by Lowry, Chris
“You were supposed to stay with the others,” I said.
I was talking to him, but it was meant for them all.
“You’re welcome,” said Bryon.
He toed the corpse of the guy who would have shot me as he stepped past it.
“There are more out there,” said Tyler. “We need to get moving.”
I took a breath, held it for a four count, then let it out slow for another four count. Then did it again.
They were right. We needed to move.
I checked Jaimie’s rifle for ammunition and motioned to Tyler to lead the way.
CHAPTER NINE
They led me through the back door and across the yard to the fence at the rear.
Tyler stood guard while Byron hopped over. The Boy followed, then I pulled myself up and managed not to fall on the other side. Tyler landed gracefully next to me.
Youth is wasted on the young.
We crept on the edge of the fence down an alleyway that separated the houses on this block.
The grid spit us out on a feeder road that led to the river in one direction and the ocean in the other.
We could hear the ocean surf pounding the shore, a relentless reminder that despite all we were going through, mother nature stayed the same.
Tyler motioned Byron forward and took rear point. They kept the Boy and I in the middle. I almost didn’t let them.
Danger was still out there, still hunting, and it could strike at any moment.
But I wanted to be near my son, to protect him if things went bad.
They didn’t.
Byron pushed open a wrought iron gate and latched it closed when the other three were all through.
It was a mini-mansion on the beach, a Mediterranean style construction that looked indestructible. Marble columns bracketed the solid oak door that opened as we approached.
Bem and Anna stood aside to let us pass and closed the door behind us with a solid thunk.
“At least you hide in style,” I said.
Anna shook her head.
Bem was more diplomatic.
“You look like crap, Dad.”
“Who me?”
“I didn’t want to say anything,” said the Boy.
I let Anna direct me into the giant living room that overlooked a wall of glass facing the beachfront. A pool full of green water marred the view, but the blue ocean beyond looked serene.
Brian and the others huddled around a small smokeless fire in the marble fireplace.
“You like?” he said as he moved to help Anna.
There was no need to clean off the pristine granite counters. She laid out rags and medical supplies, what few there were and went to work on the cuts and scrapes.
The bruising and swelling would go away on their own. Given time.
I wasn’t sure how much of that we had.
“We found a boat,” said Brian. “It can ferry us back in the morning.”
“This place has been picked clean,” Peg said from her spot next to the fireplace.
“I’m not leaving yet,” I groaned as Anna wiped a particularly deep gash I didn’t know I had.
“We found a note Dad,” Bem said. “It’s from her.”
“I want to see it.”
“We don’t think you should go back out there,” said Anna.
“It was hers,” said the Boy. “She said she’s going home.”
Home. Crap.
Home was Oviedo, a small community just north of Orlando. Thoughts of the sea of cars we blew up on our way out flickered in my mind.
There were five million people in Central Florida. Five million more on the Tampa side of the peninsula, and a couple of million more on the coast where we were.
“That’s a hell of a lot of Z,” I sighed.
“She’s smart,” said Bem. “She’ll leave another note for us to find her.”
I nodded, more to flinch away from the sting than agreeing.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Dad, I’m going home. Bis,” said the Boy.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Where?”
“Her house, I think,” he answered.
“Where was the sign?”
“Gnarly Surf Shack.”
This time the nod was real. It was a breakfast spot we went to every visit to the beach. Get to the sand early to find a spot to park and walk up the main strip to a little outdoor café on the river next to the drawbridge.
She loved it. We loved it.
“Boat?” I turned to Brian.
“We get back to the bus and go get her,” he said with an enthusiasm I didn’t feel.
He hadn’t been in a car crash and a firefight, so he could feel that way.
I looked past them to the window. Long shadows stretched across the sand as the sun dipped toward the Gulf on the other side of the state.
She was an hour away.
One hour.
Twenty minutes in the boat. Twenty minutes back to the bus. Ten minutes to get to the river from where we were.
Two hours to her house.
A trip that had taken far too long brought me right back to where I started. Where I hid and lost my kids the first time.
“Let’s get moving,” I said.
“We think we should go in the morning,” said Brian.
He bit his lip and glanced over his shoulder for support from the others. They nodded their heads.
“We can camp in the bus if we lose daylight,” I said.
“It’s not just that,” Peg said. “We’re tired. You’re tired. We’ve been going hard for weeks.”
She was right.
But we were only two hours from her. I said as much.
“But if she’s not there when we arrive,” said Brian. “If there’s another note that sends us someplace else, we’ll be spending the night in Z central.”
He motioned to the mansion.
“We have a good spot for the night. We can leave at dawn.”
“There are men out there hunting us,” I reminded him.
“They don’t know we’re here,” said Tyler.
“You need to rest,” Bem said.
The Boy nodded. I could see the others too. All nodding. All agreeing with each other.
I stood up and wobbled. Not much. But the blow to my head may have had something to do with it.
Anna put her hand on top of mine and I realized I was holding the edge of the counter for balance.
“Okay,” I said.
They watched me, but no one said anything. Guess my wobble made them wonder. Made them worry.
Made me worry too. The world wasn’t tilting sideways yet, and vertigo hadn’t started a doppler tunnel effect.
Still, I could use some rest. Maybe not sleep, because I think the rule is concussions shouldn’t go to sleep. But rest and food would be good.
“Food?”
There was much shaking of sad heads around me.
“Everywhere we look is empty,” said Brian.
The hunters, whoever they were, had scavenged the entire island. I almost made the argument that we should take the boat and fish along the way, but kept my mouth shut instead.
We would go to bed without supper that night. It wouldn’t be the first time.
CHAPTER TEN
I sat up in the dark and glared at the room around me.
There were mattresses and comforters spread on the tile floor around the fireplace, sleeping bodies curled or splayed on them.
I studied the darkness for what disturbed me.
Raymer snored. Lou whimpered, some dream making her foot twitch.
Anna lay still next to me, the Boy on one side of her, Bem and Tyler on the other. Close enough that it made me want to growl.
But it wasn’t in the house.
Something outside, some noise or shadow flitting across the glowing cat smile of the crescent moon making the sand glow two shades brighter than the dark water.
I pu
shed to the edge of the mattress and stood, picked my way across the cold tile to the floor to ceiling windows that made up the rear wall.
I made an argument for sleeping upstairs, but this room was big enough for all of us. There was safety in numbers, even if the glass made me feel exposed.
The darkness beyond stretched unbroken to the north and south, curving with the shoreline.
Once, before the Z, I had gone out in a boat after dark and the Florida coast looked like Christmas lights in the night. There were dark places along the way, natural conservation areas, especially around Cape Canaveral and the Space Center.
But here, where we were, there was a long line of condos and developments that stretched as far north as St. Augustine. A couple of thousand buildings facing the water.
A few hundred more to the south.
All dark. All empty.
A shadow moved across the sand. A body. Too quick to be a Z.
Trying to sneak.
We hadn’t made it back to the mansion unseen. Or maybe our feeble fire stood out like a lighthouse through the glass windows, and we were just too cocky, too naïve to notice.
Someone did though, and my money was on the hunters.
They found us, and they were moving in.
I opened my mouth to say something. To wake the others and get everyone moving.
But to where?
A mad dash for the boat in the dark?
How many would we lose that way? How safe would that be?
Would we be running into a trap? An ambush set up and waiting for the bodies on the beach to flush us out?
I shook my head and ignored the ache at the base of my skull. The gash there probably needed stitches and I was a good candidate for a concussion, but there was no time for pain.
The thing about running long distances was learning to compartmentalize and ignore the aches. They were there, but they couldn’t stop you.
I turned back to the room and found the Boy standing by the fireplace.
He picked his way over to me.
“You saw something,” he mouthed into my ear.
I nodded.
“Do you want my help?”
I nodded again.
“Stay here. No one goes out,” I whispered into his ear.
“I can back you,” he answered.
“This is backing me. Keep them safe. Keep them quiet if they wake.”
I leaned back, but a shadow fell across his face and I couldn’t see his reaction. I wasn’t sure if he could see mine either. The moon was bright outside, but in here, all it offered was shapes and insinuations.
The Boy reached for my hand and put it on top of his head. I curled my fingers into his hair and he nodded, letting me know he was following my play.
I patted his face with my palm, then trailed my finger along the wall to the stairs and climbed them.
It was darker upstairs.
The long tall windows below let in meager light from the moon, but up there, the doors to the rooms were closed.
I played the part of a blind man feeling my way to a door, twisted the knob and slipped into one of the bedrooms we had taken a mattress from.
I moved slow toward the window and wondered if I could be seen from the beach as I reached through the curtain and slid up the double paned glass.
It looked over a faux balcony, a narrow one foot space with a balustrade that led to the true balcony off the master bedroom. The design was for effect, but it would have been smarter for me to go back in and exit through the master.
As it was, I slid over the sill of the window and edged to the true balcony. I slipped over the side, made my way to the corner and shimmied down the slick column.
Slipped on the salt crushed thin marble. My boots made too much noise as I landed, and I crouched in the shadow of the column, waiting to see if I had been heard.
There were four shadows moving across the beach, two from either direction.
Closer now. They slipped up the shallow dune and climbed onto the walkway, skipping the gate.
Guess they didn’t want to chance a squeak.
Four on one. I hated those odds, but I had surprise on my side.
They hit the wide pool deck and split up again. Two moving on the pavers toward where I was hiding, the other two on the far side of the patio.
Far enough in the dark that it was difficult to make out details on them.
I hoped that would work to my advantage, and wished I had woken Tyler and Byron as additional back up.
The time for wishing was over.
The two shadows evolved into men, gun toting hunters with eyes locked on the glass. Watching for movement. Checking to make sure they weren’t discovered.
The first one passed the column I was behind and I held my breath. The second followed and two steps past me, I reached out, grabbed his chin and lifted. I made a swipe with my other hand and cursed as blood squirted out of his neck and made a wet, slopping sound on the tile pavers.
The first one turned, enough time to open his mouth and make a gurgle before I jammed the point of the knife home in his Adam’s apple.
He dropped the gun and it clattered on the bricks.
The other two opened up, muzzle flashes crackling in the dark. I dropped to the deck and rolled for the column.
Bullets chewed up the brick pavers, razor sharp chips slicing through the skin on my arm and face.
Two single shots rang out and the hail of fire stopped.
I glanced up and could see the shadow of the Boy in the door behind two mounds on the deck.
He stepped aside and Byron moved past him to strip the fallen of their weapons and ammunition.
“There’ll be more,” he called out.
There were.
Bullets sailed over his head and crashed the windows, showering the group inside in a rain of crystalized glass.
More shadows on the beach, just a couple of bodies shooting as they ran toward the boardwalk from the house to the sand.
The gate squeaked open as Byron crawled toward the door. I didn’t see the Boy and panic clenched my gut. Had he been hit?
No time to check. I grabbed the rifle from number two, sliced the strap that trapped it under the dead weight of his body and aimed at the end of the wooden sidewalk where it touched the deck.
The shadows kept firing as they ran, reached the brick pavers and I opened up in quick bursts.
They pitched forward, sideways and one slid across the deck and dropped into the pool.
Then the men up front opened fire.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
There is no alarm clock quite like a machine gun redecorating the walls of the house you happen to be hiding inside.
The builders of the home weren’t cheap. They used real marble and thick brick under the stucco walls, so the bullets only sounded like thunder slapping the sides of the house.
The windows were another story.
When the four now dead men tried to make their beach run toward us and took out the wall of windows, they woke everyone up in a hail of clattering glass.
The front door and windows facing the street shattered under the new assault.
“Keep low!” I heard Brian scream and people crawled out of the house and onto the pool deck.
My people.
“Beach!” I pointed and The Boy nodded from the ground where he cowered.
I watched him whisper into the ears of people as they crawled past him, and then nodded as they shimmied around the pool and moved toward the wooden boardwalk.
I strapped the stolen rifle to my back and shimmied up the marble column to the balcony.
I wish I could say it took no time. That it was easy. That my monkey like dexterity combined with athletic prowess made the climb almost super heroic easy.
And if I lived to retell it, and no one who was watching contradicted me, that would be my story.
