by Justin Bell
***
“Let me go!” screamed Brad, wrenching his shoulder away from Tamar’s firm grasp.
“Don’t!” yelled Tamar.
Brad spun around. “Max is the only one who actually cared for me! Now that Greer is dead, he’s the only one!”
Tamar could see a wet shine in his eyes, his face twisted into a strange contorted look of rage and sadness. He pulled away one final time, turning and running toward Max again, who Tamar could see was stirring slightly after Rhonda had run off.
Brad was so focused on Max he didn’t see Hyun Ki moving from around the hatchback forty feet away. He moved like a black clad wraith, walking low, bent kneed, his rifle tucked up tight to his vest, but already moving into firing position as he came around.
“Brad look out!” screamed Tamar, but Phil was already moving, pushing past the young man and charging toward where Brad was walking. He lunged, pushing the boy forward, Brad turning and yelling, arms flailing.
Hyun Ki Park fired his rifle.
Phil shouted and was thrown back, hard and fast, slamming into the pavement, spine first, legs sweeping out from underneath his sprawling frame.
“No!” screamed Tamar shifting with his pistol, firing three quick shots and sending Park down to the pavement in an ungraceful dive.
“Hyun Ki!” screamed Kramer from across the road, running toward the fallen form of the Korean intelligence agent.
Pietro Jacques moved up to Tamar, firing his own pistol. “Careful, kids, we’ve got men with guns all over the place!”
Three shots rang out to their right, one of the commandos breaking away from using the Humvee as cover and Jacques shouted as he took the shots directly in the chest, slamming back down to the road, his head bouncing off the asphalt. Tamar whirled and fired again, double tap, two shots in the torso of the man with the weapon, and he slumped back against the military vehicle, then rolled to the ground. Figures were moving all around from seemingly all directions.
“Tamar, watch it!” a voice yelled and he turned toward it, seeing Winnie moving from behind the Humvee. She came around the rear, spinning and firing, taking down another operative with Rebecca close behind her. In a calculated, step-by-step pattern, Tamar, Fields, and Winnie each drew down on the scattered remaining commandos, firing swift, short bursts, moving like a well-trained SWAT team, Angel moving in from his spot and closing the gap. They all converged in a singular group, trapping what was left of the enemy between them, their pelting crossfire punching into them and dropping them one-by-one, the echoes of gunfire cascading into the early morning sky.
***
“Rhonda?” Jodi Krueller asked, taking a step toward her. “Rhonda? Dear? Is that you?”
“Yes, it’s me, Mom,” Rhonda replied. “It’s been me this whole time. Chasing you across the country, trying to put a stop to your madness.”
“Madness?” Gerard asked, his voice an unsteady growl. “What right do you have calling this madness? After you and your little band of insurgents came through and executed all of these people?”
“Defending ourselves is hardly execution, Dad.”
Gerard Krueller stood his ground, several feet away from his daughter, looking at her, his fists clenched at his hips.
Rhonda looked around at where they stood, on the other side of the shoulder, out in an open, grassy area, between the road and the trees. To her left she saw the smashed and broken hatchback with a woman on her knees next to the fallen form of one of the gunmen.
“Where’s my daughter?” Rhonda asked. “Where is Lydia?”
“Right where she wants to be,” Jodi replied. “She came with us voluntarily, dear. We didn’t kidnap her.”
“She’s safe. Inside the truck,” Gerard said, gesturing toward the capsized box truck. “We made sure she was all right, then told her to sit tight while the fight was going on. Unlike you apparently, we didn’t want to put kids in the line of fire.” He glared over at Max, who was being helped to a seated position by Brad. “My grandson could have been killed.”
“Yes, shot by one of your cronies,” Rhonda replied. “Just like Ironclad. We’ve been going head to head with them for months, Dad. They almost killed us a dozen times.”
“We have no control over Ironclad!” Gerard replied. “You think we’re these sinister masterminds, we’re just trying to live our lives in this new reality.”
“A new reality that you created!”
Gerard lowered his eyes, then looked up at her from underneath his furrowed brow. “Don’t try to talk of things you don’t understand girl. You wouldn’t be alive right now if not for what we taught you. What I taught you.”
“You only taught me those things because you knew this was coming, didn’t you? How long have you been planning this mess?”
“We’re two old grandparents from rural Colorado, what in the world makes you think we could have pulled this off?”
“Are you telling me you had nothing to do with it?” Rhonda stepped closer. She moved her fingers, wishing she’d had the ARX with her. Or some kind of firearm. In this post-apocalypse world, going anywhere without a weapon was like walking around without pants.
Jodi flashed a look toward her husband, then looked back at Rhonda. “Surely you have to understand why this happened. I know you left us, but you’ve seen the world. What it’s become. What’s happened to our nation.”
“So instead of working to try to fix it, you just figured you’d knock it down and start over?”
“Sometimes an infection spreads so deep the limb must just be amputated,” Gerard said, his voice a low, repugnant growl.
“You didn’t amputate a limb, Dad, you tore the body apart.”
He dropped his gaze, not noticing that behind Rhonda, the gunfire was fading into nothing, the dull, persistent rattle fading up into drifting winds in the sky.
“What’s done is done,” he replied. “We are here now. We must take the next step. The final step.”
“What? Stage Three? Is that what this is all about?”
“We’re close,” Gerard replied. “So close. Close enough to taste it. Stage Three will happen, then the nation can finally rebuild. Finally get back to what it used to be.”
“A burnt-out husk of death and radiation? I don’t remember that in my history class.”
Gerard scowled, his lips twisting into an angry snarl. “When did you get so obstinate, girl? I never should have let you leave the house.”
“Gerard!” Jodi shouted, turning toward her husband. “That’s no way to talk to our daughter.”
“She’s no daughter of mine. She was at one point, but she’s been infected along with the rest of them.”
Rhonda noticed for the first time that his clenched fists were actually clenched around something. In his right hand he held a small pistol, or it at least looked small in his hands, while in his left, he held a long, rectangular device, looking somewhat like a remote control for a television.
“What are you going to do with that gun, Dad? Are you going to kill me? Shoot me down in the grass?”
Gerard glanced at his right hand, but returned his gaze to his daughter, not confirming one way or the other.
“Please, Rhonda,” Jodi whispered. “Please, we don’t have to do it this way.”
“Both of you participated in a plot to kill millions of American citizens,” Rhonda hissed. “How else do you think we should do it?”
“The plot’s not done,” Gerard replied. “Stage Three is upon us, girl. It’s happening, whether you like it or not.”
“Does this convoy have something to do with Stage Three?” Rhonda asked, waving her hand toward the ravaged vehicles broken and battered along the pavement.
“I think you know the answer to that.”
“Well then, it seems to me, it’s not happening. We already stopped you, Dad.”
Gerard’s scowl shifted to a crooked grin, his lips turning at a sideways angle. “You think so, do you?”
Rhonda’s eyes n
arrowed.
“This country has been the most important thing to me for my entire life,” Gerard said. “Ever since my pop first sat me down to talk about the constitution, and how this nation built itself from the ground up. Nothing is more important to me than the United States of America.”
“So you killed it?”
Gerard shook his head. “We’re people, Rhonda. Just people. The country is so much more than that and if some people have to die for the nation to survive, that’s a move I’m willing to make.”
“But you made that move for everyone else. They didn’t even get a say in the matter.”
“I’m willing to die for my country. Are you?”
“Do I have a choice?”
Gerard shook his head. “Not really. None of us do. We didn’t want to do it this way, but sometimes you have to make a hard choice.”
Rhonda looked at her father uneasily. “What are you talking about, Dad?”
He looked down at the remote in his hand. It had looked innocuous, like some piece of living room refuse he’d found on the ground and picked up. But as his eyes settled upon the narrow, rectangular shape and the scattered buttons, the meaning of the device became clear.
“The bomb is here, isn’t it?” Rhonda asked, glancing back toward the capsized truck.
Gerard nodded. “Oh, yes, it’s here, and it’s armed. One push of the button and Stage Three is complete.”
“The Summit—?”
“The Summit isn’t scheduled for another two days, but the right people are gathering already. Washington, DC. A hundred miles away. Less than a hundred miles away. We set the device off here and now, mission accomplished.”
“But you would all die,” Rhonda said. “We would all die. All of us. Even Lydia.”
“The price we pay for a free nation.”
“Dad—” Rhonda said, taking a step forward.
Gerard lifted his right hand, the pistol leveled at his daughter’s chest. “Don’t. Just… don’t.”
Jodi looked from him to her daughter and back again, her eyes wide.
“Mom, talk to him. Please. This can’t be what you wanted. Think about your grandchildren. Think about the Fraser family line. It would end right here. No legacy. Nothing.”
“The nation would live on. That would be our legacy.” Jodi said softly and Rhonda lowered her gaze, realizing that her mother was too far gone. Too far down the Krueller rabbit hole.
“It’s okay, Rhonda,” Gerard said. “I’m proud of you. Really proud. You made it a long way where many others would have failed. We taught you well.”
“This wasn’t you,” Rhonda snarled. “What I did? That was me. For my family. In spite of you, not because of you, you son of a bitch.”
Gerard lifted the remote, his thumb pressed to the power button.
***
At first Rhonda didn’t know what to make of the noise, the series of flat slapping sounds, like someone smacking a sheet with a broom. Her shoulders were tensed, fists clenched, bracing herself for the inevitable explosion that would be so fast and fierce that she’d never feel it at all.
Gerard stumbled backward after the first whack, his fingers springing apart, the remote spinning slowly up into the air, arcing, tumbling end over end, Rhonda’s eyes following it even as three more cracks followed. She darted forward, cupping her hands and the remote padded softly in her palms as her father’s body pounded into the grass with a muffled thud, the man laying still, his protruding stomach shuddering as he hit.
Silence enveloped her. Enveloped her and her mother, enveloped the entire world around them, a cloak of eerie quiet, not so much a silence, but a stark lack of previous noise. There was no gunfire, no shouting, no deafening explosions. Rhonda knelt in the grass, the slender remote sitting in her opened palms, and the world around her was still and vacant.
“Mom?”
Rhonda’s eyes lifted at the sound. The voice that sounded so much like Winnie, but just a touch older. Just a bit more mature. There she was.
Lydia stepped from the truck, a pistol wrapped in her fingers, the narrowest contrail of pale smoke spiraling into the still, quiet air.
“Mom?” Lydia asked again, her voice cracking.
Rhonda looked at her, eyes stinging, and she opened her mouth to speak, but her throat could not work out the words. Angel was there, at her right, taking the remote from her as she stood, her knees shaking, taking one step forward, then two. Then she ran.
Lydia dropped the pistol and the two eldest Fraser women slammed into each other with a blunt force, their arms sweeping around and swallowing, dragging each other impossibly close, merging into a single, screeching being, racking sobs and sharp intakes of breath moving their bodies back and forth within the strength of their bond.
“Lydia! You’re safe. We found you. Thank God we found you.”
“I didn’t know,” Lydia bellowed. “All those things he said. I didn’t know!”
“I know,” Rhonda replied, squeezing her more tightly, pressing her to herself. She looked to her left and saw Jodi kneeling slowly next to the still form of her husband, the man she’d been married to for four decades. She stared down at him, her eyes vacant and empty, searching for some kind of purpose, some kind of reason, but finding none.
“Lydia!”
Rhonda heard the screaming voices of Max and Winnie and turned to see them charging over the battle field, weaving between fallen commandos, arms outstretched, slamming into their embrace, the single being growing larger with each addition.
“Phil!” Rhonda shouted. “We found her, Phil! We found her!” she turned and her breath caught in her throat. Her voice cracked, threatening to shatter right alongside the rest of her world.
Tamar and Brad knelt by him on the ground, Jacques’ still and lifeless body sprawled out a few feet away. One look told Rhonda that her husband hadn’t been as fortunate as her son. There had been no handy revolver in a shoulder holster there to deflect the bullet. His chest and shirt were soaked a deep, dark red, matted to his chest.
Fields made her way around the Humvee, running over to where he lay, pushing Tamar aside and dropping to a kneel, tearing at his shirt, looking for some place to treat. Something to bandage. Anything that she could do.
Rhonda broke free of the family hug and ran over, all three children following close behind. She hit her knees so hard they scraped and burned on the uneven pavement, her jeans snagging and tearing. Lydia dropped just next to her, Winnie and Max coming around to the other side.
His eyes were open, a wet shine glistening as he looked up into the brightening sky. Clouds drew apart, revealing a seamless spread of bright blue.
“Lydia?” he asked quietly.
“I’m here, Dad,” she replied through choked tears. “I’m here. You found me. You saved me.”
Phil smiled and coughed lightly, then looked at Max and Winnie, tears brimming in his wet eyes. “My children,” he whispered. “My beautiful children.”
“You’ll be okay, Phil,” Rhonda breathed. “You’ll be okay. Rebecca’s here. Doctor Becky. She’ll get you right.”
Phil looked over at her, nodding softly, though Rhonda’s eyes betrayed her lie.
“We stopped them?” he asked.
Rhonda nodded and cleared her throat. “We stopped them.”
“Good,” he said. “That’s good.”
“Daddy, stay with us, okay?” Winnie asked. “Please, stay with us.”
“I’m right here, sweetheart,” Phil said, his own voice cracking. “Right here. Be good for your mom, okay? Do what she says. Do what’s right. She worries because she loves you.”
“Don’t talk like that. Just don’t.” Winnie urged, a tear spilling down her cheek.
“Maxie,” Phil said, looking at his son. “Take care of them. I trust you.”
Max nodded, his own eyes wet.
He turned his head slightly and looked at Rhonda and tears were flowing freely now, down his own cheeks as well as hers, running in
rivers over the contours of his face, darkening spots of pavement below him.
“We owe you everything,” he said. “Without you, we’d have died in Brisbee.”
“Phil. Save your energy, okay?”
Phil smiled and reached up with his hands, cupping them around Rhonda’s face. He brought her slowly down and pecked a kiss on her lips, just at the corner of her mouth.
“Phil,” Rhonda pleaded. “Phil, don’t go. We made it through all of this. Don’t do this now.”
Her husband smiled up at her, a warm, open smile that told her everything was going to be just fine. The sun rose high over the stretch of road in rural Maryland, and ninety miles away, the District of Colombia was starting to awaken, the city preparing for another day.
Epilogue
Was it minutes or hours? Rhonda couldn’t tell as she sat there on the hood of the smashed-up hatchback, her knees pulled up to her chest, a thick blanket draped over her narrow shoulders. Looking at the sun, it appeared to have been hours, as it drifted farther to the west, blanketing them firmly in midafternoon.
Red lights spun in a warbling arc, spraying the trees and trucks in a flashing cascade of pale crimson hue. Rhonda didn’t know that police cars even still existed, but apparently this close to the capital, they were starting to truly rebuild.
A pair of large ambulances were there as well, along with a reinforced armor SWAT transport, all relics of a modern world that Rhonda thought no longer existed. She’d heard rumblings of supply drops and an influx of financial support from other countries, and it looked as if Washington was putting those monies to good use, starting at home and working outward. That had been what the summit was all about, after all, wasn’t it?
Her eyes settled upon the shape on the pavement. The shape covered by a thick, black cloth, the shape that used to be her husband. The father of her children. The man who risked his life over the past few months to keep his family alive.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Fraser.”
It was a small, shallow voice that Rhonda almost didn’t hear. But she did hear it, and she looked down to where it came from and saw Brad standing there, looking up at her.
