Battle Lines (The Survivalist Book 5) (2 page)

“I didn’t say that you couldn’t defend yourself. But I do want you to know what works and what doesn’t. Now, put your fingers together like a spear and poke me in the eye.”

“You really are crazy,” she said, shaking her head.

“Afraid you’ll hurt me?”

“Of course, I’d hurt you. And I’m not going to do it no matter what you say.”

“Good,” he said with a nod. “I wasn’t really going to let you poke me in the eye. I only wanted to make sure you appreciated that people have soft spots and hard spots. When you’re using your body as a weapon, you aim for the soft spots.”

“Like the eyes.”

“Correct.”

“All right. Where else?”

“Here.” He pointed to his throat. “And here,” he said, moving his fingers down to his solar plexus. “And here.” He pointed to his groin. “What do you notice about the four soft targets on the front of the body?”

She thought for a moment.

“They’re all basically in a straight line.”

His mouth turned up in a big smile.

“That’s right. They’re on the centerline of the body.” He stepped closer and tapped her on the shoulders, ribcage, and thighs. “Attacks to the outside can bruise and hurt, but they won’t bring a person down. But here…” He brought his fingers together and jabbed her lightly in the solar plexus.

“Ow!”

“That, my dear, will stop a person.”

She rubbed her stomach. “That wasn’t very nice.”

“Fire is needed to harden steel.”

“What?”

“I want you to hit me again, but this time right here in the solar plexus.” He grabbed her fingers and pressed them against the soft spot below his sternum. “If you aim too high, you’ll hit the bone and hurt your hand. If you aim too low, you’ll just hit the hunk of meat like before.”

The look on Samantha’s face said she wasn’t going to hold back this time.

“Are you ready?”

He nodded. “Take a deep breath and force it out as you’re striking.”

She tightened her fists and eyed her target.

“Hard.” he said. “Like your life depends on it.”

No sooner had the words left his mouth than she stepped forward and punched him squarely in the solar plexus. Tanner stepped back and bent over, clutching his stomach. Samantha immediately rushed forward.

“Are you okay? I told you—”

Before she knew what was happening, he swept her feet out from under her, dropping her to the ground.

“Hey!” she protested. “No fair.”

“Don’t let your guard down after you strike,” he said, towering over her.

“I thought I’d hurt you.”

“You did.” He pulled up his t-shirt and showed her a bright red spot on his abdomen. “If you can learn to hit a little harder, you’ll be able to knock the wind out of a man.” He extended his hand and pulled her to her feet.

“Do we even have wind in us?”

“It’s an expression. It means they’ll be unable to breathe.”

“But won’t that kill them?”

“No, because it only lasts a short time. And while they’re busy trying to catch their breath, you’ll have time to either run away or hit them in the head with a baseball bat.”

She wrinkled her brow. “Where would I get a baseball bat?”

“I don’t know.”

“But if I had a baseball bat, wouldn’t I use it instead of punching them?”

“Of course. It’s just a saying.”

“Hitting them in the head with a baseball bat is a saying?”

“I suppose, but the important thing—”

“Because it doesn’t sound like a saying.”

Tanner sighed. “The point I’m trying to make is that a punch to the solar plexus stimulates nerves, and that in turn causes the diaphragm to spasm. Without control of the diaphragm, it becomes hard to pull in a breath.”

She pushed on her own solar plexus.

“That’s kind of cool. Is the throat the same way?”

“For purposes of our discussion, let’s say it is. You should punch it with everything you have.”

“And if I kick here,” she started to kick toward his groin.

Tanner turned sideways. “Easy, tiger.”

“But that’s right, isn’t it? You kick there?”

“If you’re going to kick for the groin, you treat it like you’re trying to punt a football out of the stadium.”

She made a pained expression. “That sounds terrible.”

“Believe me, it is.”

“Can I try?” she said, cocking her foot back.

“You most definitely may not.”

She shrugged. “What else is there to know?”

“Raise your hands like this.” Tanner brought his hands up to a classical boxer pose, and Samantha mirrored him. “Now, try to block my hands.”

He began to gently slap at her face, coming in from different directions. Most of them she managed to either duck underneath or deflect with her hands.

“Look,” she said, “I’m boxing.”

“No, right now, you’re trying not to get hit.”

“That’s boxing, isn’t it?”

“Are you hitting me?”

“No.”

“Then you’re not boxing. Remember, you can never win a fight by only defending. At some point, you have to attack.”

She stopped moving and lowered her hands.

“I guess that makes sense. So, basically I need to keep from getting hit in my soft spots, while I’m busy hitting them in theirs.”

“Sounds about right.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it for today.”

“But you’ll show me more later?”

“Of course. But learning to fight comes mostly from real-world experience.”

She looked down at her hands and made them into tiny fists.

“It feels like you’re trying to make me into some kind of a warrior.”

“Good,” he said. “The sooner you start thinking of yourself that way, the better.”

“Why?”

“Because, darlin’, the alternative is to think of yourself as a victim.”

Tanner sat up in bed, his heart thudding against his chest. He exhaled and blinked a few times, forcing himself to return to a reality that was far better than the nightmare he had just escaped. Samantha’s mother had risen from the grave, her head tipped to one side as if the muscles in her neck had turned to jelly. She chased Samantha down a long white tunnel, calling for her to “come and give momma a kiss.” Despite Tanner’s urging, Samantha kept stopping and looking back at her zombie mother. And in typical nightmare fashion, his feet were mysteriously stuck in place, as if he’d been the victim of a cruel prankster with a tube of Krazy Glue.

He forced himself to breathe… in, out, in, out. It was a stupid dream, nothing more, and it was probably due to Sam’s nonstop obsession with zombies. He would be sure to thank her for that in the morning. The lure of going back to sleep was nearly overpowering, but he groaned and swung his feet over the edge of the bed.

“When you wake up unexpectedly,” he mumbled, “you recheck your surroundings.” It was a rule he lived by, and it had saved his life on more than one occasion.

He slid out of bed, quickly dressed, and laced up his boots. Before leaving the bedroom, he lifted his sawed-off Remington 1100 shotgun from the small bedside table. A blast of double-aught buckshot would stop nearly anything alive or dead. And if it couldn’t, there were four more loads right behind it.

Awake and feeling a little less grumpy, Tanner stepped out into the dark hallway and leaned over to poke his head into Samantha’s room. She lay tangled in a mound of covers, moonlight shining in from the window above her bed. He smiled. Samantha was the most fitful sleeper he had ever known. It was as if she spent every night wrestling serpents as fearsome as Nagini.

He turned and headed downstairs. With every step, the old wooden staircase reminded him that they could be asked to bear only so much. When he reached the bottom, he glanced at the front door, making a mental note to go out and take a leak once he cleared the first floor. They had managed to get the toilets working using a couple of five-gallon buckets and water from the vice-president’s swimming pool, but he found it just as easy to belly up to a tree. And while it was true that there were things in the night that people feared, it was equally as true that Tanner was one of the worst.

But first, he thought, a quick sweep of the downstairs was in order. He started by checking the dining room and kitchen. Everything was quiet and orderly. The vice president had been kind enough to leave behind a huge cache of food in the pantry, and he and Samantha had already enjoyed several delicious meals. Even with his healthy appetite, Tanner estimated that they had enough food to last for a few months. Whether or not they would end up staying that long was anyone’s guess. He and Samantha were both restless souls, and he suspected that they would get the itch to move on long before the cupboards ran bare.

Tanner stepped from the kitchen out into the main living room. It too was quiet, but he detected a slight vibration under his feet. He knelt and placed his palm against the floor. There was a faint rhythmic trembling, like rippling aftershocks of an earthquake. Something was shaking the huge house. Maybe a motor of some sort. But there hadn’t been electricity in more than two months. What then?

To his right was a reception area, and beyond that lay the library through which he and Samantha had first entered. They had discovered the house by accident when searching for a way out of the subterranean emergency tunnels that ran below the city. Most of the tunnel exits had been sealed off by the military, but a few still remained, including the one that had led them up to the Naval Observatory.

Tanner brought his shotgun up to waist level and cautiously walked through the receptionist area and into the library. Nothing was out of place. Hundreds of old books lined the shelves, and a comfortable sitting area lay undisturbed in front of a reading window. But the rhythmic pounding was a little louder, and with every bump, the books trembled.

He knelt and touched the floor again. The vibrations were stronger and more distinct, a slow
bump… bump… bump.
If he didn’t know better, he would have sworn that a neighbor was out in the driveway breaking up concrete.

An idea came to him, and it was in no way comforting. He stood and approached the bookcase that acted as a secret door down to the tunnels. Moving to one end, he leaned against the heavy wooden shelves and pushed. Small wheels squeaked as the bookcase slowly slid away to reveal a short, dark hallway.

Tanner hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight, but the moonlight shining through the library window provided enough illumination to see the fiberglass door at the end of the hall. Beyond that, stairs led down to a heavier steel door that allowed entry into the tunnels. He hurried down the hallway with one hand extended in front of his face, stopping only when his fingers made contact with the fiberglass door. The door remained closed, but powerful vibrations rattled the knob. His stomach began to knot. There was only one logical explanation for the noise. The infected were attempting to break through the tunnel’s exit. The Superpox-99 virus had killed most of those it infected, but the few who had survived were left as disfigured homicidal mutants worthy of a Lon Chaney movie. And those vicious monsters were knocking to come in.

Tanner eased the fiberglass door open, half expecting to be attacked by a horde of bloodthirsty creatures waiting for him on the other side. He wasn’t. The landing was empty, and a long flight of stairs led down into a pool of darkness. The pounding was even louder now, jarring his teeth with every thunderous blow. Navigating the stairs completely blind would be tricky, but he deemed it worth the risk. He had to know the condition of the steel door.

Placing his hands on the left wall, he carefully took one stair at a time, counting them as he went. By the time he reached the bottom, the hammering was deafening, a slow deep thumping of metal hitting metal. The infected were swinging their battering ram with a sense of purpose as sure as that of the orcs trying to breach Helm’s Deep.

Tanner reached out and blindly felt his way over to the door. Warm hands suddenly grabbed at him, frantically pulling at his clothes.

“What the hell!” He stumbled back, knocking the hands away with the stock of his shotgun.

Arms stretched toward him and screams rang out like the cries of a thousand tortured souls. The darkness made it impossible for Tanner to see how they had managed to reach him through the door. Perhaps they had bent away a corner, or maybe they had managed to rip a hole through the metal. The fact that they weren’t mauling his body could only mean that the locking mechanism still held. But for how much longer?

Tanner scrambled to his feet and raced back up the stairs, falling twice and cracking his shin against the stone steps. He bolted through the fiberglass door, down the short hallway, and back into the library. His heart was pounding, and warm blood trickled down his shin as he shoved the bookcase back in place.

The enemy was coming, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to stop it. His choices were limited to standing and fighting—a losing proposition to be sure—or running.

“What is it?” a soft voice said from the dark.

He whipped around, bringing his shotgun up. Samantha stood in the doorway of the receptionist area, rubbing sleep from her eyes. She was in an old pair of jeans and a t-shirt, but her rifle was slung across her back.