by Brian Hodge
* *
Concealed in the scrubby growth of trees, Erika watched Jason and Rich take out the first three trucks in one fell swoop. In her hand was a lighter, ready to use when the time was right. If the opportunity presented itself.
A single thought punched through her mind like a spear: The birds. I forgot the birds. There weren’t any birds.
The highway sign had indeed listed a name beginning with N. And she’d been so intent on labeling this as the place in those recurring dreams that she forgot about the damned birds, lifting in flight from the sign. It seemed like too significant a detail to have been superfluous.
What if I’ve made a mistake? she wondered. Her insides felt ready to cave in and wrap themselves into a tight, freezing ball. Because five of their lives were on the line, and at a point of no return.
* *
For a moment, Diane could only stare in awe, transfixed by the morbid beauty of the first three trucks in their death throes, swerving and clashing and rolling about as if in some choreographed dance of carnage.
And Jason, the architect of it all, was a thing of terrible beauty himself—lean and stripped to the waist, his tanned torso striped with scars. He seemed more than human, like a young Achilles, a demigod of war.
She heard the brakes locking up on the last two trucks even before she saw them veering off the highway. The fourth arrowed down onto the grassy shoulder as if to bear down on their position behind the trees and brush, and Erika made her play. She touched a lighter to the ground and a thin tongue of fire leapt out to the shoulder. A second later a wall of flames leapt up from the ground. Jason had used the other can of fuel to soak several square yards of earth.
The fourth truck came rocketing through the fire anyway, jouncing from side to side, four men in its bed reeling to maintain balance.
The fifth truck, the last…Diane could no longer see it past the flames and the plume of smoke boiling upward.
Travis, where are you, you son of a bitch?
She hadn’t gotten a good look at the first three trucks, but Diane intuitively knew he wasn’t in them. It wasn’t his style, no. He wasn’t the type to let himself get taken out of action that quickly.
But if she did anything else that day, she would see him dead. No matter what the cost to her.
Diane deemed it her turn, taking the first pipe bomb from her bag, gripping it by the end, and lighting the fuse. She left the cover of the underbrush, sprinting past Caleb and out into the open. She saw Jason dodge the fourth truck like a toreador dodging a bull, as he and the guy in the passenger seat scrambled to get off a clear shot at each other. The four men in the bed had righted themselves, bringing up weapons, and she knew that once they started shooting, Jason couldn’t dodge them all. It would be like trying to dash through a rainstorm without getting wet.
As the truck came out of its skid, the bed was facing her. And Jason was dead if she didn’t do something.
“You! Assholes!” she screamed, and every single man in the bed turned around to look back. She’d never knock generalizations again.
She pitched the pipe bomb with as much force as her arm could muster, sending it end over end, fuse sputtering a pinwheel of sparks. Okay, so it wasn’t a graceful pitch, so she threw like a girl…
Like that even mattered when the bomb dropped clattering into the truck bed, its bristling points nearly invisible against the electrician’s tape. The men scattered against the sides of the truck, Jason forgotten, except for one foolishly brave man.
His eyes met hers and he grinned, and she knew what was coming next.
He stooped to retrieve the bomb and fling it back. All he saw, she was certain, was an inch of fuse left to burn. He grabbed it around the middle, jolting upright, his sneer suddenly a shriek. His hand opened, fingers splaying wide to drop the damn thing, and the bomb stayed stuck right where it was. His hand was drizzling blood when the pipe went off like a stick of dynamite.
An instant later, his arm ended at his elbow.
A stray bullet from the highway ripped through the fabric of her jeans, laying a raw stripe across the front of her thigh. She barely felt it. Instead a throaty cry of victory burst from her lungs, and she reached into the shoulder-slung bag for another pipe.
* *
Jason had never seen a truck corner so fast and still maintain control. He felt one fender nose into him, knocking him off his feet and pitching him back onto his ass, giving his tailbone a knock. The truck shuddered to an earth-slinging halt and a sudden lurch as the engine died, as if the driver’s foot had slipped off the clutch.
The starter ground. If they got it moving again, they’d run him over, no doubt about it.
The shotgun was empty. He’d fired his last loaded shell a couple moments before. Jason rolled backward, one hand digging into his pocket for another round, fingers closing over hard ribbed plastic, slipping in sweat and closing again.
Bullets chewed up the earth next to his head, spraying dirt into his eyes.
He managed to jam the single shell into the loading port of the shotgun just as the truck roared to life, rolling onto his knees as he jacked the pump, then bringing the weapon up with one hand, like a pistol. The recoil knocked him backward again, the discharge spraying a storm of buckshot and glass into the driver’s face. The truck hitched and jerked again, bucking, finally dying again less than a foot away.
The men in the bed tumbled to the ground, and the guy in the passenger seat was scrambling out the door. As Jason pushed himself upright, he knew there was no time to reload, not now, not with five of them dropping to the ground in front of him.
Instead, he charged at them, because to run meant to die shot in the back, and then he saw that most of them were bleeding already, one of them staggering in a daze and waving a bloody stub of an arm in the air.
Diane…
Another of them had lost an eye, the socket oozing red pulp. Jason swung his shotgun like a club, the impact jarring to the bone as it connected with someone’s skull.
He recalled the conversation he’d had with Colleen the same day he and Caleb had encountered Lucas at the liquor store. Colleen had seemed so certain that her purpose in surviving the plague had been linked to the children. How he’d envied her self-assurance, while wondering about his own continued existence among the living.
This, finally, was what he was meant for. He knew it as surely as if the sky had cracked open to the sound of trumpets to make his destiny clear. All the months of rage and pent-up fury were his to unleash. It had all made him into this, and those who’d brought it on him had come to reap what they had sown. It was him or them now. This was the only rule.
He clubbed the same man in the skull a second time and drove him to the ground, and then the guy from the passenger seat gave him the same treatment across the small of the back. The guy was huge, a black-bearded grizzly of a man. Jason fell like a swatted fly, rolling up to his feet again, unsteady, crying out, letting momentum carry him back into the men from the bed.
They were bunched too closely for gunfire, and that was his only salvation. Jason spasmed into a frenzy of fists and club. One of the men fell with his own front teeth in his throat. Jason punched someone else then, his hand splattering into something warm and sticky. Someone else he elbowed in the throat. There were no faces now, no people, only targets.
His feet looped out from under him. The next thing he knew he lay in the midst of a tangle of bleeding men, the black-bearded guy stalking across the ground. The man’s eyes looked as deadly as his bulk.
He’ll shoot his own men just to shoot me.
Jason let his shotgun go and grabbed one of the fallen men by the shoulders, holding him closer than a dancing partner, staring into a face already torn by Diane’s shrapnel. He rolled onto his back just as the huge guy opened fire, letting the man he held take the shotgun charge in the back. The man’s ey
es, just inches from his own, bulged in their sockets, and sour breath huffed into his face. Jason felt the impact of the shotgun blast through the man’s stomach as strongly as if they’d been clubbed with a sledgehammer, and by the time the second blast ripped into him, the man’s eyes were already vacant and empty.
Jason tightened his muscles, awaiting a third blast, but he instead heard another of Diane’s pipe bombs. He heard a low, throaty howl. Peering around the corpse in his arms, he saw that the black-bearded man looked even darker now, his shoulder and chest charred from powder burns, tatters of raw flesh tangled with shreds of shirt, red on black. Jason fumbled to grab someone’s fallen pistol and finished the job.
He rose, pushing aside bodies, greased with blood and not sure how much was his own and how much belonged to the bodies on the ground. But he could stand, and the pain could wait until later, so he stumbled over to lean against the truck for a moment to catch his breath, pushing his hair back from his face.
He gulped thick, humid air, then sagged against the tailgate when he saw what had become of the fifth truck.
* *
From his vantage point on the overpass, Rich had an overview of the entire field of battle. And that’s exactly what it was down there—it was a full-blown war now.
He could feel heat from above and below, the sun burning from overhead and the flames from the three-truck wreckage jumbled beneath his position. It baked him as he leaned over the railing, plinking at survivors who got too close to Jason and the rest, like shooting fish in a barrel. The only problem was the smoke, depending on which way the wind blew from moment to moment. Sometimes great dark clouds obscured his view, stung his eyes, made him cough.
He pulled back from the edge, squatting on his haunches to reload. He’d gone through two magazines already, with one more left. Once it was empty he didn’t know what he’d do. Throw it at someone, maybe. Or use it as a club; he’d seen Jason give his a workout that way.
Rich swung back over, but something at his right caught his ear.
The fifth truck.
Where the hell…?
The last truck was bearing down on him from the other end of the overpass, and for a confused moment he looked back and forth, from the truck to the scene below. That wind had picked the wrong moment to shift, and he could only focus on so much at once. He’d never seen them cutting across the highway.
But he could see the evidence now, as the smoke shifted and gave him a clear view below again. They must have slewed away from the wreckage, from the wall of fire where Jason had dumped the first can of gas. Twin tire ruts slashed across the median, and smears of earth slashed across the northbound lane onto the off-ramp.
Oh son of a bitch.
The truck roared at him like a freight train, a fusillade of gunfire erupting from inside and outside the cab.
Rich swung the AR-15 around and managed to pop off a few quick shots that went wild, hearing bullets whine around him, close, closer…
And then Rich Patton came apart at the seams.
* *
Travis raged behind the wheel like a madman.
He couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe his eyes. His army was getting smeared all over the asphalt. And by what? He’d only seen two or three of them out in the open. How could they do so much damage, and do it so quickly?
Because they’ve gotten goddamned mean, another part of him answered.
The first inkling he had that anything was going right came when he saw the shithead who’d been sniping at them go down hard and bloody, and he jogged the truck right just for the pleasure of feeling the double thud as the tires passed over his body.
He and Hagar jostled about in the front seat…there was a lot more room now. Because Solomon, ever one for surprises, had taken his Uzi as quickly as he’d taken advantage of the opportunity to turn their cover of smoke and fire against them. A dozen yards before reaching that wall of burning grass, as Travis was standing on the brakes hard enough to sprain his ankle, Solomon had bailed out the door and was gone. No farewells, no goodbyes, no explanations.
Travis stomped the brakes again and wrestled the steering wheel to put them on the other ramp and head back down. Right into the midst of Jason and the rest. And he swore that he’d seen Diane down there somewhere. Bitch.
Time to finish this off once and for all.
* *
Erika’s wrists ached to the bone. She’d never fired guns before, and was undergoing a baptism by fire. Or under fire, as it had turned out. Jason had left a revolver with her, a clunky thing she had to hold with both hands while aiming from her prone position among the trees and brush. She doubted she was even doing much good. Anybody over on the highway that dropped probably had Caleb or Rich to blame for it.
And what if all this is because I got my locations screwed up? What if I’m WRONG?
Erika had just emptied the gun and fumbled to open the cylinder to reload when she caught a rustle of movement to her left. She’d been thinking that, aside from Rich, she had the safest position, as no one would notice her so low to the ground. Such a delusion.
You didn’t get the luxury of fooling Peter Solomon twice.
He came sprinting up from behind in a low crouch, all but noiseless, dropping beside her and plucking the gun from her hands and pitching it back the way he’d come. And just how had he gotten here anyway? The man must have been a phantom. One hand clamped over her mouth to shush her, and the other held the most wicked-looking gun she’d ever seen. He didn’t point it directly at her, not exactly, but it was close enough. He grinned with good cheer.
“Surprise surprise,” he whispered.
Over his hand, her wild eyes roved in search of help. Except Jason and Rich had their hands full and then some. Caleb and Diane had both left the cover of the brush with their attention diverted elsewhere. Good luck, then. Solomon’s presence was likely to go unnoticed for a long while.
“You can’t say I’m not a generous man,” he told her. “One last chance to do it my way. It beats dying out here, don’t you think?”
It crossed her mind then: Was fighting even worth it anymore? They fought for so little anyway, just the right to subsist, their prior lives a fading memory impossible to regain.
“Why do we even matter to you?” she said when he slid his hand away from her mouth. “We’ll never be what you want. You can take everything we have and even kill us, but you can’t drag us down to the same level as the rest of your people. What have you proved? What does it matter?”
“I can’t, can’t I?” Solomon waggled his eyebrows in mock astonishment. “That’s where you’re wrong, wrong, wrong. Just take a look.”
With his free hand, he shoved her face so that she had no choice but to look in Jay’s direction. And she saw him, what he was doing out in the clearing: shirtless, teeth bared in a snarl, slashing his gun across the face of a wiry man to knock him to the ground, then knee-dropping onto the man’s chest and continuing to bludgeon his face into a red crater.
“Can’t drag you down?” he repeated. “Open your eyes. I already have. You think a part of him isn’t enjoying that?” He yanked her by the chin to face him again. “Anyone can kill. Corruption is so much more of a challenge. So much more sporting.”
She wanted to cry then, but wouldn’t allow it. Wanted to throw up, but wouldn’t allow that either. “I don’t care what you think you’ve done to him. I know what he is without you, and that’s the part I love.”
Solomon’s eyes, so sharp and all-seeing, missing nothing, softened into a moment of nostalgia. “Once you told me I don’t know what love is.” His voice had a quality she’d never heard from him, almost melancholic. “You were wrong then, too. I did know…once. But she…she was always listening to him.”
Erika watched, listened, soaking in every nuance of this crack in what had so often been Solomon’s impenetrable armor
. Obviously unstable, he still had chinks, tiny flaws, if only she could exploit one. Her focus retreated to her semesters of college before she’d dropped out, when she’d thought her sensitivities and intuitions might be a good foundation for a psychology degree, so she could help people battle the personal demons that so often got the better of them. She thought she’d hit on a course of action to pin down who this “she” was when an explosion snapped Solomon back to the here and now.
“If I come with you,” she said, “will you call off the rest of your men? And let my friends go?”
Solomon stared at her, as if peering all the way to the back of her skull. He looked as if he’d never truly considered that she would actually take him up on it.
“Ahhh, you altruistic little saint,” he whispered. “I broke you down too, huh? Sure. Sure. I can make a deal.”
“Then come on,” she said firmly, pointing toward Travis’s truck, stopped near the bottom of the off-ramp. “Let’s go back to the city.”
They stepped from the concealment of the brush, Solomon’s movements as quick and lithe as a panther’s. He whipped his free arm around her waist and yanked her close, holding the Uzi against her ribs. The feel of the muzzle brought back memories of the tool he’d probed her with in the Omni Hotel, and she shuddered.
“Just in case you thought you’d lure me out into the open, and drop and leave me standing there,” he said. The man’s mind, however cracked, did cover just about all the bases.
As Solomon dragged her out into the open, shielding himself with her body, Erika slowly fished her right hand into her jeans pocket. She eased out the Bic lighter she’d used to torch the roadside gasoline, thumbed the flame. Let it burn continually, holding it close to the front of her body so he wouldn’t notice.
All the while, she imagined a flow chart, each entry leading to an unknown past of the man who called himself Peter Solomon. Given the sadism and control he inflicted upon others, she had, after glimpsing through his facades in the Omni, guessed that he’d been an abused child. Abused, neglected, or both. Most likely psychologically rather than physically, as he seemed to be more about mind games than anything. Domination and control. Let others do the dirty work; let me fuck with the minds.
