by Ryan Schow
She never felt herself go, but she closed her eyes just enough to pass out completely.
Sometime later, a damp cloth was spread across her forehead, gently wiping away the debris covering her face. By this time she was able to take a spoonful of water into her throat, washing away the encrusted filth she couldn’t stop tasting.
She tried to talk. Couldn’t.
Tried to move.
Stopped.
Eventually she worked her eyes open and that’s when she saw him: Ballard.
“Mom, you need to eat,” her youngest said in his squeaky, puberty strained voice.
Ballard was the sensitive one. More like her than his father. In that moment, this was a welcomed trait, one that reminded her that not all of this new life was misery. That through the eternal darkness there was the possibility of light.
“Can’t,” she whispered, the word coming out hoarse, but audible.
“Hagan went for food.”
Her heart jolted, but her body was too depleted to show it.
“Dangerous,” she whispered, a cresting wave of panic rising within her.
“He took the rifle. He’ll be fine. We already scoped out the street. You killed both guys, although one of them is just...pieces. Hagan talked about eating them for dinner, but I told him you’d have none of it, so he went out hunting for something else.”
“That a joke?” she asked referring to eating the boys. Ballard shrugged his shoulders, like he wasn’t sure.
Whatever need she had to recover—to protect them, to provide for them—quickly sagged. She thought about their situation and felt defeated, pure devastation. And Hagan? He was indeed his father’s son.
Now he’d taken the rifle and charged foolhardy into the unknown with no backup and a heart beating with the reckless desire to contribute, to defend, to kill, even at the expense of his own life.
Brave, stupid boy, she thought.
Chapter Fifty
Hagan’s body was all scrapes and cuts and bruises from getting through the house. He had the rifle, but that didn’t make him safe, or dangerous. He had a hard time hunting rabbit with his father. He even refused to shoot at birds. He was his father’s son, but he wasn’t.
Then again, he wasn’t really that boy anymore. Not after his girlfriend…not after what he found…what had happened to her.
He was walking down Sacramento Street when sound cut through the air: an old motor, gasping and wound high, running hard but with just enough oil to keep it from burning out. He turned in time to see the open-top Jeep come bouncing around the corner at Locust and Sacramento, only half a block from him.
The old Jeep was pristine white about a hundred years ago and had three guys driving it. Music blared from a set of crappy speakers. Rap music. One guy was standing up in the back of the truck with a beer bottle and a pistol. He aimed it at Hagan and popped off two shots, both missing him but hitting a blue garbage can behind him and a tree trunk in front of him.
As the Jeep roared by, the guys laughed, the one in the front seat flipping him the bird. Whatever fear he had working its way through him turned almost instantaneously to fury. It was guys like this who would rule the apocalypse.
He chambered a round in the 30.06 hunting rifle, sighted down the guy in the back seat, aimed for the beer bottle in his hand. Hagan slid his finger over the trigger, let out his breath then fired. The bottle broke. But only because it fell from the kid’s hand.
The hand he’d blown a hole in.
“Oh crap,” he muttered as the brake lights burned bright red and the Jeep came to a grating halt under locked-up wheels.
The guy was screaming and holding his hand up and pointing back at Hagan. The reverse lights came on and Hagan turned and booked it back to where he’d come from, sprinting to Locust Street. Left or right? His breath was coming fast and he was scared.
Crapping-his-pants scared.
He went right.
Hagan ran with all his might toward an enclosed, drop-down staircase. He hustled to the staircase, sweat pouring down his face, starting to soak the back of his shirt. He chambered another round, set the rifle up on the top stair, which was level with the sidewalk.
The Jeep roared backwards, then swung around at the mouth of Locust Street, the front wheels bumping, sliding and jerking around with quick barks and squeals.
Gears were grinding, the driver working the stick shift until he found a gear. The Jeep then jolted forward, but slowly. The idiot in the back seat was now sitting down, holding his hand and mumbling to himself frantically. The front passenger had a shotgun out and ready.
Great.
Hagan tracked the trio of jackasses through the scope. Three things went through his head lightning quick. First, they had a Jeep that was operational when nothing else seemed to be. Second, if they saw him they were going to kill him. Third, his mother killed those two boys because those two boys were trying to kill them.
Kill before you’re killed. Get the Jeep. Live.
With a hard-ass like Jagger Justus for a father, a military man through and through, Hagan could shoot a rifle. He wasn’t a killer though. He couldn’t kill.
But his mother could?
The Jeep was creeping toward him…it was almost upon him. He was thinking about the first shot. It would stop one, but there would be two men left. One who was injured, another who was driving. If he was going to shoot, he’d have to hit the passenger. The guy with the shotgun.
You can do this, he told himself.
The Jeep crept by and Hagan kept his head low, watching the passenger’s eyes as they poured over every possible hiding place. He watched those eyes as they dropped and landed on him.
Oh, no.
“Stop!” the passenger shouted, and the Jeep braked not ten feet from him.
The dirty looking cretin was already swinging his shotgun around when Hagan put a round in his throat. The driver reacted fast just as Hagan jerked on the bolt handle, ejecting the round. The next bullet auto-loaded as the driver rounded the back of the Jeep, armed and moving in on him fast.
Hagan aimed low, squeezed the trigger. The round hit the kid in the gut, doubling him over, stopping him.
Hagan scrambled up the stairs, making a wide berth around the shot and moaning driver. Another gun went off and milliseconds later he felt a crazy burn across his head, bumping it sideways just the slightest bit. His eyes went to the guy whose hand he shot. He was bleeding badly and white, but he was in the back seat holding a smoking pistol in his good hand.
Hagan dropped down on the sidewalk behind one of the many mature trees lining this street as three more shots rang out. The Jeep’s passenger door kicked open and the guy he shot in the neck managed to get a foot out on the street.
Positioning himself as best as he could behind a tree, using a parked car for partial cover, Hagan watched the guy stagger two steps then drop to a knee and topple over. Sprawled out on the pavement, the nearly dead guy’s face came into view.
Hagan felt the repulsion flashing wide in his eyes as he saw the man’s neck pumping out the last of his arterial blood. His hand flopped over, and the light behind his eyes winked out.
Hagan was now a murderer.
Behind him, the driver was still moaning, dying a slow death.
“I’m gonna kill you kid,” the guy in the Jeep was saying, the pain apparent in his voice. “I swear I’m gonna kill you dead you little turd.”
Hagan couldn’t find a way out. He pulled the rifle’s bolt handle back, drove it forward, then stood up and shot the last capable man in the chest. All the fight in his face turned to surprise. He wavered a bit before his eyes and chin sunk down into his chest. Hagan’s eyes went to the gun still in the man’s hand. He chambered the last of four rounds. Waited.
The man toppled over and fell outside the Jeep in a pale, fatal arrangement. Hagan hurried around the side of the Jeep, trying to ignore the guy on the ground. The keys were still in the ignition. He learned to drive a clutch when he ha
d an old Scion TC, but he wrecked the car inside of a month. That was three months ago and he wasn’t the best driver ever.
He stepped on the hundred pound clutch, worried that it wasn’t light like in his Scion. He started the engine, which coughed and choked and nearly died before finally kicking over. Hagan shoved and wiggled the stick shift into first with a bit of effort and some harsh grinding. Working the clutch and the pedal, he found the sweet spot right before he jumped the clutch and stalled out.
He tried the ignition, but the motor wasn’t turning. He waited, frantic, trying not to look at the bodies.
His mind was no longer his own. It ran wild with fears, with dozens of impossible scenarios. It told him lies that could be truths as he tried and tried and tried to get the damn Jeep to start again. The engine wasn’t catching. It was just turning, moaning, coughing.
His mind was telling him this was the time the bad guy he left alive managed to get a gun and shoot at the hero.
This isn’t TV, he told himself. I’m not the hero, and the guy with the gut wound is practically dead already.
The truth was, Hagan wouldn’t drive off like a boss. He’d futz around with this stupid ass Jeep, sweating like a hooker in church, not looking cool through all of it.
The engine finally caught and he felt himself relax.
Looking over at the passenger door sitting wide open, he reached across, pulled it shut. On the floor was a crayon drawing. He picked it up. It was some kind of meeting for the Balboa Hollow residents tomorrow.
A meeting? What was the flyer doing out here, so far from Balboa Hollow? This had him looking down at the bodies. The guy he shot in the hand was dead; the guy on the street sprawled out on the street was dead; the gut shot guy on the sidewalk had fallen over in a heap, but he wasn’t dead. Hagan could see the slow rise and fall of his back and knew he was still alive. Feeling sick, Hagan pulled the gear shift into neutral, set the emergency brake and made sure it held.
Getting out of the Jeep, carrying the rifle, he went to the gut-shot man. He was curled on the sidewalk in a fetal position. Hagan rolled him on to his back, belly to the sky and panting slowly. It was all he could do to keep from dry heaving.
Keep it together, he told himself.
The guy’s eyes were trembling in their sockets, the pain written all over his face. Most of him was already gone. Then the eyes found his and he grew still.
Hagan backed up a step and the man’s eyes went back to staring in the sky, trembling. Hagan set the gun down, out of reach, and knelt down next to the fallen man. There was a huge red stain on his shirt, a hole in the center of it where the bullet went in.
Hagan lifted the man’s shirt, saw the seeping hole. He wiped the blood back, and next to it was a huge tattoo of a coiled snake. Below the snake were the words: The Ophidian Horde. He didn’t know what that meant. Looking up, he saw the man’s eyes were staring into the sky, but they weren’t moving. His jaw had gone slack.
Hagan leaned back, sitting on his heels beside the dead man. He didn’t feel him die. But he did. He was dead. All of them were.
Because of him…
Hagan stood up, grabbed the rifle, headed back to the Jeep. Before he got there, he bent over and retched. A few ribbons of stomach bile shot out of his mouth, splatted on the asphalt. His eyes teared up as he heaved over and over again, puking and gagging until only air and bile fumes emerged. When he was done, he climbed into the Jeep, released the emergency brake.
Working the gas and clutch right for the first time, he found that sweet spot then gave a little extra gas to get it over the hump. The Jeep lurched and jolted, but it didn’t stall out. It started to roll forward. Second gear came easier, and by then he was dead ending at California Street.
Right or left? He decided to go right.
He saw Chico’s, Toss, Noah’s New York Bagels and First Republic Bank. California was half blown to smithereens, half left in tact. The Ace Hardware, Stan’s Kitchen and the Bank of America were all gone. Just smoldering charcoal. Half of Cal-Mart was black and sagging. He stopped the Jeep, wondered if he should let it idle. It wouldn’t be smart, but there wasn’t really anyone around. Still…
Checking the gas, Hagan saw actual spider webs on the gauges, which didn’t surprise him since the entire vehicle seemed to be coated in three years of dust. He brushed them away, saw there was half a tank of gas.
Looking around, California was commercial on the left, residential on the right. Someone could see him leave the Jeep and go inside the store. They could hustle out of their homes and steal it and he would have killed three guys for nothing.
He shut off the engine, grabbed his rifle and headed inside where the smell of wet smoke was so heavy he felt he couldn’t breathe. Not everything was taken. There were still things people could use but were left behind. Puzzles, light switch strike plates, maxi pads.
He grabbed the maxi pads thinking they could be used as bandages if need be. If it caught the blood in one way, it could catch it in another, he thought. He found a box of Band-Aids, but they were the small ones, like if a mosquito bit you or you accidentally stapled your arm. He took them, too. There were dryer sheets and yard art, and even a loaf of bread, but there was mold over it so he left it where it was.
Band-Aid’s, maxi pads and dryer sheets.
Brilliant.
He dropped the dryer sheets as he left.
Back in the Jeep, he drove down California until he hit Spruce. The Starbuck’s on the corner was all broken glass and overturned tables. It looked like a car had driven through there at one point. The Walgreen’s on the other corner across the street looked halfway promising, but that’s because it was still standing. It was two stories tall and had a white Rx sign on the brownish-red second story decorative backdrop.
The glass doors weren’t broken, so that was a plus. He pulled up front, stopped the Jeep, got out with his weapon and peeked inside. The place was fairly well looted, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t worth a look.
As soon as he opened up the door, he was met by four women. Two of them had guns trained on him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I—”
“Best turn around and head back out,” one of them said. They looked like they were a little older than his mother, but not pretty like her. Not at all. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he realized none of them were pretty. They were all bad skin and dirty clothes.
“My mother,” he started to say. Clearing his throat, he said, “Our house was blown up, she’s hurt.”
“Lots of people are hurt,” one of the women said, cocking her pistol.
“I just need antiseptic,” he said, still tripping over his words. “Some sort of antibacterial cream maybe.”
Would they really shoot him?
He wasn’t sure.
“We’ve asked already,” one of the ladies warned.
“We’ve been polite,” another added.
“I’m going to count to three and then we’re all going to shoot you,” yet another woman said.
The two women packing didn’t take their guns off him, but the two not packing were suddenly pulling out weapons of their own: another pistol and a shotgun.
Raising his hands, holding the rifle by the forestock, right above the trigger guard, he said, “I’m not a threat. I’m just a kid trying to help his mom.”
“Leave the rifle,” one woman said. She was the mean looking one. A neglected perm, too much skin piled around the neck, wide shoulders, narrow hips, ugly polyester pants.
“No,” he said, suddenly feeling angry.
“I don’t mind plugging a kid,” she said. “Seriously. Leave the gun.”
He felt himself backing into the glass door.
“Is this what this world is coming to?” he asked, inching his fingers into the cracks in the door, giving it a tug.
“Keys, too,” another said.
He pulled the door, but it didn’t budge. Turning his body toward the door, Hagan instead gave it a push. B
ehind him, the women lowered their guns. He was pretty sure he would be shot leaving, but when he saw them just staring at him, he realized they were bluffing because they were scared, too.
“Good luck,” he said, to which they said nothing.
In the Jeep, he continued on down California, moving from shop to shop, looking for something, anything. There were bombed-out high rises, homes that were burned to a crisp and collapsed; there were shot-to-death-cars and all kinds of garbage in the street; there were more than a few downed drones from when the power went out.
Hagan continued on, navigating through the mess. A few blocks up, maybe half the block or so past Commonwealth, was a barricade of cars. They looked like they were pushed there on purpose. Like someone was creating an impenetrable wall.
Not wanting to press his luck, Hagan spun the Jeep around on Commonwealth, then headed back up California until right before Cherry Street where he stepped on the brakes.
“Holy cow,” he said. How had he missed that?
It was a five story Sutter Emergency building. He got out of the truck, tried the doors, but they were locked. He walked around the other side on Cherry Street and suddenly realized why he’d driven past it. The thing had been hit by some kind of a bomb, or a rocket. The place was gutted, and there was so much rubble that had piled into the street, it was actually spilling into the parking garage across Cherry Street.
He studied the damage, decided it wasn’t worth looking into. Maybe he’d find something in the good half of the building, but more than likely what he’d find was a lot of dead people and he wasn’t up for that. He was still in a daze thinking about those guys he killed.
Standing there, replaying the incident, feeling the terrible weight of what he’d done, he tried to rationalize the moment, but he couldn’t. He sat down on a pile of crumbled brick and stucco. He dropped the rifle beside him, wondered what to do about his mother. He thought of his father. Was sure he was dead. Was he dead? He had to be, otherwise he’d have found his way home by now. The world started to spin.
It was a whirlwind of disgust and sadness; regret spun through him—regret and failure. He was suddenly cold and so very, very lonely. That thing inside him, that bubble of fear and anxiety, that realization that his mother might die and he might never see his father again, it all welled up in him and he couldn’t stop the tears. Instead of sitting there crying, though, he forced himself to his feet, walked to the Jeep and started it up.
