Into the top now, she smoothed her hands down it, across her breasts. Then she stuffed a couple of blouses into her knapsack and wandered further into the store, to where another jumbled pile of pants of various colors and sizes lay in the middle of the floor. Karen sifted through them until she found a pair of jeans that might fit her. But she couldn’t put them on—she couldn’t bring herself to stand naked in the middle of that store, not even for a second, not even if she did have a top on. So she stuffed the jeans into her sack and slung the knapsack over her shoulder. She was about to turn and leave when she noticed a door slightly ajar at the rear of the store. Karen knew she was going in there. Even if she’d wanted to leave, she couldn’t have—and she did want to leave; common sense told her to get the heck out of there, to hurry back to the warehouse before something happened, before somebody grabbed her and her bones ended up back at the grisly place she’d found those discarded bats. But she couldn’t leave; the packrat in her wouldn’t allow it, not without rifling through the unseen treasures waiting beyond that door.
Across the room she went, through a high-arcing archway sectioning off the store into two large rooms, past empty clothes racks silently guarded by mannequins in various stages of dress, some limbless, some not, others ankle-deep in the assortment of garments lying strewn about the place. A hazy, grey light filtered through the storefront window as she paused before the partially open door that drew her forward. The door groaned when she pushed it, and the hazy grey light followed her through the doorway. She knew something was wrong when she stepped into the room, knew it for sure when she looked up at the wraith-like figure hanging like a bizarre Halloween decoration from a thick length of orange extension cord wrapped around a pipe running down the middle of the ceiling. The dried-out husk of a woman, her arms spread out and dangling beneath a threadbare black shawl, more resembled a gigantic moth, or a withered and decaying bat than a human being.
She wanted to leave, to run screaming from the place, but she didn’t. She stood there, spellbound, staring up at this poor unfortunate woman, wondering what she had seen, what manner of atrocity had driven her to such extreme measures. A ladder lay beneath her—Karen wondered if she had kicked it over on purpose, a last-second act born of desperation to keep from changing her mind as the cord tightened and her throat constricted. Or was the ladder going over simply an accidental by-product of her legs whipping back and forth, caused by the suicide itself?
Karen stepped further into the room, closer to the woman. She looked up through the faint grey light framing the corpse against the deep shadows that seemed to swallow the entirety of what lay behind her. Karen couldn’t see her face, or anything beyond it, and she was glad she couldn’t. For all she knew the room could be full of corpses, moldering husks dangling row after row in the dark, waiting for the light to go out so they could drop down and close in on their visitor. She turned and looked back at the door, which had been wide open when she’d entered the room, but now seemed to be slowly swinging shut, surely a trick of the eye. But what if it wasn’t? What if it did shut; shut and locked, and Karen found herself entombed in the dark with the dried out corpse and whatever lay behind it? Whatever it was, withering ghosts or overstocked pieces of clothing, she didn’t want to find out. She hurried across the floor, through the doorway and back to the front counter to pick up the spiked bat and discarded knapsack. Then it was out the door and onto the sidewalk, where she stood for a moment, glancing up and down the street before stepping off the curb and heading into the roadway. She was in the middle of the street when a pack of bikers roared around the corner.
Karen took off running. She wasn’t going to make it; she knew it—she’d seen how fast they were coming before she turned and ran, seen the clouds of dust kicking up behind them. She turned, twirling and flinging her knapsack like an Olympic hammer thrower. There were five of them, and they were right behind her—the first guy ducked and swerved, the one trailing him caught the bag of canned goods square in the face. His head jerked back and his Harley veered to the left, crashing into the biker beside him, laying both machines over and sending them into a sideways tumble, end-over-end while their riders skidded down the roadway, screaming and skidding and rolling and yelling, the bikes following behind them as Karen ran for the sidewalk, barely missed by the fourth biker, who had lurched forward, gunning his engine in an effort to run her down.
Onto the sidewalk and into the first open doorway she ran, flinging the door shut behind her as the lead rider, who had ducked and swerved and braked to a screeching halt, jumped off his Harley and ran hell-bent after her.
“Hey, goddamnit!” he yelled, kicking the door open while the fourth biker scrambled onto the sidewalk and followed him through the doorway.
It was a bodega, a long abandoned corner store, the shelves wiped clean by looters weeks ago when the shit hit the fan and the lightning flashed, and the clouds chased each other across the horizon. Karen didn’t bother hiding—she ran for the back of the store, hoping like hell the rear entrance wasn’t barricaded or locked. She could hear her pursuers yelling their threats, screaming and cursing and stomping across the floor behind her, both men huffing and puffing, snorting like angry bulls as she raced down the aisle, through an open doorway and into a small stockroom, that faint, grey light spilling in through the open back door, the hard-charging bikers gaining ground as she neared the exit. The roar of gunfire sent her into a sprawling face-forward dive as bullets pounded the white-plaster wall and Karen bounced off the rear threshold, still holding the bat, her chest throbbing with pain as she slid forward and rolled into the alley.
Karen stood up to find a motorcycle roaring down the alley toward her. The last remaining biker, who had not followed his partners into the bodega, obviously electing to head her off at the pass, was closing in fast. She’d never make it to the other side—even if she dodged her way past the guy, the others would gun her down before she managed to get very far. She was as good as dead, and everybody knew it—everybody: her, the grinning biker rumbling his way toward her, and the two behemoths charging for the rear exit.
She stepped back against the wall, gripped the bat and waited. She was as good as dead, but she wouldn’t go down without a fight.
The biker screeched to a halt in the middle of the road. “Look out!” he yelled as his partner appeared in the doorway, and Karen pounded two rusty spikes square into his throat, blood seeping and squirting across the hands that shot up, gripping the fat end of the bat as his pistol clattered to the ground and Karen let go, and the biker did a drunken, stiff-legged stagger into the alley, blood covering his hands and forearms, the guy behind him staring wide-eyed at two pointed pieces of metal protruding from the back of his friend’s neck.
The three of them stood their ground: Karen, watching in horror as the biker fell gurgling to his knees, the two bikers seeming to enjoy what they were seeing. Finally, when the wounded man tumbled onto his back, when his eyes closed and his hands let go of the bat, that last remaining biker killed his engine, stepped off his bike, and said, “You’re in some deep shit now, little lady.”
Chapter Nine
“Grab her, Claude,” the biker said, and a hand clamped around Karen’s forearm. Seconds later she was being hauled through the doorway, back into the bodega. The motorcycle roared to life, and the rumble of the engine moved off in the direction it had been coming from when Karen had first seen the guy moving up the alley.
She struggled to resist and the biker laughed; let herself go limp and he dropped her to the floor. Then he grabbed a fistful of hair, dragging her like a sack of potatoes kicking and screaming through the stockroom and into the store, all the way to the front of the place, where he pulled her to her feet and marched her out onto the sidewalk.
The biker from the back alley pulled up in front of her, killed the engine, slammed down the kickstand and leaned back in his seat. Beside him was the guy Karen had walloped with her knapsack, one eye puffy and swollen, the rig
ht side of his face a torn and shredded mess—behind him, entwined in the twisted wreckage of the two Harley’s, was the guy he’d collided with. He was shaking his head and mumbling, talking to himself and looking down at his leg. Karen could see that it was bad, the leg twisted at an awkward angle, the blood-soaked pants ripped open, exposing a pointed shard of bone that rose through the torn skin just below his knee.
“You all right, dude?” Claude called out to him.
“No, I’m not all right! My FUCKING LEG IS BROKE!”
“Man,” Claude said. “That’s fucked-up.”
“Maybe I should take a look at him,” Karen said, yelping when Claude, still gripping a handful of hair, yanked her head sideways.
“What?” he said. “What the fuck did you say?”
“I should take a look at him,” she said, wincing against the pain. “Take a look at his leg.”
“I think you’ve done quite enough, already.”
“Seriously, I’m a nurse, or used to be.”
“Well, you know what,” Claude said. “I think you just violated your Hippocratic Oath there, sweetheart. Didn’t she, Ben?”
The guy on the bike chuckled. “No shit,” he said.
“I’m just saying: maybe I should look at him. Maybe I—ow!”
Ben said, “Oh, don’t you worry; we got something for you to look at, all right—up close and personal. Something that ain’t legs. And you’re gonna do a damn site more than look at ‘em. And when you’re done lookin’ at ‘em, we’re gonna shove ‘em right up that pretty little cunt of yours.”
He got off his bike and stepped forward, closer, until he was an arm’s reach away. “And when you’re done lickin’ our chops, you’re gonna give that poor bastard the ride of his life.”
He took another menacing step forward. He was huge, thick shouldered and well-muscled. He wore a sleeveless Devil’s Own jacket, but no shirt beneath it. Curly black hair sprouted wildly from his head; his chest was covered with it. He was smiling like it was all a big joke, but his eyes were hard, mean-looking. Smiling like it was joke, but Karen knew it wasn’t a joke.
He said, “What’dya think about that?”
Behind him, the guy with the bleeding face had walked over to Karen’s knapsack and dumped its contents onto the asphalt. He snatched up a white blouse and pressed it to his cheek.
“Go ahead if you want to. I’ve got AIDS. I’m dying anyway. You want a good dose, have at it. You and your boys.”
“You lying, god—”
“Go ahead. Find out for yourself—up close and personal.”
Ben punched her in the gut; her legs gave out and she hung there, suspended from Claude’s hand like a broken marionette, her face twisted into a frozen mask of pain and frustration. Claude let go and she dropped to her knees, wheezing and gasping as he drew a hunting knife from behind his back. “You’re right about one thing,” he said. He grabbed another handful of hair, yanked her head back and showed her the knife. “You are dying.”
She had survived the fire and brimstone raining down from the heavens, scratching and clawing, ducking and diving and starving nearly to death, hiding out like a rat in a hole—and for what? So she could wind up cut to ribbons by these two? She closed her eyes and the blade came down; it touched her throat and she began to shake.
“Huh-uh,” Ben said.
“My ass!” said Claude.
“Let’s take her back to Dub, see what he wants to do with her.”
“Gut her ass,” the third biker said, still pressing the bloody blouse to his face.
“Nah, let’s take her back to Dub.”
In the middle of the street, their injured counterpart cried out, “MY GODDAMN LEG!”
“I’ll take a look at him, if you want.”
“Yeah,” Claude said. “Maybe you should.” Still with a handful of hair, he relaxed his grip and let go, and he and Ben marched Karen across the asphalt, behind their friend, who was still pressing the blouse to his face as he leaned over the injured gang member.
“Jesus, man,” he said. “Some spill we took, huh?” Maybe he was trying to cheer the guy up, take his mind off his problems with a little casual conversation. Whatever he was doing wasn’t working. The guy glared up at him, his jaw clenched, his face wracked with pain.
“What’dya think?” Claude said when they were standing over the bikes.
“Give me your knife,” said Karen.
“What are you,” Ben said, “a comedian?”
“I need to cut his pants leg so I can get good a look at him.”
“Yeah, right,” Claude said, chuckling and kneeling beside the injured biker, probably picturing his dead friend with the spikes sticking out the back of his neck. “I’ll do it for you.” He pulled his knife, grabbing a piece of the bloody pants leg and working the blade inside it, the guy howling as he drew the blade down, shearing the fabric away from his ruined leg so Karen could get a clear enough view. And there it was, ruined, just like Karen had known it would be from the moment she spied the piece of bone from her vantage point on the sidewalk. There wasn’t much she could do—she’d known that, too. She’d just been trying to get on their good side. If they had a good side, which, of course, they didn’t. Not these guys, with their cruel smiles and their cavalier attitude toward their injured friend. An attitude punctuated when Ben pulled a .45 caliber pistol from behind his back, put it to the howling biker’s head and blew it apart.
“The fuck, man!” Claude said, jumping to his feet, the gun’s loud report echoing down the street as the other biker pulled a pistol of his own.
“What?” Ben said. “We got no doctor out here, no way to mend that busted leg. I ain’t no genius, but even I know he was beyond help, unless we had a hospital to cart him off to. And I don’t see a working hospital around here. How ‘bout you, sweetie—you got an emergency room in that backpack of yours?”
Karen, who had turned her head a split second after the shot rang out, said nothing. She’d heard the world had gone mad; people were turning on one another, savaging each other, and people had died. But up to now she had witnessed no such event. Sure, she’d been a trauma nurse, and had been elbow-deep in much worse than this. But it had always been the aftermath. She’d never seen a face contort, the jaws puff out, the head rock sideways as blood and bone and pulped pieces of brain blew out the back of it.
“Hey, you. I’m talking to you.”
“No,” Karen said. “No hosp—”
Ben’s arm flashed up, leveling the .45’s barrel directly at his puffy-eyed comrade, who stood holding his gun by his side. “You! Holster that weapon or try to use it—makes no difference to me!”
The guy’s hand went behind him, and came back empty. “Jesus, did you have to kill him?”
“What’d you wanta do, leave him out here to rot? We couldn’t even get him back home, the way he was. And what if we did manage to haul his ass back to camp? Then what, watch him suffer ‘til his leg rotted off? And that’s what we were looking forward to, wasn’t it, Dr. Nurse?”
Karen, still looking away from the corpse, slowly nodded her head.
“You see that, don’t you, Jet?” Claude said, and Karen finally had a name to put that torn and bleeding face to—Jet, the guy who had just told Ben to ‘gut the bitch’.
“I guess… But, man, it just doesn’t seem right.”
“I know, but, well, hell; we did him a favor.”
Ben said, “Damn right we did him a favor. I ever get fucked-up like that, end it quick. I sure as hell don’t wanta spend my last days suffering like he was gonna.”
They stood for a moment, Ben, Jet and Claude, looking down at their fallen brother in arms, at the wreckage he was entangled in, then back to Karen, who had been dreading the moment when their thoughts turned to the business at hand: what to do with their captive, who had done much more damage than her slight build would ever have indicated.
It was Claude who finally spoke up. Claude, with the big bushy beard and the
straight black hair, with a tattoo of Jesus on his left shoulder and the Devil on his right. “I’ve heard of big things coming in small packages,” he said, “but this is ridiculous.”
Ben chuckled, and Jet said, “We should just kill her, gut her ass and leave her in the street. I sure as hell don’t wanta be the one tellin’ Dub this little girl wiped out two of his men, not to mention what she did to them bikes.”
“What, you wanta get caught up in a lie, instead? Hey, we didn’t do anything wrong, but you go making up some bullshit story and Dub sniffs it out, well, I wouldn’t wanta be in your shoes if he does. I mean, what’re you gonna tell him—they run off? They lit out? How ‘bout you, Claude? You gonna back that action?”
“Not me.”
“We should still kill her—tell Dub we got jumped by a gang of Q’s or something.”
Karen stepped back and looked off to her right, at the wide-open door of the store she’d just been walked out of—she wouldn’t make it, of course, but better a bullet or two in the back than Claude’s hunting knife carving up her belly.
“Don’t even think about it,” Claude said, alerted by the sudden movement.
“Yeah,” Ben said. “Don’t make us take up his suggestion. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t dig it.” To Jet, he said, “What is it, dude, you embarrassed half-pint here got the best of us?”
“Well, yeah, that’s part of it, sure. I mean, look at her.”
“Oh, I’ve been looking at her, all right. Don’t you worry about that.”
Karen, who had been on the verge of making a mad dash to what most certainly would have been her death, detected a begrudged tone of respect in the timbre of Ben’s voice, and for the first time since Claude had dragged her kicking and screaming through the store, thought that she just might live long enough to make it off this dusty city street—in spite of what she’d done, the trouble she’d caused them.
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