by Lowry, Chris
Hundreds of condos in block developments had empty black windows that could house anyone. Anything.
I didn’t think there would be supplies there. Most were rentals, condo-tels leased out by owners to one week vacationers.
If she was hiding on the island, she might hole up in one though.
Bis. Her message led us here.
I don’t know how long ago she spray painted the words on a plywood sign outside the refugee camp where she was supposed to be.
But it was there.
Against the odds. The universe loved me, I mused. It must, because I had more luck than a leprechaun.
Until it ran out.
Two tan army transport trucks trundled out of a side road and blocked the way.
Two more belched black smoke from thick pipes as they blocked the road behind me when I passed.
I stopped halfway between them.
Guess my distraction worked.
CHAPTER SIX
I was reminded of a line from a poem. Instead of cannons to the left and right of me, there were guns. Enough barrels to make a porcupine blush.
“Turn it off!” one of the men screamed. “Kill the engine.”
I listened to the rumble of the motor. It was good advice.
Straight ahead was a house. Stucco over concrete bricks. A scene from a movie flashed through my mind.
The front end of the car smashing through the wall. Debris flying. Airbags popped. Blood.
Then the bullets.
I flicked my eyes up to the rearview mirror. Same house style behind me.
One difference.
The garage.
A carport conversion. Siding instead of brick.
“Get out!” the men started advancing up the road.
Time to do the thing or get off the pot.
I dropped my hand to the gear shift, popped into reverse and shoved the pedal to the metal.
A plume of smoke shot across the yellow hood. The front end shimmied as I rocketed across the yard and half the driveway. Backwards.
I aimed for the garage door.
Prayed it was empty. I think I heard bullets.
The rat a tat followed me for two seconds until the trunk crunched through the thin pressed metal of the door.
A chunk of something whacked me across the back of the head.
The car plowed through the garage and luck was with me. It smashed into the rear wall and everything went gray.
I was lucky.
Sometimes things happen so fast, move so quickly that it’s only in the memory of it that you know what happened.
The airbag deployed. A piece of technology designed to save lives in front end collisions still worked just fine when the driver chose to smash through a wall.
There was a bang and a pop, a smash and shatter, the crunch of plastic and crumpled metal and the tick tick tick of fluid as it sprayed on the hot engine and enveloped the garage in boiling steam.
Lucky.
I took a shot to the face and side of the head. Stayed half awake enough to grab the rifle as I folded out of the car and bent toward the door.
Bullets ripped through the fog enshrouded opening and nicked the rifle out of my hand.
I let it go, stumbled over the two steps and fell into a laundry room and kicked the door closed. Another layer between me and the boys with the bullets.
The house smelled like rancid meat. There was a Z in here.
I shoved off the floor and scrambled through the kitchen. The open floor plan put a bar between the living room and sink on the counter.
It wasn’t a Z giving off that smell.
A rotting body lay on the couch, the top of her head missing. The only way I could tell it was a woman was the dress.
A man sat across from her, shotgun at his feet, half his head gone as well. A pact for the end of the world.
I tried not to gag as I reached for the gun. Checked the rounds. Two gone, four more for the pumping.
I jacked a new round in the chamber and aimed at the front door as I backed toward the slider.
My foot slipped in sticky goo and I fell over on my ass.
As the front door shredded. Bullet tore through the hollow metal panels and buzzed over my head, angry hornets of death.
I scooted, aimed from my back and waited.
They kicked in the front door and two rushed in as it bounced back on them. The door hit number two and shoved him slightly sideways.
The shotgun went off like a cannon in the enclosed space and pounded a slug into each of them.
It made the others hesitate.
Just enough for me to hit the slider and fight it open. It was stuck. Wouldn’t budge.
I slammed the butt of the shotgun into the glass, ducked as it sparkled in shards around me and crawled out as the second wave of bandits screwed up their courage and came in shooting.
The back yard was shallow, narrow, surrounded by a fence. Two shots against how many men and how many bullets, I wasn’t sure.
No way to know.
I ran for the fence as fast as I could, expecting shots from the side of the house. But whoever was in charge of this boondoggle didn’t flank the house.
Just sent the men through the front.
I hit the fence, jumped, hopped and plopped on the other side.
The gray spots from the crash came back and blossomed black, like an eclipse on the Florida sun.
I could hear the men pounding through the back door on the other side, boots slapping the concrete of the patio.
I rolled over and crawled, scrambled in the dry brown grass and sand.
A dead dog’s body was chained to a red doghouse. I curled up on the far side of the doghouse and waited.
I could see the shadow of the fence and a round head pop over it, the voice shouting.
“Clear!”
Then it moved on. I held still. Trying to breath. Trying not to pass out.
I lost that fight.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I woke up later.
How much later, I wasn’t sure. Hours, maybe.
Long enough that it would matter. People might come looking for me. My people.
And I didn’t want them out there for the bandits to find.
Another thing about a car crash that no one talks about is the ache. It hurts.
The trauma makes every muscle sore and add to it other injuries from dumb moves in my cross country romp and I’m sad to say it took a few moments to get up and limber.
Before the Z, I would schedule a massage and imagine a happy ending while they worked on the knots, and pounded out the pain.
Now I couldn’t imagine such a luxury.
I listened before I moved too much. It was quiet enough to stand, stretch, wait for the blood to restore feeling.
The body of the dog and almost melted into the earth and I sent a curse after the people who just left it chained up to die. Maybe they met a similar fate.
They did.
The sliding glass door opened to my pull, released a noxious cloud of dead fumes, two bodies laid out on the floor, tiny holes in the back of their heads, shot execution style.
Maybe they didn’t mean to kill their dog, I thought as I looked at the cabinets. Empty, doors open.
Someone took everything.
The bandits, I suspected. Killed these people. Took their food. Didn’t free their dog.
I let a surge of hate gurgle in my gut. Kids and dogs. Anyone who would hurt either had a special place in hell and I wanted to help them get there.
But I had to get to my people first.
The road in front of the house was empty. The two transport trucks gone.
I could see the twin skid marks of burned rubber leading across the asphalt to the house next door, but that was the only damage visible from this angle.
The front door unlocked with a click and I opened it to a gust of salty tinged wind slipping in from the ocean side of the island as I stepped out onto the porch.
The cold steel of a barrel poked against the side of my head and bounced.
“Got you,” a young thin reedy voice said.
I slowly lifted my hands in surrender, glanced out of the side of my eyes.
It was a kid, little more than at least. Byron’s age. All elbows and knock knees and a bad case of acne that dotted his cheeks like blush.
“Don’t move,” he warned and took a deep breath.
He was going to shout for help. Scream maybe.
The glance showed me his finger wasn’t on the trigger. Me walking out of the door must have surprised him as much as he surprised me.
I kept my hands moving up and whipped them up and twisted. The move knocked his gun up, toward the house, and I had enough time to glimpse his wide eyes before I jammed the heel of my palm into his nose.
Blood splotched across the sand drizzled porch as he plopped over backwards, yanked the rifle with him as he fell and hauled on the strap.
The hit was enough to blast starbursts in his eyes, but the kid was tough. I had to give that to him.
He crab crawled backwards, mouth working through a sheet of blood that fountained from his misshapen nose, fingers discovering how to reach the trigger, how to aim.
I planted one foot on the porch and the other between his spread legs before he could get too far.
He forgot about the gun, forgot his name even as both hands cupped his smashed groin. He opened his mouth to howl. I dropped down and punched him in the stomach.
His diaphragm spasmed as he struggled to breath, the two hits curling him over on his side, so painful he couldn’t even moan. That kind of hurt is intense agony, the only relief is in freezing and remaining still.
Still and silent.
I looked around.
There was a guy at the house on the other side of the car crash, waiting by the door. His back to us as he leaned against the rail, waiting.
They left two to stand watch, maybe more that I couldn’t see. I was too exposed out here, to vulnerable.
What I needed was more information.
I grabbed my guard by the ankle and hauled him through the front door, into the house and clicked it closed behind us.
CHAPTER EIGHT
There is something to be said for the resiliency of youth. I’d been kicked in the nuts before not too long ago and it felt like it took me a lot longer to recover than the kid.
By the time I had him in a chair and used shoelaces from the two dead bodies to tie him up, he was breathing and glaring.
But he hadn’t started talking yet. Or screaming, so maybe he wasn’t recovering as fast as I thought.
He just showed it better than I did.
"Are you going to shoot me?" he grunted.
“Too loud,” I told him.
He seemed to consider this and nodded.
“You want me to talk,” he said.
He knew. Smart kid. He didn’t need me to tell him. He squared his jaw anyway.
“I’m not telling you shit.”
I stared at him. Let the silence stretch for a few moments until it got uncomfortable. Most people can’t stand the quiet. Nature abhors a vacuum and human nature wants to fill it with noise.
Before the Z, it was radios and television, mindless chatter. We called it small talk because it signified nothing. Small talk from scared minds afraid of what might happen in the void.
Silence is boring, the Boy had told me once when he heard I drove sixteen hours from Florida with the radio off. Nothing but the hum of the tires on the road and the wind against the windshield in my ears, and the thoughts that bubbled up in silence such as that.
I told him that the only way to hear something was to listen. I tried to make it sound deep and meaningful, wise words from his old man he could repeat to his own children one day.
But I think he thought me a fool.
Why listen to the quiet when there is such a thing as a guitar solo.
Still, my ability to just be served me well in the long runs, and long drives and served me still even now as the pimple faced boy stared up at me and began to babble.
Just to fill the void.
I was glad he decided to talk instead of scream, but his rifle in my hands may have helped him make that choice. No need to threaten someone who can conjure up worse things in their mind.
His name was Jamie and he was nineteen, though folks thought he looked younger. He worked at a gas station before the Z, and he was part of a group of hard chargers and bad asses that owned the island now.
They were going to kill me and my friends for trespassing, and take all of our stuff.
I didn’t bother to correct him that we had no stuff, and in fact, were looking to get supplies on this side of the island, just to tide us over in a house to house hunt for clues or answers.
The sign that led us here didn’t exactly put an X on the spot we needed to find.
Jamie kept talking. His family was gone, the group the only people he had left. He was from south of Daytona, and it was lost to the Z, just like Orlando and the rest of Florida. Probably.
I didn’t ask questions. Just kept watching him. I watched him talk, shift, twitch and squirm as he filled the silence with information.
But it wasn’t good information.
I didn’t care about his name, or his history. I wanted to know how many men were still hunting out there. What their resources were. And most importantly, how to avoid them while I did a hunt of my own.
His eyes flicked over my shoulder and I ducked to one side as the front door popped in and two bodies slammed through shooting.
They shot Jamie. They shot the spot where I had been standing. The slider shattered as a third bandit crashed through in a hail of bullets and shards of glass.
A firefight is chaos. Smoke fills the air, the acrid scent of powder assaults the sinuses. Explosions and noise rip at the eardrums, and death is imminent. A second and a centimeter away.
The person who can survive a firefight is the one who can keep their head when all about them are losing theirs.
I kept my head low. Covered with my forearms and elbows while I cowered on the floor next to the island bar that separated the living space from the kitchen.
Bullets ripped through walls. Pounded through glass and chipped the counter, spraying the floor with sharp splinters of wood and tile.
Jamie pitched over backwards, blood leaking from holes in his chest and stomach.
His wide gray eyes stared at me as he died.
Then the bullets stopped. The bodies of the men who made the assault stood up, surveyed the scene.
I assumed their eyes were drawn to the dead kid on the floor. His blood pooling in a widening circle of crimson.
They could tell he was dead. They may have assumed the same about me, my back against the shattered wood, curled up on the floor too.
I don’t know if they relaxed. Or if they were in shock at killing one of their own.
It didn’t matter.
I flinched the rifle around, aimed center mass at the biggest one and pulled the trigger. Pulled it again at the second guy next to him at the front door.
Twirled it on the third guy. Too late.
He grinned at me over the barrel of his gun aimed at my face.
The top of his head erupted in a geyser of goo that splatted onto the tile floor. He crumpled on top of it.
Tyler’s boots crunched in the glass as he stepped through, gun at the ready. Byron and the Boy followed.
“Are you hit?” Tyler asked as he stood over me.
“Not my blood,” I said.
He reached down and helped me up. I held on to the bar for a moment as the blood pounded in my head.
Byron moved past and scooped up weapons and ammunition. He tossed a couple of magazines to the Boy who slid them into pockets.
“We kicked over the beehive, Dad.”
