“Down there,” the second man told me, pushing me again.
I opened the door, wishing I had my pen light out, and took to the stairs slowly. I weighed my options and decided the stairs might be the perfect place to make my move, but I hadn't expected them to make me go first. That threw things off a bit. Not by much, though. I wished I'd paid better attention to what was on or in front of the stairs.
“Can I get some light, it's kinda hard to see, man,” I said trying my best to sound like ‘the Dude’ from The Big Lebowski.
“Shut up,” Larry hissed from behind me.
“One of us should go get Gary and the guys. We're breaking protocol. Especially with him stabbing Carl,” Jay, the second man, said.
“Yeah, hurry back, get reinforcements, man,” I said, grinning to myself.
If I was about to die, I might as well enjoy it. If on the other hand, Jay or Larry were stupid enough to leave me alone with just one of them, I would make my play.
“Shut up,” Larry said, a gun pressed into the back of my head.
“Hey man, be cool. What you looking for?” I asked.
“Make sure you're all alone, your stash of food,” Jay said quietly.
“You ain't cannibals, are ya?” I asked, trying to make myself sound scared.
“Shut up, just show us where you sleep.” The gun was back grinding into my hair just above where I had it tied off in a ponytail.
“Over there,” I pointed.
I'd reached the bottom of the stairs and I waited for them to follow me down. Jay, by the sound of it, was still at the last step, but I could feel Larry's gun on the back of my head still.
“Go check it out,” Larry said from behind me.
I was jostled to the side as Jay pushed by, and the gun left my head for a second. I put my hands up and turned my head to look back at Larry.
“You're really going to rob a homeless dude?” I asked him.
“You can't rob the dead,” Larry said with a wicked grin and cocked the gun, “You can loot their corpse, though.”
I turned half my body with my hands up so I could somewhat face him. I considered going for the gun, but Jay yelled.
“The fuck is this?” he asked, pointing down.
“The sub-basement,” I told him, without turning my gaze from Larry.
“What's down there?” he asked.
“Rats, my sleeping bag, the food.”
“There's no fucking way I'm going down that hole, man,” Jay said, turning to us.
I could see him out of the corner of my eye. He'd started moving back toward us, pistol in one hand, flashlight in the other when a shadow disengaged from the darkness and swarmed up behind him. An arm clad in black wrapped around his neck and he let out a shrill scream before it abruptly cut off. The gun at my face wavered and I lashed out with my hands.
The gun went off twice as I pushed it in the air and when Larry tried to bring the gun down, I locked my grip on his gun hand and fell backward, lifting my knees to catch his weight and kept the momentum going. Momentum is a funny thing. It allows you to move objects that you may not be able to lift, or to move objects much further and faster than you could with just your own muscle power. Thankfully, I managed a little of both.
Garbage and boxes crunched under my weight, but as my back hit with Larry almost on top, I pushed up with my legs and arched my back, twisting and pulling. When I came up, I'd pulled the gun under the man's chin and held it there. I wasn’t sure what had happened to Jay exactly, but I chanced a glance to see the flashlight being picked up by a figure dressed in black, with a knit ski mask over his or her features. The shotgun was loosely held in the figure’s hands.
“You come any closer, I blow him away,” I said, the gunshots still ringing in my ears.
“Don't kill me, man,” Larry said from below me, his voice strange because it had a rounded piece of barrel shoved into the tender hollow spot under his chin at the base of his neck.
“Dick,” the figure said in a familiar raspy voice and Jeremy pulled the mask off to expose his features.
“That's it, you're grounded,” I said in relief.
“I'm a grown ass man,” Jeremy said and spat on the floor.
He knelt down and pulled a black blade out of Jay's back, wiped it on the corpse’s shirt and sheathed it.
“Come on man, you kill me, this place is going to be swarming. They probably already heard the shots. You let me go, I'll tell them you ran off. They don't need to know that--”
I slugged him with my free hand viciously, turning his face sideways with the force.
“He's right,” Jeremy rasped, looking out one of the side windows. “People are coming.”
“Well, there's only one thing we can do,” I told him.
“Shoot him?” Jeremy asked me, an eyebrow raised.
“Naw, we're just gonna put him down,” I said, smiling.
“Put me down? Come on man, I don't...”
The flashlight was pointed at him and I could see my punch had gashed his mouth. He’d probably cut himself with his own teeth. They were stained a reddish pink.
“If you make one more sound, I'm going to pig stick you like I did your friend out there,” I told him viciously.
12
“Come on, Larry. Wake up,” I said, slapping the man lightly.
He startled awake. We’d tied his arms and legs to a lightweight armchair and left him in the darkness when he had started blubbering about rats. I guessed it was a phobia for him. I’d sent Jeremy off, but Danielle and I sat alone in the dark.
“What are you doing, man? Who is it?” he asked.
We hadn’t bothered putting a light on for him. I decided living in the dark gave you better night vision than you’d expect. For example, I could kind of make out his features in the gloom. We were in an old storm sewer and a little sunlight was filtering down through a manhole cover over a hundred yards behind him. It was enough for us.
“It’s still just me. The guy you were trying to rob and kill.”
“What the fuck you want?” he snarled.
“I want you to answer some questions for me,” I told him quietly.
“And then you’ll let me go?” he asked.
“Probably not. But if you want to do this the hard way, I’ll let her take care of you.”
“Her?” he asked and Danielle snapped on an electric LED lantern I’d kept in case of emergencies because the scarcity of batteries.
“You recognize me?” Danielle asked.
The man flinched, but there was no recognition in it. It was probably the fact that she was holding Jeremy’s knife up close to his face that did it.
“I… No, not really,” he said, and I could hear the truth of it.
“Do you kidnap, torture, and rape women and children?” I asked him.
“No, no… I swear.”
“Really? So your gang at the museum haven’t been hit by an old vet a handful of times?”
“You! But last I saw you…” A horror-stricken expression hit his face as I made sure my features were well-lit.
He’d just admitted that he was a part of that gang and also, that he knew of me. He’d also figured out, that in those six words, he’d just sealed his fate.
“Yeah, a shave does wonders, doesn’t it? Listen, the kid has some questions for you. If you don’t answer, she’ll use the knife.”
“What happens if I do tell you?” he asked hopefully.
I pulled a .45 from my belt and showed it to him.
“It’ll be quick and painless. She was held for a time by guys like you. You don’t want to know what she’ll do.”
The man’s eyes were almost rolling into the back of his head in fear. I couldn’t blame him, but he needed to talk.
“I can’t… I mean, they’ll kill me,” he whispered.
I shrugged. “You’re dead either way. I’m giving you the chance to make it quick and painless. Otherwise, I’ll let the girl get involved.”
“You, I
mean… No. If I’m dead anyway, no. I won’t talk.”
“He’s all yours,” I said to Danielle and walked away into the darkness.
I was waiting around a bend in the tunnel when the pleas stopped and the sharp report of gunfire startled me so bad I almost fell. It was loud in the confines of the tunnel and I pulled my .45 and started running, with only forty short feet to cover. Only forty feet. My body knew what to do though my mind was racing. Larry didn’t have a gun, I’d checked him myself - unless I thought I’d checked him and he’d squirreled one away and I hadn’t found it.
“Danielle,” I whimpered as I rounded the corner.
I already had the .45 raised and was ready to fire, but I hit the safety back on as soon as I saw Danielle standing over Larry’s slumped form.
“Danielle,” I said, noticing the gun in her hand, it was one of the revolvers I’d brought back. “What…?”
“He gave them up,” she said.
“But… You were just going to scare him. You weren’t going to— “
“It was my choice, Dick,” she said, wiping her eyes. “In the end, he begged for it to be me who’d do it.”
That stopped me short. “Why?” I asked finally.
“He said that with all the evil he’s done,” she said and her chest hitched and I could see her fighting back her tears, “He said it would be fitting for me to do it. It was Karma, and…”
She held the gun out to me. I took it and pulled her close in a hug. I wanted to ask her if he had given up the answers, but I knew he probably had if she’d ended him. I heard footsteps far off behind us, but I held her as she cried into my chest. Something inside of me was threatening to break, a dam about to burst. I held it back somehow.
I knew Jeremy was back there somewhere, but he was expecting me to do the shooting. Hopefully, I could get her out of here with him, so I could clean up. As it was, she’d hit him perfectly. One shot to the heart, and she’d been so close that there were powder burns on his shirt.
“I’m sorry, you shouldn’t have had to do that,” I whispered.
“No, I did. That was one thing that he was right about. He might not have been one of the men who… who hurt me… but… I’m not that girl anymore.”
“No, no you’re not,” I said taking her weight as her legs wobbled.
Before she fainted, I’d already started bending at the knees to catch her. Sudden adrenaline or even shock can cause it.
“Oh God, I’m sorry,” she said a moment later, wiping her nose with her shirt sleeve and pulling on my arms to get her feet back under her.
She was still crying, but it wasn’t the deep wrenching sobs like it had been a minute before. She put her arms around me and cried some more. I looked at Larry. If you looked at him from the shoulders up, he almost looked like he was sleeping peacefully.
“You’re ok,” I murmured and rubbed my hands over the top of her head, smoothing her hair back before she got snot and tears in it.
“He talked. I wrote a lot of stuff down,” she said. “I didn’t have to hurt him with the knife.”
I had noticed that, other than the marks of the scuffle and being bound, he was still in pretty good shape.
“Let’s go back and talk. I think Jeremy’s coming.”
“Oh God,” she said, wiping her eyes and rubbing her face.
“Do you have any water?” she asked.
I smiled and handed her the bottle I kept in my pack. She poured some on her hands and then rubbed her face before throwing her head back, whipping her hair over her shoulder.
“Better,” she said.
“If you’re sure,” I told her. “But if you ever want to talk… I know what it’s like.”
“The bad dreams?” she asked me.
“Those are mostly… guilt dreams. Why did I live, why did so and so die…? Could I have fixed or changed anything? I guess the usual stuff,” I admitted.
“Guilt? You were fighting a war,” she whispered, hugging me then breaking all contact.
“Yeah, and you were fighting one, too. Winning doesn’t stop the dreams, though. Killing changes someone. I’m just so sorry you had to do this.”
She looked over her shoulder at Larry, then back at me. “I don’t think I’ll have any problems sleeping. It is horrible, but with one less guy like him in the world, it seems like it might be a little easier to sleep at night.”
“I think it’s too early to know that,” I said. “But yeah, I know it’ll make me sleep easier.”
Danielle looked up at me, the edges of her lips tugging up in what could only have been a half of a smile.
We’d had to rehydrate some of the jerky strips to add to the soup. The traps had been empty for a couple of days, and instead of going out to new locations to set my snares, I’d been watching the museum. Danielle had done her job, but the man had either lied and done it well enough to fool her, or he hadn’t known shit. Larry had only gone to a few drop offs with the slaves and his point of contact had been a guy named Manny. I assumed he was Latino, but I also knew where assumptions could get one in life. He’d also given us the basics of their gang and I was a little blown away.
When most people think of gangs, they think of black youths, hard cases… or Latinos… This was a gang of redneck trailer trash at its core, but one with a progressive recruiting policy. They actually didn’t care about skin color so much, especially since the EMP had taken out the grid and all rule of law. They would recruit anyone who could bring value to the gang. First, though, they had to go through an initiation phase. Kind of how bikers have to earn their patches. I’d never have thought it’d take the end of the world as we know it to dilute the effects of racism, but it had.
To earn a spot, each new prospect had to bring in a woman or child or give the location on where some were hiding for the main gang to pick up. A lot of times, the scum had turned on their own families and then just skipped the after party and breaking them in. The really sick ones didn’t skip. It made my planning easier to know that I’d be killing pure evil. Still, the gang’s strengths were also its weakness. They had a lot of members left.
Before the event, there had probably been ten to twenty core members, with hanger-on’s and girlfriends that numbered upwards of a hundred souls all told - if they still had their souls. Hunger had gotten to a lot of them and they were down to thirty or forty, with their various sidekicks included. Still, horribly huge numbers for one man to consider.
But I had quite a few things in the plus side column if I was to keep a tally. None of them were military, or law enforcement, or had any formal training.
Most of them were only lightly armed with handguns or knives. One dude even walked around with a Katana like he thought he was in The Walking Dead. The few rifles they had were scoped and quite a few of the guys were deadly accurate with them, but none of them had been under accurate return fire or had been fired on first.
Now for the cons. There were thirty to forty of them. Most of them were armed. They were evil and wouldn’t hesitate to bury someone or turn on their own family, if it meant they could get another meal, another fix, another bottle of booze.
Which brought me to the slave issue. Currently, in the old cafeteria, they were holding ten to fifteen women and young ladies. Apparently, when they took the odd male, he was always under eighteen and was kept separate from the ladies. All were held until the gang got word from Manny, and then they were shipped up to the docks where an exchange of goods was made. Two truckloads of humanity for two truckloads of food and supplies, ammunition and medication.
That in of itself just blew my mind. I understood how the black market worked… I was a junkie for a long time. You get the stuff from your dealer. The dealer uses your money to buy more stuff. But somewhere in this situation, Manny’s people had become the dealer’s dealer and I was wondering how the hell they had the materials and manpower for all of that. On top of it, if they had two or three gangs supplying them somewhat regularly, where were the slaves
going?
One last piece of good news was that the former punks had wiped out a third gang right after I’d hit Curtis’s group. At first, they’d thought it had been them consolidating and taking more territory. Knowing that they were slightly larger and better armed, they’d staged things and hit the other gang when they were having a party. Sound familiar? They killed or absorbed everyone from that gang and took all of their supplies and slaves. That’s why they had so many currently waiting on word from Manny.
I was torn. Did I let the fifteen souls go to Manny, so I could find the source? Should I stop them like I did with Jamie and Mel? Should I go in before any word came entirely? None of them and all of them were both the right and wrong decision for a list of reasons too numerous for me to count. For the third day in a row since we’d snatched Larry and killed his two buddies, I was watching the museum. I’d changed rooftops and vantage points until I could see more.
I was almost too far away to shoot, but when I saw a car I didn’t recognize pull up, I tensed, waiting. I’d heard it coming, but I’d missed where it came from. One man walked in, getting the nod from the four guards at the east entrance. I debated going down to get closer to ground level, but I’d seen that car come in and now I could pay close attention to where it went, unless—
The man walked out again smiling and got in the car. Three stories. That’s all I had to get down in a hurry if I wanted to chase him on the ground. Three stories of pounding on the metal fire escape, drawing all kinds of attention. Nobody was paying attention to my direction now, but if I made a racket I’d be dead. Instead, I watched. It looked like a late model BMW, probably a diesel judging by the black smoke that puffed with every gear shift. Its silver color would make it easy enough to find if it was kept in the open, which it might not be.
“Is that Manny?” Jeremy asked me.
“I think so,” I told him.
“Flashy wheels he has,” he said, a little pissy sounding.
“Probably old enough not to have a computer and diesel fuel lasts for a long time. Smart,” I said in admiration. “Smart too, that it’s so pretty. Makes our job easier.”
The Devil Dog Trilogy: Out Of The Dark Page 13
