The Last War Box Set, Vol. 2 [Books 5-7]

by Schow, Ryan

  The way she’s been training, I’m thinking she might even be better than me, but the fact that I know she thinks this has me wondering when the day will come where she’ll get too cocky and get shot again, this time killed.

  Focus, Cincinnati, I tell myself.

  Focus.

  I trot forward, match Macy’s pace to my own. I steal a glance at the college rooftop hoping to see the vets in place, but they aren’t on the roof as far as I can see. We left too soon. We were too ambitious.

  A sickening pall of dread overshadows me, has me wondering if this one wrong move will be our downfall.

  Too late now, I tell myself.

  I reach the end of the street, duck behind another car—this one smoked, all the glass blown out, the pleather upholstery melted and curled black.

  Macy is now on Hayes. She ducks behind a metal trashcan affixed to the street. Looking at me, she makes the signal that she’s got eyes on the boy. He just slipped inside a brown and gray building that was once a café.

  When he disappeared inside, he had an assault rifle at his side and a big black backpack on. The size of it and the way he moved has me thinking he’s got something in there.

  I point to the girl, make the sign that I have eyes on her.

  She’s working on one side of the corner of the building with what looks like a hand operated corkscrew, the kind my grandfather used to use. The building she’s working on is a four story, dark green residence.

  “Oh no you don’t,” I mutter.

  With the corkscrew, she starts on the other side of the corner with her back facing me. I cross the street on light feet, my gun in and my knife out. When I’m about five feet from her, she either hears me or senses something, or perhaps her sixth sense kicks in. She turns and gets wide eyed. I can’t reach her with the knife, but I can hit her with a kick to the shoulder as she tries to get up.

  By the time she lands on her butt a few feet away, I’ve got my pistol in my hand and she’s got hers. Slowly getting up, her hand steady, she says, “Look at you, all Linda Hamilton and shit.”

  I get the Terminator 2 reference and it sort of fuels me. “You shouldn’t play with dynamite,” I tell her. “Or body-slinging catapults.”

  “Your side started this,” she says.

  “The hell we did.”

  I’ve got her dead to rights, but she’s got me, too. She turns for the slightest second, fast enough to see Macy heading into the café.

  “Bucky!” she shouts. She looks back at me, quick, her face curling into a devious grin. “You want to go guns or knives, because it looks like you can’t decide.”

  “Knives,” I say.

  “On the count of three,” she says. “One, two, three.”

  We both lower our pistols to the ground, then kick them aside. Now she’s got a knife and I’ve got a knife. Hers is longer, but I’m good with mine.

  “I’m gonna cut you,” she says, grinning, moving toward me.

  The first cut drifts millimeters past my cheek and then I’m suddenly in the fight. The world closes in around me, putting us in the small center of everything. At this point in time, my training with Rider kicks in and I’m moving with confidence.

  The thing about knife fighting is you know you’re going to get cut, you just have to accept it and go. You have to say “yes” to the marring up of your own body because when the blade hits, it’s right then that you either live or die. Rider says everyone freaks out over that first cut and then it’s game over. He says, “Once this happens, you just lost your timing, your advantage, and if your attacker is anything like me, you probably just lost your life.”

  My eyes are on her eyes, but then they drop to her breastbone. In training, more times than I can count, Rider said, “Eyes on the center mass. That way you can see everything.”

  A knife fight isn’t just about knives. That’s just one weapon of many. The key, Rider told us, is to use all your weapons.

  She swings again; I duck under her arm, come up and stick her in the triceps with the point of my blade. She grunts, then swings back; I duck back under the arcing blade and get inside her guard, driving a knee up into her ribs then head butting her in the nose.

  She staggers backwards, the blood geysering out of both nostrils.

  Not worrying about the mess, I drive a shoulder into her, knocking her on her ass. She’s a bleeding mess but trying to get up when I kick her in the face, grab her knife and mount her.

  Check your surroundings, a voice inside me says. My training. I look around, fast, taking in everything, making sure there is nothing, as in no other immediate threat.

  “How many more of you?” I growl, my adrenaline surging.

  Smiling, one ear mashed into the sidewalk, a face slicked red, she says, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  Gulping heavy, coughing out blood, the twenty-something girl works her way through a pain-filled fit.

  “So now how do you want it?” I ask, staying put. “A bullet or the blade?”

  “Bullet,” she says, the fight draining, the coughing up of blood persisting.

  In the span of two seconds, I violently but purposefully snake my arm around her throat, then use Rex’s rear naked choke to put her to sleep.

  When she’s out cold, I get to work fast.

  “This is war, right?” I mumble to myself. “And war has no rules, no law—it’s just…war.”

  In Guantanamo Bay, the first thing they do is break your will. They take away everything you hold dear. So when I start shearing away her hair, I’m thinking this is cruel and it’ll send a message, but at least she won’t be dead.

  When her head is nothing but roughly hewn sprouts and a few open cuts, I lift the collar of her shirt, run the blade down the back of it, cutting it away. First the hair, then the clothes. That’s how they keep you docile. That’s how they break your spirit without killing you.

  Inside the building Macy is in, I hear three tight shots. That’s how we were taught to shoot. Two to the chest, one to the head. Macy’s fine. Going back to my girl, I cut away her pants, throwing the scraps in a pile beside me. The girl starts to stir in time for me to cut off her bra. She’s in bad shape, and she’ll be humiliated, but she’ll live.

  A moan escapes her. She is trying to figure out what’s going on. I cut the sides of her underwear, yank them off, rocking her body. She turns over, looks at me through unfocused eyes.

  “One day you’ll thank me,” I say.

  Macy comes out of the café about this time with a backpack on her shoulders. “What the hell?” she says. She’s looking at the naked girl who is now seeing her sheared hair and her clothes lying on the sidewalk all around her.

  “Saw this on TV when they did a special on Guantanamo Bay,” I say to the girl. “I didn’t like guns or knives, so you’ll forgive me if I took the liberty to exercise option three.”

  She picks up a handful of hair that just slides through her fingers. Looking horrified, she runs a shaky hand over her baldish head. Breathless, she says, “What did you do?”

  “Saved your life.”

  By now I have her clothes in one hand and my pistol in the other. “Run back to whatever garbage can you slithered out of, or just leave your little gang of losers—”

  “What did you do to Bucky?” she asks Macy, eyes bubbling over, tears mixing with half a face full blood.

  “Sent him to his maker.”

  She stands like a newborn calf and takes a step toward Macy, but I step in and say, “Whoa, whoa girl. Your life is yours for now, but it won’t be if you keep at it. Now you have your shoes and socks, so why don’t you get your skinny ass moving and don’t come back here ever again. I see you I won’t talk, I’ll just shoot, got it?”

  With pinched features and a beet red face, with her modesty ripped from her and her hair lying on the sidewalk, she spits at my feet then starts up the street not bothering to cover up. I wipe the blight away thinking I deserved that. The way I figured, it was easier than trying to l
ive with myself for executing a girl.

  “Why did you do that?” Macy asks.

  “Because I couldn’t kill her. Not when I’d already beaten her.”

  “So you do that?”

  “In some circles they’d call me merciful.”

  “Yes, well mercy is for the weak, Mother, and you’d best get that idea through your head.”

  Taking the backpack and the assault rifle off her shoulder, she unzipped the bag and showed me several wraps of dynamite and a smattering of tools.

  “Maybe they’re just launching bodies at us or dropping buildings on us,” Macy says, “but before I shot that kid, he said they were two-hundred strong over at the college. Not ours, but Lone Mountain.”

  “Lone what?”

  “It’s the big building with the adobe colored roof up the hill.”

  The air seems to drop out of me. That was the direction the naked girl ran in. “Get back home,” I say as I break into a run.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Get home!”

  I catch the nude girl fast-walking up Masonic. She’s almost at Turk. I think Turk is the road Lone Mountain is most likely on. As if I’m not already gasping for breath, my lungs are now on fire, too. When I’m about fifty yards out, the girl turns and sees me and breaks into a sprint. I stop, aim the weapon at her then empty the mag into her back. She kicks forward, her body shot out over her legs. When she goes down, the girl goes down hard.

  Taking a deep breath, I slow to a steady jog, finally catching up to her where she lay face-down on the ground. She’s got three holes in her back: one in her kidney, one dug into her upper spine and the third just below her neck.

  She’s huffing, panting, making the sounds of a dying animal.

  Don’t think about it, I tell myself as the sickness wiggles its way up through me. Kneeling down, I use my blade to open the girl’s carotid artery. It’s better for her this way. I cut her again inside her thigh, right were Rider said to cut. In less than a minute it’s over with.

  All the dying is done.

  “Put your weapon down and your hands up,” the voice says. Startled, crying silent tears, I look up and see a young boy with a pistol drawn on me. He must’ve heard the shots.

  You deserve this, I tell myself.

  I lower my knife, start to put my hands up but that’s when I hear the shot fired and see a hole open in his forehead. Three more guys round the corner of Turk onto Masonic. They’re in a flat out sprint. I duck into a very narrow alcove as Rex and Rider open fire and take down the three teens.

  Turning, seeing Rider waving me down, I sprint in his direction, pushing my physical limits. Rex fires three more rounds, the bullets whistling past me as I zero in on Rider. When I reach them, the three of us double-time it back to base where Rider can tell me I’m a moron in between breaths. He’s kind of right. I should’ve killed the girl back on Hayes.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “Sorry like a girl,” he says, and now I know he’ll forgive me. The man holds women in high esteem more than anyone I know, so when he’s joking with me about gender, I know he’s kidding, or in this case, begrudgingly forgiving me.

  That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped seeing the girl gasping for her last breaths. In my head, the horror of what I’ve done plays on, unbidden.

  When we get back inside the walls of our fortress, I say, “Did I just start a war?”

  “They started it. But when they find the girl you killed, and when they find those other boys, then yes, it’ll escalate and soon enough we’ll be up to our tits in the soup.”

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  The girl’s feet hurt. Her back hurt and she was sweating, but mostly it was her feet. Maria turned, looked at her and said, “This moping business doesn’t suit you.”

  “Not moping,” the girl said, shoving her hair out of her face.

  Maria stopped, waited for the child, then said, “Let’s go into town and find something to eat. Maybe the food will give you the energy to walk faster.”

  They ventured off the highway, which was stacked with damaged cars, dead people and roadside garbage. Off the beaten path, they found blown up buildings and homes, more dead people and more street side garbage. A couple of people were smoking crack on the side of the road, not even hiding it. A dozen feet away, there was a dead man sprawled face first in the gutter. There were a couple of tents nearby, old looking, worn.

  “Looks like we’re on the scenic route,” she said.

  For some reason, she didn’t want the girl to see the body, but that’s because she knew children were afraid of dead people.

  “Come here,” Maria said.

  The girl came over.

  Maria reached out her hand and the girl reluctantly took it. Maria walked her across the street then stood in front of the dead person. The girl didn’t want to look at it.

  “This is the world now,” she told the girl. “Look at him.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “If you start whining, or heaven forbid you start crying, I’m taking him with us. He’ll sleep with us, eat with us, walk with us. He’ll even watch you pee of you don’t look at him right now.”

  “He can’t walk,” the girl mumbled. “He’s dead.”

  “Then you’ll drag him along behind you with a chain, like an unruly mutt.”

  “What’s unruly?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You either look at it now and we’ll leave, or we take it with us.”

  Maria took the girl’s face, forced her to look at it, then let go. The child crunched up her face, which made dimples high on her cheek just under each eye.

  Maria let go of her hand, then used her foot to roll the body over. The underside was wet and it stunk worse than anything she could have imagined. There were bugs on his face, maggots packed in and around his eyes. A few flies circled his mouth before settling on his lips.

  When Maria looked up, the child was studying the face.

  “Gross,” she said.

  “Indeed it is,” Maria replied. “Now we sit and stare at it until it no longer affects us.”

  “What is affects?”

  “What I’m trying to say is you can’t be scared of anything in this world. Or grossed out. You can’t be scared of not being alone, or being with me. You can’t be scared of being around dead people or drug addicts or people with guns and knives. If you want to live in this world with me, we’re going to do some scary stuff and you can’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Do you miss your parents?”

  Her lips bunched together and she looked down, her hands falling at her sides, her entire spine seemingly curving forward extra far.

  “Well at least you’re not sobbing like some little crybaby, so that’s good. If you were doing that, I would have killed you long ago.”

  “Like you killed my mommy and daddy?” she grumbled.

  “The car killed your father, and your mother died from a broken heart,” she said. “Or a broken neck.”

  “But you did it.”

  Looking at the child, she said, “Does that make you scared of me?”

  She looked up at Maria, her eyes big and shimmering, her little bowtie lips pursed, her tiny nostrils not seeming to be the least big upset by the monstrous, sickening smell.

  “This corpse stinks,” Maria finally said. “You can smell it, right?”

  The girl nodded.

  When Maria looked away from the child, in the opposite direction of the corpse, she saw a half dozen little faces in the window of a nearby day care facility.

  “Interesting,” Maria said.

  The girl looked, but the faces were gone.

  “Let’s go,” Maria said, heading for the kids.

  When she got to the day care building’s front door, a glass door, she gave it a nudge, but the door was locked. She peeked inside the large building, but saw no one. With an extra hard shove, one she really put her strength into, she shoved the door so hard
it drove the metal lock through the metal door casing, cracking the glass and making a hell of a racket.

  Inside, it was quiet. In the corner was a large pile of coats. Were they hiding in there? All those little kids with their curious little faces?

  “Come inside, stay inside. And don’t make a sound,” she said to the girl who nodded. The girl did as she was told, standing just inside the doorway and waiting patiently.

  Maria went to the pile of coats, started pulling them off. When she got far enough down, Maria found the body. It wasn’t a child’s body, or the alive bodies of children; this was an adult woman and she was dead. Maria looked her over. No obvious signs of death, but she was definitely thin, and old. Or maybe she just looked old because she was decomposing.

  “Come out, children, I can help you.”

  She looked at the girl by the door, and the girl looked back, but no one came out.

  “It’s okay. No one will hurt you,” she announced inside the small space. “If you haven’t noticed, I have a little girl with me as well. We’re traveling together to find a place that’s safe to stay. It’s not safe here. I can help you. I can bring you to safety, if you want.”

  A little face popped out from behind a wall. She was maybe five or six years old. Cute, but dirty.

  “Miss Roberts died,” she said, her voice small, shaky.

  “Yes, I see that.”

  “She left us food, but it’s almost out.”

  Maria nodded.

  “What about water? Drinks?”

  A little boy stepped into the larger room now from behind the same wall and said, “There’s a lot of water but the food is almost gone.”

  “Well then we’ll need to find some more. Do any of you have backpacks?”

  A few more faces began appearing. All kids about the same age as the girl. Her girl. Looking over, Maria saw the child staring at the other kids, almost a relief for her, like she might have some people her own age to interact with.

  “Okay, everyone with a backpack please step forward. My name is Maria, by the way.”