by Ryan Schow
They took it anyway.
The next day, in Davis, they went through two neighborhoods, looking for homes that weren’t looted. They found one particularly devastated city block and Marcus said, “This is it.”
“How do you know?” Nick asked.
“Because if I was a looter with time on my hands and plenty of homes to choose from, I wouldn’t come within a hundred yards of this block.”
True to his word, they found more than enough food to last them the trip. Unfortunately someone else found them, too. The sound of someone pulling the hammer on a gun broke through the near silence.
“You got that truck,” a smart mouth juvenile said. He could be either seventeen or twenty-three. Marcus hated the way he looked. “I like it.”
“Yeah,” the other one said, just as ugly. “We both like it, so we both want it.”
These two clowns were shaggy beards, clean looking clothes, unkempt hair. Marcus said, “It’s been stalling a lot in second.” He pulled the key from his pocket held the key out and started walking toward them. “This will work the ignition and the gas tank, but it takes diesel—”
“Whoa man, stop!” the first guy said, bowing up fast.
Nick was having flashbacks of the last scuffle Marcus got them in to, but he was powerless to speak because it was all happening so fast, and Marcus wasn’t being himself. He was being too congenial.
“No man, it’s cool,” Marcus said. “We’re getting ready to drop roots.”
The other guy put his gun up and was starting to pull the slide when Marcus literally launched himself at the two of them, ripping the guns from both of them. He smacked one across the face with the grip of one gun while spinning the other gun, catching it and putting a round into the other kid’s head.
Bailey froze. It wasn’t over though. Instead, it was happening in slow motion. Marcus was on top of the kid, beating him relentlessly, beating him even after he was clearly dead. Nick reached down, grabbed for the gun, but Marcus was still going.
“Marcus,” he said, reaching for his friend’s arm, but he shrugged Nick off.
“Hey!” another voice said.
Nick turned and saw two more guys that looked like the ones who drew on them. They had guns drawn and were trying in those invaluable fractions of a second to make sense of what they were seeing when Nick popped them both.
He looked back at Bailey who was standing strong, but obviously rattled.
Marcus fell back on his butt, dropped the gun, drew his knees in and put his face into his hands. The sounds of the big man sobbing somehow seemed worse than all of this. They were in the middle of a bloodbath and Marcus was losing it.
“Why didn’t she want to come with us?!” he finally barked out. His eyes were wet and red, and they were angry. “I didn’t even say good-bye. Why did I do that?!”
It was Bailey who went to him. It was Bailey who sat down in the blood beside him and consoled him while he let go of all these demons inside himself.
“She was in love with you,” Bailey said.
“She wasn’t,” he said, sobbing, his nose stuffed.
“A girl knows these things,” Bailey said, brushing his hair back. “She’s just scared for her daughter and for Corrine. We’re all scared, Marcus.”
Finally he pulled himself together enough to load up the truck, apologize for acting the way he did, then give the big rig the start it needed. Working through the gears, they drove back to I80 heading west.
Chapter One Hundred Forty-Seven
Gunderson couldn’t stop picking at the scab on his arm. As he was looking at how angry it was, how swollen the skin around it was, he couldn’t seem to pinpoint exactly how or when he’d first been cut or scraped or whatever. It had to have happened when the guys at the park roughed him up. But what made that cut? The curb? A boot with a sharp-edged sole?
Oh well, he thought, it didn’t matter. The cut did spur an old memory though.
When he was a kid at a junior high basketball game, on a Friday night in the metal bleachers, he’d stepped backwards wrong and ran his Achilles heel into the rugged edge the school bleacher. The sharp sting surprised him. Looking down, he’d torn back a flap of skin. It hurt like crazy, but he wasn’t a baby, so he didn’t do anything about it.
Later that week he was playing in the waters of the bay and somehow the wound got infected. At first he felt uncomfortable in his shoe, but then the scab and the skin around it started to swell and he was walking with a limp. His mother forced him to go to the doctor. The doctor, brilliant as he was, said the best thing to do was pull the dime-sized scab off and let the wound empty itself out.
At the time he remembered thinking he could have pulled the scab off for free. Dumped a crap ton of hydrogen peroxide in it and went about his life. He looked at his mother; she looked at him. His expression was like, what the hell?
She flashed him a warning look to behave.
He hated that look.
So the doctor put a little numbing cream over the infected area, waited the appropriate time, then tore off the scab and squeezed out all that milky-white pus. His mother stepped sideways, wobbled a bit then passed out from watching this.
Fortunately there was a nurse there to catch her.
“This should take away the pain and the pressure,” the doctor said, checking first on his mother, then returning to Gunderson. He wore a look of satisfaction on his face. Like he’d saved Gunderson’s life. This guy, Gunderson remembered him being an uppity white doctor. A guy with a freshly shaven face, dark blue eyes and eyebrows he’d penciled in because they were thinning on the ends. There was something artificial about his face that still, to this day, bothered Gunderson. It was that same feeling you got when you were around someone with slimy secrets, or perhaps a dark past that threatened to slowly creep into the light.
“I appreciate your scab management skills,” Gunderson had said before his mother could come to. “They were spot on.”
“I’m sure you do,” the doctor brazenly remarked, also realizing Gunderson’s mother was still not conscious enough to witness the exchange.
His congenial look slipped.
“I’ll get you a prescription for some pain pills,” he grumbled, not so amazed anymore.
“Don’t bother. Pain is for sissies.”
The doctor laughed, but wrote out a prescription anyway, handed it to the nurse who was now helping Gunderson’s mother sit up.
“What did I miss?” she said, a bit woozy.
“The big show,” Gunderson quipped.
Deep down, he didn’t want the pain pills. There was something sharp and warm in the pain, a hot needling that enveloped his foot with sensation. He didn’t tell the doctor this, and he’d never tell his mother this, but after that day, Gunderson acquired a taste for pain.
It meant he wasn’t normal. That he wasn’t like other kids. He was tougher. More willing to do what others wouldn’t. That’s why he got into so many fights, to just get hit a few times, just to juice himself with that feeling.
But now here he was, an adult in a world gone to all hell, looking at a scab, thinking about that day the doctor said, “The cure to all your problems is me ripping that thing off.”
Okay, he didn’t say that, but hadn’t that been the answer?
Looking away from the long cut on the side of his bicep, he scanned the Spartan room for something to stop the blood that would come when he did what he was about to do.
He found a clean sock, inspected the fabric. The white tube sock was worn enough to be free of all the loose fibers you find in new socks—all those little bits of fabric he knew not to press into an open cut—and clean enough not to dirty the already infected wound he was about to peel open.
Eyes back on the scab. He ran his thumb over the ridged surface, found an edge. He worked it a bit, giving it gentle little pulls here and there, and then he got a fingernail under it and slowly got to work.
The purplish-red discoloration around it was pai
nful to the touch, and there was an unusual heat to it, like a really pissed off rash. He broke the skin with a little rip and pull, and that got the blood flowing. A crimson bead boiled to the surface, then rolled down his arm. He dabbed it with the sock, the white material blotting red.
Not smart, he told himself.
No sock in the history of mankind ever disinfected an infected wound. A sock wasn’t a Band-Aid. It wasn’t gauze. Or antibiotics.
“Dammit,” he mumbled, pressing the sock against his arm as he left his quarters and wandered down the hallway toward the infirmary. There were people in the hallways. Survivors. Five, ten, fifteen of them. Their eyes caught his, but they refused to hold his gaze.
Even for a second.
He was the new guy, but he also had tattoos snaking up his neck, brilliant “Day of the Dead” style tattoos trailing down his arms all the way to his knuckles, and a small tattoo of an anvil just under his left eye. His was the unintentional, but unkempt neo-Nazi looking version of yesterday’s enforcers.
Naturally, everyone who first encountered him treated him with the same caution they’d treat someone like say, Charles Manson, if he entered the proverbial hen house.
“I’m trying to find the infirmary,” he finally said to one woman who didn’t act afraid of him.
“You’re headed in the right direction,” she said. “She’s just a few more doors down. Sarah’s her name. Cute little brunette, super sweet. Do you know Rider?”
“I do,” he said, thinking of the older, fit guy with the spirit of a damn attack bear. “And I remember Sarah. I saw her when I first arrived.”
“Well, Sarah’s his girlfriend,” she said with a smile, one that held a little extra something. A warning, perhaps.
“I understand,” he said, cutting through the pretense. He felt his face go flat, but this was to be expected.
“Well good luck,” she said, looking down at the tube sock Band-Aid.
He thanked her, continued past an open room with a bunch of kids circled around a board game, then found the door to what looked like a makeshift infirmary. Inside was a stunning brunette. She appeared young enough to be Gunderson’s daughter’s age, but responsible and mature enough to garner the ex-enforcer’s respect.
“Uh oh,” she said with a smile and kind, green eyes.
She spoke and he couldn’t help watching her mouth, how her laugh lines seemed to frame the kind of lips his wife was always talking about. Hers were thin lips, but this girl—Sarah—her lips were plump, naturally alluring.
Rider must be so protective of her, he thought. Anyone who didn’t find this girl attractive was an absolute fool.
“Yeah,” he said, sort of chicken-winging his upper arm toward her and removing the sock. “I was going to pull it off, squeeze out the infection, but thought maybe I should leave that to a professional.”
“I’m glad you did,” she said, stepping closer, having a look at it.
He stood half a foot taller than her. As she examined the upper side of his left arm, he looked down on her, the scent of her permeating through the air. She smelled clean, like fresh skin and just-washed hair. His eyes dipped down to the side of her face, how her long brown hair was tucked behind one ear. He looked at the ridges of the ear, the small mole just below her cheekbone, the way her nose made her look younger and more adorable that her age might warrant.
For a second, he thought he might be obsessed with her. With the texture of her skin, with her youth, with her implied competence. Is this why men his age liked women her age? The idea of being with her, though—her being almost half his age, him being…who he was—it would never work. He couldn’t do it. She was too close to his daughter’s age.
He let go of the breath he’d been holding. The tension seemed to melt from his body and he pulled out of this little bubble of two that he’d created for them in his mind. Looking around the room, he saw a bed, an exam table, IV drips, a long shelf of medical supplies and several books on medicine and mental health.
“You did good here,” he said.
She glanced up, saw him appraising the room, her supplies, the non-electric equipment she had. Leaning back, he exuded an air of indifference toward her obvious beauty and instead focused only on what she needed to do to knock out the infection.
Eyes back down on his arm, she said, “It’s definitely infected.” Then she stopped. Like her brain was rolling along at sixty miles an hour, then just drove head first into a four foot concrete wall having never touched the brakes.
She looked straight up at him and he knew. It took a second to sink in, for his brain to stumble through his own set of gears. The wavy black snake. The words The Ophidian Horde tattooed below.
She smiled at him, but now it was not an easy smile. Now it was a cautious smile. Like she was biding her time to let someone know they had a fox in the hen house.
He wanted to say something to diffuse…whatever this was, but he couldn’t find the words. Tattoo ink was permanent. But the human heart, like the savage hunger, could change directions, sometimes on a dime. Some guys going straight, or finding Jesus, or just wanting to make that change…they could be different if they tried. They could navigate the same straight road for years if they kept at it, and some of them could do it until the end of time.
He was committed to being a better person, but perhaps one did too many bad things in their life to be considered redeemable.
But how do you explain this to a group who holds a girl like Indigo in such high regard? The girl carved up his soldier’s body in the elementary school firefight a few months back. She and her crew massacred some pretty decent soldiers. Men he didn’t care about today, men he cared for even less considering the wet work they made of the people in the school. Still, what Indigo did…how was he any different?
One attacked. One defended.
He was an attacker.
Would they see him the same way they’d seen these men who slaughtered so many innocents? Like animals that needed putting down? Probably.
Most likely.
The tattoo. It was that damned tattoo. He never wanted to get it, but it was a show of loyalty when all the local gangs were falling. When you go into these types of things, you don’t plan on going out, except by way of a bullet or a life sentence. He’d had his fair share of bullets, but he found a way to stay insulated from the cops.
Bribes, payoffs, threats.
“Where exactly did you come from?” Sarah asked him.
“Your friends found me up by the park. I got jumped by a few guys who didn’t like my look. Or maybe they just wanted my gun. I don’t know. I’ve got that look people either can’t or don’t want to trust, you know? It’s a look most people hate.”
She smiled, but didn’t give an answer.
He’d admitted this to her like the weight of this admission was a thousand pounds resting right on his soul. Like he was Atlas and the world he carried on his shoulders was his ever growing mound of problems given to him and created by him and his looks. In that single glance, she saw this. By the tension he sensed bleeding from her body, he knew she understood. But he also knew he was right about her: she was scared.
Then she said, “Your past only matters if you keep it in play. But here, you can change all that. Be a part of something bigger, something better than you were.”
“Sometimes I feel like I’m running from people who can no longer chase me. Maybe I’m running from the past, even though the past has no legs and it isn’t out to get you.”
“I think I understand,” she said, loosening up by the minute, but not enough to let him know she was dismissing him as a threat. She wasn’t.
“It’s like you want to relax, but you can’t,” he continued. “You won’t let yourself.”
“This is going to hurt,” she said, her Hippocratic oath kicking in. She took the edge of the scab, looked under it, then said, “Roll up the front of your shirt, put the wad of it in your mouth, so you can bite down. This is going to hurt
.”
“I’m no stranger to pain, Doc. You just do your thing. I’ll be okay.”
She gave him the kind of look that said, don’t say I didn’t warn you, but she did.
“Here we go,” she said, and then she ripped it clean off and pressed a square of gauze into the long, open wound.
He felt his teeth clench so hard he feared he might crack something, but then the pain endorphins came flooding in and he let go of a tempered smile.
“You like this?” she asked, looking up at him, her eyes bright but not curious.
“I learned a long time ago how to understand pain. It’s just a feeling, like anything else. You have a loved one die—like many of us have—it’s a feeling we expect to be the most awful thing ever. And it is. But it doesn’t have to be.”
“Was it that way for you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Go on,” she said, spritzing the open wound with hydrogen peroxide, then dabbing it with gauze as it bubbled and frothed. The sharp sting of having the scab torn off was euphoric, but the secondary burn of having the wound drenched in hydrogen peroxide was like that second shot of tequila. The way it settled his nerves, he felt something in him slowly unwinding.
“You want me to describe my process in understanding pain?”
“I’m curious,” she said, dabbing the cut dry.
“When my family died, it was like a sunburn on my heart and on my brain,” he said, pacifying her. “It’s like, well there’s this prickle of emotion that starts out strong and stays on the gas. Having your loved ones die definitely works you over. This is where most people try to run from their emotions. This is where they get it all wrong. You have to let yourself get down in that pain, really feel it, you know? If you examine it from a clinical perspective, from a detached point of view, you realize that if you can pull it apart, and circumscribe it, then it holds less sway over you. That’s how I get around the pain. By keeping it front and center.”
