by Ryan Schow
“I know you said I’m way too old for you, but did you ever think you’re way too young for me?”
Smiling in the dark, she said, “Of course not.”
He laughed, and it was the first jovial laugh he’d had in years. Perhaps the hard shell he’d constructed so thoroughly around his heart wasn’t so impenetrable.
“So what are you saying?” he asked, hoping she was saying what he hoped she was saying.
“I’m saying, you’re pretty hot for an old fart, and you can protect us if things turn ugly, which I’m smart enough to know they will. Plus I see the way you look at me. I know that feeling. I have it when I look at you, too.”
She was right, he thought. Perceptive and right. The fact that she was feeling the same about him was not only unexpected, but welcome.
If they were ever going to beat back the darkness and hopelessness this attack had left behind on the city and its people, it would be through moments like this with people like Sarah.
Would he still have to face all these demons though? Would he still want to hurt those who hurt others to make up for the part of him that lamented his brother’s death, and his own run of misdeeds? If so, in this city that once embraced nearly a million souls, there would be gangs, felons, power trippers and monsters.
Plenty of people meant plenty of trouble. And in times like these, the lawless, the cruel and the insane came out from the darkness and into the light. If he could put all his pain into ending their lives, then perhaps he could find meaning again. If he could dispense of it on others, maybe it wouldn’t leak out on Sarah, as had happened in all his other relationships.
Or maybe he was still an old, ruined fool.
Feeling her naked body curled against his, he brushed a strand of hair from her head and wondered how long it would be before he broke her heart, before she gave up looking for that something inside of him that had long ago been hollowed out.
Chapter Forty-Three
Chad and Wagner set out into the night with their stack of bombs, their last baggie of weed, their papers and their lighter. They were already tripping, but not enough to concern them.
“There’s a lot of cars out here,” Chad says.
Wagner simply nodded.
“We should go a few blocks up, try out these things in a neighborhood that isn’t ours,” Chad said.
Wagner just nodded again.
“You okay?”
“I feel…I feel…do you feel it?” he asked, practically dazed. It’s dark outside and they were just walking down the street, away from their home.
“Mine’s wearing off.” His high. That soft, fuzzy edge of everything.
“Yeah, man.”
“Let’s head up into Presidio Heights,” Chad said. That’s where they were heading, but someone needed to say it. “Most of that neighborhood is vacant anyway.”
“How do you know?” Wagner asked.
“Is it cold out here, or is it just me?”
“Where’s your jacket?” Wagner said, looking up at his friend. Chad’s eyes were dropped down on the pipe bombs he was carrying in a box in his arms. Inside the box was his jacket.
“It’s keeping the bombs warm,” Chad said.
“If they get cold will they blow up?” Wagner asked.
“Of course, that’s why we have the jacket.”
Wagner rolled his eyes and said, “Dude, you’re dumb. Seriously. When did you ever see anything blow up because the conditions were too cold?”
“I may be dumb,” Chad said, “but you’re still high, so maybe we’re both stupid.”
At that, they both started laughing, then began talking about how to daisy chain a bunch of the pipe bombs together if they could only find a pair of cars close by.
“First things first,” Wagner said, “we try one and go from there.”
They walked for the next few blocks in the cold, quiet night, then Chad handed the box to Wagner and said, “This is getting too heavy. You carry it for awhile.”
“We’re far enough from home,” Wagner said.
They looked down one street, then the other, and there they found an older Suburban SUV parked bumper to bumper with a newer Maxima.
“Bingo freaking bango,” Chad said.
“Daisy chain?” Wagner asked, his high winding down.
“Hells to the yes.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Sometime in the middle of the night, a bomb exploded so close it shook the entire house. Lenna Justus sat up fast in bed. A hard sleep clung to her, dragging her down when instinct alone had her disoriented, scared and blasted through with a surge of fight-or-flight adrenaline.
Through a fog of delirium, her first concern was for the boys.
Scrambling out of the sheets, she raced from her bedroom down the hallway, nearly slipping on the polished hardwood floor. The boys’ door was blown wide open. It looked like Hell had opened a portal and she was staring into its yawning mouth. In that split second, Lenna found herself in the heart of every parent’s worst nightmare.
Are my children alive?
Stepping inside the bedroom, a quick look left and she was staring at the gaping hole where a wall and a window used to be. The smoking ruin of a sagging roofline was all that was left. Down at the curb, an exploded SUV was in flames alongside the neighbor’s Maxima.
Debris littered the boys’ bedroom: broken two by fours, glass shards, drywall chunks and powder, smoldering clothes. Outside, firelight illuminated the neighborhood—a lurid sight if ever there was one. Turning away, her eyes frantically zeroed in on the beds.
Both were empty.
“Boys?” she said, tentative, scared of hearing nothing in return. She wanted to scream their names, had intended to, but the lump in her throat was the size of a fist.
Nothing.
Were her boys dead? Don’t think like that! she screamed inside her head. Hagan, Ballard. Seventeen and fourteen. Gone.
No!
Desperate to find them, she tore back the mess of blankets. That’s when she found them. They were in a tangle together on the floor, stuffed between the two beds and the wall. Both lay at odd angles, eyes shut, unmoving.
“No, no, no, no, no…” she whimpered frantically.
Neither seemed responsive to her voice.
Scuttling over Hagan’s bed, her body suffering an onslaught of tremors, she was half beside herself and fighting back a scream. It didn’t help that there was a high-pitched ringing in her ears, or that the positioning of the beds was making it impossible for her to get to her boys.
Climbing back over the mattress and bedsheets, she took hold of one bedframe and then the other, and then she yanked, pulled and dragged both beds backwards with a strength she never remembered having.
A small sob escaped her at the sight of her boys’ contorted bodies. Moving closer, hand to her mouth, tears streaming down her cheeks, she suffered a great and torturous agony.
The shimmer of blood coated Ballard’s face—his sweet, innocent face—which was turned sideways, half tucked in shadow. Hagan started to move, causing in her a surprised, relieved gasp. She sunk to her knees between them, took her older son’s hand.
“Hagan, baby, can you hear me?”
He didn’t respond. Then, slowly, he turned his head and creaked open his jaw, making the same face you make when you pop the pressure from your ears.
If she still had that high-pitched ringing in her ears from the blast—and she’d been in the back of the house—then they must be either temporarily or permanently deaf. Being this close to the explosion, she shuddered to think of what their little bodies were going through.
She turned to Ballard.
He started to move, too, and that’s when terrified tears became tears of joy. Both boys moved into sitting positions against the wall, their faces covered with blood and debris.
She pushed Ballard’s hair out of his eyes, saw they were becoming lucid, then did the same to Hagan. Lenna leaned forward, pulled both their heads t
o hers and fought the mixed bag of emotions swirling around inside her.
After seeing they were still alive, her first thoughts were of Jagger. How in the world did he expect her to handle all of this on her own?!
Was he ever coming home? Is he even alive?
Then her husband’s voice crept into her mind, the same as it always did when she was overwhelmed. This time, what she heard playing back was a conversation they had when all this began.
It was August 21, 2019, a Wednesday. Jagger was in Corpus Christi, Texas, also taking fire from UAV’s; what he said that day changed everything. His voice was insistent, his tone burning with an intensity she remembered only from his days following combat.
“When you’re under attack, the laws of before no longer apply,” he’d said into the phone, putting things into perspective. “When we die, when God sees the intentions in our heart, that the need for our survival both fed and nourished our darker instincts—but that we weren’t evil—He will have no choice but to understand us enough to forgive us.”
“And if He doesn’t?” she’d asked.
“Then heaven help us, because things are going south so fast, there’s no way we’re going to survive this kind of thing if we play by the rules. When it comes to protecting our boys and our home, nothing is off limits, Lenna. Do you hear me? Nothing.”
They’d talked a couple of times since that first day, when he could, but they were now more than a month into the attacks and the phones were dead. The power was gone. He knew how bad it was, didn’t he? He had to know.
Then again, the times when they’d spoken over satellite phone, it was mostly him telling her why he was stuck somewhere and her crying all over the place and begging for him to come home.
“I’m trying, Lenna,” he’d said more than once with a weariness in his voice he couldn’t seem to hide from her. “I really, really am.”
“Can’t you just tell them you need to be home for your family?” He’d managed to get out of Texas and back to San Diego, but Camp Pendleton was sustaining heavy fire, and she knew this.
“If we don’t get this worked out,” he said, “the top brass are afraid there’ll be no family left to go home to. I’m not telling you this to scare you, only to let you know this isn’t happening in just San Francisco, San Diego or Corpus Christi. I’m starting to suspect this is a larger field of battle than any of us first imagined.”
“You promised to keep us safe,” she pleaded.
“And I will.”
Yet there she was, the front of her house a cratered wreck. No husband, no protection, no clue as to what just happened.
Shaking these poisonous thoughts from her mind, she focused on her boys. Hagan started groaning a bit, rocking himself back and forth, which was tough for Lenna to watch because Hagan was the sturdier of her two kids.
His eyes eventually cleared enough for him to look right at her and say, “I’m okay,” a little too loud.
“You can hear me?” she asked, the noise in her ears a low buzzing as opposed to a shrill and present ringing.
He nodded.
Turning to Ballard, her fourteen year old, she said, “What about you, kiddo? Can you hear me, too?”
He nodded, but his eyes weren’t as clear as Hagan’s, and his face had a lot more blood on it. She helped them both off the floor, walked them to the bathtub where she dipped a washcloth into a bucket of water to clean their faces.
Their cuts were plentiful, but superficial. Just a lot of little nicks that would heal on their own so long as they were cleaned properly and kept from infection. Outside, a burst of laughter erupted. A quick, but hearty noise that stopped almost the moment it started.
She froze.
It had been days since the drones had gone through here. But drones didn’t laugh when they destroyed entire parts of your life. So what blew up the cars in front of their house? Rather, who blew them up?
She listened again. All she heard was silence. She let herself breathe again. Cautious, not optimistic…not yet.
The silence stretched out, allowing her mind to think of other things while she finished wiping their faces with soap and water.
Who knew Presidio Heights would ever see such a day? The homes were once so beautiful, a staple of the city. A part of its simple yet elegant grandeur. As breathtaking as downtown San Francisco could be, they didn’t exactly live in the heart of it as much as their home rested on the less congested edge of it.
An inheritance from her mother a few years back left them flush with cash, money they’d invested into this house, their future.
Now it all seemed like a silly dream.
Some future, she thought, a bitter taste in her mouth. This was not a home anymore. This was a hiding place. An unfortified paper fortress.
As she finished with the boys’ wounds, the questions began to spin around in her head. The nagging need for answers. Their little sanctuary had just taken a substantial hit, her boys nearly killed. And why? Were they targeted, or was this a random occurrence? What in the world had caused so much damage to their room? So much damage that they all nearly perished because of it? It couldn’t have just been two cars blowing up. Cars didn’t just blow up.
Lenna wasn’t sure, but she knew for certain she was going to find out, and fast. In that moment, she thought, God, please know what is in my heart, and don’t punish me for what I might be forced to do.
She tucked the boys into hers and Jagger’s king sized bed and tried to think. After only a few minutes of contemplation, the silence was cut short by a few more hoots and some inebriated laughter.
“Stay here,” she told them both.
Lenna slinked into the hallway, made her way into the boys’ bedroom. Moving through the wreckage, keeping to the shadows, she snuck a quick look outside. The inferno on the street below was tapering down in its intensity, casting off just enough light to expose a shaggy looking kid not-so-innocently fiddling with another car, this one down the road a dozen feet from the SUV and the Maxima, near the other side of their home—Jagger’s and her office.
Son of a…
Rage became a bolt of terror that tore right through her. Someone was tinkering around on the car out front, a car that had been there since the bombing started. Was he trying to blow it up? Did he blow up the SUV and the Maxima, too?
Animosity and fury coursed through her. If the car the kid was fiddling with exploded, not only would it take out the other side of their home, it could weaken the whole structure and cause a collapse.
She needed a plan and quick!
God, that sounded so civilized. Jagger would tell her in times like these, survival of the fittest meant being bold and precise. She was about to go for her rifle when the derelict at the car below turned and waved at someone across the street, almost like he needed help.
There were two of them?
A small, equally shaggy-haired teen moved out of the shadows and crossed the street to meet him. He was moving slow, like he was drunk, or stoned. Thinking of her boys, of her home, Lenna needed no more convincing.
Time to get moving.
She quietly hustled the boys out of bed, told them to pull the mattress halfway over them. As the three of them wrestled the mattress into place, Hagan wanted to know what she was doing, what was happening.
Unlike her youngest son, Hagan looked for the fight. He was like his father: full of gasoline and vinegar, angry enough at what this world had become he wanted to participate in the struggle to take it back.
“Just get under the bed and watch out for your brother.”
They did as they were told.
Looking at Hagan, she didn’t have the heart to tell him there was nothing left to take back. No enemy small enough to kill to make a difference. The poor thing…he’d became a man too quickly.
It happened when his girlfriend was shot dead in her car outside her house. The attacks had just begun, and he’d snuck out to see her. Her parents never came home to find her. They didn’t s
ee what Hagan saw, how her body had been riddled with bullets so savagely, it could only be the work of drones. Of course, her folks were probably dead, both of them having jobs downtown.
Anything sweet in Hagan died that day, and practically overnight his genial nature turned hard and calculating. She could really use Jagger right about now. He would know what to do better than her!
Then it became clear.
Her mind returned her to their first conversation about the climate of war and she knew exactly what Jagger would say. He’d tell her to defend herself, defend their boys, defend the house at all cost.
Lenna missed him so much. He was right though.
He was always right.
“Mom?” Hagan said, letting her know he was okay, that he could help her where he was needed.
She had bigger problems, though. Right-now problems. If the delinquents in the street below were wiring up another explosion, Lenna had to assume they’d lose everything, possibly even their lives. This was her assessment, and now more than ever she needed to trust her instincts.
“Stay down, the both of you,” she said, stern enough that they listened.
Lenna grabbed the hunting rifle from the closet, snatched up the box of ammo and hurried to the other street-facing bedroom, the one that was still somewhat in tact. Through the broken glass (courtesy of the first explosion), she spotted the two delinquents immediately.
Their overconfidence was startling. Then again, there weren’t many people left on this street so they probably assumed they were alone.
She had the high-ground, the clear advantage. Their naiveté, their stupidity, bought her the seconds she needed to get into position. Through the large scope, she sighted the first kid, the tall white kid mostly hidden from view.
Oblivious to her, he was fiddling with wires inside the car, under the dash by the looks of it. The other guy—what appeared to be a shorter Asian kid, probably in his late-teens—hovered over his friend, instructing him and pointing to things inside the car.
