Chapter 10: Vince Aut Morire

25 October 2014 – Hilltop Road, Lancaster, Massachusetts

Sabrina burst through the basement door to the kitchen. It crashed against the wall. The adults in the living room turned to stare at her.

“ALAMO! ALAMO! ALAMO!” she shouted as she ran for her father’s office.

Behind her, Keiko and Jeff’s drink glasses hit the coffee table. They grabbed their phones, which had been on vibrate. They hadn’t heard the alerts. They snapped urgent orders at their guests. In the office, Sabrina pressed her thumb to the fingerprint lock on the gun safe’s door and pulled it open when it unlocked. She buckled on the web belt that held her fighting knife’s sheath. Jeff rushed into the room.

“What’s wrong?”

“We’ve got over a dozen hostiles with weapons over the back perimeter fence and halfway to the house. There’s an SUV creeping up the access road! I figure there’s another four or five in the car.”

She tied the knife’s sheath to her right leg and pulled ‘her’ shotgun from the safe. She put a mixed load of shells into it before pouring more buckshot shells into a pouch on her belt.

“I energized the fence in case there’s another group coming, but it won’t be long before that first group is here. We need to buy time for people to get downstairs!”

Sabrina positioned the shotgun across her back on its combat sling.

“I had Alex and Pete get my friends into the panic room. I activated the silent alarm, and I’m pretty sure it went out, but I think the bad guys cut the cable and internet at the pole. The message probably went out via cellular in that case. Our internal network is still up, so I activated the recorder for the inside cameras. There’ll be a record of what happens. And I made sure the magnetic locks are active on all the exterior doors.”

Sabrina saw muzzle flashes on the camera feed. Bullets shattered windows in the living room, hitting the ceiling, and headlights swept over the office windows. Guests cried out in shock and fear. Sabrina tapped the security application to dim the house lights almost to the point of darkness. She heard more shouts of distress from the front hall, where their guests retrieved their shoes. Jeff reached past Sabrina and pulled his SWAT portable from its charger. He turned it on and waited for it to connect to the statewide radio network.

“County, this is CEMLEC SWAT Medic Three with urgent traffic.”

Someone hammered on the front door. Something bounced off the reinforced polycarbonate sidelight window. Guests scampered back toward the kitchen.

“They’re here,” Sabrina said.

An arm reached past Jeff to pull a shotgun from the safe. He looked over his shoulder to see Sally Dadashova hand the shotgun to Hamish MacDougall. She reached in again and took another gun for herself.

“Would you hand us some shells, please?” she asked as she put her phone away.

“What are you guys doing?” Jeff asked while Sabrina tossed boxes of shells to Sally and Hamish.

Sally ignored the question. She hung her State Police badge from a chain around her neck.

“Is that your SWAT raid armor, Jeff?”

“Yeah?”

“Put it on.”

“And these too, Dad,” Sabrina said, handing out shooter’s safety glasses.

“Medic Three? County is answering, Sir. Send your traffic,” a voice from the radio said.

“County, I have a home invasion in progress at my residence. We are under attack from an estimated twenty – that’s two-zero – armed hostiles. Send us everything you’ve got and anything you can get.”

“Understood, Medic Three. Stand by on this channel and...”

The message cut off when an explosion roared in the distance. Some guests screamed again when they heard the sound and felt the shock of it. Jeff’s radio and their cell phones began searching for lost signals.

“They must have dropped the cell tower next door,” Jeff said while his radio bleeped.

Sabrina handed him a loaded shotgun. Hammering at the front door continued as she locked the safe. Their four-person fire team dashed back to the kitchen. Another spray of bullets punched through the living room windows. The first knot of guests followed Keiko down the basement stairs, spurred on by the chaos swirling around them.

The front door burst open. Two shotguns roared out in the hall behind Sabrina seconds later. The last huddle of guests pushed through to the basement staircase as the shotguns thundered. Sabrina saw her father lock the basement door and break his key off in the lock. Now, the emergency escape pole was the four defenders’ only way down to the panic room.

Another crash of glass drew Sabrina’s attention to the back hall. She crept forward to cover that approach. Her father hissed in frustration behind her when she moved away from the emergency escape. That crash of glass from their flank worried her. The family intended to reinforce the large, ground-level windows by the back patio with polycarbonate, but a supply shortage caused them to gamble that reinforcing the downstairs family room windows first would be a wiser choice. They hoped the backyard fence would be deterrent enough. It was a gamble they just lost.

A <thud> and the crash of shattering glass sounded from a window in the living room. The top of a ladder poked into the opening. Sabrina crept toward the back of the house, through the kitchen, and aimed her shotgun at the top rung of the ladder. An intruder’s head appeared above the window frame. She fired. The rifled lead slug shattered the man’s head and sent him tumbling backward off the ladder.

She ducked back behind the kitchen island and kept moving while a burst of gunfire erupted through the window, scattering chunks of ceiling and walls behind her. Seconds later, Sabrina heard the metal locking bar for the mechanical room’s door slam into place.

She peeked around the corner into the back hall. Three men advanced toward her while they shielded their eyes from the halogen spotlights shining in their faces, which were positioned to make it difficult for intruders to see into the kitchen. Sabrina doubted they could see her waiting in the dim kitchen through the glare. She slung her shotgun across her back again, drew her knife, and waited for them to step into the kitchen. When the first one came close – looking the wrong way – she attacked.

Sabrina struck silently with a vicious overhand strike to the base of the first one’s neck. He died without a sound. The second man suspected nothing until her leg struck from the gloom and kicked him in the chest, staggering him back into the third intruder.

Sabrina leaped and grabbed Number Two and shoved both him and Number Three stumbling backward into the wall. She drove the spiked pommel of her knife down into Number Two’s skull, crushing it. She reversed her knife and stabbed its blade into Number Three’s neck just under his chin, piercing his trachea, ripped the razor-sharp blade across, and severed his carotid artery and jugular vein. He died spraying her with his blood.

She heard the crunch of glass to her left when two more intruders stepped into view. She dropped her knife and pulled her shotgun around, pulling the trigger while racking the slide. Two rapid shotgun blasts put the men down. Those two wouldn’t trouble her family again.

“SABRINA!”

Her father’s bellow snapped her out of her red haze of rage. She picked up her knife, wiped it clean on a dead man’s shirt, and backpedaled to the kitchen. She slipped her knife into its sheath, then reloaded the shotgun. Her father ushered Hamish and Sally – both injured – into the emergency escape shaft while scanning for more threats. Sabrina saw more bodies littering the front hall near the ruined front door and in the living room.

Another attacker hammered on the door from the gym while Jeff frantically urged Sabrina to get inside the escape shaft. The hammering noise stopped. Through the door, she heard a shotgun cycling as she passed the entry. Jeff grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him. His pull turned Sabrina to face the door. The shotgun blast punched through the steel door, spraying shrapnel into the kitchen. Sabrina yelped as jagged metal peppered the left side of her face and her left shoulder. A pellet tore at her ear. More shrapnel peppered her safety glasses.