There was no time to formulate a plan. His women were alone in the pharmacy.
They should have consolidated their personnel and split some of the medical supplies between the pharmacy and the refrigerator; that was clear to him now. Stretching themselves too thin, trying to occupy too many objectives too far apart, had been a mistake.
But they were so strong, so disciplined, so well trained. And with so much hubris.
Arnold wanted to take a page out of Ivan’s book and close his hand inside one of the steel cabinets of the kitchen. No. He could punish himself later, if he lived.
The growls and shouts of his women echoed through the open air vents, making the pharmacy sound like it was right next door even though it wasn’t. They were strong women, and would try their best to hold their ground until reinforcements could get there to help, but they wouldn’t last long. If Clemson had still been alive he could have snaked through the vents and helped them fight on two fronts.
Arnold had been referring to them as his women for so long that he’d forgotten their names. What kind of leader did that? Asked people to die and didn’t bother to learn their names? Bad ones. The kind that got their outfits killed.
Arnold Piper let loose a roar that surprised even himself and bent to pick up his spear and shield. His men followed suit, Ivan having to feel around in the darkness, his drooped eye and salt rub leaving him nearly blind and worthless.
Grant and Beaumont fell in, but Arnold pointed back to the fridge and Beaumont nodded, resuming his position.
“Wait. No, you,” Arnold said, switching Beaumont for Ivan. If he was going to split his force, he would do it this way, bring his most capable men into battle. If Ivan wanted to make up for his mistakes, he could start by cooling his heels here.
Harry Beaumont guided Ivan to the door, sat him down, still weeping in the excitement. Every sob he let out hurt the men’s morale, and Arnold decided that he liked Ivan better back when he had been catatonic, before the healing.
They fell behind Arnold as he tore through the swinging door into the dining room, the force of the handle hitting the wall behind it and knocking paint off. It wasn’t just rage; he needed to make as much noise as possible, convince the residents in the hallway to disperse before they realized that there were only three men on the other side of the door.
Out in the hallway, more residents streamed from the rec room into the open doorway of the pharmacy. They trampled one another to get in, fights breaking out over pill bottles that had already been removed from the room. The looters tried to stuff their mouths with meds and return to the game room before they could be jumped.
Arnold put metal to acrylic, banging his spear against the cafeteria tray shield, screaming as he did so. Grant and Beaumont did the same, and the residents in front of them took notice. Took notice but did not flee, for the most part.
Some of them gave up ground as Arnold approached, allowing him space to maneuver. They were weaklings, too timid to throw the first punch.
The first aggression that came wasn’t a punch, as Arnold pushed into the mass of them with his shield, nearly at the door to the pharmacy before the first attack. It was a wineglass, lobbed at him, bouncing off his head and shattering on the floor. Glass crushed below the bare feet of the residents around him, but did not pierce his rubber soles. All the drinking cups in the cafeteria were hard plastic, so the glass must have been pilfered from the dining room.
The blow didn’t hurt, but it did embolden the residents surrounding them. Harry Beaumont yelped as a resident began to wrestle his shield away, the man weathering several blasts from the tray, but holding on. Beaumont let him have the shield, pulling a large knife from his bandolier and putting it through the man’s eye. The resident died still gripping the cafeteria tray, a pyrrhic victory in death.
Grant impaled both a man and a woman on the end of his spear, then drove it as far as he could into the wall and left it there. He then switched to small arms as Beaumont had, using a paring knife to slice his way forward, turning a few noses and ears into useless flaps as he advanced.
No one was taking a swing at Arnold, so he didn’t need to expend the energy or encourage retaliation. He just bowled residents over as he made it through the doorway, first into the breach.
The room had been hot before when it had been packed with naked bodies, but it was hell now. There was blood and shit an inch thick on the linoleum, and two or three dead residents lying across the threshold dividing the desk from the aisles. The looters who’d gotten their pills were trying to jostle their way out with what they could; those who hadn’t had a chance yet tried to dive through the doorway and found themselves stuck.
The residents weren’t the only casualties, though; pressed against the Plexiglas were his women.
Their necks had been slit, but that probably hadn’t been the cause of death—the wounds had been inflicted just to make sure. The women’s faces were bruised, their corpses stacked on top of each other, their weapons stripped away. That they had been put on display let Arnold know that they hadn’t gone easily; they’d stayed ferocious to the end.
Arnold wanted to apologize to them, but there was no sense in that. Looking beyond their bodies to the shelves he could see that their stock had been depleted. At his feet, empty baggies and bottles floated among pills, their casing dissolving in the blood.
It was too late.
“Fall back! Get out!” Arnold yelled, colliding with Harry Beaumont as the man backed out the door, slashing at the latecomers who got in his way.
They no longer controlled the drugs, but they still might be able to calm the people of Mercy House. Maybe not supremacy, but at least order could still be established if they gave the people what they wanted.