One Second After [137]
The hundreds of fires merged together into an inferno, acting as the blocking force on each flank, flames driving eastward, cutting off retreat except back onto the interstate or the railroad, which were now kill zones.
At the other end of the box, to the west, at the interstate bridge waited what was left of Company A along with them every citizen of the town who could carry a gun, concealed behind the reverse slope.
It had been a bloodbath.
Once his outer defenses fell, the second wave of the Posse swarmed in, hundreds of vehicles pressing over the crest and, as John hoped, undisciplined enough that, sensing victory, they were now just rushing forward to start the looting and slaughter.
The fight at the bridge had almost been like something from the Civil War, hundreds of men and women rising up from concealment, leveling rifles and blazing away, shredding everything in front of them. Posse vehicles crashed into the barrier line and the fighting had turned hand-to-hand. And then along the opposite slopes fires ignited and began to spread, and as the last of the vehicles crossed in, Malady's team shut the back door, using the two automatic weapons provided by Tom, complete with six thousand rounds of ammunition, backed up by citizens who had produced "illegal weapons" and students armed with a couple hundred of the dangerous homemade grenades.
The force on the bridge had nearly given way, though. For several crucial minutes John had been down, knocked out by an explosion. But someone had rallied the ill-trained backup force, and they were charging forward regardless of loss.
All that was left then was the killing, the closing in of the box, and when cornered their opponents knew their fate and fought with a mad frenzy. This was not the type of fight where surrender was a way out, and they knew it. There would be no escape for them, no pulling back to wait and to then lunge back days or weeks later. They were all going to die this day, and tragically, for Black Mountain and Swannanoa, it was going to cost dearly to do that killing.
Washington had warned of that before the battle, suggesting a false escape path for the routed who could then be hunted down later in a second killing zone farther down the mountain, but there was no other way, John realized. If they left an escape valve, a sound idea with a well-trained force but risky with the assets he now had, the surviving Posse just might break through and indeed escape, and then it could be months of a bitter guerilla war against the vengeful survivors.
It had turned into seven horrid hours of taking ground back, a step at a time, a bloody step at a time.
The medics were coming forward at the double. Wounded from earlier in the attack who had managed to hide and not get murdered, those wounded in the relentless push back, lay by the hundreds along the road. From up on the south side the fire was rolling eastward and screams could be heard, those trapped up there and now burning to death. It made John think of the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. One could read of that fight in the history books and feel remote somehow. Not now. Even if they were all Posse burning up there, it was horrific.
And behind him Tom's men now came, deployed out in open order, and every few feet one would stop, lower his pistol, and fire.
The Posse wounded were to be summarily executed, and that was a task John wanted the police and older men of the town to do, not his own kids. They were hardened now, but he never wanted them that hard.
John slowly walked up the sloping road towards the crest and at last found him, a knot of students gathered round his body, heads lowered, some weeping.
Washington Parker was dead, killed in the opening minutes of the fight. The way he lay here seemed almost Christ-like, arms spread wide, heartbreakingly a young female student, dead as well, nestled under his arm as if in his final seconds he was trying to protect or comfort her, or maybe it had been the other way around.
Washington had insisted