrade's warning and dove for an obscured space just behind their firing line. Yet still, Ward caught another hound with two 30-06' rounds to their side, the sheer force tearing them in half and sending red and pink viscera flying in all directions. Another, far too slow and still trying to run, took a single round to the leg and was torn in two at the knee, diving behind the wall as he fell. Dana emptied the rest of her magazine at the wall those devils fled behind, before her R75 fell silent.
"I'm out, I'm out!" then the cheerleader quickly rolled away from the exposed threshold, cueing Chloe and the others to cover her. The monotonous hammering of the bluenette's AR to the ear-splitting thunder of Juliet and Max's Mausers rung in the small, enclosed space, and Ward felt her hands shake terribly as she racked the bolt handle, then fumbled the mag release and slid the empty mag out of her gun.
Chloe's index finger ached as she sent round after round down the hallway, the barrel beneath the handguard was warming her other hand almost unbearably and cordite now hung thick in the air, choking at her breath. The muzzle of her SR-556 would flash terribly bright for every other trigger pull.
BANG-BANG-BANG-click
Ice blue eyes widened at the lack of a shot, and Price swiveled back to cover, ejecting her empty mag and fumbling for a fresh one. It was as she drove the new mag into her semi-auto rifle that a torrent of lead overcame the girls' weakened fire suppression, and they recoiled as far back from the deadly spew as they could manage. The railing in front of the open door, as well as the concrete wall enclosing the stairway behind it was suddenly littered with bullet holes, turned into a brutal mosaic of lead and dust. Panic swelled in Chloe's heart as those bullet holes were edging closer and closer to her spot in the corner, and she pressed herself against the wall and swore frantically.
"Get out of there, Price!" came a cry from the opposite side, and Victoria blindly fired her MP5 in the direction of the hailstorm, orienting her aim after the first burst and being supported by Max and Juliet. Once the death-torrent had been suppressed Chloe strafed left, firing a few rounds down the hall before bouncing into cover, then tripping over some expended shell casings and rolling down the first few stair-steps.
"Get back, get back—!" the torrent started up again, so Max let go of the door as the five of them clambered down the steps in a rush. Adrenaline beat to the frantic rhythm of drumming hearts as they settled at the mid-flight landing, Chloe situated in front of the second flight of stairs with Dana and Juliet cowering behind the curve of the railing.
"Damnit, God—fuckin'—damnit!" squishing the backpack against the railing, Juliet's hand shook as she slotted another stripper clip of rounds into her bolt action rifle, its barrel still smoking.
Her AR aimed permanently at the shredded railing part up top, the tense bluenette observed the cheerleader beside her, clutching her loaded R75A, eyeing the many holes in the upper wall above with mute shock.
"Chloe, you guys, keep an eye on the door, they'll be coming for us!" Max called to the three of them, "Victoria and I are going back down—!"
"ENEMY!" came a loud cry from down below, and a spur of shouting and gunfire erupted at the ground floor. Caulfield and Chase seized the opportunity to rush down the steps into the fray, skirting to the right as ricochets and splinters sparked across the left side of the stairs.
Alyssa was bent around the corner of the right wall firing her self-loading rifle as fast as she could. Beside the stocky girl was Stella, clutching at her vest, being carried away from the threshold by Courtney and Brooke, gasping and coughing horribly.
"Keep shooting! Don't let up!" from the left side, scrunched up behind the small brick indent right behind the opened door, Kate and Taylor fired their Mausers with frantic calamity, the latter spouting curses as her rifle's bolt refused to completely close. Marsh took the denim-clad blonde by the shoulder, pulling Christensen down as an incoming burst tore nasty splinters at where she'd been crouched.
Alyssa's magazine ran empty, and the incoming fire increased dramatically as Anderson pulled herself back into cover, a grimace carved on her face as the lead storm swarmed dangerously close to the wall they crowded behind. With worried eyes she looked back to the coughing ebony brunette and shouted over the gunfire, "How is she?! Stella?!" the stocky girl addressed, and was answered with even more ragged coughs and spasms.
"Check the wound, check the wound—!" Courtney, with the help of Brooke, eased the petite girl in their care against the cold furnished steel of the lockers, "Where're you hit, Stell'!? Where is it!?" Brooke loudly asked, muffled from the percussion of horrible pops and bangs. Stella tried to speak, but whatever speech came out as a wheezing rush of air, so the ebony brunette took her right hand and smacked it against the upper part of her Kevlar, upon her chest.
Victoria and Max eyed with mounting trepidation as Stella let them observe the impact of the round, and felt their eyes widen at the sight. It was a miracle: the round, no bigger than a pistol cartridge, had been completely flattened like a pancake, unable to pierce the durable texture of the ceramic plate surrounding their comrade's frame. If Stella hadn't been adorned with the body armor, the round would have without a doubt torn through and ripped her heart to shreds.
The gunfire trickled then, at first slowly, then with abrupt delay it ceased.
Shouting could be heard from down the hall. Multiple voices carried their tones with muffled clarity. The ringing in their ears was screeching loud in that sudden silence that now fell within Blackwell.
"Kate, Taylor, you okay?" Caulfield called out from opposite the bullet-ridden threshold.
"We're good!" Christensen called back, clambering out of the other blonde's personal space and lying prone, her Mauser pointing down the hallway in anxious hesitation to fire once again, "W—Why'd they stop shooting?"
"Why have they? The hell's going on?" Alyssa muttered, daring a peek around the corner before ducking back, having no desire to be suddenly shot.
"M-maybe they wanna talk," Courtney guessed, "maybe they're tired of fighting."
"Aren't we all," coughed Stella, and she pulled herself from Wagner's grip and clutched at the impact upon her bosom, breathing slow and heavy.
"Whoever you are, lay down your weapons, now!" echoed an order from across the hall, it's baritone pitch was loud and brash, and the girls turned their heads at the commanding voice, "Come out with your hands up!"
"Speak of the devil," Brooke grimly muttered, "and he shall come."
"Nathan," Chase recognized, nervously did the pixie blonde furrow her brow as Prescott handed her and the others this ultimatum. Caulfield took the time to crawl on hands and knees to the corner, earning a worried glance from Anderson as the brunette peeked 'round it.
"If you do not comply in the next five minutes, we WILL hunt you down, and we will show you no mercy; come out with your hands up!" the Prescott heir bellowed down the hall, standing menacingly at the hallway's center, a pistol in his hand. He was adorned in a black jacket, and black cargo pants, these with black boots and a pair of black shadows that hung over his eyes, concealing their cold fury. He stood flanked by two of his hounds, both armed with rifles and obscured with ski masks. Their dull green and brown woodland camouflage stood out against the brighter primary colors of the lockers and the off-white walls.