by Ryan Schow
“Let’s not make a big deal of it,” she grumbled.
Fair enough, he thought.
With that he nodded, then moved in front of the store’s doors, pried one open and held it for Indigo. In one hand Rex held his pistol, in the other Indigo’s Ka-bar. In front of him, Indigo was armed with two pistols she’d grabbed off the dead scumbags back in the field. He hated saying it, but she looked incredibly sexy just then.
Not now, he thought.
As disagreeable as this girl was proving to be, she was also proving to be quite competent. No one was prepared for a war that found its way stateside, certainly not like this, not from our own technology going rogue, if that’s what this was. But she was fitting in just fine.
If he was attracted to her before, he was really attracted to her now.
Not now!
Shaking off these distracting thoughts, he attuned his senses to his surroundings. The inside was hardly recognizable as a store. Most of the shelves had been looted. Displays were knocked over, aisles pushed this way and that, beds and tents everywhere. It all made for some lousy cover. Even worse, there was a distinct smell of urine and pot smoke in the air. Urine he could stomach; pot smoke residue…not so much.
Deeper inside the store, near the back, he heard voices. He held up a fist; Indigo stopped. She was good with directions, he thought. A plus considering Cincinnati tended to hesitate and Macy tended to rush into things. Stanton, on the other hand, was reliable. For a ragtag gang of untrained talent, it was a start.
He made out two men’s voices and a woman’s. Rex motioned for Indigo to head up one side of the store and to keep her eyes on him. She nodded. He then signaled that they were going to flank the group and she seemed to understand.
As he moved around an end-cap, he saw a middle-aged man in sweat pants and a touristy t-shirt (one size too small) sitting on the floor with his back against the wall. He wore a trucker’s cap with the tag still on, but it was pulled over his eyes and he was sleeping. He had no visible ink, except for the two teardrops tattooed below his eyes.
Looking down, Rex almost stepped into a coil of human excrement. Not fresh, but not crispy either. Poo fumes tickled the air. He stepped over the pile, leaving the fecal artwork behind him where he couldn’t smell it.
Standing perfectly still, dead quiet, Rex steadied his breath. When Rex studied the man, he was pretty sure he knew what he was looking at: a misfit of the violent sort. Scarred knuckles weren’t always a true tell to a brawler, but more often than not they were.
Creeping forward, Rex snuck up on the sleeping man, knelt down, then with a burst of force, he drove the Ka-bar’s mammoth blade in between the man’s fourth and fifth rib. They guy jolted awake in time for Rex to palm-strike the blade the rest of the way in. The man’s eyes shot wide open and he drew a sharp breath. Rex quickly covered the man’s mouth to silence any sound that may escape and give them away. The man’s breath held for a second, then he began to deflate like an old balloon losing air.
Death imminent, his head lolled toward Rex, terribly slow. Pain-stricken eyes slid toward him. He tried to focus, but couldn’t. There was no vibrancy left. The body drooped against the blade. Feeling the weight of him on the knife, Rex ripped the Ka-bar out, opening up the man’s insides, which would most assuredly lead to rapid and permanent organ failure.
Rex stepped over him, quiet as a mouse, and left him there to die.
Moving forward, unobstructed, he crept toward the sound of the voices. He nearly reached the back of the store when he looked over and saw Indigo waiting for him, giving him the “what gives?” signal. He raised the bloody blade and pointed to it. She nodded in understanding, then used two fingers to tell him she had eyes on the targets. After that she held up three fingers. He nodded. Three subs, confirmed.
She moved forward; he intended to follow.
That’s when an explosion of gunfire erupted behind him. One shot zinged past him, whistling so close to his ear he froze, but only for a split second. What pulled him from his momentary paralysis was the second, third and fourth shots.
One of them punched into the back of his triceps, dipping his shoulder and pitching him forward.
He spun and immediately saw his attacker as some strung out kid with bony arms and clothes that looked draped over an emaciated body.
This was the guy who got away. The one in the field Indigo lost two arrows trying to hit. And according to her, he was one of the members of the so called Ophidian Horde who held him captive and threatened his family. Recognition took but a millisecond.
Behind him, Indigo was screaming at the three targets to not move a single muscle or she’d shoot the girl first.
Rex lost track of what was happening very quickly because he was firing off a quick succession of rounds at the clown who got over on him. The sharp echo of a gun of this caliber going off inside a closed, nearly emptied-out store pierced and rattled his brain, something he was used to but never really liked.
The first two rounds hammered the boy’s chest, staggering him but not putting him down; the third shot—the kill shot—found its mark. The boy’s head snapped backwards and he toppled like a fallen tree.
The bite in Rex’s arm had a hot sting to it, and the Ka-bar had fallen from his grip somewhere between him getting shot and him neutralizing his target.
He flexed his fingers on the arm he’d been shot in, cringed at the stab of pain, lamented the stiffness of muscles in revolt. This was the second time he’d been shot today.
In his shot arm, the dull ache he’d managed to stop obsessing over was now throbbing again. Of course, so was his head where he’d been struck. He couldn’t give in to the pain this time. He couldn’t pass out or complain.
Pain is not a now thing, his CO once told him. Pain is a later thing.
He needed to cover Indigo. That was the important thing, the right-now thing. Moving as fast as he could to her position, eyes roving everywhere, he found her. She didn’t exactly have the situation under control, but she wasn’t looking overwhelmed either.
“You don’t understand,” she was telling one of the two guys who had a gun trained on her. She was looking at him, but one of her guns was on him while the other was aimed low on the girl’s torso. “You shoot me, I shoot her in the stomach then you can watch her bleed out slowly as she dies a horrible death.”
Rex stepped in…
“Or I kill you and you die anyway,” he added, pointing his weapon at the immediate threat. “Either way, this ends up with me using your skull as target practice. Unless you want to be reasonable, which would involve you putting your guns down so we can talk to you the way we intend to talk to you.”
“And how’s that?” the thug asked, his gun still aimed at Indigo, his eyes as hard as stone and every bit as serious.
“With you pissing your pants and wishing for a weapon, and me and the hottie over there pointing our guns at your man veggies, tiny and insignificant as they may be.”
For a second, someone wanted to laugh, he just knew it, but it appeared Rex was the only one appreciating his sense of humor. Then again, he was also the only one of the five of them bleeding. Was there a correlation he was missing? Perhaps. Would he pass out again from the pain of being shot? It was possible. After all, he was a great soldier, but not so great a victim.
“I’m going to count to three, and then I’m going to shoot your little girlfriend here in the ear,” Rex said, turning his gun on the girl.
Indigo moved her gun off the girl and now had both guns on the gunman. She looked him straight in the eye and said, “I’m faster than you are, puta. With double the load.”
“She is,” Rex echoed.
The guy finally lowered his gun.
“You know the drill,” Indigo said. “Kick them over.”
Reluctantly he dropped the weapon, kicked it her way. She didn’t take her eyes off his eyes as she shoved the weapon aside, unconcerned.
“Down on your knees, lace your finger
s together and place them behind your head.”
With a lot of grumbling and some very colorful language, all three did as they were told.
“The Ophidian Horde,” Indigo said. No one looked up. All three of them either looked down or away, confirming what Rex gathered were her suspicions.
Stuffing her weapons into her jeans at the small of her back, she stepped forward, pulled the man’s shirt up and saw the tattoo of the black snake in the double S pattern.
“I thought so,” she said.
Rex didn’t like her being so close to the man and he was prepared to shoot him dead if he so much as flinched in her direction. Fortunately for all of them, he did no such thing.
“Where are the rest of you?” she asked, standing to her full height once more. “Because if this is the whole gang, I’d say you’re all pretty pathetic.”
The prisoners didn’t move, speak, or even look up. Rex was feeling a bit woozy, but fighting it. Before he knew what happened, Indigo had pulled the gun from her pants, spun it around, then pistol-whipped the prisoner on the crown of his head. The man’s entire body bucked and a nasty gash opened just beneath his hairline. A stream of blood followed within seconds. He looked up at her, eyes raging, disgusting curses just draining from his mouth.
Rex wasn’t surprised by the blood flow; if Indigo was, she didn’t show it.
“Are you trying to turn me on?” Rex asked her after the guy finished with his verbal tirade. Now he was really feeling that syrupy fog coming on.
Indigo ignored him.
“Honestly, if that was your intention,” Rex replied, “it might be working.”
At this point his triceps was really smarting, furthering his agitation. For a second, he couldn’t seem to balance out his emotions. He was, in fact, kind of crushing hard on Indigo, but he was also shot and losing blood, and then there was the matter of this taking a long time. Too long. The way the outside world was pushing so mightily at the edges of his vision, how he was starting to feel weak and overcome, he had to speed things up a little or he wouldn’t be conscious enough to back Indigo. By passing out, he could be signing her death warrant. His, too.
“I said, where are the rest of you?” Indigo asked.
He said nothing, so Rex shot him in the head, causing everyone to jump. The man slumped over and Indigo turned and fired him a look.
Did that just happen?
Woozy, things blurring fast, Rex wobbled backwards a step, caught himself.
“Ask him,” Rex said. The blood was now draining from his face. He watched Indigo’s eyes drop to the red bloom expanding across his shirt sleeve from where the bullet exited.
“Really?” she said, irritated.
“This is number two, today,” he said, sounding not quite himself.
Indigo registered all this with a hint of concern, then she turned to the second man and said, “Answer the question. Now!”
“Just shoot me you stupid bi—”
Her gun was already in his face; her finger was already squeezing the trigger; his head was already rocking back.
She turned and pointed the gun at the girl, who was too freaked out to cry, even though her eyes where filling with tears fast.
“New question,” Indigo said.
The bottle blonde with the sloppy body, the heavy makeup and the terrified eyes couldn’t stop staring at the two dead men beside her.
“They went easy,” Indigo warned the girl, softly, almost compassionately. “It won’t be the same for you. I’ll start with your feet and work my way up your body because you’re the last. And do you know what they say about the last?”
The girl finally met Indigo’s eyes. She looked scared.
“The last ones get it the worst. Which means by the time I’m done with you, you’ll be begging for a bullet right in the kisser.”
“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,” she finally said, tears flooding her eyes.
“Good. First question. Do you have any medical supplies?” By now Rex felt himself leaning on an end-cap, his arm really heavy, his legs feeling a bit gummy.
Indigo looked at him, then back to their impromptu hostage.
“Yes.”
“On your feet,” Indigo barked. “Now!”
The girl was slow to stand. Obviously she was athletically disinclined, as evidenced by balance issues and a lack of coordination when getting up.
She took Indigo and Rex to the employee lounge where there were stacks of all kinds of things, very little of which were edible. Indigo found what she needed.
“Water?” she asked.
“Bottled,” the blonde said.
“Get me one.”
Rex moved a few things off one of the breakroom tables, then crawled up on it and rolled over on his back.
“Are we bad people, Indigo?” he heard himself ask. “Because they could have been innocent people and we just shot them.”
“They weren’t innocents,” Indigo said, even though she sounded miles away. “Not even close. It’s why I’ve been tracking them.”
“I hope you’re…right.”
When the girl brought the water over, Indigo said, “Open it.”
She did.
“Now go stand in that corner, forehead to the wall, and if I see you turn around before I tell you, I’ll put two rounds in your spine and leave you to your woes.”
The girl started to say something, but thought better of it. Instead, she went to the corner, pressed her face to the wall and stood there.
“And pull up your pants for God’s sake. I don’t need to be staring at your butt crack the whole time.”
Reaching one hand around, the girl hiked up the back of her jeans.
“When I’m done with him,” Rex thought he heard Indigo say as the lights in his head were quickly going out, “you’re going to tell me everything you know.”
At that point, what Rex said next, it could’ve happened, or perhaps it was all in his head. He wasn’t quite sure. Not that it mattered when you’re about to pass out. The world around him was closing into a pinhole from the encroaching darkness and he couldn’t tell if it was his brain or his mouth doing the talking, but he said it. Or maybe he didn’t. The delirium was masking what was real, confusing him, dragging him under.
“I might be falling in love with you.”
Those were the words rolling around in his head, or dropping from his mouth. They were cheesy and irrational, but they weren’t terribly wrong either.
All he knew was that was the last dominant thought on his mind before his eyes fell shut and the darkness finally closed over him.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Rider strolled confidently through the streets with an AR slung over one shoulder, a Glock on both hips, a spare magazine for each gun on his person, three different knives and two sticks of chewing gum—watermelon flavored.
The second the EMP hit, he put two and two together. It seemed the US government had been overwhelmed by the drones, that they somehow broke free of command. Killing everything with a computer chip was their only option. How far did this reach? For the military to go high altitude with this meant half the country had been effected by the burst. Reason would have it that if half the country was under attack, then why not the whole country?
With precious little information, and a surprising lack of curiosity on his part now that the EMP had fried the grid, he found he didn’t really care about the details, important as they may be. The point was, the machines had been stopped. The point was things were about to get really, really bad inside the city.
At least the nuke wasn’t detonated at ground level or directly over the city, so barring any unusual weather patterns, he didn’t think radiation would be an immediate problem. In the days ahead, he’d have to get a Geiger counter, or a portable multichannel analyzer, just to be sure.
For the first time in a long time, the former contractor felt his face break into a smile. This was the calm before the storm. He liked calm. He also li
ked the chaos of the storm. But what sated him most was the level playing field.
Days ago, Rider had been to Dirt Alley where he found Indigo. She was a tough kid, not at all what he expected and certainly able to handle herself in times like these. For now. That much he’d report back. He was heading to home base now, but home base wasn’t a house as much as it was a compound: the City College of San Francisco/John Adams Library on Mission and Grove.
He and a couple of guys from the VA found the perfect place to dig in and ride out the collapse of society. Having spent a few years in near isolation, he was comfortable keeping his own company. He knew he should grab a go bag and bug out, but he was a former asset for the dark side of the CIA and war was in his blood. So he stayed. And he gathered a few allies, guys like him, guys who wouldn’t run. Guys who liked war.
The college/library was a U shaped structure standing four stories tall. It was solid brick construction, contained multiple defensible points from up high and had chain link fences at the rear. It was already halfway fortified. With enough people from the neighborhood, people who needed shelter and weren’t afraid to work hard for others, or fight, they had a safe place to stay, at least until the power was restored.
It could be years. Decades. Or this could just be an isolated event and the National Guard would roll in to assist in the rebuilding of San Francisco.
He tended to think that an EMP blast made things a little more permanent than the average person thought. He wasn’t terribly excited about that, but he did like new adventures and new places, and he did thrive when faced with impossible problems, so sadly, there was a part of him that accepted this dark new challenge.
Walking down Masonic Street, two blocks from Grove, he encountered trouble. This wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. The problem with lawlessness was that the dregs of society always had a way of being everywhere, in everyone’s business. And no matter how hard you tried to avoid them, some circumstances just didn’t allow for it.
The instant these guys saw him (he counted six total), they nodded his way and changed their gait, which became predictably thuggish. Great, he thought. Awesome. One of them pulled out a pistol, walked with it at his side. This must be the leader.
