The Fall of Polite

by Sam Kench

  Georgie left the street and got behind a vehicle. He heard running footsteps and a moment later gunfire hammered the area where he had just shot from. The footsteps ran off again in the opposite direction.

  EAMON FELT ALONG THE SNOW BANK between the sidewalk and the street. He got his hand on a chunk of ice and pulled it free. With his eyes directed toward the street, Eamon threw the ice chunk at the next car down from him. It shattered loudly against the trunk, and automatic gunfire soon opened on the same spot.

  Eamon found the muzzle flashes through the smoke and shot just behind them. A body hit the ground with a gargle and the area went quiet.

  SILENCE HUNG above the battlefield until the smoke dispersed and visibility returned. Probey slid his way out from under the van and looked over the dead security guards. He called out to his posse, ‘Who’s all left?!’

  ‘I am alive!’ Yelled Peter at the top of his lungs, as he climbed out from under the steering wheel. Georgie approached Probey and gave a short wave, then set about re-lacing his boots.

  ‘Glad to see ya, buddy.’ Probey said as he walked up to Georgie and gave him a brief one-armed hug.

  A honk signaled Lance’s vitality. ‘Horn still works at least.’ Lance climbed out of Buella and walked around the vehicle, surveying the damage. ‘Oh baby, what did they do to you?’

  ‘Sorry about Buella, Lance.’

  ‘Maybe I can fix her. I don’t know. I think so. If I had the tools and enough time. And replacement parts… and some raw materials.’

  Eamon approached the rest of the posse, reloading his shotgun. He was three shells short of a full load.

  Probey looked surprised to see him breathing. ‘You made it Eamon!’ Probey removed his yellow glasses and hung them off his collar. ‘Wow. You’re quite the soldier.’

  Georgie opened his top break revolver and shook out the empty cartridges. He displayed the empty Webley to Probey.

  ‘Need more .44 ammo?’ Probey inquired.

  Georgie showed four fingers, then flashed five fingers twice.

  ‘That takes .45?’

  Georgie shook his head then flashed five fingers twice again, more slowly this time.

  ‘.455? That caliber might be hard to find. Why don’t you ditch that for something else?’

  Georgie shook his head and loaded his last two cartridges into the Webley. The old gun had been passed down through the men in his family since his great grandfather had killed with it in WW1. He snapped the gun shut and holstered it.

  ‘Let’s see what these guys were protecting.’ Probey approached the van and climbed through the door. Empty bullet casings littered the inside and the area just outside the doors. Empty magazines were strewn about the largely empty interior of the van. There was a thick plastic ammo case ratchet strapped to the wall of the van with the lid popped open. Probey lifted the lid and found the contents had been fully consumed in the shootout.

  ‘Well what’s in there?’ Peter asked, semi-excitedly.

  Probey ignored him and went around the other side of the van.

  ‘What were they protecting?’ Peter inquired again.

  Eamon answered, ‘Nothing. There were just trying to survive.’

  ‘Oh. Like us.’

  ‘Not quite.’ Eamon grumbled as he turned his back on the others.

  Eamon checked the magazines of the fallen assault rifles; half of them empty, the others bare enough that they totaled under a full load. He consolidated all of the ammunition into one magazine, loaded it into a rifle, and strapped it across his chest.

  He noticed Michael, lying bloodied in the street, and approached his body slowly. He looked to Probey. ‘Are we burying him?’

  ‘No we are not.’ The cop’s answer was definitive; no room for argument.

  Eamon didn’t push. He took a silent moment for reflection, then gave the corpse a single acknowledging nod.

  ‘On the bright side, we can all fit in one vehicle again. If we squeeze.’ Peter said.

  ‘We don’t even have one working vehicle, asshole!’ Lance shouted, verging on tears again. He massaged Buella’s bullet riddled hood like a clay pot. ‘We need to find a garage and push her there.’

  ‘You sure that’s fixable, Lance?’

  ‘No, I’m not!’

  ‘Might be irreparable given the state of the world. We'd be awful exposed pushing her around and tryin' to fix her up. Maybe we ought to say sayonara to Buella.’

  Lance was no longer on the verge of tears… he was beyond that.

  10. FIVE, SIX, SEVEN, STRYCH, NINE, TEN

  MAISEY FOLLOWED Charli and Lucas on foot. Her face was no longer numb and the searing pain was beginning to creep back in. She took another pain killer, and hid her discomfort from the others. She followed, quietly, a few feet behind her parallel leaders. Snow fell gently onto her shoulders and chilled her shaved head. She had tried donning a cap, but even such slight pressure on her wound brought about significant pain and an upgrade to her ever-present headache. In time, she would try again.

  Lucas pointed up ahead, ‘Is that parking garage on fire?’. Two small plumes of smoke wafted from the fourth floor and up into the grey sky.

  ‘No, you idiot. It’s made of cement.’ Charli adjusted course for the structure. ‘There's people living inside.’

  THE TRIO STEPPED into the dark cement structure, its walls dirty with varying shades of grey and brown. A chill wind whistled through the parking garage.

  ‘Ramp or stairs?’ Lucas asked. ‘We could try to climb over.’

  The top of the first floor ramp had been blocked with vehicles, their tires slashed. ‘Let’s take a look at the stairs.’ Charli replied quietly. She softened her footsteps and moved on bent knees over to the wall. The door to the stairwell had a vertical rectangle of a window; glass lined with a wire mesh. Charli peered through it and saw a trash strewn landing and stone steps. She couldn’t see very far up the stairs through the window.

  She drew her gun and gently wrapped the fingers of her opposite hand around the metal door handle. She gave it a pull and found resistance. She gave the door a stronger tug and it opened a few inches before snapping shut. Charli peered through the crack as she held the door open. An elastic resistance pulled the door back to its closed position. Two pairs of stretchy yoga pants were tied together, and connected the inside door handle to the staircase railing. ‘Lucas, your knife.’

  Lucas approached the door with a serrated hunting knife. It had been a gift from his father on their first hunting trip together. He left his dad sorely disappointed when he couldn’t pull the trigger on any of the game they came across.

  Lucas fit his hand through the opening and sawed away at the pant legs while Charli held the door ajar. Maisey kept her eye on the ramp to their back. Nearing the end of the second pant leg, the fabric ripped apart and the door swung open freely.

  Lucas took a step forward, and Charli stretched her arm out across his chest. He stopped in his tracks.

  Without stepping into the stairwell, Charli leaned inside and looked up the stairs. It was dark in the stairwell. Very little sunlight reached this interior. The first floor landing was absorbed by darkness.

  Charli stooped and took up a shaft of wood that she was pretty sure was once a broomstick. She carefully prodded along the trash covered floor: a mat of empty bags, cups, food scraps, cigarette butts, and lottery tickets rose two inches above the cement floor.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Maisey asked, watching Charli poke the stick repeatedly into the mat of garbage. She turned her attention from Charli to the ramp and back again.

  Charli brushed trash aside. ‘I’m checking for- Ah, here it is. Bear trap.’ Charli cleared empty wrappers and containers away from the metal jawed snare hidden beneath the refuse; locked and ready to spring. It wasn’t large enough for a bear; made for a much smaller animal, maybe a rabbit or a raccoon, but sharp and strong enough to sink into a human’s leg and likely crack the bone within.

  ‘How’d you know that
was there.’ Maisey asked.

  ‘I didn’t know for sure. All that trash- It’s how I would hide a trap if I were trying to protect someplace.’ Charli answered.

  UPON FIRST ARRIVING at the converted gym shelter, Charli had pushed those in charge to add more defensive measures to the perimeter and surrounding area of the building. They had shrugged her off, but now that she had proven herself to the top dogs as someone worth listening to, maybe her warning would hold more weight. She decided she would voice her concerns for a second time.

  Charli’s reputation had steadily grown over the course of her time at the shelter. The government workers in charge first took note of her name when she managed to fix the generator that powered the lights and heaters. Dozens of others had taken a crack at the sputtering machine, but Charli managed to sort it out in six minutes flat.

  Her second notoriety garnering action saw her taking up a national guardsman’s fallen rifle after he was shot by a quartet of angry brutes trying to force their way inside. While others ran and hid, Charli stood alongside trained soldiers and repelled the attack.

  She was asked to join the guard rotation, but declined. Charli felt she could get far more accomplished through other means.

  After their scheduled governmental supply drop of food and medicine missed the expected arrival date by more than two weeks, Charli grew tired of waiting. She had lost all faith in the system.

  She learned that the men and women who were supposedly in communication with governmental officials in Washington DC, weren’t really in any kind of communication at all. Maybe they had been during the early stages of chaos, but all lines of discourse had been severed by the time Charli arrived at the gym. The bosses kept up the charade to avoid panic amongst the shelter’s residents.

  With the approval of those in charge, Charli organized a ragtag team of five. Lucas was her first volunteer. He needed to get out and do something worthwhile; he was tired of being cooped up, and was going a bit stir crazy while feeling thoroughly useless in a world that demanded every kind heart do their part.

  Once they were all trained up, Charli led the group on a medical supply run to a hospital that was rumored to be under the control of an unknown force.

  Charli was cautious. A less pragmatic leader may have attempted the mission in a single day; the hospital wasn’t too far from the shelter. For Charli, the excursion lasted half a week. She led her team into an abandoned flower shop on the other side of the medical pavilion from the hospital and surveyed it from a distance.

  There were nude bodies with broken limbs scattered around the hospital’s front entrance. The gang inside the hospital knew it was a scavenge worthy location that would draw in all kinds of small groups and isolated individuals in need of medicine and other supplies.

  They had a choke point set up in the central stairwell to the third floor that made for an excellent ambush opportunity. They would quickly dispatch anyone who was unfortunate enough to head inside, loot everything they had on them, then toss their naked bodies from the roof. It was a self-renewing supply source that did most of the work for them. They never had to set foot outside the hospital for this supply chain to function, so they never did. It was impossible for anyone to surmise how many members made up the gang or for anyone to catch them off-guard.

  Or so they thought.

  Charli watched the front of the hospital for three days; long enough for her followers to lose faith in her and question her leadership, all except for Lucas. He backed Charli up when the others urged her to make a move, to rush in guns blazing or else turn around and head back to the gym a failure. But still, Charli waited.

  On the third day, a lone man and woman, armed with a tire iron and a chef’s knife, wandered into the medical pavilion and hazarded the front entrance past the nude corpses. Charli tracked their movement as much as she could through the many large windows, though many reflected too much of the sun for a clear look inside.

  For a while there was silence, then a sudden eruption of automatic gunfire opened up from a half-dozen sources all at once. Charli located the gunfire against the glass front of the hospital; somewhere up on the second or third floor, clustered together in the center of the building.

  She kept her eyes on that spot. As the sun went down, the glare across the glass retreated and she could see inside to the stairwell within. Ah, between the second and third floors, she realized. An hour later, a pair of nude corpses plummeted into the earth from up on the roof. Charli tried but couldn’t get a good look at whoever did the throwing; they didn’t step close enough to the edge of the roof to become visible.

  When the sun had fully left the sky, Charli led her group into the hospital. They didn’t cross the pavilion, instead making the far longer journey of circling around the perimeter and approaching from the side. Charli was cautious enough in her opening of the front door to avoid setting off the string of Christmas bells that was laid over the tops of the interior door handles.

  The entire first floor was picked clean, demanding that anyone in need of supplies head up to the next levels. She quietly told the others that she would be moving up to the next level on her own. ‘I can move more quietly if I’m solo. I’ll grab what I can and meet you back down here. If you hear shooting, hurry on up and help me.’

  Lucas refused to let her go solo. He demanded to be her backup at the very least if the others couldn’t follow as well. A hushed argument led to three gym residents waiting in the lobby while Charli and Lucas quietly pressed on ahead.

  Charli and Lucas knew to ignore the stairwell. They pulled open the doors of the out-of-commission elevator and looked into the deep dark shaft. Below them led straight down to the basement/morgue, and up on the fifth floor sat the elevator car.

  Any little sound in the elevator shaft would result in a booming echo, so Charli and Lucas were absolutely silent as they carefully climbed up the service ladder to the fourth floor. The doors were left slightly ajar when the power had been cut and they were easy enough to force open while keeping a grip on the ladder.

  They exited the elevator shaft above their would-be ambushers and quietly set about gathering as many useful medical supplies as they could stuff into their bags and still manage the climb in silence from the bountiful, unoccupied fourth floor.

  The duo made two more trips up to the fourth floor with the other gym residents’ bags, and left the hospital fully loaded, without the ambushers ever knowing they had even been inside.

  The two gym shelter docs used up the gathered supplies quickly, but the scavenged goods enabled them to save seven lives that they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise, and to treat a dozen others with less severe afflictions. Charli’s mother was one of them, though she was now suffering from an unrelated illness that wasn’t responding to any attempts at treatment.

  ‘WATCH YOUR STEP in here.’ Charli said quietly in the parking garage stairwell. She used the broomstick to depress the pressure plate within the foot snare. The trap slammed shut, cracking and splintering the wood and folding itself into a quarter of the size.

  Charli pulled a short keychain flashlight from her pocket and clicked it on. She didn’t carry a backpack on most missions; her mobility was of utmost importance to her. She shone the light up to the landing and found a glare against a metal placard depicting the floor number. The landing was equally trash strewn but the stairs themselves were clear and appeared safe.

  ‘Don’t step anywhere you can’t see the floor.’ Charli held onto the door frame, stretched her leg over the trash covered floor, and found footing on the bottom step. She grabbed onto the railing and pulled herself onto the stairs.

  Lucas followed suit.

  When it was Maisey's turn, she first stopped to kneel down and slide the triggered trap toward herself. She picked it up. It’s metal frame was heavy but not overly cumbersome. She deposited the trap into her bag.

  ‘Don’t weigh yourself down too much.’ Charli said to her from the middle of the stairs.
>
  ‘I don’t have much else in here, just the stuff from the doc and the gun you gave me.’

  ‘You might want to take that out now.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Maisey unzipped her bag again and reached past the folded trap to fill her hand with the pistol.

  Charli continued up the stairs, shining the light at her feet. The landing was covered by another rug of garbage. Charli climbed over the railing and onto the next set of stairs where they reversed directions and continued up.

  The trio made their way carefully up the stairs, ascending into pitch blackness, the tiny beam of artificial light made insignificant by the all-consuming dark. The second and third floor doors were both blocked by vehicles parked up against them.

  Lucas considered voicing his desire to turn around, but kept it to himself.

  As they neared the fourth floor landing, the air in the stairwell grew slightly warmer but also smelled far more foul.

  Lucas and Maisey followed closely behind Charli who led the way with her eyes and light pointed at her feet. She stepped slowly and quietly, only able to see a few steps ahead of herself. With her eyes to the floor, she didn’t see the string of cans hanging from the ceiling by a patch of tape. She bumped into the cans and dislodged them from their place of holding, filling the stairwell with a cacophony of banging and clanging as the tin and aluminum cans tumbled down the cement steps.

  Lucas swallowed hard as Charli and Maisey synchronized cuss words, ‘Shit/fuck.’

  They froze in place, Charli shut off her flashlight and raised her gun toward the door above them where the smallest shaft of light crept in.

  They waited in silence and in darkness.

  The fourth floor door flung open and two silhouettes of men stepped inside the stairwell, one holding a baseball bat, the other holding a long thin pipe he had torn off the parking garage wall. It looked sharpened on one end like a skewer.

  ‘Who’s there?!’ One of the silhouettes shouted.