Gray Skies

by Justin Bell

  “Stay down, there’s a right turn just up ahead!” Liu said as the man withdrew back inside the van, most likely to reload. The van crashed into the back of the Subaru with a rough thump, sending the WRX lurching ahead before the back tires slammed onto the ground, catching rubber on pavement and squelching briefly.

  Liu down-shifted, slowed, and turned the wheel, ramming the trunk back into the front left corner of the van, pushing it wide where it punched through a stack of debris, sending trash scattering over the windshield and roof, the driver having to slam on the brakes so as not to smash into a building. Brandon accelerated, shifted up, and hurled the WRX forward, angling towards the right turn, and slamming around into a tight right spin, squealing tires and jettisoning through an alley, out into a parking lot shared between a gas station and a fast food restaurant. The van was not far behind as the Subaru spun left, jumping back onto route 29, but the van cut the skid, continuing on forward. Liu could see the long lake ahead of him as he cranked the wheel left, but he was not quite quick enough. The van smashed hard into the rear quarter of the sports car, picking the back wheels up off the pavement and sending it skidding right.

  “Agh!” Liu screamed, clasping his hands on the wheel and trying to maintain control, but the vehicle smashed the shoulder, back wheels rattling and tugging, shifting momentum. Liu tried to compensate as the passenger emerged from the window of the van again, shouldering his rifle and firing. This time he fired low, and the back left tire of the vehicle exploded into strips of flayed rubber, tearing from the metal rim and threatening to send the car spinning out of control.

  “Hold on, boys!” Liu screamed. “I don’t know if I can keep this together!”

  Max tensed his arms, pressing hands into the back seat. “Your seat belt!” he shouted at Liu as the belt flapped free around Liu as he drove. He’d been so busy making sure the kids were wearing their seat belts, he hadn’t bothered buckling his own. Liu whipped the wheel the other way, trying to bring the car back straight, but it was too late. With a muffled thump, the car jumped a ridge and spun, slamming broadside into a tree, the passenger door caving in, then bursting off its hinges. As the car spun wildly back around, the door spun off and Liu catapulted from the hurtling vehicle, rolling end over end, slamming shoulder, skull, and spine on the gravel as he rolled, sparks and fireworks exploding in the blacks of his fading vision. Pain tore at every part of his limp body, but after the second bounce, he was blissfully unconscious.

  The van skidded to a halt on the shoulder as the WRX toppled from the tree and rolled down the narrow slope towards the lake. Driver’s side door flying open, the passenger charged out onto the grass, semi-automatic rifle in hand, and reached the ridge as the red sports car plunged into the lake water below.

  “It’s in the water!” he shouted as the murky liquid began crawling up the red metal of the vehicle, covering the automobile, the man with the rifle staring down as it sank into the depths. Behind him the van driver charged up on his left, looking over the bank as well, eyes wide as the car spewed air bubbles and was dragged down into the brown water.

  “Were the kids in there?” the driver asked.

  “Yep,” the passenger replied. “I’d say they’re no longer our problem.”

  The driver shook his head and pushed past the passenger, walking towards Liu who lay on the ground, unmoving.

  “What about this guy? He breathing?” He bent down, checking for a pulse. “Yeah, our boy’s still alive.”

  “That’s the customs dude, right?” the passenger asked, moving over towards where the driver huddled over Liu’s body. The driver nodded.

  “Karl will be glad to hear we nabbed him.”

  “Load him in the van. Let’s head back to Lakeview. I’ll tell Bruce about the customs guy, you get to break the news about the kids.”

  The two men chuckled as they lifted Liu’s prone form from the gravel shoulder and dragged him towards the van. A third man slid open the side door looking now like a square, dark mouth, waiting for its next meal.

  ***

  Taking the scenic route back through the shopping complex and around towards the beaten wreck of the RV, Phil and Rhonda walked through the shadows. From where they stood, they could see the RV, or what remained of it anyway, a split and broken wreckage, debris dragged over a grassy median and across a lane of traffic. Phil halted for a moment, looking back at his wife.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. The surrounding area was dark and appeared empty though the restricted light of deep night didn’t allow for much visibility.

  “We have to do this, Phil,” Rhonda said. “We have to. I can’t lose my children. Not again.” Her voice hitched as she spoke.

  “We haven’t lost anyone, Rhonda,” Phil said quietly. “We’ll find Lydia. I promise we will. We’ll find them all.”

  Rhonda lowered her gaze, shaking her head. “Even if we do find her,” Rhonda whispered. “Even if we do…she may be lost. I think we lost her when she left.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Rhonda looked up at him. “You know what I’m talking about. She was accepted to the University of Colorado. They were going to give her a partial scholarship, Phil. We’d all agreed.”

  Phil remembered well. It was one of those indelible events in a family’s life you don’t forget. The feeling of your eldest child telling you that instead of going to the local school, she’s going to California. To UCLA. She needed to find herself. Be her own person.

  In other words, she needed to get away from her parents.

  Phil had accepted her comments at face value, not finding them especially traumatic, and he thought Rhonda had as well, but clearly he was wrong. She’d either held her emotions in check very well, or he hadn’t been paying close enough attention. He hoped it was the former.

  “What she did, it’s not unusual, Rhonda.”

  “I know, Phil. I do. It’s hard to explain.”

  “It’s not that hard, Rhonda. She’s grown. She needed to evolve.”

  “I wasn’t ready for her to evolve!” Rhonda nearly shouted. “Winnie is closer to you! Max barely interacts with either of us. Lydia was mine. She was the only link I had to our children’s lives!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, you’re their mother—”

  “You don’t understand, Phil. You’ve always been the cool guy. The guy that floated off to work, did your thing, then floated back home, children running to you, coming home the hero. I’ve been the boss, the disciplinarian, the one who ran the household. I was mandatory. Necessary. Always present. Lydia was the only one who understood and appreciated that.”

  Phil opened his mouth but closed it again.

  “She was my one anchor to this family life…and then she wasn’t.”

  “Rhonda.”

  “We need to find her, Phil. I need to see her and talk to her. To make her a part of our family again. She was breaking apart, and we need to find her and put her back together.”

  Phil nodded but said nothing. He wasn’t sure what he could say. The things Rhonda was saying had obviously been on her mind for a long time, issues that had been bothering her, nagging at her, and chewing away at her motherly instincts. That delicate line between parent and friend, she had easily stayed on one side of that with the two younger kids, but for the eldest, that line had blurred, which made the transition of Lydia’s voyage to California all that much more painful. Rhonda wasn’t just losing a daughter, she was losing one of her closest friends.

  “I get it, Rhonda,” Phil said. “I do understand, as much as you might think I don’t. But I’m not sure risking death in an ambush is the best way to approach that. We’re too out in the open. What if they come back?”

  “What if they don’t and our son is laying over in that crash bleeding to death? What if Winnie is pinned underneath something, slowly dying? I’ll take that chance, Phil.”

  As the sun worked its way towards purple skies, a faint, opaque pallor fell over
the road in front of them, cloaking the wreckage of the camper as if it were the faint memory of a bad, color-laden dream as it faded in waking. Seeing the wreckage from across the road gave a surreal feeling of life after death, as if it must have been impossible to survive the crash, and her and Phil were only specters and not real at all. As they approached the crumpled and broken cab of the RV, Rhonda half expected to see their own bodies still laying there, broken and bloody, this whole adventure some strange last moment before death hallucination.

  But the grass was matted and empty underneath the bent structure of the cab. The windshield was still punched free and bent away where they’d escaped. There were no bodies, including any of the gunmen that attacked them, and she’d seen Phil shoot one of them, so either he had survived or they’d cleaned up after themselves.

  “Take it easy, Rhonda,” Phil said as they wove around the wreckage of the RV and headed back towards the rear section which had been torn, pummeled, and discarded like old soda cans. Rhonda picked up the pace as she walked, stepping over discarded refuse and angling towards the mangled back half of the RV. Looking at it put a thick, rigid pit in the bowels of Phil’s stomach, the idea of what could happen to human bodies in the midst of the carnage he saw there.

  Yet they saw no bodies. They didn’t even see any blood or indication of grievous injury.

  “Nothing,” Rhonda whispered. “Nothing at all.”

  “Do you think they’re all okay?” Phil asked. “Somehow they all made it through okay?”

  Rhonda looked at the twisted wreckage of the vehicle and shook her head, her mind not quite able to wrap around the fact that several people, including children, would have been able to walk away from the crash without injury.

  But if they had…where were they?

  “So where are they?” Rhonda asked aloud, putting to words what they were both thinking. “Where could they have gone?”

  “Maybe they headed for Lakeview?”

  Rhonda looked at him. “Isn’t that like fifteen miles from here? Twenty even? How could they have even considered walking that whole way?”

  “This is Max we’re talking about. He could have convinced them to do anything.”

  Rhonda didn’t reply, she just shook her head looking at the smashed RV. Her eyes glazed over and she swayed as she visualized the wreckage and thought back to the visceral, brutal accident that had just happened.

  Phil turned towards the shadows of the buildings across the street, a faint sound catching in his ear. As he turned he saw two headlights easing down route 29, back towards them, set high up off the ground, as if the vehicle behind them was a truck…

  Or a van.

  “Rhonda?” he asked, grabbing her arm. “We might have company.”

  Rhonda whirled, snaking her pistol from her belt, scowling at the approaching headlights.

  “I don’t have much ammunition,” Phil whispered, his own pistol now in hand.

  “Neither of us do,” Rhonda said, taking a cautious step backwards as the van drew closer. It swept around and the brakes snapped, catching tires on the pavement and swinging the rear of the van around into a tight sideways drag. The passenger door flung open, and a man leaped out as the side door slid aside and a second man jumped out onto the pavement, both of them clutching assault rifles.

  Phil broke left, ducking behind some of the remains of the RV and squeezed off two gunshots. One of the men dropped to his own left as the two rounds clanged off the metal hide of the van, and Rhonda fired more herself. The passenger window exploded into a shattering web of safety glass as the van passenger swung up his rifle and fired a handful of times. Sparks slammed off the metal wreck Phil was hiding behind as Rhonda scrambled to find cover herself. Phil stood and returned fire, drawing the shooter’s attention.

  “Run, Rhonda, run!” he shouted, making himself a target. Attention was focused on him, rifles firing again even as Phil darted left out of the way, chunks of dirt and twisted plastic blasting up into the air at his heels. Rhonda jerked the other way, though the van leaped after her, charging down the road as she tried to scramble across route 29, heading for a scant collection of trees ahead. The van blocked her way, and another man jumped out of the back, through the already opened door, tackling her to the ground.

  “Rhonda!” Phil screamed, twisting towards her and firing his weapon, but after two shots, the weapon simply clicked on an empty chamber. Standing in the midst of the smashed RV, Phil looked left and right, noticing the two approaching men with rifles pointing at his chest.

  “Don’t bother,” one of them said. “Nowhere to go. We’ve got your wife.”

  Phil looked over towards the van and saw her being dragged into the rear of it and heard the muffled thump of body against metal.

  “Might as well just come with us, buddy.”

  Phil scowled at them, then dropped his pistol and raised his hands. They grabbed him by the scruff of his shirt and pressed him forward, walking him like a shamed dog, pushing him along as he clumsily stumbled towards the vehicle.

  “Take it easy, I’m coming,” Phil muttered as he was pressed, half-shoved towards the van. His shin hit the edge, and he toppled over into the vehicle, slamming his face on the metal floor.

  “Phil!” Rhonda yelled from the opposite side as her husband tried to push himself up. One of the gunmen stepped in and drove his foot deep into Phil’s back, ramming him back down onto the floor.

  “No funny business!” he shouted. As Phil slammed back down, he looked to his left, eyes falling on another heap in the corner, a huddled mass of clothes and limbs.

  “Is that—?” he asked, but the stock of a rifle blasted into the side of his face, sending stars across his vision.

  “It’s Brandon,” Rhonda replied. “They found Brandon.”

  “We found your little snot-nosed son, too,” the man barked, holding his weapon close. “But he was in the car when it went in the lake. Your boy’s dead. D. E. A. D. Dead.”

  Rhonda’s eyes widened, feeling like they might tear open and drop the milky whites out into her lap.

  “No. You’re lying.”

  “Him and his little friend, too,” the man said. “Both of them went in the water.”

  “Shut up!” Phil screamed, starting to scramble to his feet, right fist clenched. The man turned and kicked him in the chest, slamming him back down to the floor.

  “You’re lying!” screamed Rhonda and she jumped to her feet, leaping at him, clawing with angled fingers. The gunman stepped aside and rammed the stock of his weapon into her stomach, doubling her over. As she stumbled backwards he took another swing, but she stepped under the swing and threw a rigid uppercut, slamming bony fingers into the underside of his beard-covered chin. His teeth clamped together, and he took two steps backwards, back ramming the inside of the van. Rhonda jumped towards him, screaming and yelling something intelligible, beating on his face and chest with both fists. A second man jumped into the van and swung a booted foot, smashing the bridge of her nose and sending her head snapping back, and she tumbled to the floor of the van.

  “Yikes, she’s crazy!” said the gunman, looking at her laying there. “You done got your butt whupped by a woman. Nice one, Larry.”

  Larry shook his head back and forth to clear the cobwebs and pressed a hand to his bloodied nose. His eyes wandered as if he still wasn’t sure where that truck had come from that just ran him over. Beside him, the side door of the van slid and slammed shut and the engine gunned, easing the dark vehicle forward, going north up 29 towards Lakeview Shopping Mall.

  ***

  The world was silent at the grassy shore of Peoria Lake, a seeming oasis away from the burnt and scalding wreckage of the world. Long grass swayed in the gentle dawn breeze as calm waters lapped at the shoreline. Water moved in steady and even waves, slight ripples cascading to larger waves, reaching out towards the grass and trees like fingers. Fingers of water, clawing at the ground, digging at the grass, trying to clutch to the narrow woode
n stalks of trees.

  Then there were fingers. And a hand. An entire arm reached out of the murky, dark water, fingers tangling with grass, clutching at dirt and pulling; pulling as if life itself might depend on it.

  It did.

  Max broke the surface of the water, gasping and spitting, hauling himself up and out, the muscles of his arms bunching with the effort of his climb from the lake. He could feel the dead weight of Brad in his other arm, looped around his chest and pulling, the young man struggling with everything he had. Shouting up into the purple sky, he twisted and yanked his shoulder free from the water, pulling Brad’s face out and dropping him back first on the grassy shoreline. Immediately Brad coughed and spat, his mouth working for desperate intake of air and Max slumped down next to him, legs still submerged in the lake that had very nearly taken both of their lives.

  If not for the bullet that had shattered the rear window of the Subaru WRX, it very likely would have taken their lives.

  “Brad!” Max shouted, grabbing his friend’s shoulder and jostling it. “Wake up!”

  “I’m ’wake,” Brad groaned, moving on the grass, his eyes opening, then closing again. “I’m awake.”

  Both boys lay there, gasping and breathing, consuming air as if it were the tastiest dessert, drawing it deep within themselves and treasuring the very feel of it as it coated their throat and filled their lungs. It tasted fantastic, almost as if the air over half the country wasn’t coated in deadly radioactive particles.

  “Did you see Brandon?” Max asked, rolling over and pushing himself up on his elbows.