by Dixon, Chuck
Jim Kim put his hand through the collar and crouched, unsure if all his one hundred and thirty pounds would hold the big dog back should she—he chose to bolt.
“You ready for this?” Caz said as he pulled the top bolt free.
“We need our shit,” Smash said, poised by the door.
“Then that’s decided,” Caz said and yanked the bottom bolt up from the slot in the floor.
They shouldered the door open with Caz taking lead, rifle tight to his shoulder. He moved to the top of the steel steps with the sights trained on the little collection of gomers gathered around the car. Smash picked up the luggage and rushed to the door to toss it inside.
Jim Kim’s new boots ground on the concrete floor while Wendy lunged for the open door. He had both hands wrapped in the collar, and still the dog was dragging him inch by inch to the sunlight. The dog mewled deep in its throat, pleading, yearning noises.
The gomers moved at what for them was a hustle toward the steel steps that led up to the raised dock. Mostly they only got in their own way. The bagboy was the most determined of the bunch. He began to climb the steps on all fours while the others bumped against the raised wall of the dock the way goldfish bump the glass of their bowl.
Caz had a leather tool belt about his waist. From a loop at his side, he pulled a ten-pound mallet (Aisle 8, Position A). With a downward swing, he planted it in the center of the bagboy’s skull. The bone made an audible pop. Jellied cranial fluid splashed Caz in the face. His eyes were protected by safety goggles (Aisle 16, Position D). He spat and cursed, kicking out to send bagboy tumbling back into the others.
“We almost done here?” Caz called, stepping back. Wiped goop from his beard with the back of a sleeve.
“Last one!” Smash called back, breathless from exertion.
He walked the last box in and Caz followed, securing the door tight behind him. Wendy broke from Jim Kim’s grasp to jump excitedly before Caz.
“What is all this shit?” Caz scowled at the bags, cases, and boxes strewn all over the floor where Smash had tossed them. One of the boxes had split open. Blu-rays spilled from it.
“You ever play Xbox?” Smash said, grinning and red-faced from exertion.
27
“They took them. Why’d they take them?” Mercy said.
“I don’t know,” Doe said, eyes on the road.
The dead were scattered over the road coming toward Sleepy Hollow in either direction. Doe slalomed around them like they were slow-moving traffic cones. The Impala would fishtail and swipe them aside with a thump.
“They must have surprised them. Uncle Fuller wouldn’t have gone without a fight,” she said.
“Yeah,” Doe said, remembering the scorched skeleton on the seared grass around the pickup. There were steel pins and a metal ball socket in the ashes. Fuller had his hip replaced after a beating he took down in Homestead back during Andrew. He’d gone down fighting.
“We’ll find them.” Mercy nodded to herself.
“Open that can of noodles, okay?” Doe said.
They roared north along the township road. Wooded hills either side grew down to the shoulders. Night was coming on, but Doe kept the headlights off. The road curved away like a river of dull silver before them. He ate cold Spaghetti-Os from the can as he drove.
“You need to eat something,” he said. He held out the can, the spoon stuck in the red soupy mess.
“Gross.” Mercy watched the blue dot creep closer to the center of the screen on her phone.
“We can’t be riding right up on them. All we can do is get close and figure something out. That’s a goddamn army those crows have,” Doe said.
“Crows?”
“That crow on their shirts. Their gang colors or some shit.”
“Oh.”
“That dude back there? The one the fat guy killed? That was prison ink he was wearing.”
“I recognized it. Looked like your tattoos, cousin,” she said. “Could be these guys broke out of a prison in all this. Or were released. They stuck together after that. Took to the road.”
“They’re getting close to another town. They’ll probably stop there, right?”
“Which town?”
“It’s called Lyle. It’s off the interstate. Doesn’t look like much,” she said and held up the phone.
“Looks like a speck of bug shit from here,” Doe said. “Now eat something.”
She had some Goldfish as she watched the glacial progress of the blue dot, as big in her eyes as the moon.
A few miles on, Doe slowed them to a crawl. Mercy broke her trance, tearing her eyes from the screen in her hands. Through the trees, they could see lights playing back and forth from somewhere beyond the next curve. Beams of jiggling brilliance turned the boles of the trees into strobing black bars.
Doe parked the Impala on the shoulder and pulled the wire connection free to cut the engine. The high whine of motors echoed through the woods.
“That’s dirt bikes. More than one or two,” he said.
“Can’t be the crows. The RV’s still a long ways away,” Mercy said.
“Stragglers then.”
“What can we do?”
“We can wait them out. But I’m sick of that shit. We’re down below a quarter tank. We can’t blow past and outrun them. Not for long. What do you want to do, Mercy girl?”
“See what they know.”
They moved through the woods to a post-and-rail fence that encircled a field. There were skeletons of horses scattered in the tall grass. Bleached white with long skulls grinning. The buzzards and bugs had been at them. Mercy saw the loop of a leather bridle hanging loose from a skull staring sightlessly at her.
There were dark buildings on the far side of the field. There were lights among them. The motor sounds had gone quieter but idling. There were voices now. Men shouting.
A stable and a machine shed. All steel buildings. This had been a working farm once. Mercy followed Doe in a wide circle, moving well around the buildings, keeping a distance from them and the light. At a sudden burst of gunshots, they both dropped to the ground.
The gunfire waxed and waned. None of it was aimed their way. Doe gripped Mercy’s shoulder and urged her to get up and follow him. He duck-walked to a high stack of hay bales, big circular bundles spun up by threshers and stacked with a forklift. The hay was old and green with mold and had a sour, damp smell. It provided cover from which they could see a dark farmhouse on the other side of the stables.
It looked like an older home that had been lovingly restored. The metal roof was black under the moonlight. New white clapboard siding shone in the glare of headlight beams from three dirt bikes parked before it. The effect of the house’s charm was further marred by the plywood sheets nailed over the windows. Each had a rifle slit cut in it. Someone was forted up inside.
Behind the glare of the headlamps, a man was calling to the occupants of the house.
“You’re only making this hard on yourself!” the voice shouted slow and even.
Nothing from the house.
“Give us what we want and we leave you alone!” A new voice, hoarse, gravelly, from shouting, from somewhere in the shadows behind the lights.
A shotgun boomed from a gun slit cut in the plywood that covered a second-floor window. Once. Twice. Long tongues of sparks.
Rifle fire answered the twin blasts. Semi-auto fire raised showers of splinters around the upper windows and punched dark holes in the plywood sheets. A three-foot section of window frame flew end over end into the dark. A few rounds struck sparks off the metal roof.
“You’re really pissing us off !” a man shrieked when the gunfire died down once again. More voices spoke low as if in conference or just talk to work up their courage.
Mercy felt Doe’s hand on her shoulder. Whether to steady her or himself or to keep her from running, she wasn’t sure.
A muffled voice came from inside the house. A man calling out.
“What was that? Wha
t did you say?” said the hoarse voice in reply.
The muffled voice called again. Louder but no more clear to Doe or Mercy. A figure stepped into the light cast by the dirt bikes.
A tall man in a leather jacket that jingled as he moved. He held a handgun up in his fist, barrel trained at the house.
“All right then! You send them on out. But you take another shot at us, and alla you motherfuckers will die.”
From the front of the house came a metallic clacking sound. There were new voices raised within. High, feminine voices, rising in wordless pleading. A man’s voice rose to cut them off and the front door swung open in the combined glare of the headlamps.
Three women were shoved out onto the porch into the light. A woman maybe in her thirties, willowy and tall. She held two girls close to her. One maybe a teenager. Another barely so.
The door swung closed behind them. Bolts clacked shut with cold finality. The women clung to one another, faces turned from the harsh light illuminating them.
“Come on down, bitches. Let’s get a look at you,” the man with the hoarse voice said, lowering his handgun to his side.
Behind him, men in the shadows laughed ugly and low.
28
Mercy was trembling under Doe’s hand. He tightened his grip on her shoulder, silently willing her to stay put.
The woman came down from the porch holding the girls tight to her sides. They approached the man waiting for them before the lights. The other two riders stepped forward from the dark to cast a trio of shadows reaching across the farmyard.
The waiting man, the one with a hoarse voice, pulled the youngest of the girls from the arms of the woman. The girl yipped. The mother stepped forward only to be seized by one of the other riders. He held her around the arms in an embrace, locking them to her ribs. She screeched and kicked her legs.
The other girl, the older of the two, sank to her knees in the grass. A rider yanked her up by the hair. He laughed when she cried out, mouth twisted, face wet with tears.
“Let’s see what we have here,” hoarse voice said.
He pulled the younger girl to him and tore at her loose-fitting t-shirt. She wriggled from him and backed away, hugging the tatters of her shirt to her. The big man stepped to her and drove a fist into her face, knocking the girl, a child, to the ground. She yelped but kept the rent shirt held tight to her chest. He straddled her to slap her arms away and expose her small breasts. They were white in the moonlight. Tan lines described a bikini top. With a barking laugh, he tugged at the waist of her jeans as she cried out for her mother to help her.
Mercy wrenched herself free of Doe’s hold. She was around the high stack of hay bales, with him tripping after to catch up to her.
Her first shot sent a load of buck wild into the dark. Her second took the big man in the upper thigh and hip, spinning him away. The other two were slow to react. One brought up a revolver from a police gun belt. His eyes were uncertain as he searched, blinded by the light from the idling bikes. The third rider ducked away to run.
The revolver fired once, high and wide. Mercy slid to her side in the grass, loosing a charge of buck as she fell. The pellets took the rider in the shins. He fell mewling to the grass. She pumped a fresh round and made to stand. Behind her, an animal snarl rose in fury. The big man. He was up on one knee, holding a hand to the ruin of his hip, making a feeble attempt to reach for a holstered pistol on his right with his left hand. His head jerked forward violently. A fount of blood gushed from his throat. Doe stepped closer and put a second round through the big man’s head as he dropped to the grass.
“Get up,” Doe growled. He was pissed. He yanked Mercy to her feet and stepped away.
“Where you going?”
“Finishing what you started,” he said and trotted past the three women who were clinging to one another once more. The youngest was sobbing violently, shaking as if in a fever chill.
Mercy stepped up to the man she’d legged. He lay back on the grass, eyes wide, panting with mouth open. The revolver had been lost somewhere when he fell. He wasn’t any older than Mercy. A sad try at a mustache on his pimply upper lip. His t-shirt bore the silk-screened emblem of the crow standing atop the skull. Seeing it close up for the first time, it looked to Mercy like something taken from an old book. The boy wore a strip of black cloth tied like a sash under the police belt. Both legs below the knee were bloody strips of flesh and denim shining black in the harsh light.
Gunfire from closer to the house. Pop. Pop. Pop. Three flashes of flame close together.
Mercy trained the bead sight at the end of the barrel toward the fading nimbus of light still dancing on her retina. Doe stepped from the dying remnant glow. The Browning was smoking in his fist. Face gleaming with fresh sweat. His eyes alive with a wild thrill.
“He alive?” Doe said, gesturing with the pistol to the man
keening and rocking on the ground.
“Hurt but alive.”
“You ladies okay? They going to be all right?” Doe said to the woman standing now, holding her daughters against her.
“Thank you,” the woman croaked. Her face was angry, red with rage. Nothing like gratitude to be seen there.
“Anything I can do for you?”
“You can kill their son-of-a-bitch of a father,” she said and nodded toward the house.
Doe turned to see the shadow of a man standing on the porch before the open door, a double-barrel shotgun in his hand.
“That’s family. I got enough troubles of my own,” Doe said and turned to the man on the ground.
The man in the grass, a kid really, was rocking back and forth. His hands shook like palsy. His mouth moved open and closed, a mute wet hole. Mercy stood close, shotgun trained on the kid’s head until Doe waved her back.
“Were you in Harrow?” Doe said, leaning down to watch the kid’s eyes.
“Where?” the kid managed, eyes drifting.
Doe put a toe of one boot on the kid’s shin. The kid’s eyes popped open. He sucked in air with a hiss.
“Town back there. It was called Harrow.”
“Yeah! Okay!”
“There was a trailer park. A family there. You see that?”
“No.”
Doe put some weight on his boot. The kid gasped and blew, a child-like whine escaped his slack lips.
“You didn’t see a big old RV with a family? A big old grease fire?”
“Yeah! Saw that! Wasn’t there! Just rode past!”
The mother sent the two girls back to the house. They ran for the man on the porch. She stayed back, watching Doe talking to the bleeding kid.
“Where are you heading?”
“North. We’re going north.”
“Who the hell is we?”
“Us. All of us.”
“Are you a gang?”
“We’re an army, motherfucker,” the kid said, raising his head from the ground, twisting his mouth into a smile. A smile like a hungry dog.
“Whose army?” Doe said.
“Bird. He calls himself that. Just Bird.”
The mother stepped away, eyes to the ground. Mercy saw her stoop to pick something up. It gleamed blue-black as the woman tucked it close to her belly. Her white fingers against the dark metal of the kid’s revolver.
“I need a doctor,” the kid rasped. His lids were dropping. He fought to stay conscious.
“No doctor here,” Doe said.
“Are you going to kill me?”
“I am not. I’m gonna let you lay here. You ain’t bleeding much. You’ll last until someone comes for you.”
The kid’s eyes grew big. Pupils dancing. Shit scared.
“All this noise and light? Some’re heading this way for sure. They take their time, but they’ll be here.” Doe shrugged and looked away into the dark as if watching for someone approaching. “And you’ll be here waiting for them.”
The kid reached out with a bloody hand to grip the leg of Doe’s jeans. His head bobbled. His mout
h worked. His eyes searched the hard face of the man standing above him.
“You’re looking for your family?” the woman said.
“Yes, ma’am. Some of these bastards took them. My mom and little sister,” Mercy said.
“There’s an Explorer and a pickup in the machine shed. Keys in them. The pickup has a full tank. Take whichever you like,” she said and raised her chin toward the steel shed by the stables.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Doe said and yanked his leg from the kid’s feeble grip.
“What are you going to do with that, ma’am?” Mercy said, eyes on the revolver the woman held to her middle.
“I don’t know yet,” she said and turned to walk back to the house.
29
Gomers pressed against the wire mesh gate over the bank of entrance doors. They stretched fingers through the lattice of steel wire. New arrivals pressed on the back of the crowd, crushing gomers against the fence with the combined weight. Fingers were severed from hands by the increasing pressure. A gomer kid in a Superman t-shirt was strained through the wire like uncooked pasta through a mold.
Smash and Jim Kim dipped rollers into pans of paint and ran them over the inside of the glass doors, blotting out the collage of longing faces. Working together, they quickly had the long wall of panes covered in a thick coat of jet black paint. The job was hasty and messy. Their white painter’s overalls were spotted with blotches. The floor was slippery with pools of paint.
The jangling of the wire mesh rose in volume as the view through the windows was obscured. The coat was smeary. It would take a second and third coat to block all light.
The walkie on Smash’s belt squawked.
“You’re drawing a crowd,” Caz said from his post on the roof.
“How many are near the exit doors?” Smash said.
“Only a couple and they’re shuffling for your grid,” Caz said.
Jim Kim pushed the shopping car loaded with open paint cans for the exit doors. He left a trail of black splotches behind. Smash and Wendy trotted after.
