DePresti quickly showed her how to use the rifle. He cleared the chamber — it was empty — and then helped her insert a magazine and pull the charging handle back to load the first round. She put the stock on her good shoulder and aimed it at the ground, making sure the safety was on.
He then put one of the NVGs on her head. “They’re already configured,” DePresti told her. “Just pull them down when we get upstairs.”
Her heart beat a little faster. She might not be overthinking it after all.
He slung the bolt-action rifle on his back and picked up his own assault rifle. “Ready?” DePresti asked as he grabbed the duffel bag.
“Ready,” Parkowski responded. But she wasn’t — how could she be? She was no soldier, no warrior. But her life was at stake. And she only saw one way out of this.
“Ok, here goes nothing,” her boyfriend said with an obviously false sense of bravado.
Parkowski followed him out of the armory and up the stairs.
Right before they reached the top, DePresti stopped and turned to her. “Take these, I almost forgot,” he said as he handed her something small. It was a pair of earplugs.
“You’re going to want them,” he promised.
Parkowski shrugged and put them into her pocket.
They had only been in the basement for eight minutes. The main level was just as dark and quiet as it had been before they had armed themselves.
She slipped to the kitchen and looked out the window at the ridge beyond as her boyfriend checked the front of the house.
The moon was a little higher in the sky, but the rest of the desert landscape, or what she could make out in the limited light, looked the same.
Parkowski peered at the ridgeline. The same bushes were there, or at least she thought they were. She heard a loud cracking sound — almost like someone snapping a large branch in two — coming from the ridgeline and then echoed off of the hills below.
The window spider-webbed.
And a large-caliber bullet slammed into the wall behind her.
Parkowski dove towards the cheap tile floor.
She cursed as her rifle slammed into the ground first, followed by her hands and knees. A searing pain shot through her injured shoulder as time slowed down, much like it had on the highway. Parkowski rolled towards the refrigerator as she heard another
The glass broke again, this time in a different place, shattering it and littering the kitchen with fragments.
DePresti sprinted into the kitchen and knelt in front of the dishwasher to the left of the sink.
He pointed at his ears.
She gave him a blank look.
DePresti shrugged, pulled his NVGs down, from the top of his head to his face, and readied his assault rifle. He carefully and deliberately swept the muzzle up to the window.
He then aimed and fired three times.
The report reverberated through the small kitchen.
Parkowski’s ears burned. The noise hadn’t shattered her eardrums, but they hurt like hell. She dug the earplugs out of her pocket and jammed them into her ears.
DePresti ducked, then popped back up and fired another couple of rounds.
This time, it was more of a dull roar, but still loud even with the protection.
She crawled on her hands and knees, rifle dangling precariously under her, to her boyfriend.
He didn’t speak but breathed heavily. She saw his chest heave up and down in the dim moonlight.
Parkowski tilted her head slightly, as if to ask a question, but didn’t say anything either. She probably could yell and get through to him, but she didn’t want to make any noise that would give away their position.
DePresti pantomimed his most recent action — firing into the ridge — and then pointed at Parkowski, and finally at the entryway.
She understood. Her boyfriend wanted her to cover the front of the house.
Parkowski painfully crawled out of the kitchen into the entrance.
There were three rooms located on that side of the house: one of the two smaller bedrooms, the master bedroom at the far end of the house, and the living room at the other end.
Parkowski chose the living room.
It had a large window overlooking the carport and sweeping driveway, the one direction not protected by the hills and ridges. There was less moonlight on this side of the house, and Parkowski could barely make out the road.
In a brief moment of calmness in between those of pure terror, she noticed that between the house and the road were a number of boulders and mounds, some natural, others created by the dirt removed when Chang had dug out his underground lair. She figured that if their unseen assailants were coming towards them, they would use those for cover.
Parkowski got up, ran towards the window, and slid down to the left side.
A pair of bullets streaked into the house from the window, leaving dime-sized holes. They both impacted the old couch on the far side of the room.
She quickly put her NVGs on. They made the world a fuzzy green; giving her the perception that everything she saw had a slight glow around it. Then, she peeked out of the window.
