by Ryan Schow
Chapter Twenty-Four
I hear the shuffling sounds of our feet, and the grunts and protestations of Marcus and Bailey and I realize we were shot with bean bag rounds and rubber bullets.
Honestly, and I’ll admit this to no one, but I’ve never known pain like this. It was even worse with the black bag over my face.
I’ve had more than enough injuries on a half pipe, skating pools, or riding the streets of San Francisco on the back of my board. I’ve lost skin to asphalt and Masonite ramps, I’ve rolled an ankle, broken a wrist and three fingers, had seventeen stitches in my chin and got credit carded in the worst possible way. If you don’t know what that is, trust me, you don’t want to know. The point is, if all those things happened to me at once, they wouldn’t measure up to this by a thousandth of a percent.
Every breath is a labor of pain. Each step I take has this pounding head of mine throbbing beyond measure, taking me past agony and into the realm of dizziness and nausea. And my knuckles. They’re swelling like grapes, both of them cracked or broken for sure. These guys don’t waste time taking us to wherever they’re taking us, and every time I get pulled this way or that, I wonder if I’m going to puke in this black canvas hood.
When we get where we’re going, I hear two heavy blows and two grunts, and then something hits my head and it’s lights out.
Again.
It’s pitch black. I have no idea where I’m being held. All I know is I think I woke to the sounds of men talking. My head is pounded meat, my ribs on fire with every breath. I’m thinking they’re cracked. Bruised for sure. And my fingers no longer seem real that’s how tight and swollen they are.
Feeling around with my good hand, I realize I’m in a bathroom stall. Well, what I assume was once a bathroom stall. There’s a tile floor and a toilet. There’s even a big roll of toilet paper. The stall walls are not the hollow stall walls of a regular restaurant or outlet store crapper. These are heavy duty iron walls that go straight to the floor, and I’m sure right up to the ceiling.
I give them a light pounding to test the metal. It’s rock solid. Outside the voices start up again. I recognize one of them.
“Are you being straight with us?” Marcus asks. The hollow ring of the words tells me no carpet, nothing soft. Definitely bathroom.
“Yes, sir.”
“I want to talk to the CO.”
“What did your DD 214 say?” the voice asks. DD 214?
“Says I have a crappy attitude,” Marcus replies with an audible strain in his voice, “but that I served honorably.”
“So you got an honorable discharge?”
“I didn’t say that,” Marcus growls, leaving that out there to hang. “But then again, that has nothing to do with nothing.”
“You shot a man,” he says.
“I didn’t shoot anyone,” he says. “You guys shot me first. I wasn’t even armed!”
“The girl from your group, she shot him. He might not make it.”
“I don’t remember any of that.”
“I’ll make sure the CO knows you’re here,” he says, nondescript.
“Tell him we only wanted to move through,” Marcus calls out, his voice muffled by the reinforced walls. “Tell him we don’t want to be here anymore than he wants us here.”
“You just need to okay from the CO,” the voice says.
“And that’s it?”
“So I’m told,” he says, leaving the bathroom.
“Marcus?” I say.
“Nick?”
“Where the hell are we?”
“Detainment facility. Solitary confinement, I’d guess.”
The smell starts to hit me. It’s the toilet. Almost gagging, my eyes starting to water and my head beginning to hurt from what’s about to be dry heaving, I reach out, find a handle, flush. But nothing happens.
“I think someone crapped in my toilet and didn’t flush.”
“Mine, too.”
“Same here,” comes the third voice.
Bailey.
Bailey who almost came to our rescue with her shotgun blazing.
She had to have known she was going to be shot, yet she came anyway. Whatever changed in her was changing in us, too.
“Thanks for having my back,” Marcus says. This is the first time I actually hear emotion in his voice.
“And thank you Bailey for having mine.”
“Yeah, well my left tit—among other areas on me—got shot to hell and it still hurts.”
“Hurts how?” Marcus says.
“Like when you guys get kicked in the nuts,” she retorts.
“Well thank you,” I say.
“Anytime.”
It’s hard to say how much time has passed when you’re sitting in a black box, but I’ve slept a few times, had to add to the toilet treasures a few times, just sat there in an empty daze a few times. Marcus and I talk a bit (he’s next to me), and I talk to Bailey, who sounds like she’s on the other side of Marcus. Her voice is kind of muffled, and we can’t really have a private conversation with Marcus between us, so the long bouts of silence grow.
Finally we get some food, but it’s not good. The water, however, is amazing. It tastes fresh and honestly, my lips are cracked open and bleeding. I only know this because I taste blood every time I yawn.
We don’t know how many days have come and gone before we finally get a visit from the CO. When he arrives, however, it’s clear he’s in charge. We can’t see him, obviously, but the authority in his voice, the no bs tone, he’s a man of few words, each of them measured.
“I assume you know where you are,” he says.
We all wait for the other to answer, and finally Marcus says, “I have an idea, but I don’t know the specifics.”
“It was a Wal-Mart before it was closed and turned into a storage facility leased out to several different companies. It was boats and RVs, but mostly it was big rigs, not unlike that hunk of crap you guys drove here in.”
I’m tempted to say “Which one?” but I don’t because it doesn’t matter.
My stall door is now being unlocked and opened. At that moment, the silence that fills the bathroom-turned-solitary-confinement is so thick you can spread it like peanut butter. My cell door opens and I can see why Marcus isn’t really speaking. The light feels like needles in my eyes.
When I can see again, I see the man in charge and he’s looking very authoritarian. He has both hands behind his back and two men, both with shotguns aimed at Marcus and I, flanking him on either side.
“These are real rounds,” the Commanding Officer says. “Not bean bag rounds.”
“You going to shoot us?” Marcus says, his voice caved with defeat.
“Will you give me a reason to shoot you?”
“Not if you let us be on our way.”
“I understand you assaulted two of my men. One of them might lose his arm. Hell, with the blood loss, he might lose his life.”
“I don’t just randomly assault fellow soldiers.”
“Nevertheless, that type of behavior will not be tolerated, so you will be allowed to stay as long as is required of you for us to make this city safe and then, if you’ve behaved yourself, and if my man lives, I will personally escort you out of my city.”
“What if he dies?” Marcus asks. He knows now that it was Bailey who shot the man, but he’s not going to throw her under the bus, which is very above and beyond for him.
“Then the next time you see me, it will be to put a bullet in your brain.”
“Fair enough,” Marcus says, surprising me. It’s not fair enough. They shouldn’t even be holding us here!
“How long is that going to take?” I ask, trying to come off as good-natured and caught in a situation beyond our control. “To secure the city and escort us out, I mean?”
He stands a little straighter, lifts his chin enough to look down his nose at us both. “A month, maybe two,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of people we’ve got to get settled, but we’re also holdi
ng folks here who are out-of-towners or malcontents. Men like yourself and your friends.”
“We’re not malcontents,” Marcus says.
“Your actions say otherwise.”
“I told you we were just passing through,” Marcus says, his tone sharpening once more. “His little squeeze on my left is breaking up with her fiancée so the two of them can go make babies in San Francisco.”
“I honestly don’t care what your plans were,” the CO says with a measured voice. “As long as we have a place to put you, you’ll be staying. But only if you choose.”
“I don’t choose. We can go back to our truck and we’ll go around the city.”
“I want you to stay, but so long as you choose to stay,” the CO says, almost like he’s wanting his suggestion to be ours.
“I already told you what I wanted,” Marcus barks.
“Although we are technically under Marshal Law, only the President can issue that and he is MIA, so now I’m the President and you’re my guest.”
“You’re the President?”
“Of this jurisdiction, yes.”
“So let’s say I want to stay, which will make you smile, but then say I want to leave, will you then just shoot me?”
“First off, since this country is officially FUBAR on an epic scale, you will never catch me smiling. And second, yes, if you tell me you want to leave once more, then I’ll send you out of here in a bag.”
“In that case,” Marcus says, “I feel like staying.”
“And you?” he says, looking over at me. I think about smiling, but right now everything hurts too bad.
“I love the smell of other people’s crap in the morning, afternoon and evening,” I say.
“I thought you might.”
With that, the two men lower their weapons, then shut and lock our doors.
Outside the bathroom-turned-solitary confinement wing, the CO tells his men, “Keep them on rations. Keep them weak. That means half the food, half the water.”
“What about the ones they came in with? The woman and the two girls?”
“General population is fine,” the CO said.
“Sir, half these women will kick those girl’s asses just because of the way they look.”
“This is Darwin’s wet dream, boys. No sense in me spoiling it.”
“What happens when we roll this place up?”
“If they’re still alive? I don’t know. My thinking is we just leave them. I don’t like the way the big guy looked at me.”
“He’s just like us,” he said.
“Time will tell, I suppose.”
“What if Anders dies? Are you really going to kill him?”
The CO, a company man who’d personally seen combat in fourteen different countries, glared at the man under his charge.
“Of course I will.”
“You think we’ll be able to keep Sac from spinning out of control?”
“Hell no, I just want to get as many people together as we can before we head out and make our own civilization.”
“What’s the goal?”
“We select the best five hundred souls, then we free the others and kill the dissidents, like that deviant back there if he proves to be as much of a problem as he is now.”
“You still want the girls in general population?”
“Now that I think about it, no. I like them for the community. If that’s the woman’s real kid, keep them together in a cell. Separate her from the other one.”
“They don’t seem like trouble.”
“On second thought, put all three of them in daycare. Maybe if they’re together, they’ll stay isolated from the others. We need that. You know how it can be in an uprising.”
“You think there will be an uprising?”
“There always is in situations like this, even more so if we don’t tread lightly.”
“So?”
“So tread lightly and deal with a heavy hand,” the CO said. Then, looking at his men, he said, “By the time this is over, mark my words, there will be a lot of dead people to contend with, but we will have our community and we’ll have our freedom.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Two months later…
After Gunderson killed the members of the Ophidian Horde, he left the ruined hospital where they were staying and found a home to live in. He did not sleep though, and lately he was not eating. He was missing his ex-wife and his daughter and he couldn’t help wondering about his son. He hated that his son hated him, and as a result, he’d come to a point of reckoning.
Whatever bad existed in him had passed down to his son. Gunderson left his father, too. Made his own way in the world. He was not a corporate man, a student, an entrepreneur. He spent the better part of his life as a criminal. And now that there was no such thing as law and order, and now that it looked as though the city was destined to rot, Gunderson stayed on the move, finding food where he could, water where there was some.
He tried to make a life at a home in Jordan Park, which was above Balboa Hollow in between the Presidio and the eastern most edge of The Golden Gate Park near the Panhandle. The house was gorgeous, but cold. And the neighborhood was cleaner than most, but abandoned, so quiet in fact that most times he felt like the last person on earth. If he died, he realized, no one would notice, no one would care.
He tried not to think about it, but he couldn’t help it most days.
Gunderson was all alone in this apocalyptic nightmare with no friends, no goals or aspirations, no one to answer to and nothing to do but survive. So he wandered through Golden Gate Park, assessing the survivors, making conversation where he could.
Mostly people didn’t take to him. It was his look. The black hair, the tattoos on his arms and up his neck, the pale almost ghoulish look of him. These people set up a community and it was clear they didn’t care for the likes of him. Most people seemed scared of him. He could see it in their eyes, but he was powerless to do anything about it.
The new ways of this world were telling him he was a better gangster than he was a man. As a man, he longed for friendship, companionship, some sense of being. But he could not be a man in this world and not be alone. So it was best to be a criminal. But even the criminals kept their own company. There were mumblings of a couple of gangs coming together, but he wasn’t after that kind of life. There was already too much bad in the world. After the great culling that took place over the last few weeks, the dead littered the streets by the thousands.
They were literally everywhere.
Whenever he went into people’s homes scavenging for food, he found them. Throats cut, bullet holes in their guts, their chests, their heads. Homes were looted, medical supplies gone, weapons and gas were taken. That left four walls, most times a bed and—by his own estimation—the restlessness of the departed souls still hanging around trying to figure out what happened.
It was beyond depressing. He felt suicidal.
He was walking the streets one day, fresh from Golden Gate Park where someone said he’d been coming around too often and should move on, when he saw them. Four guys. The kind of guys he recognized. He walked past them and they started to talk to him. He didn’t want to talk. He was tired. Worn down. Then the four of them caught up to him, moving quickly to block his path.
“Where you going?”
“Wherever I want, pal. Just move.”
He started to walk through the thirtysomething man, but the derelict pushed him back. Gunderson turned around to walk the other direction, but there was someone there to block that path, too. They now boxed him in. He lowered his hand down to his pistol. A threat unto itself. The threat didn’t work. The truth was, he’d weakened himself with no food and little water over the last few days and now he was regretting it. Rather, he was regretting doing it on purpose. He’d been wondering if he would die of starvation first, or dehydration. Those days, staving yourself to death was what passed for entertainment.
So now he was there. With four de
linquents. He knew the score. They were going to hassle him a bit, maybe rough him up, rob him blind. Or maybe they were like him. Maybe they’d kill him, make him pay his karmic bill. For all the people he’d murdered over the decades, he deserved to die out here, alone in the street and irrelevant.
One guy made for his gun. He slapped the man’s hand, shoved him off. The next thing he knew, he was being bum rushed. For whatever reason, all he cared about was keeping his gun. It was all he had left.
He tried to jerk it free of the holster, but the snaps were stiff, his fingers weak. The first punch rattled his brain. The next staggered him. It had been a shot to the gut, one that had his already aching stomach folding in on him. From there it was all too much. He went to a knee after a dozen brutal shots, then he fell over and barely managed to pull himself into a fetal position.
The blows were unrelenting.
He was hit in the legs, the arms, the back and gut. Some guy soccer ball kicked his head and he saw stars, but still he kept his hand on his weapon. When the flurry died down, he turned and spit at the men kicking him. Bloody phlegm spattered all over one guy’s chin.
This renewed their efforts.
While they were kicking him, while each foot connected with bones and sore muscles, with lips and teeth, he realized he did in fact deserve this. This was a just retribution. His own personal reckoning. This was the culmination of his life’s misdeeds coming to a head and for some reason, he was resigned to this outcome.
Finally someone dropped a knee on him, pinning him down, and then they wrestled the gun out of his holster and away from him.
His fingers were so thoroughly battered at this point, he couldn’t do anything to stop the theft. Finally everything stopped. Gunner snuck a glance. All four of them were standing over him, blocking out most of the afternoon sun.
The guy he spit on, the guy now looking down the barrel of Gunderson’s weapon, he said, “Killing guys like you with your own guns make this life worth living.”
He drew back the slide, checked for a round, then grinned and said, “One for you…”
