by Schow, Ryan
“Damn right I would have,” he said. “Can’t always say I feel good with someone on my six, but with you, I’ll take you to war with me anytime.”
Moved by the compliment, Stanton nodded his head and for the first time felt like maybe he could do this life. That he could be someone in this world. Respectable in a time when your baseline instincts and your ability to act without hesitation in the midst of the impossible cut a clear line between life and death. He was no longer a white collar worker. He wasn’t a stockbroker or a millionaire. He wasn’t a husband or a father or a failure. He was simply a man and a man protected those he cared about, those he loved most.
“What’s cooking in that dome of yours?” Rider asked.
“Just thinking about who I am in all of this,” he said. “Where I started out in life, where I’ve come, who I am now.”
“Well don’t overthink it, my friend. This is but one skirmish in what will surely be the war to end all wars.”
“The last war,” Stanton said.
“And the most important. Let’s go get the kids.”
Chapter Eighty
When they rode their bikes with now two wagons in tow, they went slow and he stopped often to make sure the girl was okay. There was a steadfastness inside her that Jagger admired. He was beginning to wonder if he possessed the same resolve. After killing the boy, after watching Bright die, he found himself losing optimism by the day and he didn’t think he could stop it. But they rode, and they rested, and they made their way through the traffic jam of abandoned cars and sometimes dead bodies.
As the afternoon sun climbed into the sky overhead, it got hot. He felt his skin starting to burn. He pulled the hats and sunscreen out of his backpack, put the hat on the girl’s head, dried the sweat from her face and shoulders, then applied the sunscreen.
She didn’t say a word.
She just looked at him and he just looked at her, each of them feeling the other’s pain, each of them too destroyed inside to even summon the words.
He gave her an apple, which she ate. They shared a bottle of water then got back on their bikes and got moving. Somewhere in between Vacaville and Vallejo, on highway 80 three guys on bicycles were riding from car to car, looting the insides of them. They saw Jagger and the girl and started riding toward them.
His senses flared and he studied their movements, their expressions as they approached, what they did with their hands and arms. They rode by, eyeballs glued to them, these three thirty-somethings with sneering grins. Like everyone else, the trio was dirty and unkempt. One of them was missing his two front teeth and all of them were ugly in both their looks and expressions.
Jagger turned his head, saw the three clowns riding behind the girl. She looked scared. Circling around, they caught back up with them, fell into stride on either side of Jagger.
He looked back and forth between them, saying nothing, giving nothing away in either his eyes or his countenance. Why the hell were they riding beside him and saying nothing? They just rode, smiling their dirty teeth at him, saying nothing.
This is too weird, he thought.
Lightning quick, he drew his weapon, shot the one next to him, then swung his pistol around and shot the other two. All head shots. All of them flopped sideways, their bikes losing balance and crashing to the asphalt. He slowed to a stop, the girl pulling up beside him.
“You okay?” he asked.
She just looked at him, no expression.
“Good.”
They ran into plenty more scavengers that day but none as weird as the three he killed. That night, he stopped under an underpass and made camp. He sat beside the girl under two blankets next to a fire and wondered what he’d done.
He killed those three louts because they were intimidating. Did he have to do that? Was there another way?
He couldn’t stop wondering if they were thugs or just three guys whose minds went soft. Were they trying to harm him? Were they dangerous? The questions persisted, yet he was no closer to a definitive answer than when he first pondered the question. Even worse, he couldn’t make himself feel bad for it either.
That worried him the most. When life no longer had any value, did humanity stand a chance at survival?
He slept fitfully next to the girl, who hadn’t changed positions all night. She was snoring loudly, her nose plugged, and he couldn’t seem to get comfortable. He finally sat up and re-stoked the fire. The bitter cold found the insides of his bones, but the heat chased it away allowing him a better night’s sleep than he’d anticipated.
They woke the next morning to the sounds of big trucks driving by. Two Humvees roared by; three more came minutes after that.
National Guard.
He and the girl got back on their bikes and rode off and on until they hit the Bay Bridge. The traffic was stacked up there. It was a war zone. Bodies and burnt cars everywhere. Plus there were huge holes in the suspension bridge from where it was attacked.
They wheeled their bikes and wagons through the chaos, watching where they went. At one point, Jagger had to lift everything over a huge pile-up of cars. He helped the girl over the vehicles, got her safely on the other side. The other side, however, was hit so badly by munitions most of it had crumbled into the level below and didn’t look passable.
There was one steel beam still intact, the concrete all around it crushed down. It was a way over, but not even close to ideal.
How the hell was he supposed to get everything over that? The bare beam was at least thirty feet from edge to edge. He looked down to see if they could slide down one side of the concrete to the first level roadway. They couldn’t. The collapse was too complete.
Jagger stood there for what felt like ten minutes of contemplating before he picked up his bike and started across the beam. He wasn’t a very large man, but he’d lost weight on this trip and the winds were not friendly. He forced himself to go slow and steady. Every gust could have been his end though, so he watched his balance and kept his eyes straight ahead.
When he got to the other side, he saw the girl just staring at him. He walked back across the beam, his confidence growing. He carried the two wagons and their things across the beam, and then her bike. Then he went back for her. She was scared, he could see that.
“Don’t look down past your feet. It’s wider than you think.”
It wasn’t.
She started across the beam and he followed her, measuring her balance. She stopped halfway across, froze.
“You’re doing great,” he said.
She didn’t move.
“You can do it,” he said. “Just put one foot in front of the other.”
She started to move, but stopped, and this messed up her balance. She put her hands out, started to circle them as her body lost balance. He reached out, grabbed her—nearly lost his own balance—then held her in place.
She started crying, sobbing. He finally said, “Turn to me.”
She turned, her delicate hands gripping his arms, his shirt. When they were facing each other, he said, “Come here.”
She did.
He picked her up, slowly, carefully, and she clung to him for dear life, circling her arms around his neck, pressing her face into his chest.
He moved, slowly, carefully, beyond terrified across the rest of the beam. When they reached the other side, he plunked down hard and tried to still his rampant heart.
She sat beside him but didn’t say anything. She just snuffled and wiped her face. Her hair was dirty, tangled and in her face. She brushed it away, didn’t look at him. It was almost as if she was embarrassed for having failed to walk across herself.
When he stood, she stood. They went to the bikes and he hooked the wagons back up. After that, they rode across the rest of the bridge. The nightmare that was San Francisco slowly unfolded. The skies were smoky, but not terrible. Certainly breathable. But the damage was immeasurable.
The closer he got to the Fremont exit, which would take him downtown, the more h
e realized this city was gone. Fallen. The Transamerica Pyramid was a memory, skyscrapers shelled and toppled, entire roads buried beneath collapsed buildings. Fremont was still passable, but barely. Half the street was broken glass from the skyscraper next to the exit, so they were forced to tread slowly over it, sparing the tires of their bikes, but risking getting cut if they stepped wrong.
They circled around a swamp of debris, struggling to get the bikes past, almost abandoning the wagons because at some point he was having to carry them over huge mounds of unstable debris. Twice he slipped. Twice he lost his footing and sat down hard on lumps of dusty concrete. Somewhere along the way, he twisted his ankle in a pile of rubble.
The skin cut open, not in a gash, but enough that he began to worry about infection. Once they got to Fremont, he realized just how bad downtown was. He almost forgot to breathe, seeing what he was seeing.
Most of downtown was piles of wreckage. Completely impassable.
“We’re so screwed,” he muttered under his breath. He looked at the girl and she was looking at him, waiting.
It took them days to get through.
His ankle didn’t get infected, but they got plenty more scrapes, bruises and cuts trying to get through the crumbled buildings that once defined the skyline of this magical city by the bay.
They ran out of food around the fifth day into being in San Francisco. From there it got a bit hairy. He told the girl to wait for him in the corner of a building that wasn’t demolished. It didn’t look safe, but he couldn’t leave her unattended either. Jagger slipped inside where it was pitch black and dusty. Using one of the shotguns and an old battery operated flashlight he took from Bright’s place before they left, he went door to door, floor by floor looking through all the abandoned apartments.
All of the numbered doors had been kicked in. There wasn’t a body to be found.
He found spoiled food and some dead pets, but he wasn’t finding anything to eat. Finally, on the sixth floor, doing knock and drops—knocking on the door then kicking the door down—he found some canned food. A lot of it. Using plastic bags he grabbed from one of the previous homes, he packed up the food as well as an iron skillet and a hot mit, a can opener and two plastic bowls with silverware.
He returned to the girl. He found her cowering in the corner where he’d left her. She held her finger to her lips, giving him the universal shush! signal. He moved as quietly as he could into the corner of the building with her. Poking his head around the corner, he saw several guys in National Guard uniforms loading stacks of dead bodies onto a large platform trailer hooked onto a ragtag Humvee.
One of the bodies in the pile moved, then mewled. A withered hand tried to creep out of a heap of bodies while the exposed head turned, eyes slowly blinking, its mouth trying to work its way open, to maybe say he was still alive.
“Got another one,” the young kid announced.
An older man with a steely look in his eyes, a set jaw and the hardened disposition of a career soldier, walked over, withdrew his pistol then discharged the weapon. The dying man’s head flopped over, a single red hole in it.
“Problem solved,” he said to the kid with a disgusted look on his face.
Jagger opened a bottle of water. He handed it to the girl, who went after it like she hadn’t seen water in a decade. She drank deeply, her little lips cracked. Studying the rest of her, he found her skin to be a bit too sallow, and her eyes a bit sunken. She handed him the bottle and he finished most of it off. She was looking at it, the last inch in the bottom. The last inch he left for her.
He handed it over; she downed it in a single shot.
Outside the building, the soldiers went about their business collecting the bodies, dragging them to the trailer, pitching them onto the heap. When they were done with that building, they moved up the street to the next, loaded the trailer until they couldn’t toss another body on top, then they left the scene altogether, presumably to dump their load.
Jagger wasted no time popping open a can of beets. He and the girl ate greedily from them, chewing loudly, drizzling maroon-colored juice down their lips and chins. Every so often, she would look up at him and he would look down at her, but they wouldn’t say anything. They didn’t need to. When they finished the beets, they opened a can of green beans, ate at a more reasonable pace, then dried their chins and mouths with their shirts.
She let out a little burp, then followed it with a smile.
“Good one,” he said, opening the last bottle of water. He handed it to her and she shook her head. He took a sip then stored it with their things inside the wagon.
“We should check out the rest of this building,” he said. He watched her body sag. “You want to come with me?”
Now she perked up.
They found a place to stash their stuff where it wouldn’t be seen by the casual observer, then walked up to the sixth floor where he resumed their apartment to apartment search. They hunted for whatever they could use. Things like medications and water. Maybe a butcher knife or a meat cleaver. There was more stuff than food, and more food than fresh water, but they managed to gather a few jugs, some anti-biotic ointment for their cuts, a handful of vitamins and a couple bottles of Vicodin from an undisturbed bedside table.
When they got back to the wagons and bikes, they loaded up what they could before setting out into city. Jagger was trying to make it home before nightfall, but home was across town, closer to The Presidio.
The moving was really slow, the destruction beyond measure. So much of the city was treacherous and impassable. Nightfall would come quickly, far too quickly for his liking. They found an old apartment building that was locked from the outside, but undisturbed. With a chunked block of concrete, Jagger broke the glass to the front door. After clearing it out, he entered the building with the girl in tow. Shotgun at the ready, they proceeded in.
The lobby was dark, a staircase nearby. They made it up two floors without incident, but the walk was creepy. It was pitch black. He was so moved by the dark he felt alone, even though the girl was with him. His brain began to unravel.
He thought of all the horror movies he watched as a kid, the haunted homes and roaming ghosts and paranormal activity and it started to get to him so he tried to clear his mind and just move forward.
The silence was eerie though.
They got into a hallway where he flicked on his old flashlight enough to see the path ahead. When he clicked it out again, he started moving from door to door, knocking lightly. Somewhere down the hall, they heard rustling, but it was just a pack of rats scurrying into a hole in the wall.
When they entered the first apartment, the last of the natural light coming in from the windows brightened the place just enough to see around, but he didn’t need the light to know someone had died in there.
Behind him, the girl gagged.
He moved into the kitchen, telling her to shut the door behind her. She did. He went through the pantry, the fridge, the drawers. There were useful things in the drawers: a book of matches, a pack of batteries, chewing gum. But no food. Not even a can of beans or an unopened jar of pickles.
They went through three more places before they found a 24 pack of water stashed between a bed and the wall it sat upon. There was a dried, meaty spray of what Jagger could only imagine on the pillow. He ignored it while trying to tell himself he needed to be grateful for what he’d found. The girl turned and threw up. It looked like a bloody mess, but that’s only because they’d eaten beets a few hours ago.
“You okay?” he asked, pulling her hair back.
She nodded her head.
“Good, let’s go. We’ve got water now.”
She looked back up at the bed, her eyes on the carnage, then doubled over and dry heaved twice more. When she was ready, they left the apartment tower, got their things and headed deeper into downtown.
Night fell on them fast; they found a place to crash for the night. It was on a couch in a gas station lounge, not ideal. Th
at’s all they could safely find as the sun dipped below the cityscape, taking both the light and the heat with it.
Bundled in the blankets from the big rig, the girl slept, snoring lightly, her nose not as plugged as the day before. He wrapped a blanket around himself, sat close to the girl, let himself drift off. The next day was slow moving. Really slow moving where they had to take the long way around everything. They finally made it to the outskirts of downtown, but were stopped by a thirty-foot pile of bodies and the sinking sun.
“We can’t walk over them,” he said, still taken aback. “Not with cuts on our legs and arms.”
He could only imagine the kinds of diseases festering in that gigantic mound of rot. Besides the almost steady buzzing of blow flies, and the rustling of bodies that made him think of huge, ravenous rats. When they were ready to go, he had to pull the girl away from the heap of bodies.
She couldn’t stop staring.
Together Jagger and the girl meandered into a nearby building looking for a place to crash. The bottom few stories suffered some sort of ground level blast which left them uninhabitable, even for a night, but they did get upstairs about seven floors where he felt they were safe. The only bed was a queen sized bed. She took one side; he took the other. Both of them stretched out and called it a day.
“Good night,” he said.
She didn’t say anything, but she reached out and put a little hand on his arm and it touched his heart. This little girl he’d saved, maybe she would save him too one day. Not from harm, but from the cruel weight of this war and the destruction it left in its wake. This also made him think of his boys, and Lenna, and how much he missed all of them.
As he was drifting off, he wondered if the boys would take to her. He knew they would. They had always wanted a little sister, same as Lenna always wanted a little girl. Already Jagger was beginning to think of her as his child. Was this because she had no one? Or was it because he was developing a fondness for the child? Perhaps it was measures of both.
He drifted off, then woke the next morning to sounds from the street below. Someone was setting the pile of bodies they’d encountered on fire, some Hitler youth looking guy. The men were all fanning out, some of them heading into the same building he and the girl were in.
