by Ryan Harding
She couldn’t move her wrist off the bed, but she still had the gun. She just needed to get the barrel turned up.
Orange deftly used her momentum to swing the gun in an arc so sudden she didn’t realize it until the barrel came back around like a floating eye to her stare her in the face. He’d bent her arm into a wing. She managed to curl her trigger finger out, but his grip kept the gun tight in both their hands. He pushed her elbow with his free hand. The barrel punched her lips against her teeth. She tasted blood. She twisted her head away from him, face to the box springs. The barrel bounced off her cheek.
He relinquished her elbow and pinched the piece of ear he almost cleaved from her a moment ago. She braced herself, but it was no matter. She somehow found the air to scream as he ripped the remaining strand of skin. He guided the gun to fill her mouth. She followed it with her face to keep it from punching out several of her teeth. He forced her index finger back through the trigger guard.
She found his eyes for an instant. She saw no trace of anger from the man (or whatever he could be considered now) she had stabbed twice, only a nearly palpable excitement; a child prodigy with a new chemistry set. His finger tightened over hers.
Maybe it won’t even work, Marcus.
Marcus didn’t answer.
Suzanne’s finger depressed the trigger, and her world vanished in a rushing ball of flame.
Seven
Father, deliver us from this unholy place.
It was a talent Pamela had possessed since junior high, this ability to pray in one part of her mind while she continued to interact with the world around her. Perhaps the conventional wisdom suggested you should do it alone in a quiet place, but she always thought she needed the lifeline to God especially when she had to face everybody else. So much uncertainty, duplicity, and unpleasantness. And terror.
“We need to get to a damned phone,” Ed said, as if reminded by the useless one in the kitchen as they marched past to the basement. The “useless” aspect of it reminded her of that plan too.
Protect us all in our time of need.
“It’s not safe,” she whispered to his ear. They led the way down the steps.
Watch over our family and all of these poor souls with us.
“You think we’re safe here?” Ed didn’t care if they were overheard on the stairs and didn’t whisper back.
“We can’t risk Adam’s life on a maybe.” She took his arm to guide him away from the group when they reached the bottom. “You heard what Patrick said; they might not even come for us.”
Patrick unequivocally said there wouldn’t be any rescue, but she didn’t want to rile her husband any further. It would be horrible if the majority opted for “Chicken Exit suicide by committee” with Ed standing in for Jim Jones. He put the “Ed” in hardheaded when he felt pushed. If Nathan hadn’t fallen so quickly, they would have inevitably clashed.
Accept Nathan into Your shining kingdom, and may he have eternal peace with You.
“How would he know? Do you realize the reckless endangerment lawsuit they’d have on their hands if they didn’t provide an efficient means of egress?”
Ed had never sued anyone but talked about it the way her brother claimed to be writing a novel for the past seventeen years, with the same net result.
“But he’s out there right now, Ed. A hundred working phones won’t do us any good if we aren’t alive to use them.”
Please let there be working phones and working us.
Adam looked up from the bottles on the floor to acknowledge her. “You saw him?”
“Not close up. He turned away.” She suppressed mother impulses to provide a more positive spin on it but channeled them into leading Ed away before he tried to enlist Adam in his crusade. “You be careful with those, too,” she warned, pointing at the bottles.
“Okay, mom,” he said. The more genuine version of assurance pleased her. Sometimes he made “Okay, mom,” sound like “Yeah, whatever.”
She steered Ed toward the far wall. Who on earth would mount a swordfish in their basement? Tackiest thing she’d seen since the carpet in the lodge.
“Why are you taking his side?” Ed nodded sharply in Patrick’s direction, where he crouched to evaluate Adam and Gin’s progress. Ed had filled her in on the strategy. Was “poor man’s napalm” really a thing?
Please let poor man’s napalm be a thing.
She didn’t like Adam helping, but it couldn’t be much more dangerous than trooping through the house with that girl.
She tried to sound neutral, but her jaw clenched. “I’m not! I’m on Adam’s side.”
Wrong thing to say, of course. Knew it and said it anyway.
“Adam’s the one I’m thinking about!” swore the man who let him roam around a potentially dangerous house. “Why would he trap the phone if it didn’t work?”
Because people like you would be foolish enough to try it anyway.
Not a prayer that time.
“We’re not even here because of Patrick,” Ed said, a little louder as if he wanted Patrick to overhear him, but not truly loud enough. “It was that idiot Lawrence’s idea to go this way, remember?”
She actually didn’t until he said that, but yes, they came on Lawrence’s say-so.
Please watch over Lawrence’s soul if it be Your will. Even though he asked Adam, “Are you gay?” at the lodge so I wouldn’t hear him (but You let me) and even though he used that awful C.S. word and a bunch of other bad ones too. It is not mine to judge, as it is between You and he. May he find redemption for his vulgarity and likely sodomy.
She rubbed her arms, suddenly cold. An ambient hum in the room tried to twist itself into Lawrence’s screams. A friend of hers who’d seen Muslims decapitate a soldier on a viral video said it was the screams which made it so hard to watch and impossible to forget. A nauseous Pamela carefully avoided her for the next six weeks.
The others filed around the basement, thankfully not getting too close. Where were Marcus and Suzanne?
“Patrick said they got him in Mexico,” Ed said. “What was he doing there, watching the donkey show?”
“What’s…what’s a donkey show?”
“You don’t want to know. I’m just saying, it makes no sense to bring someone here all the way from Mexico. What if he’s in on all this?”
“The guy mixing together napalm for us?”
“That’s what he says. It’ll blow up because he’s using gas. Any idiot could figure that out. That doesn’t make it ‘napalm.’ Even if it was, why would he know something like that? Think about it. They probably caught him whacking off to The Turner Diaries somewhere in South Dakota.”
Please don’t let Ed do anything stupid, Father. He means well.
“He’s got Adam drinking the Kool-Aid. Look at him over there. He looks retarded.”
She frowned. This was Ed in manipulation mode, a common theme at home. Things not going his way? Then invoke Adam’s name and charge forward again behind a spearhead of spotty rationale.
“Come on, you don’t want Adam tagging along with a guy who can make napalm, do you?” Ed said, right on cue. “He could blow us all to hell playing MacGyver. Napalm is his opening move. What’s plan B? Split an atom?”
Please don’t let me do anything stupid to Ed, like try to strangle him.
“You just said the napalm might not really be napalm.”
“Look, I’m sure you’ve noticed a bigger problem here. It’s that girl. You know, if Adam got her pregnant she could sue him for child support and garnish his wages when he started working. Of course it’s statutory rape if she crosses the line with him, and we’ll have her ass in court faster than you can say Ho Chi Minh, but I’m just saying, she’s in with Patrick, and Adam’s ready to follow her right off a cliff.”
Adam nodded enthusiastically at something Gin (who was Korean, not Vietnamese) said, head bouncing like a puppet on a string.
Lord, please please please don’t let Adam get careless here over some sill
y crush.
Home schooling hadn’t blunted the edge of hormones. Sometimes his sheets could practically be folded into a box. She didn’t need an angelic messenger to tell her he was shaming himself in God’s eyes. She’d avoided the whole topic out of embarrassment but it was high time she schooled him on the story of Onan.
Let us have the chance soon, with all this awfulness behind us. I’ll welcome the embarrassment.
“You’re worried Adam might be distracted? You’re the one talking about lawsuits and trying to drag us all out of cover for a phone that might not work to call someone who might not help!”
“You’re trying to twist my words! Why do you always do that?”
Please don’t let that vein explode in his forehead.
Marcus and Suzanne finally trailed down the stairs. What took them so long?
Ed grabbed tufts of hair on either side of his head, as though to keep his brain from exploding. “And that’s crazy! How can you buy into that idiot’s paranoia? We’re not a bunch of anarchists. We pay taxes and we vote. There’s no rhyme or reason to dragging us here, and why would they bring a child into something like this on top of it?”
Pamela watched as the eyes of her “child” lingered on Gin’s chest while she handed another bottle to Patrick. His knee bumped into a bottle and almost knocked it over. His hands flew to it just in time.
“The phones will still be there when he gives up looking for us here, Ed.”
Take him away to another town, far from us. May we never so much as see him again.
Ed shook his head. “No way. Screw that.” He turned back to the group.
“I think we should look for more weapons next door,” Patrick said. “This was a decent haul, but—”
“One of us needs to go for a Chicken Exit,” Ed said. “Maybe two. Is anyone with me?”
Outside, the sirens renewed.
“Fuck! This again?” Marcus said.
Thank you, Lord.
Language aside, the strong opposition to Ed’s idiotic plan comforted her. Ed tried to petition Eliza, also to no avail. For all his bluster, she didn’t believe he would dare go it alone. One more push and hopefully the whole matter would rest. When she got the opening, she said, “Ed, don’t be like this. You’d get lost or run into him just as soon as you’d find one of those phones.”
She wasn’t big on it either, but ditching this house for another was the sounder of the strategies. She had no feeling one way or the other as to whether the government brought them here because she refused to think about it long enough. What mattered was staying close to her family and far from danger.
Guide us to freedom and safety, and thank You for keeping us all safe so far, other than Lawrence and Nathan, for whom You had a different plan.
Patrick said something to Gin she didn’t hear.
Everyone looked over sharply at the sound of the sliding door. The air in Pamela’s lungs whooshed out painfully as Marcus apologized. She couldn’t take much more of this. Had the sound carried outside?
“Better close the curtain over that, Marcus,” Patrick said. “If he—”
The spill of sunlight through the door suddenly darkened. Marcus’s shadow, she told herself, and even when Annette screamed, she didn’t abandon the theory—Annette had screamed more in Agent Orange’s absence than his presence. But then the door flew aside, clattering in its track, and he stepped through, never breaking stride.
Marcus and Suzanne burst through the opening an instant without hesitation, never looked back. Either he wasn’t too concerned or his peripheral vision in that hood left much to be desired.
He caught Patrick stacking the bottles on the bar. The harpoon gun was on the other side of the counter. Patrick jumped across its length to snatch the gun and aim it at the mask. Orange slapped it aside. The spear angled off into the far left corner where Eliza and Annette backed up. One of them shrieked—Pamela could guess who without looking—as they tackled each other to the safety of the ground and crawled into the bathroom. The spear stuck in the wall, its rope effectively cordoning off one side of the room.
Pamela looked at the easy route out of the basement, surprisingly unmarked by some kind of dust cloud lingering in the air from Marcus and Suzanne’s hasty retreat, but she couldn’t leave Adam’s safety to chance. Ed stationed himself between her and Agent Orange, pushing her to the side of the couch. He was about as formidable as a sheet of wet paper as shields went, but she was grateful to have him and seized one of his hands. He squeezed back, then loosened his grip to step up on the couch and pry at one of the fish hooks from the display above her. She never thought to try for the other one, fixated on Adam.
The nightmare continued. Orange snatched hold of the speargun. Patrick tried to pull it back with both hands, but it barely shook in Orange’s grasp, and he shoved Patrick with his free hand. He crested over the edge of the bar like a bowling ball toward a set of pins, the pins in this case unfortunately comprised of the napalm bottles painstakingly poured just a moment ago. Pamela’s heart leapt into her throat. Glass shattered behind the bar, lots of homemade napalm seeking new life as highly flammable carpet cleaner.
Gin elbowed aside Adam and managed to yank away one of the bottles before Patrick cleared the others off the bar top.
“Lighter!” Gin shouted, a palm extended to Patrick.
Agent Orange stopped at her voice. He tilted his head as if puzzled, but there was no mistaking who captured his attention so completely. The speargun hung by his side, forgotten.
Patrick’s brow knotted at this bizarre diversion, but only an instant. He turned back to Gin. “We’d incinerate ourselves in here! Stairs!”
Patrick pushed Adam through the doorway and bolted past him. Adam tried to look back, his eyes seeking his mother’s. She thought she heard a “Mom!” over Patrick urging “Gogogogogo!” Gin slipped out right behind them, gone like a wisp of smoke.
Pamela tensed, waited for the staggering horror of the killer choosing to pursue a group with her child. Orange didn’t go after them, though. His head swung back to Pamela and Ed.
“Ed,” she said, surprised she could get the word out.
“Shit,” Ed muttered. “Come on, you bastard!” He meant the fish hook, but Orange appeared to take it as a personal challenge. He ripped the spear back from the wall without turning around.
Eliza and Annette remained on all fours in the wake of the spear shot, as though to avoid smoke inhalation in a burning house. They crawled toward Pamela’s side of the room after Orange reclaimed the spear, provided additional cover by the pool table. They had weighed their chances of getting past him to the stairs and apparently found them wanting, particularly with the speargun soon to be reloaded. They nearly had their heads taken off by a wild shot and probably didn’t want to press their luck in a tight space against the guy who managed to hit Nathan from fifty yards out. There may have been a look of regret and apology on Eliza’s face, but she didn’t meet Pamela’s gaze for more than a second. She grabbed Annette’s wrist and dragged her out the sliding door.
And then there were three.
“Got it!” Ed cried. He turned to face Agent Orange with the hook.
The hooded face did not stray from Pamela and Ed as Orange angled the spear back onto the gun. Eternities had passed since he entered, but Pamela logically knew it might have been only twenty seconds. Hysteria almost consumed her at the thought she might have seen Adam for the last time, yet she could not move to defend herself; could only stand there like a tree to be felled.
What in the name of God…?
His necklace, like a lei made of withered human ears, bounced from one side to another as he crossed the room to them.
Father, give me strength. Give Ed strength.
Ed reared back and Pamela found the fortitude to move; the arc of the hook came within an inch of blackening her eye. Ed shouted as he swung it at the gasmask, a primal sound millennia removed from the legally conscious threats for which he was infamou
s to his family. Like something ancient unleashed from his brain to strike its claim for survival.
Orange caught his wrist and drove both Ed and Pamela against the wall. He dropped the speargun to wrest away the hook with his other hand. Pamela sank to the ground, both to get away from the struggle and because her knees could not support her another moment. Orange pinned Ed’s head against the wall, a gloved hand clamped over his mouth. Ed gnawed at the hand, grunting unintelligibly; something all too easy to imagine as the promise of a lawsuit if he was not unhanded immediately. Orange let him push off the wall, then pounded his head against it again, hard. Two times. Three times. Streaks of blood spilled down the panel, thicker with each heavy thud, and wood splintered. Ed stopped trying to bite, stopped struggling at all. The panic vacated his eyes. He looked like someone sedated, about to go under the blade.
Orange struck with the hook. The tip of the blade sank into Ed’s eyeball, which burst like a cherry tomato, erupting down his cheek with a nauseating, almost sexual sound. He worked the blade deeper through the meat of Ed’s skull. Pamela watched from the ground, face a pallid shade of shock. Bracing Ed to the wall, he navigated the point of the hook back through Ed’s face. Bone cracked and the hook burst free, a wide gap gouged between Ed’s eyes as it hewed through nasal bone. Blood soaked his nose and mouth, cascading in a crimson waterfall from the newly created cavern in his skull.
It stunned Pamela to find the speargun in her hands, but they somehow claimed it while the rest of her bore silent witness to the horror. She tried to scream, but nothing happened when she opened her mouth.
Orange stepped aside. Ed’s knees struck the ground first before he pitched over, arms limp at his sides, and fell directly onto his face with a wet slap. Bony fragments scattered as blood bloomed beneath.
He found her training the speargun at him when he at last turned back. She’d never fired any sort of gun before, but at this distance it would be harder not to hit him. She squeezed the trigger and the spear hissed from the gun. It stuck just below his heart, within “earshot” of his necklace. He dropped the hook, but other than that he barely reacted, like she’d bounced a paper wad off his chest. He didn’t bother to pull it out as he knocked away her gun and grabbed a fistful of her hair. She didn’t feel the strength to stand under her own power, but he had plenty to donate. It took only a moment before the roots of her shoulder length hair threatened to tear from her scalp. Only the toes of her shoes struck the carpet, too high to gain any purchase and alleviate the strain of her own weight.
