by Ryan Schow
The rifle stock hits the door again. “Open up or we’ll kick it down and come in anyway.”
Why these thugs still try to pass themselves off as cops seems preposterous. Apparently they’re doing it because people are still complying. So as long as things keep going their way, success will shape their actions and they’ll continue doing the same thing until someone stops them.
Can we stop them? Is that what Stanton’s planning?
Out in the living room, at the end of a short hall, we hear the front door open and booted feet tromping in. The mix of authoritative voices puts my nerves on edge. The one thing I can’t stop wondering is why the hell Stanton is obliging them. Is he thinking he can do what they want and they’ll just leave us alone and move on? With everything we have, the truth is, we don’t stand a chance against them. If they broke that door down and saw everything we have, they’d look for more and find us, too.
There was no way around letting them in and Stanton knew this.
Unconsciously I squeeze Macy even tighter against me, feeling her skin and bony frame, listening to her every quiet breath. Is she breathing too loud? If she yelps at some point, if she can’t stand the anxiety anymore, there’s a pretty good chance she’ll get us killed.
Pressing my face into her hair, suppressing a hard sob, I inhale the scents of her and wonder if this will be our last time together.
Tears flood my eyes. At this point, I’ve stopped trying to contain them. I’m cracking, just like Stanton’s cracking, just like Macy’s maybe cracking inside, but in a different way altogether.
The ruckus going on in the living room is the only thing keeping me from going to pieces. If someone opens this door…oh God, I don’t even want to think about that!
Taking a deep breath, I find my resolve and realize that at some point I’m going to have to start killing, too. I can’t just leave all this on Stanton anymore. It’s time to pull my weight.
“Mom?” Macy whispers.
“Shhhh.”
Rex and Stanton claim to be committed to the task of getting us out of the city, but it’s proven to be more difficult than any of us had imagined. Listening to what’s happening in the living room, I’m starting to realize it was all a big pipe dream.
Speaking of Rex, I wish he were here now. He’s the merciless one. The determined one. The one with the combat experience and a penchant for bloodshed.
“Can’t breathe,” Macy finally whispers.
I don’t realize how tight I’ve been holding her until she fights for that extra deep breath. My grip on her loosens, but I keep her close. If we’re going to die here, it’s not going to happen without one hell of a fight.
Another round of bombing rattles the world from a few blocks away, the walls rumbling, the floor beneath our feet shifting. I press a palm against the wall to steady us. Macy shifts her footing for balance, quickly but quietly. Some powdered drywall from above drops into our hair and lands on our shoulders.
We pay it little mind. I’m more concerned about the floor collapsing.
Heavy voices inside our home bark orders. It’s amazing how authoritative they sound, how…police-like. They’re mimicking even the simplest of details. Working quickly toward the goal of forced compliance. I hear Stanton’s manic, aggravated voice talking back to them and I wince.
I can’t help thinking, this isn’t the time to lose it, baby. I can’t help thinking, keep it together.
“What business do you have with us while blocks away we’re getting shelled?” he asks. “We’re nobodies. This whole city is filled with nobodies.” Stanton is pretending that not knowing they’re former gang bangers will save him. That it will save us all.
Will it?
“Get on your knees,” the voice says, now monotone, completely devoid of empathy or humanity, “hands behind your head, lower your face to the floor, slowly.”
“You’re going to have to put a bullet in me before I bend a knee to you,” Stanton finally growls, steadfast before them.
My body pulls in on itself, my muscles squeezing hard against the bones. There’s the shouting of orders, my husband’s crumbling foothold on life, and then that sound.
Their guns.
Their modified shotguns make a horrendous mechanical sound when chambering a round. It’s a hard industrial clacking, that metal-scraping-over-metal sound of something that will easily shell out round after round after round of blazing hot death.
The sound is power. The sound is lives being ended.
We didn’t expect the first round to blow through the drywall in the living room and end up cutting through the upper corner of the closet, but it did. Macy and I jump, but neither of us make a sound. Breathless, terrified, I check Macy, make sure she isn’t hit. She’s okay. Scared witless by the shaking feel of her, but okay nevertheless.
There’s a scuffle outside and I hear the one in charge saying, “See, that wasn’t so hard,” and I know Stanton is on his knees, complying.
Keep it together, I’m thinking. Please, please, please, Stanton. For us. For your daughter!
Macy’s head is jammed against my heart, which is slamming around in my chest with the fear that they’re going to find us. When they do, there’s no telling what they’ll do. Actually I have an idea, and perhaps this is why I’m so scared.
“Search the house,” the one calling out the orders says.
Things get pulled apart, overturned; drawers are torn from cabinets, flung about, kicked to pieces. I can’t even imagine what they hoped to gain by destroying our things. But if they keep at it, if they tear through this house the way they are, they will find us.
It’s inevitable.
Slowly I move Macy around to my backside as I step to the front of the tiny closet. My arm comes up, the gun goes out as far as it can, and when the door is finally jerked open, I see a man’s face that isn’t my husband’s or Rex’s and I just do it.
I squeeze the trigger.
He staggers backwards and I shoot him again, the ferocious jolt of gunfire startling me, unnerving me, damn near deafening me. Only for the slightest second do I realize the guy I shot is in uniform and he has no obvious tattoos.
Oh, no! I think.
I hear scuffling and realize now that I’ve played my hand, real cop or not, it’s time to come to the table and up the ante. It’s time to not be the me I’ve always been, but the me I must be in this world to survive.
I move out into the hallway, ready to charge whomever is out there with guns blazing. What I come up to is Stanton on his knees with a gigantic black shotgun pointed at his head. The barrel is pushing down on his skull and the man in the police uniform is frowning.
Beside him is another cop who has a shotgun trained on me. Both these guys have that hard look. Like time-on-the-street hard. Like time-in-the-joint hard.
“You just killed Clive,” he growls.
His piercing blue eyes and slicked-back black hair make him look like the Devil. Already I’m thinking of killing him. But Stanton will die if I do, then I’ll have to shoot the other guy, but by then he would’ve already got me and that’ll leave him and Macy.
The word rape runs rampant in my mind. I don’t squeeze the trigger just yet.
“Did you hear me?” he asks, perturbed.
“I didn’t kill him,” I say, swallowing hard, “the bullets did.”
The front door is still open. Can I make it? Get across the street to Rex before Stanton is dead and they get to Macy? No way. Stanton can’t help himself. He’s looking at me and I can see the defeat in his eyes. He’s not wanting to go, but he’s realizing he’s dead and he’s coming to accept it.
“Just shoot him, Sin,” he says.
In a fit of rage, the fake-cop spins his weapon around, cracks Stanton on the head with the stock and from there everything moves fast and slows at the same time. The bullet I fired his way blows through the guy’s jaw, but I’m already rolling for cover (a shotgun is fired, the explosion in this small space deafening)
. The last fake cop racks another load just as I’m coming up with the gun pointed at his face.
“I have you,” I say. “You’re down two, I’m down one, but I have you.”
“I’m not down two, we’re down two. There were three of us here in here, but there are dozens of us out there.”
“You mean your brothers in blue?”
“My brothers. Period.”
My arms are trembling right now. This is taking too long. I don’t want to look over at Stanton, but the guy cracked him with authority and he’s not moving. Whatever bravado I started with is melting fast as I’m realizing there’s no way out of this.
He shoots or I shoot; one of us dies.
That’s when I see Macy. She’s creeping out of the hall closet with her assault sock at her side. She’s looking at me, but moving in stealth and I’m thinking, please God, no.
The fake-cop sees me looking at her and he looks and that’s when she steps out, the sock swinging backwards like a soft-ball windup.
“You know why I’m having a hard time shooting you?” he finally says. “Because you’re too pretty to waste. But now that I see her, I’m thinking it’s time for you to go. Because the fun me and her can—”
Just as his eyes are coming back to mine, his entire head roosters red in a shower of gore that fans out over a small slice of the entire living room.
The body drops face(less)-first to the floor and standing in the open doorway is Rex with a smoking shotgun and Gunner beside him, trying to peek in. Rex is pushing his face away because…damn, the mess that’s been made is…too gory for words.
“If you can believe it, I think we’ve got our ride out of the city. Thank God for Gunner, though,” Rex says. “Kid’s got a pair of legs on him.” Meaning he can run. Meaning he ran and got Rex the second he found a way.
“I had it under control,” I tell him, my body starting with the post trauma shakes.
“What about Stanton?” he asks. “Did he have it under control, too?”
Looking down at him, Stanton’s slumped over, blood soaking his hair and the floor around him. Panic wells in me and I’m on my knees in no time checking for a pulse. It’s strong, thank God.
“Unconscious,” I announce.
Then turning to Macy, my relief short lived, I say, “What were you thinking?!”
She blanches.
“I was thinking I could help. I mean, that’s what Rex and Daddy have been trying to teach us, right? To work together to protect each other?”
“You could have gotten killed!”
“But she didn’t, sis,” Rex says softly. “None of us did and that’s always been the point.” To Gunner, he says, “You coming with us or staying here?”
“Coming with,” he says in a meek voice.
“Good, get your stuff, we’re getting out of here. And double-time it!”
“Guess he’s done expecting his parents to come home,” I say.
Rex gives me a proud-papa nod. “Yeah, we finally had the talk a few days back. He cried, got it all out, and now he’s looking like he’s turning a new leaf. Not being so much of a milquetoast.”
Stanton starts to come around.
“Get me a cold compress and the kit,” I tell Macy. She’s on it. “Just sit still,” I tell Stanton, cradling his sagging body. “You’re going to need stitches.”
“He’ll need to hold for a few,” Rex says. “I’ve got us a ride out of the city.”
I look up at him. “For real?” I ask.
“Time to blow this pop-stand,” he says, grinning.
“Let me just stitch Stanton up—”
“Cincinnati,” Rex says, softly, “we don’t have time. We need to leave now if we’re going to get to the rendezvous point. That’s why Gunner didn’t have to run far. I was already on my way over to tell you this.”
I can’t leave, yet we can’t stay. I know this.
Taking Stanton’s head in my hands, looking eye to eye at him, I can’t believe we’re going to have to go with him looking like he’s lost in outer space.
“Just give me ten or fifteen minutes,” I say.
Rex takes a hold of my arm. Roughly, he hauls me to my feet, grabs my face and turns it so we’re eye to eye.
“You’re not hearing me, we have to move, now!”
I shove his hands off me.
“We’re not going like this!” I shout, grief stricken, so juiced with hatred for what happened my organs feel pulped, like they’re boiling over with acid.
I would have died for him. I guess I planned on it the second I shot the fake cop, the second I shot the second one, the second I saw Macy come out and realized if I died, she’d at least have another parent.
This man sitting before me is my whole life.
“How can I just let him bleed like this, Rex?” I ask, my voice so small, so wounded. I wipe away the start of tears, but the flood is as persistent as the pain of seeing him hurt.
“I’m so sorry, Cincinnati,” he says, his eyes wild and jumpy, but unmistakably afraid.
Shaking off Rex’s loosened grip, I sink to all fours, take Stanton’s face and kiss him right on the mouth. Tears drip down my cheeks. His glassy eyes find mine; his mouth starts to move.
“Who’s blood?” he’s trying to say.
“Not mine,” I answer. “And not yours.”
I knew I caught some of the blood when fake-cop number three lost his head, but not that much. Looking down, my shirt is flecked with red spatter.
Macy brings me the medical backpack. “Cold compress, now,” I tell her. She knows exactly what I’m talking about.
“We have to go, Stanton. You need stitches and we shouldn’t move you, but Rex says there’s a way out. He says we’ve got a ride.”
He looks over at Rex.
“This true?”
“Took them a minute to find a clear route out of the city, and another minute to get the right vehicle for the run, but these guys are resourceful and good under fire. So yeah, we’ve got a way out.”
In the background, bombs start to drop. They sound nearby. Too close. By the time we’ve got everything we need to move, the smoke and ash from the fires is like a fresh winter’s snow, except it’s gray and dry and will probably end up in our lungs.
“Ready?” I ask Stanton. He nods. “Let me know if you get dizzy, or if you start to feel sick, okay?”
“I’ll be fine, Sin. It’s just a cut.”
“It’s more than that,” Macy says. “It’s like a huge vagina on your head.”
I draw a deep breath through my nose, try not to laugh, but also contain myself from screaming at her.
Rex isn’t so discreet. He bursts out laughing while Gunner says, “Looks like it’s on its period though,” and then we’re all in stitches. Well, everyone but Stanton, who’s just looking at Macy shaking his head like he can’t believe she just said that.
“On that fine note…” Stanton says.
On the way out of the house (I don’t even see this, but later I’ll realize what happened and it’ll be too late), Macy grabs a holstered pistol from the dead fake-cop and tucks it into the waist of her pants, saying nothing, her expression giving nothing away.
Chapter Eighteen
Half the city away, we see the first of a churning halo of fire lift into the sky. Is this one nuclear? Holy crap, it looks enormous! When the clouds spread out rather than turn into a giant mushroom, I realize our time hasn’t come just yet, and this makes me even more determined to protect Macy. Within the hour, based on the moisture in the air and the low, dark clouds, it’ll be raining sludge.
We should have brought some coats.
“Where are we headed?” I finally ask, the words sounding meek on my lips. “Where’s the rendezvous point?”
“Diversidero and Turk,” Rex says. “We’re running late, so I hope they didn’t leave us behind.”
“Would they do that?” Macy asks.
“They’re ex-military. They plan to the half-minute, so ye
ah…throw off their schedule and the whole op can sour.”
“They didn’t teach you flexibility in the military?” Macy asks.
He looks at her dead serious and says, “No.”
The rain starts. It gets nasty shortly after. People are wandering through the wet muck in a haze of delirium, exhaustion. I had no idea it would be this bad. I keep an eye on the sky, but the drones don’t seem to fly much in this kind of weather.
Silver linings.
We keep to the sidewalks, using the buildings as shelter, but I’m scared. This is emotional torture, this is fear ripping at me with the same force as grief, or loneliness, or the sense of having abandoned the home we’d just made our own. I’m frightened, devastated, crackling with anger.
Survivors of this war scurry from one place to another, one guy bumping into us and not apologizing, another woman pushing a shopping car with a plastic cover on whatever junk she’s got stashed in there, some guy sitting on a curb holding his head, which is bleeding worse than Stanton’s was and not saying a word about it.
The downpour is some unspoken signal to humans that it’s safe to move. Without the drones, everyone gets brave. Traffic amongst the abandoned cars picks up quickly, too quickly for a few of these poor souls staggering this way and that. They look like malnourished zombies, some fighting with strangers, some with eyes as large as saucers looking to be somewhere. Just not here.
Not stuck at Ground Zero.
Maybe there are a million Ground Zero’s. Maybe there is no safe zone. This city from top to bottom is hostile territory. But maybe every city is like this. Maybe there are people just like us in places just like this thinking the key to their salvation is a ride out of town.
Maybe we’re all desperate fools.
The five of us don’t slow our pace. We weave through the mayhem, hoping the weather keeps until we can get to wherever it is Rex is taking us.
Looking at Stanton, seeing that he’s keeping up, I say, “You doing okay?”
He nods. I think he’s in pain. Or thinking he should be in pain. Head wounds bleed a lot, but they don’t always hurt so much.
