In the house

Lani watched as the floor started to glow. She started backing her way up the stairwell, looking up to make sure nobody had followed her into the room. Looking back at the circle on the floor, she noticed someone climb out of it almost like they had walked up a stairway. It was Michael, carrying the girl that had bested them in the hospital. Michael had her cradled in his arms, running toward the stairs.

“We’re getting the fuck outta here,” Michael barked with urgency in his voice. “Shit’s about to get bad!”

Lani gave no hesitation as she turned back up the stairs and started moving toward the exit. Left with a pistol and a couple mags, she wasn’t quite ready for a full fight. But Michael was also reduced much in the same way, only he was unprotected entirely. “What happened?” she asked as she led them to the remaining door.

“Devil shit,” Michael uttered as he stepped out and looked around. “Where the fuck are we?”

“I dunno,” Lani barked bitterly, “that bitch in your arms knocked me out and brought me here with the truck!”

Michael chuckled a little bit. This was a bad idea.

Lani led him into the barn, but before opening the door to get the truck started she turned to Michael and grabbed the girl, shoving her out of his arms. “I’m not fuckin laughing!” she shouted at him. She started swinging her open hands at his face wildly with anger. “I thought that thing had killed you,” she yelled through her sobbing. “I couldn’t protect you, I felt helpless!”

For a moment, Michael let her slap him about. After about fifteen strikes against the side of his head he grabbed her arms and shoved her against the suburban, pinning her in place. “Lani listen,” he said calmly as he kept himself braced against her, “please hear me, okay?”

Lani still cried and screamed into his chest for a moment, reaching her hands up to grab him. She bunched some of his shirt in her hands and lay her head on his chest. “Michael,” she said softly, “you’re all I have ever had.”

Michael nodded, shifting his arms from a brace to a hug as he set a hand on the back of her head and patted his fingers. “You still have me,” he whispered, “I’m still right here, very much alive. But we gotta take the girl with us. I’ll explain on the way out of here.”

Lani took a breath. “You’ve been right till now,” she said softly before turning to look at the girl who lay on the ground, “so I’ll trust that you’ll explain it when we have time to discuss it.” She let go of Michael and got into the driver's seat. She started the engine as Michael loaded the girl into the back seat.

Michael ziptied the girls hands and tied a strap around a secure handle that was built into the floor for securing people of interest. He then used another tie to tie the wrists down. This made it safe for her to be in the back seat while the cargo space had the weapons that were left.

As they drove through the barn doors, Michael sat himself in the back seat and looked for a suitable weapon. He grabbed a chest rig and put it on. He passed pistol mags to Lani and grabbed his .300 Blackout rifle. He shoved the corresponding magazines in his pouches and loaded his rifle. He climbed his way back to the front seat.

They had made it about a mile down the road when a large explosion erupted. Ground zero was the destroyed house. “Is that why we were in such a hurry?” Lani asked in a rather relaxed manner.

“I had a feeling that was gonna happen,” Michael said through a soft smile, “but we also don’t know where we are, or who else is around.”

Not long after he said this, a sedan pulled out in front of them. Lani knew the suburban was pretty tough, and they’d survive the t-bone impact against a sedan quite easily. What they didn't realize was that this sedan was also armored. The suburban struck the front passenger door and the front wheel-well of the now blocking vehicle. The back of the suburban lifted about a foot off the ground from the force and momentum of the impact, but it set back down relatively quickly as they pushed the front of the sedan about forty five degrees.

Michael immediately stepped out and opened fire on the sedan. The rounds bounced off the windshield, which Michael was keen to observe. This bitch is armored he realized as he got his head down and threw his door closed.

Lani scrambled to the back and grabbed a shotgun and a speed feeding tube. She gripped her hand over the end of the tube as she lined it over the feed chute at the bottom of a Benelli M1014 and shoved six shells into it. They were three inch slugs, meant specifically for shooting into vehicles, armored or not.

As Lani made her way out of the suburban, Michael had gotten on top of the sedan and shot into the engine block. Reloading his weapon, he watched as someone tried to get out of the drivers side back door. He had a very familiar suit of armor on. He had seen this in Germany on the Autobahn near his old house. That’s the same ballistic suit they had Michael figured to himself as he ducked back in front of the sedan and fished a fragmentation grenade from a pouch in his vest. He yanked the pin and pushed the grenade under the sedan. It rolled into the driver side back tire, the furthest point under the car from Michael or the suburban. He stood up quickly and began shooting the padded suit man’s face, though it was well protected, he knew his impacts would impair the view and keep them from moving away from the grenade.

Lani had moved to the back of the suburban and gotten her feet behind a wheel before the grenade went off. While Michael dropped to the ground as the explosion went off, Lani stood still and braced herself against the suburban. The sedan lifted partway off the ground and fell back down where it was. The back seat of the sedan was ripped apart by the shrapnel and the blast, which managed to kill the driver and one of the back seat passengers. The front seat passenger was hurt but not slowed. He quickly slid himself over the body of the driver and escaped the nearly destroyed wreckage and stepped over the man in the ballistic suit who had just lost his legs from the ankle down.

As the last surviving man escaped the car, Lani had made her way back toward the rear of the sedan and clambered her way to the top of its trunk. She began throwing shots at the man who was able to nimbly move his way to the other side of an open drivers door for some protection. The man fired back with a 10mm pistol that looked much like a 1911 model. He grazed Lani’s ear as she moved out of the way.

Michael managed to come around to the front of the car and open fire on the shooter, hitting his shoulder a couple times before the man turned and fired at Michael. Michael was quick to get his head down. He recognized the slightly harder sound of the shot from his pistol. He didn’t put much thought into it at the moment, but he knew that he was dealing with an enhanced attacker. This is too much like Germany, Michael thought as he threw himself to the ground and fired into the man's ankles. These hits were very effective, causing the normally agile man to fall over.

As he fell, Lani came back up and fired the rest of the magazine tube of slugs into the man's chest. She backed into cover again and started shoving slugs into the feed slot as she watched around the corner for movement. She got three loaded before dropping the bolt on a shell and walking over to the man and placing the muzzle to his forehead and firing a shot with absolutely no hesitation. She then quickly moved her attention to the writhing man in the padded suit. She kicked his helmet off his head and placed the muzzle against his mouth and fired twice. Not fucking around with you tonight, she thought to herself as she smiled brighter than a child who had just been fed a bowl of her favorite ice cream.

As Lani stepped back from the car and reloaded her shotgun, she looked through the rear window to see if any of the two remaining idiots in the car were moving. She saw them sitting absolutely still, but she was also not a chance taker. She aimed her now fully loaded shotgun into the open door space and shot the heads of the bodies twice each. As she went back to the suburban, she topped off the four spent shots in her tube.

Michael opened the back door of his suburban to check on the girl. She appeared unhurt by the disaster that had just taken place, but she was no longer as unconscious as she had been. She was groaning and swaying her head about. Michael was satisfied with her somewhat okay condition, so he closed the door. “We gotta go,” he said to Lani, “pretty sure someone heard that shit.”