He heard the door to his building open and slam shut. Shouts of men out for blood followed. Joe backed away from the window and stood in the center of the room, listening to them running along the floor below, checking the rooms and dragging out anyone unlucky enough to be found. They were going to reach his room in a matter of minutes.
‘Help me block the door,’ Joe said, grabbing the side of the moldy fridge with both hands and scraping it across the carpet. Zeb pushed it from the back, coughing through the clouds of dust that lifted with it. With a monumental crash, the fridge toppled over in front of the door.
‘Well, if they didn’t know we were here already…’ Zeb said, picking up his shotgun and setting it on top of the fridge.
Joe stuffed all his belongings in his backpack, then slung it on, buckling the strap across his chest. Zeb lit a cigarette as they waited.
Shouts rang out along the hallway and Joe ran a thumb nervously over the ridged pistol stock, listening to them scavenging in nearby rooms, throwing doors wide. A woman screamed, chilling Joe’s blood. He took a step towards the door when she screamed again. Zeb held a hand out and shook his head. ‘It’s too late,’ he whispered. The woman’s screams grew fainter as someone dragged her away.
Someone else was still out there, stalking the hall, carefully stepping over broken glass, unsatisfied with their female haul. Joe heard him try the door across the hall. A few seconds later, their door knob jiggled.
Everything was silent except for Zeb’s deep draw on the cigarette. The knob jiggled again, this time with more force; then someone shoulder-charged the door, buckling its center inward. Joe leveled the pistol at the door, wondering if the bullet would go through the wood. He jerked back, his finger fumbling over the trigger, as the sharp edge of an axe sliced through the door directly where he was aiming.
The axe head was wrenched out of the splintered gash and a bloodshot eye appeared. It ricocheted back and forth from Joe to Zeb, then vanished as its owner screamed down the hallway, ‘I found ’em! I found them bastards! Gettup ’ere quick.’
Zeb flicked his cigarette aside and rushed to the door, the shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm. ‘We’ve gotta get out of here before the whole gang shows up.’
They grabbed the side of the fridge and pulled it a couple feet from the door, creating enough space for both of them to fit through. Joe quickly glanced out into the hallway. It wouldn’t be empty for long.
‘Is there any other way out?’ Zeb asked.
‘Just the stairs.’
With Zeb leading the way, they ran across the hallway to the stairwell. He placed his ear to the door and listened while Joe went to the window and looked down at the street. Four members of the Arm were running into the building. ‘They’re coming,’ he said.
‘Just wait. You sure this’s the only way up?’ Zeb asked.
‘Positive.’
Zeb kept his ear to the door, monitoring the sound of the footsteps in the stairwell. Just when it seemed like they were inches from the door, Zeb flung it open, the shotgun aimed directly ahead, and fired twice. Blood spewed from a man’s chest as he flew backwards into his friend, who took the second shot to the face. The other two men, covered in their friends’ blood, scrambled backwards, stumbling down the steps towards the front door.
Zeb and Joe followed them, leaping over the dead man. Joe couldn’t help but look at the injured man. The shot had torn the skin off his cheeks, peeling back the scalp to reveal bloody flesh and bone. With one roving eye that lay on his cheek, the man watched Joe step over him. Joe wished he could put the man out of his misery, put a bullet through his head to end the pain, but he couldn’t waste a bullet on someone who was no longer a threat. Anyway, he had to remind himself, that man had been coming up those steps to kill him.
The street stank of smoke and alcohol; oil glistened over the pavement, reflecting the crazily blurred stars like crushed jellyfish. Fire erupting from the nearby buildings encased the street in hot light, illuminating the dead bodies of the murdered Slummers. Some who had jumped to their deaths still lay in a smoldering heap. Joe looked back at his own building: a shrouded, monolithic tower reaching all the way to outer space, lights flashing in it randomly. Everywhere was chaos: shouting, gunshots, screaming, the whoosh of flames, groaning, breaking glass, last breaths.
As Joe and Zeb ran to the parking garage a block over, Joe looked out at the river. Burning riverboats floated on the water, crewmen scrambling over the decks, desperately trying to put out the fires. On the remnants of the bridge, several men stood with lit bottles in their hands, waiting to launch another flaming cocktail at another boat. It all seemed so senseless: killing just for the sake of it. Had he been the catalyst, the final excuse they needed to break Slushland?
‘There!’ someone behind them screamed.
Without looking back, Joe and Zeb sprinted through the ground floor of the parking garage, where the riot’s din was momentarily muffled as if they’d entered some kind of purgatory. Zeb was out of breath by the time they reached his truck.
‘Asthma,’ he gasped and held a hand to his chest to slow his breathing.
‘Can you drive?’
‘Got to…Your bike…Can’t leave it.’
Still fighting for breath, Zeb wedged himself into the truck and started the engine, while Joe revved up the motorcycle. They each did a U-turn, tires squealing, and hurtled off towards the exit, Joe’s bike barely two feet from the truck’s bumper. They zipped around a square pillar coated in graffiti and up the ramp to the exit.
Just as Zeb flew over the ramp, a dreadlocked woman hurled herself out of the darkness and swung a bat into the windshield of the truck. Zeb roared on past her and out into the street. Then the woman spotted Joe, and with bat held aloft, ran towards him, screaming like a banshee. Without thinking about it, Joe cut her short. The pistol shook in his hand, its recoil making it tingle. The woman staggered backwards, dropped the bat, and fell to the ground in a pool of blood.
Two quick honks from Zeb’s truck dragged Joe back to the present. He pulled out into the street, jerking his eyes from the dead woman’s head that was haloed in blood, her dreadlocks spreading out like tentacles.
Act III
23
Joe dipped into the valley thick with fog. His fingers tightened around the rubber handlebar grips as he concentrated hard, following the dim red lights of Zeb’s truck to Phillip’s home at Midland.
He wasn’t quite sure where they were. He turned his head quickly and glimpsed the burning city behind him, filled with remorse that he had to abandon the Guttermen in their concrete cell. He imagined Dan and Faith watching the city crumble around them. Fire lit up the sky, creating red auras around the tops of the buildings. The bone-colored moon hung above the destruction like an enormous, weeping eye.
He lifted a hand to his face and wiped away tears torn from his eyes by the wind. His heart was thudding in his chest and his hands were shaking. He felt like screaming as loud as he could, like a kettle that whistles when the pressure becomes too much. He wanted to roar at the night. Then, in his peripheral vision, he picked up two glowing white eyes hidden in the underbrush; they streaked towards the road.
Zeb’s truck swerved violently to one side, bouncing off the cement into the dirt, the brakes squealing dramatically as Zeb brought the truck to a halt in a cloud of white smoke. Joe slammed on his brakes and slid to a stop behind the truck.
A deer wandered off on the far side of the road. It stooped to smell something, then lifted its head to look at them. Its white tail stood on end when the truck door was flung open. Zeb dropped out cursing, and the deer scampered away, leaping over a fencepost and vanishing into the dark.
Zeb circled the truck until he came to the back right tire that had blown out hopping from the road to the dirt. ‘Dammit,’ he moaned, kicking at the tire. ‘Position your light over this.’
Joe angled his bike so the light fell over the back of the truck. He dismounted and walked over
to take a look. The tire was mangled around the wheel, curved pieces of rubber hanging limply across the hubcap. He looked back at the road. Black skid marks zagged towards them.
Zeb reached into the bed of the truck and pulled out a jack that he dropped beside the tire. He knelt down by the rear fender and reached below the truck to feel around for the spare. He hauled out his hand, covered with grease, and started coughing into his fist. Wheezing, he tilted his face to the side and spat into the dirt.
‘Let me do it,’ Joe said. Before Zeb could protest, he bent down beside him and slid beneath the truck.
While Joe fixed the tire, Zeb stood coughing for a while. Then he spoke into the darkness. ‘You asked about my brother. I’ll tell you. My brother died when the bridge collapsed.’
Joe stopped what he was doing, looked up at Zeb silhouetted by the burning city, and sat beside the truck listening.
‘He was crossing the bridge to come to work at the shop. He was younger by about four years. I told him I had some work for him. I’d always jip him on the pay but he didn’t care. The kid just liked working at the shop.’ Zeb coughed again. ‘I’d always sit on the patio. See if I could spot his car as he crossed the bridge. He drove this bright orange thing, some kind of old pinto. A real piece of shit. You could spot that ugly color a mile away. And I did. I could see it chugging along the bridge just as it collapsed, breaking in half like a wafer. All the vehicles went spilling into the water. Some people made it out of their cars and swam to shore. But not my brother—he couldn’t swim.’
Joe leaned the spare tire against the side of the truck, walked over to Zeb and stood a couple feet behind him. Zeb turned his head towards Joe. ‘I don’t want your pity,’ he said. ‘You asked about my brother and I’m tellin’ you. I love that city because that’s where my brother’s buried. Somewhere in that river, he’s watching those fires burn.’
24
Joe chose one of the guest rooms on the second floor of Phillip’s house. He threw his backpack on the bed. Then, making sure nobody was around, shut the door and took out the pistol. He opened the chamber and counted the bullets.
Four.
He really had shot her—the dreadlocked woman. It wasn’t just some dream that he would wake from and find himself back in Hell Paso, where the most he’d had to deal with was a beating from his mom’s addict boyfriend. No, if he went back to Hell Paso, he wouldn’t be the same person. Could he return to a normal existence knowing that he’d ended someone’s life? What was normal existence anyhow? He slammed the chamber shut and shoved the pistol back into his backpack. Better that woman dead than him.
The guest room had several pictures hanging on the walls. Joe eased himself off the bed to take a look. Most of them were of Amanda and her mother. They must have been taken before the cancer because Amanda’s mother had hair down to her shoulders. Looking at the mother was like seeing a photograph of Amanda fifteen years in the future. As he looked at the pictures, Joe found himself desperately wishing Amanda was there to calm him with her relaxing presence.
He went to a shelf and thumbed through some of the books that had been relegated to the guest room. They were classics that even Joe recognized: Gulliver’s Travels, Moby Dick, Ivanhoe, and White Fang. There were also some modern philosophy books by men whose names he couldn’t pronounce. He wondered if these books would still be read, now that most universities in America had closed their doors. He picked up Ivanhoe, skimmed the back cover and tossed it on the bed for later.
Joe left the room and went to the banisters, leaning over the edge to listen to Zeb and Phillip downstairs. Phillip’s voice, which started out calm but worried, had grown increasingly loud, verging on angry.
Joe sighed and slowly made his way down the flight of stairs.
‘What do you mean you left them?’ Phillip said, pacing in front of the fireplace, the smell of whisky following him like a sickly ghost. When he reached the window, he turned and went back to the front of the fireplace.
Joe walked past Phillip and sat at the kitchen counter. He hunched over, his hands on his knees. Phillip’s anger was bringing the image of the bleeding dreadlocked woman back into his mind. He looked up at Phillip, whose cloudy eyes hinted at his drunkenness. Joe wanted to scream at him, tell him to shut the hell up, that they’d been through enough that night; so many people had died and were still dying in Slushland. Zeb, standing behind the couch, merely looked at Phillip, raised his hands and shook his head.
‘Do you have any idea what went into getting those blueprints? How important they are?’ Phillip went on. ‘Someone died in order to get them for us, and now because of you two he died for nothing.’
‘Don’t blame Joe,’ Zeb said. ‘They weren’t his responsibility.’
‘I don’t give a damn whose responsibility they were. We need them. We have to have them.’
Phillip put his fingers to his eyes and pressed inward, mumbling, ‘Damn it all to hell.’ Joe thought he looked like some kind of drug lord or kingpin from the old movies in his white bathrobe with his tumbler of whisky. He’d never seen Phillip in such a rage. The man didn’t seem capable of it. He usually seemed so beaten down by the world. Joe didn’t know he had this kind of spark left in him.
‘I’ll get ’em then,’ Zeb said, straightening up. ‘I’ll go back and get them.’
‘No,’ Joe suddenly said. He thought about Zeb’s breathlessness, the multiple packs of cigarettes each day, the asthma. Even if he did make it to the auto shop, he was too big and lumbering to sneak past the Arm. His coughing and wheezing would be like a klaxon.
Phillip and Zeb looked at him expectantly. When Joe didn’t continue, Zeb said, ‘This is my problem. I left them so I oughta retrieve them.’
‘They’ll kill you,’ said Joe. ‘Can’t we just wait for it to die down in Slushland?’
‘By that time it’ll be too late. They’ll take one look at Zeb’s safe and drag it out of the shop,’ Phillip explained. ‘Then we’d have to find a way to get the blueprints away from the Arm, which is an idea I don’t want to entertain.’
‘D’you have any shotgun shells, Phillip?’ Zeb asked. ‘I’m gonna need more.’
‘Come on.’ Phillip led the way out of the kitchen with Zeb following, leaving Joe alone at the counter.
Joe let out a sigh so pent up it rattled from his bones. He clutched the sides of his face with both hands, knowing that Zeb’s task was impossible, the ultimate fool’s errand. They were about to watch him drive away for the last time and walk right to his own death. Joe shook his head. How could Phillip force him into this? Zeb wasn’t a fighter. He could kill a man without flinching—Joe had learned that earlier—but that didn’t mean he had what it took to fight his way to the shop. Even all three of them might not be able to do it.
Joe wondered what would his father have done. His mom had told him that when the war came, his dad was one of the first to volunteer to defend the border. Joe doubted he gave it a second thought.
He slid silently off the stool at the counter, listening for any sign of Phillip or Zeb returning. He knew he didn’t have much time. His heart raced inside his chest and his brain felt strange with the rush of adrenaline. He breathed deeply, trying to summon his father’s courage buried somewhere inside him.
He grabbed Zeb’s keys from the kitchen table and went quietly out the front door. When he reached the gravel walkway, he took a last look back at the empty kitchen and tossed the keys beneath the porch, where Zeb couldn’t find them.
His motorcycle roared to life. Phillip and Zeb appeared at the kitchen window holding the shotgun and handfuls of shells. Through the glass, Joe met Zeb’s eyes; Zeb yelled something. Then he and Phillip raced to the front door, but by the time they got there, Joe was tearing down the dirt road towards the highway.
25
The freezing water of the Slushland river went to his ankles, rising as he took each step over the rocks and sludge, until it was up to his crotch. Joe cast a quick glance back at his m
otorcycle parked at the water’s edge beside a clump of small bushes. Holding the pistol above his head with one hand, he swam with the other.
As he got closer, he could see the full extent of the city’s destruction. Tall buildings roared with flames like great sizzling logs, lame sentinels unable to stop the destruction of their city; fire sparked menacingly on the broken bridge. Everything looked haunted, as if it was some weird ghost world. Yet the auto shop remained untouched. Were they saving it for last? Maybe they were lying in wait for Joe and Zeb to return.
Something swam by Joe’s leg—he kicked out, sending ripples through the dark water, and swam harder, searching the shoreline for movement. He found none. Everyone must be out on the streets, murdering, looting, destroying. He didn’t understand what the Arm wanted with a burned-down city. Phillip and Zeb said that the Arm’s goal was to break the Slummers’ will, but what was the point of torching the city in the process? The Slummers’ will was already broken, that was obvious enough.
He arrived beneath the shop’s back deck elevated above the water. Clinging to one of the wooden pillars, Joe caught his breath and listened for any noise from inside. He remained in the water for…he didn’t know how long. Five? Ten minutes? He watched through the floorboards for any sign of life and listened so hard his ears hurt.
Reassured that no one was there, he slid the gun up onto the deck. Then he grabbed the bottom of the deck and hoisted himself, dripping, up to the railing and scrambled over. His boots squelched against the wood, leaking water. He slipped them off and silently poured out the river water, then put them back on again. He picked up the pistol and crept through the backdoor of the shop.
Inside it was dark but with just enough light speckling through the front door to allow him to grope his way around. He felt like he’d wandered into the shop as it would look in a different time period, as if a hundred years had passed since he’d last been there—abandoned, dusty, dangerous; a useless relic of a lost generation.
Our Home is Nowhere (The Borrowed Land, Book 1) Page 14
