by Bell, Justin
“It’s not too late to just come out with your hands raised,” a voice echoed over the momentary silence. “My name’s Bruce Cavendish, I’ve known your family for a very long time! We don’t have to be enemies.”
Rhonda didn’t reply. She didn’t want to give away her exact position even though they had her pretty well bracketed.
“Are you the daughter?” Bruce shouted out. “Rhonda, right? I remember you!”
She bent down and retrieved another magazine from the bag, then removed the almost empty one and clicked the fresh one into place. Listening to the voice, she could tell the group was approaching her, walking through the narrow trees, trying to close the distance.
“Come on, Rhonda!” he shouted. “Nobody has to die tonight! I just want to know what happened to my brother.”
Rhonda spun around the tree and opened fire, roaring off a quick series of shots, each bang punctuating a trigger pull. She saw narrow trees ahead of her twisting in the glow of the car headlights and the scattered shape of shadows separating. Shots brightened the darkness with muzzle flashes of return fire and she ducked as bullets smacked into the trees, then kicked at the ground around her feet. She felt a white-hot burn trace the length of one thigh, then the warm wetness of blood soaking her blue jeans. There was pain, but it was pain she could deal with, and she pushed herself back up, moving behind the trees again just as the AR chattered another time, sending bullets drilling into the wood. One round hacked a massive chunk of broken bark from the group of trees, and Rhonda started to worry that her cover wouldn’t even last another twenty-five minutes.
“You had your chance! Hope you’re ready for what comes next!”
Gunfire echoed from the driveway, a long and steady stream and Rhonda lost track of just how many weapons were firing on her. The trees behind her jumped, thrashed, and cracked, and a pair of thin branches broke away, falling down on top of her.
She sat back against the trees, pressing a palm to her throbbing leg and drew long, deep breaths, trying to calm herself. Counting gunshots, she tried to gauge just how many of them were out there, but she couldn’t; the patterns were too uneven. What she did know was that there were a lot more of them than there was of her, and the trees were not going to continue to provide cover for long.
Dirt punched up from the ground around her as she turned and shouldered her rifle again, drawing down on one of the shooters. She pulled the trigger and fired twice, then adjusted her aim and fired again. She could already see the emerging shadows of six, then seven approaching gunmen. They were closer than she thought, moving in quickly and she had nowhere to go.
“Duck, Rhonda!” the voice was low and hoarse in the darkened night, and she reacted slowly, turning towards it and lowering herself at the same time. To her shock, Phil emerged from the darkness, clutching a pistol in two hands. As he ran towards her, he fired several times, the weapon kicking in his hand, shots roaring off into the night behind her.
“Phil? What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice a pitched hiss.
“I couldn’t just leave you!” he shouted back.
“What about the kids? Did you just leave the kids?”
Phil rattled off another series of shots until the pistol clicked empty, then dropped down as a burst of return fire shattered against the trees barely acting as cover. Branches thrashed and leaves dropped down around them.
“The kids are fine,” he barked back, then withdrew a magazine from his pocket. Kneeling next to Rhonda, he fumbled with the eject switch on the empty mag but couldn’t figure out how to get it to come out. Another quick succession of echoing shots barked through the night, shooting puffs of dirt up in the air to their left. Phil stumbled right, finally dropping the magazine from the pistol.
He tried to slam the fresh magazine in, but it didn’t quite fit and two more shots bellowed, bullets whizzing just above both of their heads.
“Phil, you put yourself and the kids at risk.” She grabbed the magazine and turned it around, then handed it back. “Here.”
Her husband looked at her, a determined clench of his jaw tightening his teeth. “I wasn’t going to leave you.”
“Then we’ll just die together and they’ll be orphans for the five minutes they’ll last against these people.”
Phil grimaced and made one last movement, slamming the fresh magazine into the pistol and lifting it with two hands.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he said with a sly smirk and punched three bullets into the darkness towards one of the bobbing flashlights. He heard a swift shout and saw the light jump, then fall, his heart leaping triumphantly.
“I think I got one!”
Rhonda couldn’t help but smile herself, even as she wondered how she would manage to get them both out of this mess she got them into.
Then she heard it. The noise. At first she didn’t know what to make of it. It was a low, grinding growl; a rumbling, mechanical roar. Her eyes scanned the area in front of her, trying to translate the sound to some vision, but she could not. Several of the shadows heard it as well, shifting their focus towards the house, and Rhonda followed their gaze.
She saw it then. Twin, bright eyed, old school halogen headlights split the darkness to the side of the Cavendish house, bathing the gunman in a surprising splash of pale, yellow light. The growl roared again and the lights charged forward, chased by crunching trees and gravel and Rhonda could make out the shape.
It was a pickup truck. Not just any pickup truck, but the vintage Chevy she’d seen behind the Cavendish house earlier in the day, only it wasn’t sitting there idle anymore; it was lurching forward, the powerful American-made engine screaming in the low sound of night. Thin trees buckled and dragged underneath the grill as it roared forward. The shadows started to scatter but not fast enough. The truck slammed into the crowd of approaching gunmen, and Rhonda actually saw one of them pitch up into the air, tumbling end over end, while another leaped backwards, thrown by the blunt force impact of the onrushing truck.
“Mom, dad, get in!”
“Max? You were supposed to be heading to town!” Phil screamed from next to Rhonda.
“Max, how do you even know how to drive?” Rhonda barked.
“Just get in!” Max shouted from the driver’s seat. He looked remarkably adult sitting behind the wheel, even if his head barely cleared the top arch.
“Mom, come on!” screamed Winnie, crammed into the back seat of the truck. Brad sat next to her, keeping his body low as he tried to keep cover.
Rhonda grabbed the duffel bag and threw it over her shoulder, then ran forward, leaping over an outstretched root. Phil kept up close behind, rattling off a few stray gunshots as a form of cover as he followed her. She swung her arm up and around, tossing the bag into the flatbed of the truck with a metallic clatter, then hooked her hand on the lip and vaulted up inside, trying to ignore the flare of pain in her leg as she did so. Barely clearing the edge of the truck bed, she rolled sideways into it just as gunfire barked from close by, sending bright sparks dancing across the thick, metal hide of the vehicle. Phil stumbled down into the bed next to her, and the pistol flew from his loose grasp, scattering across the ridged, metal floor.
“We’re in!” she shouted. “Go! Go! Go!”
Max slammed his foot on the accelerator, and the Chevy roared forward, sending more converging gunmen scattering away. Rhonda stayed pinned to the floor of the bed as bullets panged and whizzed against the metal and just over the truck.
“Hold on!” Max shouted just as the truck slammed into a low ditch at the side of the gravel road. It jumped up, the front wheels leaving the ground momentarily, and then they crashed back down onto the gravel. The tires locked tight, catching on the loose stone, and then he thrust the truck forward and right, hurtling down the declining mountain passage.
Stones spit and launched from behind the truck as it barreled down into the darkness and off in the distance, Rhonda could just see the shadows moving around in the pale he
adlights.
If she had stepped in it before, they had full blown leaped into it now, and their only hope was to get out of Dodge while they still could.
***
They rounded a corner heading towards downtown and Rhonda smacked her lips together, tasting and smelling a foul, putrid stench in the air. It was a smell that she didn’t recognize at first, but instinctively didn’t like. Phil had taken Max’s place behind the wheel of the truck, but Rhonda had stayed in the bed, just in case anyone had tried to follow them. In the sky above the trees, she could make out a faint red glow as they approached the main drag, and it was an ominous sight, as if the mouth of hell had opened and was glowing red with rage.
Phil downshifted and eased the truck around one last corner, and Rhonda’s fears were confirmed. The main street was thick with smoke, a dark and angry cloud clinging to nearly every scattered building. Two cars were parked along the side of the street as they made their approach, and when Rhonda glanced into one of them, she thought she saw the slumped form of someone behind the wheel. The second car was empty, but the windows were shattered and broken, and a layer of ash covered the canvas seats inside.
Phil coasted the truck to a stop and rolled down the window, leaning out.
“Rhonda, are you okay?” he asked. “Did you get hurt out there?”
“I’m fine,” she replied, choosing not to mention the gouge that a bullet had torn through her thigh. The active bleeding had stopped, though there was a dark, rust-colored stain on her jeans that she figured would never wash out. But hey, she could already picture Max bragging to his school about his mom’s blood-stained pants where she got shot.
Max’s school. What would happen with the school? More and more often now these thoughts were coming to her, images of what used to be everyday life that was now drastically changing. If they even still existed at all.
“Are you sure? You were just in a gun fight, for crying out loud.”
“Yeah, I noticed.” Rhonda looked over the cab of the truck towards the darkening main street ahead. No lights were visible, but the same eerie glow cast a crimson pallor over the narrow street, a strange sense of foreboding, like they were driving into an open flame.
“Keep going?” Phil asked.
“Definitely. We need to get home.” That much was true. They did need to get home, and she wanted to do so via the road, but looking at the rippling red air emanating from downtown Brisbee, she suddenly wished there was some other way to go. Phil wrestled with the transmission and finally clunked the truck into gear, pressing the vehicle forward and moving over the pavement, tires rubbing on the hard road.
As they moved further down the main drag, the air grew thick and bitter, a sour charcoal taste filling Rhonda’s mouth to the point that she felt like she had to spit something out. Phil took it slow, navigating down the street cautiously, swerving around a two-car wreck on the right-hand side, then easing past a strange mound of something unrecognizable in the middle of the road.
“Don’t look, kids,” Phil whispered, realizing as soon as he said it that he was ensuring that they would indeed look. Over on the left-hand sidewalk, two bodies were sprawled, arms splayed and legs at awkward angles as if they had run at full speed towards each other and simply collided into one final, vicious embrace. The red tint deepened as they drove along, the air itself looking as if the edges were burning embers, peeling away and floating off into the air.
When they rounded the corner, they saw it. Pete’s Market was engulfed in orange flames. Fire crawled up the walls and stroked the windows, then slunk along the roof, reaching up to meet the black clouds above. Flames had fallen from the market and splashed along the driveway, creating spot fires here and there, and two other buildings in the near vicinity were simmering and smoking, sporadic burns scattered throughout the walls.
Debris was sprayed across the road, much of it lit with flames, and everywhere Phil looked buildings were at least trimmed with flickering orange, if not fully engulfed. The entire town was on fire, setting the dark sky glowing with red, simmering light.
Phil glanced towards Pete’s as he passed, his stomach churning as he saw heaped shapes inside the windows—shapes that looked remarkably like human beings. He wondered if the fat man who had chased him down was in there somewhere, and if Pete himself had gotten patched up and pulled out before any of this shook out.
Rapid slams echoed from the roof of the truck cab and he swung his head around, seeing Rhonda pointing frantically to her right.
“Pull over!” she screamed. “Pull over right now!”
Her husband corrected his path and eased the truck to the right, coasting next to the sidewalk. Before he had even fully stopped, Rhonda was vaulting from the bed of the truck. She landed awkwardly on her injured leg and stumbled slightly but recovered before making her way towards the angled stairs of the town hall.
“Sheriff Greer!” she shouted. Greer was laying on the stairs, one hand pressed to his abdomen while his other arm was reaching far out to his left, bent over the ridged edges of the steps. His knees were bent and his legs laid motionless, and Rhonda feared the worst.
“Sheriff? Clancy? Are you okay?”
Greer groaned and moved slightly, rolling to one side. His hand moved from his stomach and Rhonda could see his tan uniform shirt soaked a deepening crimson.
“Sheriff! Are you okay?” she shouted again as she bent down over him.
“It’s…it’s okay,” Greer replied in a throaty croak. “Looks worse than it is.”
“Is this a gunshot wound?”
“Knife,” he replied. “Just a stupid knife.”
“Sheriff, what happened here? We were just here a few hours ago!”
Greer planted his palms behind himself and hiked up into an unsteady seated position. “Didn’t you hear?” he asked, holding himself barely upright with one arm as he kept pressure on his injury with the other.
“Hear what?”
He shook his head softly as if not wanting to betray some horrific secret. “There’s been another detonation.”
The color drained from Rhonda’s face. She could feel the warm blood sweeping down into her neck, leaving her face pale and cool, even in the surrounding blaze.
“No. Oh, no. Where at?”
“U…Utah. Natural gas plant. South of Salt Lake City...close to Provo.”
Rhonda’s eyes grew wide. “That close? How far away is that? A few hundred miles?”
“Yeah. As soon as the lights went out, things went sideways. Not that it was particularly calm to begin with. Once word got out about the nuclear detonation…well, everything fell completely apart.”
Rhonda leaned down and pulled Greer’s arm over her shoulder, then struggled to help him to his feet.
“Where did everyone go?”
They walked towards the truck. “I don’t know,” Greer replied. “Honestly I think most of them went home to just wait for the end. Some went east. Some are laying right over there in Pete’s Market. Too many of them are over there, if you ask me. I don’t even want to think about how many people have died in the last three hours.”
They approached the truck and Rhonda eased down the tailgate.
“It’s not your fault, Sheriff, okay? Don’t blame yourself.”
Greer chuckled, then winced and grabbed at his stomach. “I ain’t got time for blame, ma’am. I’d already made peace with the Lord as I was laying there. I was ready to go.”
“Sorry to interrupt your one-way trip.” Rhonda gave him a smile.
Greer chuckled again as Rhonda helped him up onto the tailgate and into the back of the truck. “I think I can let it slide.”
Rhonda pulled herself up into the back of the truck and slammed shut the tailgate. “So how long do you think this place has before radiation gets here? And what about further east? Denver?”
Greer shook his head. “No idea, Mrs. Fraser. Not my area of expertise.”
“Call me Rhonda.”
Greer no
dded. “Clancy.”
“I remember.” She started to lean forward to talk to Phil inside the cab, but a sound drew her attention away. It was a quiet growl and screech and as she spun to look out over the tailgate, she saw two pairs of headlights careening around that final corner, punching through the dark clouds of smoke.
“Oh, no,” she said quietly, then turned. “Phil, go!”
Her husband needed no encouragement. Faint pops echoed from the two cars as they approached, and bullets whacked and pinged into the tailgate, shooting sparks and echoes of metal on metal.
“Are they shooting at us?” Greer stammered as Rhonda pushed him closer to the floor.
“Yeah, long story. Keep your head down!” She reached towards the canvas bag that was wedged next to the truck cab and pulled out the SIG, then eased out the magazine as she lay stomach first, as low as possible in the bed.
“Yeesh, Rhonda,” Greer hissed. “Who on earth did you piss off?”
“I’ll tell you all about it, I promise.” There were only four rounds in the mag and she didn’t exactly have time to fish around for more. Pressing her back against the cab, she cradled the weapon in her hands and aimed carefully just above the tailgate as the two cars bore down on them. Three more pops spat from the cars, but the bullets went wide and Rhonda fired three swift times with the rifle. It kicked back, but she held it steady and as she looked down the barrel’s site she saw a hole punch through the windshield on the car to her left, then a second shot smacked the same windshield, starring it into a gooey web of safety glass. The vehicle jerked, swerved, then hauled right, jumping the sidewalk and slamming into a house with a ratcheting crunch of metal on concrete.
Rhonda adjusted her aim and fired the last round at the second car, but the bullet smacked harmlessly on the corner of the roof, sparking and spinning away.
