by Sam Kench
Georgie pushed open the door to the operating room and headed down a hallway with his saviors in tow. They continued to caution him against doing anything other than lying down, but he ignored them. The older two lagged behind and grew less interested in following their ungrateful patient around with each subsequent step.
Georgie rounded one corner, then another. He spotted his jacket on the floor, his rifle on a metal cart and his Webley beside it. He scooped up his firearms and checked to make sure they were still loaded: seven shells in the rifle, two in the Webley. Then he put on his coat.
‘We coulda brought those to you. We weren’t going to keep ‘em or anything. You’re welcome to stay here.’ The young skinhead said.
Georgie kept walking. He pushed open a door that he was pretty sure would lead outside and was proven correct. It was night time, but his internal clock was still set on “day”.
‘All right, I’m gonna go back to organizing the new food.’ One of the disinterested skinheads said.
‘I’ll help.’ Said the other bored bigot. The two took their leave.
The young one stuck around and followed Georgie outside and over to the vehicles. ‘Look, I get it if you wanna go out for revenge. I don’t know the whole story with your gang but I think I know that you want blood.’
Georgie stopped at one of many trucks parked within the base, nothing too nice, but good enough to handle the snowy roads without trouble, and full canisters of gasoline in the back to boot. Georgie held a hand out, palm toward the sky, and drew his fingers inward. When the neo-Nazi showed hesitation, Georgie lifted his Webley toward the man’s face.
‘Hey now, there’s no need for that. We fixed you up. We saved you.’
Georgie repeated the hand motion, his wide eye stared, unblinking, at the man.
‘Listen, I’m happy to help you get payback. We can kill ‘em and bring that bus back here. Let me just tell the others, we can put a whole group together-’
Georgie shook his head and repeated the hand motion one final time. He cocked the revolver.
Once the keys were in his possession, Georgie waited for the gate to open, then drove off the base. The bus’s tire tracks were clear as day and Georgie knew it had gone back the way they had come. He had a good guess where they were headed and it made tracking them easier.
Georgie drove straight through the night. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed since Eamon turned on them. His mind wasn’t tired, but his body was. He had a coughing fit three hours into the drive that didn’t let up for another hour after that. He wasn’t surprised to find blood in his cough.
His body was falling apart and he knew his timeframe was shrinking. He had a final task to carry out before expiring.
BY MIDDAY, Georgie had reached the farm house. The front door was open and the house was as still as stagnant water. The bus’s distinctive tire tracks entered the driveway, then backed out and continued down the other end of the road. The sky was clear and the tracks were in no danger of being filled by snow. Georgie recalled seeing cases of water in the house when he had executed Paul and his family. He entered the home and located the water. He downed a bottle, took two more with him, and headed back out on the road.
GEORGIE SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY following the tracks. By sunset he had crossed town lines twice. He no longer knew Eamon’s destination, but the tracks made his route clear. He ignored any other vehicles he saw on the road or anyone on foot. After another six hours of driving, Georgie parked on the side of the road and slept for two hours under the moonlight. When he awoke the sun was starting to rise. His journey resumed.
By noon Georgie reached the termination of the tire tracks. The bus sat in the middle of the road, blackened; a burned out shell of metal with ash all through the snow around it. A diminished plume of smoke gently wafted toward the clouds. Georgie got out of his vehicle and approached the bus.
The left side of the bus was riddled with bullet holes, as was the house across the road, it’s windows blown out. The area was silent, aside from the sharp whistle of cold wind through the perforated hull of the burned-out bus. Georgie endeavored to kill Eamon himself, along with Lance and Peter for letting Eamon get away with it, and anyone else who was with them. He hoped he wouldn’t find their bodies inside the bus as he climbed the charred metal steps. He would not be happy to be robbed of his kills. They were his prey.
The cushions of the bus benches had burned away, leaving only metal frames behind and there was a section on the left side of the bus facing the house that had been destroyed entirely where it was struck by multiple Molotov cocktails. Georgie spotted burnt legs sticking out into the aisle, barely decipherable amongst the other charred debris. He approached the blackened corpse and gave it a once over. Too small to be Eamon, could be any of the others.
Georgie exited the bus and approached the house with his Webley drawn. He neither heard nor saw any movement from inside the house, nor from anywhere else for that matter. The front door was ajar. He carefully gave it a light push and let it swing inward. The air stunk just as badly as it had in the bus, but the bus had better ventilation. There were several corpses in the front two rooms of the house, but no members of the posse.
Georgie returned to the road and analyzed the ground. The snow all around the bus was disturbed, clearly chaos had taken place. He ventured further down the road, away from his own vehicle. Eventually the randomness of the disturbed snow began to take relative shape. There was a stripe of well-trodden ground that Georgie took to be a jumbled collage of footprints. six pairs of feet, not walking side-by-side but seemingly in two malformed rows.
With the trail found, Georgie continued forward on foot. It would be an easy track for the seasoned hunter as long as the weather remained cooperative. He looked to the horizon, then to the sky. The clouds were pleasant. The sky was bright and calm.
19. A DEADLY CONVERGENCE AT KING’S GAS FARM
MARIA FELT DIFFERENT. Older. She had already learned to transmute sadness into anger, now she was learning how to do the same with pain. Any time her bruised ribs hurt, or the cuts on her face from the stained glass stung, she refocused that energy on Mark. She had pulled the shards from her face, but still felt slivers of colored glass beneath her skin that she couldn’t remove. She thought of a film shown in her social studies class; a documentary checking in on children who were near the Hiroshima bombing, now as adults.
One woman had lived with a shard of glass in her forehead without realizing it for most of her life, until it eventually worked its way out through her skin decades later. In thinking of Mark’s abandonment of her, Maria found her pain muffled and her hatred of him recharged. Her mind was too busy with anger to linger on pain. Maybe the glass would work its way out of her skin by the time she caught up to Mark.
The blizzard had stopped trailing behind her and now the sky was clear. Synthetic heat blew from the vents of the green Volvo. The old car had fought valiantly against the snowy roads and, with some slowing down and careful driving, had managed the journey so far without automotive incident. She found herself leaving the first tire tracks through the snow on some roads, while others seemed well traveled by foot and by vehicle. She followed the highway toward the state line and saw the toll pop onto the horizon like a blip on a radar. The lights of the toll-line lit up before her eyes, red Xs filling LED monitors above each lane. She hit the brakes with the toll still far off in the distance.
Two nights had passed since she left Brighton. Both nights she slept on the car’s rear facing way-back seat. She took an exit off the highway, found a crowded parking lot, and slotted the vehicle in amongst the abandoned cars, making sure to obscure the tracks that were left across the lot. On the first night, she found a pair of binoculars beneath the passenger seat, stuck lightly to the fuzzy floor with melted candy.
Through the windshield, she raised the binoculars and looked with enhanced sight toward the toll. She saw the LED “X”s above the tolls up close, then lowered her visio
n to the inside of a booth. It sat empty, as did the ones on either side of it. She noticed what looked like a wooden barricade stretching across each toll lane. It didn’t appear reinforced, and didn’t look too strong.
She moved the binoculars farther down the line and found a man through the glass. He was in his 40s. A brown fur coat draped over his shoulders and hung all the way down past his knees. He wore a black turtleneck and tight black pants under the luxurious coat. Gold chains hung around his neck and multicolored rings graced the fingers of both hands. Maria watched him bend down beside one of the barricades and pick something up. He turned to face her with a gasoline canister in both hands. He didn’t seem able to see her from so far away, and his lips were puckered like he was whistling. He walked with the gas can around to the back of the tolls and continued off the main road to a small unmarked building about 100 yards from the tolls. Maria watched him approach a large red generator behind the building, pour some of the gasoline in through an opening on the top, then set the can down beside it. He walked around to the other side of the building and left Maria’s line of sight.
She figured he went inside. She also figured one of those barricades wouldn’t be strong enough to stop the tough old car. She was willing to bet.
With the pedal to the metal, the Volvo surged forward. The “X”s above the toll booths disappeared, then reappeared and started to blink. The man inside the building fiddled with the controls, unaware of Maria’s presence. The “X”s became green arrows pointing down, then switched back. Maria didn’t release the peddle, she got in a lane and blew straight through the flimsy wooden barricade. The car was slowed none, and continued its forward charge. In the rearview she saw the man run out of the building in bewilderment, soon he became nothing more than a shrinking dot on the unfavorable horizon.
SHE WAS BACK in her home state, but still far from her actual home. The gas tank was nearly empty. She took a random exit and followed signs for the closest gas station.
“King’s Gas Farm”, the massive sign read. It looked like it was meant to rotate, but without being connected to a working power source, it only swiveled slightly in the wind. The sign was about as large as the entire adjoining mini-mart. The store and just two pumps made up the whole gas station.
The green Volvo became the first car in the lot and took a post at one of the two pumps. Maria exited the car and set about trying to find a way to get the gas into her car without electricity. The cold wasn’t as biting as it had been in recent weeks. Maria had lost track of the days, but with the air starting to warm, she thought maybe spring was approaching.
She wasn’t having any luck with the pump. She thought of siphoning the gas like she had seen in movies, but was sure the pump would have some kind of locking mechanism in place, and there was nowhere on the pump to insert a siphoning hose at any rate. She looked over the pump for a maintenance hatch of some sort, then thought back to what she had seen at the gas station down the street from her house. When the gas trucks came to refuel the station, they didn’t run their hoses into the pumps, they ran them into the ground.
Maria stepped away from the pump and began brushing away snow with her feet. After a few minutes of searching, she kicked clean a patch of cement that housed a manhole cover. Words etched in the metal lid confirmed that the gas tanks were beneath her feet. There was a thin slot around the perimeter of the manhole cover that she figured she could use to pry it open, but with what? How do I get the gas out of there once it’s open? Maria wondered. She knew where she was from a distant memory. Unaware of the town’s name, she knew she had driven through it with her family at least once. She hoped there would be a hardware store nearby as she left the parking lot on foot.
***
EAMON HAD LEARNED the names of the remaining recruits. Lee, who had made a stand against Probey, seemed the most capable. The other two were Grant and Alton. They hadn’t said much, but Eamon had said even less. He stood a few feet back while Lance looked over a mini-van parked on the side of the street. Lance had the hood up and was conducting a thorough examination of the engine. He had proven that he wasn’t going to be a threat, so Eamon no longer kept a gun trained on him.
‘Looks pretty good.’
‘Oh, finally,’ Peter said. It had proven to be a challenge to find a vehicle that was in working order and could seat six.
Lance did a circle around the car and his twitchy smile dissipated. ‘Oh, wait.’
‘What?’
‘Hang on.’ Lance got down on the ground and slid himself under the van. ‘No good,’ he said from under its chassis. ‘This won’t work.’
‘Why not?’ Peter asked, irritated and tired of walking.
‘Someone punched a hole in the underside of the gas tank and oil pan. Drained ‘em.’ He tossed a dirty funnel into the street.
The men looked to Eamon. He shifted and aimed his body down the sidewalk. The group continued the direction they had been heading. The others looked to the lumberjack for leadership, but he had none to give. He had no goal; no destination. His internal fire was dying and he couldn’t fight back the sadness any longer. He couldn’t even bring himself to enter the farmhouse upon finding Paul dead outside.
Each night the group had stopped, Eamon had planned to end his life, but each night he had the same thought: tomorrow. Why tomorrow? He didn’t know. It didn’t feel like cowardice; he wanted to die. It felt like something else that he couldn’t place his finger on. He hated what life had become; what he had become… and yet something stopped him from pulling the trigger every time he stuck the gun in his mouth. He was only leading this group in as much as they followed whatever direction he shambled. He felt a hand on his arm.
‘You think that’s big enough?’ Lee asked, pointing to a green Volvo sitting in the shadow of the massive “King’s Gas Farm” sign.
‘Might be.’ Eamon answered quietly. He started across the street toward the gas station and the others adjusted course to follow. He approached the car and placed a hand on its glass. The car had a way-back seat in addition to its front and back seats, the perfect size for what was left of the posse. ‘Lance.’
That was all Eamon needed to say. Lance sprang into action, hopping into the driver’s seat, popping the hood, and giving the engine a twice over.
‘We could stock up on food from in there.’ Lee said of the mini-mart. Eamon nodded silently and started toward the small building. Lee could lead the others when Eamon finally ended it, he figured. Not that he truly cared what happened to the rest of the posse. They could burn in hell right beside him for all he cared.
The rest of the group left Lance with the car. Once he was satisfied with the condition of the engine and the underside of the vehicle, he closed the hood and joined them inside.
***
SHE HADN’T COME ACROSS a hardware store, but, a block away from the gas station, she had found a tractor supply store. She exited the store carrying canvas bags containing what she hoped would serve as useful implements in procuring the gas from its underground tank. She was feeling confident, having found a hand pump that she was sure would get the job done if she could reach the gasoline. She had also acquired a pair of bolt cutters in case there was a lock on the tank, a rubber tube and hoses of differing widths and lengths in case one of them didn’t work, and a crowbar that she was fairly certain the store didn’t sell, but a looter had brought in himself and then expired with. She had torn it from the frozen hands of a corpse wrapped in a black rubber mat used to line the floor of a vehicle. Whether he starved first or froze to death hardly mattered.
On her walk back to King’s Gas Farm, she wondered if everywhere was as bad as here. She had no idea whether the mayhem was confined to the United States, or indeed, a smaller portion of the country. With how bad it was in small town New England, she guessed the chaos must be far reaching. She had never imagined a world where seeing a stranger meant kill or be killed, but she found herself living in one anyway.
I’ve gotta
be more careful, Maria told herself upon seeing that she had left the door to the Volvo open. Can’t afford stupid mistakes like that. She crossed the parking lot to the exposed manhole cover, knelt, and broke away the ice. Once the manhole was exposed, she stuck the crowbar into the slot on its perimeter.
‘SHH! QUIET.’ Lee said to the others inside the dark store. He pointed through the mini-mart window at a girl kneeling in the snow. ‘Should we see if she wants to come with us?’ He asked Eamon. ‘We might be able to squeeze one more into that car.’
Eamon lifted his eyes from the linoleum floor of the mini-mart to the window and the girl beyond it. His breathing quickened and something sparked in his chest like two defibrillator paddles coming into close proximity. He took this re-crossing of paths to be a sign; the reason he was still alive. Without saying a word, Eamon left the mini-mart.
A BELL RANG above the mini-mart’s door. Maria didn’t dare look up without her gun at the ready. She had both hands on the crowbar, and had the manhole cover halfway lifted. Her big guns were still in the car and her handgun had only one shot left. Footfalls thudded towards her. She dropped the crowbar and the manhole slammed back into place. She made the decision to draw her gun instead of rising to her feet. She gripped the lightly loaded firearm with both hands and took aim even as she lifted her eyes to meet whatever force had exited the mini-mart. She recognized him instantly. ‘Eamon?’ She said aloud.
He continued towards her as she lowered the gun and stood up. He was the last living person she had made actual conversation with. She felt glad to see him, until the look on his face made her doubt that he felt the same way. The mini-mart door opened for another five men to pour out behind him.
