by Ryan Schow
“Good luck,” Hooper tells her.
He quickly gives her the once over, not like he’s drooling and having to make a point of it, but because he seems to appreciate what he sees and he has to take her all in in a single glance. As a guy, I totally get that. What kept the gesture from being rude was that he offered her nothing in the way of a smile, or even a look of appreciation. For a military fella, I imagine he really, really likes what he sees and doesn’t want to offend. I look at Bailey wondering how she’s done it all her life—being looked at like dessert, and maybe not taken seriously because of her face and body.
“How clear are the roads ahead?” I ask before we get back in the vehicles and leave.
“Riley,” Hooper calls out over his shoulder. “How’s it coming down from Sac?”
“Stay on the 5,” he says, “and you’ll be fine. A few hiccups along the way, but you won’t be re-parking cars if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“Just make sure you have enough gas, too,” Hooper adds. “Given enough time, the highway will be like something out of Mad Max.”
“We’ll be fine on the gas part,” I say, straight-faced and confident. “Marcus here can suck a tank dry in no time flat.”
Everyone breaks into laughter, everyone but Marcus who turns red and is about to counter me when Corrine leans out the window and says, “Good one, Nick!”
Marcus raises his eyebrows and lets himself laugh along with me. He really doesn’t find it funny, of course, and I almost tell him we’ll have to work on that non-existent sense of humor of his. But I don’t.
One thing at a time…
Chapter One Hundred Thirty
It takes a full day and a few hours the next morning before we roll into Sacramento. By now, I have to say, I’m so irritated and headachy and ready to snap it’s not even funny. Bailey is like, “Damn, haven’t seen this side of you.”
“Yeah, me either.”
The first thing we see is a line of Humvees parked behind an A-Frame blockade of strung barbed wire. Great.
“What is this, Berlin in the eighties?” Bailey asks.
My back is a tangle of knotted muscle, my knee is shot because this heap doesn’t have cruise control and I’ve been on this freaking peddle for entirely too long!
Looking at the blockade, I’m not even thinking of a response. I’m only wondering whether or not Marcus can get us through. The barrier is not heavily fortified. There’s not a formal guard shack, no mounted fifty caliber machine gun, no MP badges with helmets and no long wooden arm we need to have someone raise should they clear us for entry. It’s just a short line of five or six personnel under a makeshift tent with a jug of water and some small arms. Pistols and shotguns mostly, maybe an M16.
“I think the barbed wire is just for show. Like arts and crafts for jarheads.” Still, there’s a checkpoint and we have to get through before we can get Bailey back to her rent-a-chump. “I need to stretch anyway. My knee is super pissed off at me right now.”
Marcus climbs out of the truck. I get out of the car. Just one look at him and I can tell he’s going to be short tempered and difficult. It’s all in his bunched shoulders, his puffed up chest and those big hands of his working extra hard not to become bigger fists.
Two of the six men get out of canvas folding chairs, weapons at their sides. The other four are just kicking back, drinking a few beers.
“They cold?” I ask, looking at the half-nursed bottle in one guy’s hand.
“It’s pretty much warm piss since you’re wondering.”
“I was,” I say, not really liking the air around these guys. The others were so much better.
“We’re dropping the girl in the El Camino off in Lincoln, then we’re headed back down to San Francisco.”
“No can do Cochise,” the one in front of us says. He’s a stern man, forty, maybe forty-five, got some rank to him based on the way he carries himself. Plus the other men don’t seem too concerned about Marcus, even though he’s not exactly small and not exactly amiable.
“Listen man, I get it, I ran checkpoints too—”
“In America?”
“Obviously not in America,” Marcus says, his tone deepening, a bit of grit hitting the edge of his face.
I feel heat stealing into my own face, my lower back, under my armpits. Suddenly my mouth feels so terribly parched.
“Well then you don’t get it,” he says to Marcus.
“Look man, we came all the way from San Diego to make this drop. She’s going to tell her fiancée she’s getting dicked by GQ here, then we’re on our way. Honestly, it’s one hour in and out. One fifteen, tops.”
“You’ll have to check with the CO.”
“For a minor domestic issue?” he says. “Gimme a break man. I served too. I get being a hard ass.”
“What were you?”
“Special Forces. I was stationed down south.” He doesn’t give units, or really any details, which confuses me. Most guys talk that talk.
“Yeah, I met you guys before. With your beards and your muscles and your long hair telling men of rank to go fu—”
“Let me guess, some operator like me got under your skin and changed you forever.”
“There wasn’t one guy like you I ever met that I liked.” The man wasn’t a good looking man. He had deep lines on his face and a Cindy Crawford mole on his cheek that made him look both ugly and feminine. And now these two are measuring their di—
“Look I get it man. You were ate-up. All about the rules, your eyes on the prize.”
“Oh, and what prize would that be?”
“Rank.”
“Yeah, well you’re all about your chest candy.”
“I never wore one ribbon. Not one medal. They’re all in a box, collecting dust. See while you were out giving handies to your CO and getting his coffee, guys like me were packing sand and blood into the soles of our boots,” he says, getting into Cindy Crawford’s personal space. “We wanted to be in the shit. We wanted to get our guns hot and our knives wet. So you may have met guys like me before, but you’ve never really met guys like me before.”
Back in the tent, not ten feet away, the four loungers are now getting up, guns in hand, one of them reaching for a shotgun.
“Marcus,” I say, putting a hand on his shoulder. He shrugs it off, jaw clenched, those hands of his now becoming fists.
I can already see this thing spinning out of control. Why the hell is Marcus doing this? I look behind me, in the window of the truck and the three girls are in the windshield, wide eyed and looking justifiably nervous. Bailey is wearing the same look in the El Camino. I hold a hand up, low, enough of a signal to stay that she obeys. She holds up a gun and I give a curt nod.
By now Marcus is so inside Cindy Crawford’s space, the man needs to react. He shoves Marcus back, but the big man pretends not to notice. I get it now. Two and a half days in a truck with three girls for a guy like Marcus must be a million years in the ninth circle of Hell.
“Let’s just go see the CO,” I say, trying to walk Marcus off that ledge.
“No way, Nick. This errand boy here is going to open up his tinker-toy gate and let us through so we can get in and out of this cow town and be on our way.”
The soldier’s pistol flies up, both hands on it like he isn’t kidding. He’s got the barrel aimed at Marcus’s head. Big mistake.
“Bro, it doesn’t have to be like this,” I hear myself saying.
“Shut your crumb catcher, you sissy bitch.”
“What the hell is going on inside the city that you have to take this stand?” I ask, the insides of my body tightening. It’s a rush of adrenaline and nervousness mixed with high anxiety and a bit of rage. Marcus isn’t the only one with a temper. After several days in the El Camino, I’m already feeling it. How the buffer zone between me being patient and me losing my cool is virtually non-existent.
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is this condescending cherry twat can let us through if he
wants,” Marcus growls, eyes buried in the man’s soul and so full of hate they practically run black. “He wants to mess with us because someone like me probably pumped his wife while he was in the field servicing his CO so he didn’t have to actually—”
The man pistol whips Marcus in the head so hard and so fast it staggers him. Then Cindy Crawford steps toward me—away from him, eyes still on Marcus—as a hail of gunfire catches Marcus in the chest and stomach, causing him to grunt and dance backwards.
My chest is a nuclear bomb going off. My mood is officially radioactive.
A shotgun racks a load from behind the makeshift barbed wire fence. My eye sees it, tracks the trajectory, sees Marcus about to lose whatever’s left of his face. Without thinking, I shove Cindy Crawford into the line of fire.
The round catches him in the upper back, causing him to stagger forward a few steps while gasping for breath. Everything is now happening super slow and too fast at the same time.
As Cindy is reeling from being shot in the back , I rush him, cock my arm and hit him with the mother of all haymakers. My fist connects with that ugly ass mole, but the angle of his skull catches the knuckles of my pinkie and ring finger just right. Both knuckles crack, sending shockwaves of pain up my arm.
I don’t have time to marvel at how this scumbag is twisting and falling toward the pavement because somewhere in the back of my mind, I hear the shotgun. The shooter is busy, not breaking stride. He ejects the shell, racks a new load. Cradling my hand, I hear another shotgun racking its load. Turning, I see Bailey.
“No!”
The checkpoint guard’s shotgun explodes and the round catches Marcus in the forehead, putting him down. Bailey’s gun fires, too. Her round catches one of the four in the shoulder, shredding his arm and half his face. He spins around and goes down while the other three men turn their weapons on Bailey, lighting her up with no less than six well-placed shots.
Her body shakes to each shot, then her knee gives out and she collapses on the pavement. My heart stops, but then it surges, kicking out a ferocious amount of adrenaline. I don’t care that one of the guys is screaming, “She’s got live rounds!” All I care is that Marcus is down, Bailey is down, and these idiots are off the reservation.
Maybe that’s why I charge them, why the guy with the shotgun is the first person I go after. It’s not smart, not when the other three are turning on me with their pistols. The shotgun goes off, the round glancing off my side as I weave my way at him like Marcus taught me. I tackle him just as the rounds start pelting my side.
My mind registers the sounds of gunfire after the feel of the bullets start hitting me. My fingers dig into the shooter, in spite of the pain and lack of breath, and then for whatever reason, maybe because I just lost two of my friends, I head-butt the man, then grab a hold of his cheek with my teeth and tear at it like some kind of rabid mental patient.
More gunfire. More pain flaring in my side. Then something pulls my head off the man, there is lots of screaming, and the butt of a gun cracks down on my face.
I can’t even tell you what happens next.
Chapter One Hundred Thirty-One
Corrine watches the gunfight go down in horror. Amber is covering Abigail’s face, then she’s shoving her daughter into the back of the truck.
Corrine is screaming, grabbing at the first gun she sees. She looks at it, doesn’t know how it works. She only knows that if she points it at someone, in the movies, it makes everyone stop. So she aimed it at the man Nick punched. He was slowly getting to his feet, favoring his back and rubbing his cheek. He picked up his gun, stood and saw her.
He stopped flat, looked at her. Now what? Corrine wondered. He then looked at his buddy who was screaming and cussing and trying to fathom how Bailey got the jump on him. Eyes back on them, the man Nick punched turned to Corrine, raised the pistol and fired. The round drilled through the windshield, burying itself into the back of the seat mere inches from Corrine’s head.
“Put the gun down and get out of the truck, all three of you.”
Shaking, terrified, Corrine set the gun down then slowly raised her hands.
Amber said, “Don’t go out there!” She had Abigail tucked in her arms as best as she could, but the little girl was bawling and to some degree squirming with fear.
“I’m not asking again!” the man outside barked, rolling his left shoulder uncomfortably.
Corrine opened the door as the other soldiers were dragging Marcus’s and Nick’s bodies into the back of a covered Humvee.
She looked down at Bailey and she was down, too. Corrine’s world was suddenly changing. Everything was changing. Tears flooded her eyes as she wondered how she was going to survive without them. Was she supposed to be the strong one here? She wasn’t. I’m not. The one in charge, he saw Corrine looking down at Bailey’s body and he said, “She shot first.”
“You could have just let us go through,” Corrine said in a small voice. Behind them, Corrine heard Amber and Abigail getting out of the big rig.
“I have my orders,” he countered, his cheek beat red and swelling. He rolled his neck, arched his back, winced. Turning back, he looked at his men, one of them tending to the one Bailey shot.
“We’re not allowed to shoot US citizens unless provoked with violence,” he said with a deeply cruel edge to his voice. “Then that bitch had to go and do that.”
Obviously enraged, he grabbed Bailey by the arm then dragged her limp body over to the Humvee. Getting underneath her, still favoring his back, he hoisted her up and threw her in the back with Nick and Marcus. He threw her in there like she was garbage.
“Get in,” he said, turning his gun on the three girls.
Corrine looked back at Amber and Abigail, how frightened they were, and then she looked back at this man before them.
There wasn’t a soul in that body.
There was only anger.
And pride.
“I said get in the damn truck!” he bellowed.
The three of them hustled into the Humvee, which started the second the doors were shut. The man Nick punched in the face double tapped his palm on the outside of the truck prompting the driver to get moving.
Corrine turned around and looked at Marcus, Nick and Bailey. They were a pile of bodies in the back of this thing. Abigail was still crying. Amber was crying now, too. It took everything in her not to break out in tears, but in the end, they came anyway. What she used to still her emotions was visions of her rape. How when she couldn’t breathe, how when she was thinking of what those animals did to her father—just shooting him like that—she realized she’d never been so deep down in the dark and it was about to get far, far worse.
When she was in that place, remembering the fear of being mounted by that pig, violated, treated like meat, or product instead of a human being, her eyes went dry and a plague of darkness rose in her. She’d been through worse. She’d get through this, too.
A few minutes later, movement caught her eye. She turned around to the noise of a faint struggle. Looking over the seat, she saw Marcus stirring.
What the hell?
Nick and Bailey were piled over him and he was moving beneath them. He opened his eyes, which startled the bejesus out of Corrine. There, on his forehead where there should’ve been a bloody hole, he’d turned enough for her to see a huge knot, dark and swelling.
“Bean bag round,” he said, clearly in pain. “Rubber bullets.”
Now she started to cry different tears. Bent to a flood of emotions, she rolled Nick over as well and his eyes were fluttering open. Bailey woke with a whimper and a sob. She started crying. She’d been shot quite a few times, once on the side of the head, as evidenced by a knot and the red trail of a glancing round.
“They’re okay,” Corrine said to Amber who spun around, saw them and also broke to the flood of emotion.
Just then they pulled into the parking lot of a huge industrial-sized building. On the front, where the sign once was, Corrine saw the
shadow of the words Walmart.
“Let me guess,” she said to the driver. “Our accommodations?”
“It won’t be bad for you,” one of them said. “For the three in back, it will be. Especially the big guy.”
“His name is Marcus.”
“I don’t care if his name is Pinocchio.”
“You’re a bad man,” Abigail said, causing the driver to turn around and look at the red-faced, teary-eyed little girl.
“That’s a matter of perspective, young lady.” Then looking up at Amber, he said, “But to keep your life in this world, in this reordering of civilization, society even—what’s left of it—you have to be a little bad. And then sometimes you have to be really bad. But in the end, the bad survive, they become good and the world moves on.”
“That’s an interesting way of justifying your behavior,” Amber said.
“One day, if you survive this, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s not a matter of if you have to compromise your former values, it’s a matter of when.” Looking down at Abigail, he said, “You, too, Miss Sassafras.”
Amber pulled a glowering Abigail toward her, as if sheltering her from this man’s sick provocations, but it did no good.
“Get out of the truck,” he said, cold and robotic, “we need to get you checked in.”
By then the other man had already taken off.
The girls got out of the car and stood together in one place as ordered. Three more men were running back with the original and one guy in an Army green medic truck was speeding off, presumably to take care of the man Bailey shot.
The back hatch was open and the military men went to work on Marcus, Nick and Bailey, zip-tying their wrists, putting black bags over their heads. Corrine couldn’t help thinking, this is what terrorists do to the good guys in the movies.
When they finally got to the Walmart’s doors, she saw the store had been gutted and was instead divided by cages. Cages with ten to fifteen beds, cages for a kid’s play area, cages for an adults recreation area (basketball hoop, picnic benches, two sets of slant boards and bean bags for the game Cornhole), cages for the cafeteria. There was no privacy, and though some of these people looked like they were not being held prisoner, many of them had that look on their faces. It was like they were staring at something far off in the distance. Something that stole their emotion, their heart, their soul, and yet they could not look away from this thing.
