The Divide

by Scott B. Williams

  “If they try something, they’ll expect more resistance from you, since you’re the guy. It may be better that I’m the one that’s armed. That gives me the element of surprise.”

  Jonathan agreed and said that was good thinking on her part. Shauna hoped he was right, but whether the strategy would work or not depended greatly on whether or not the four overtaking them were also armed. She had to assume they were, but she still wasn’t ready to stop until she knew they were going to force it. The small canvas bag the gun was inside was still partially open so she could quickly reach in and grab it, but Jonathan was right, it wouldn’t be safe to do that and try to aim too without coming to a stop first. She could steer with her injured hand but putting all her weight on it to steady the bike enough for shooting was a different matter altogether. And the riders behind them were closing to inside of a hundred feet by now, a couple of them already shouting “Hey!” and “Wait up, what’s your hurry?”

  “I hope we can talk our way out of this, Jonathan, but I’m not counting on it.”

  “I’ll bet they think we have all kinds of good stuff in these bags. Maybe we can make them think we’ll give it to them without a fight.”

  “Well, we can’t outrun them, that’s for sure, but let’s see what they do when they get closer. If it’s clear that they are going to try something, then you yell and hit your brakes hard and make them think you’re stopping to protect me. That might give me enough time to create some distance and get into position to shoot if I have to.”

  Shauna glanced back again and saw that whatever was going to happen, it was imminent. The four riders had spread apart across the 12-foot width of the bike path, running abreast of each other as they pedaled from the standing position. When the one nearest her saw her look back, he shouted again: “Hey baby! You’re new in town, aren’t you? Hold up! We just want to talk!”

  Shauna ignored him and pedaled harder. Jonathan was still beside her for now and they exchanged glances, each of them knowing this was indeed going to be trouble. Another of the riders commented on the shape of her rear end and made a derogatory remark about the ‘punk’ accompanying her. Two of them were almost on her back wheel now and when she glanced over her shoulder, she saw they were about Jonathan’s age themselves but had the manner of street thugs who certainly weren’t new to the lifestyle in just the short period since the fall of law and order. When she looked across to Jonathan’s other side, she saw that the rider pulling alongside him had a three-foot stick that appeared to be a cut-down pool cue in one hand. Just when she thought he was going to take a swing at the kid’s head and was hoping Jonathan would stop suddenly as agreed, the attacker instead shoved the stick into his rear spokes, causing the wheel to instantly lock up, slamming him and the bike to the hard asphalt.

  Shauna screamed Jonathan’s name as all four of the riders howled with laughter. She saw the kid roll to his hands and knees as his tumble came to an end and wondered if he’d broken any bones. Regardless, he couldn’t help her now and her best hope was to appear terrified and helpless, if only long enough to get her hand on that Glock. She braked to a stop before she was knocked down as well, pleading with them not to hurt Jonathan as they began jumping off their bikes to follow up their attack. “Please! Just leave us alone! We don’t have anything you want! We’re just trying to get home!”

  The biggest of the four, wild-eyed, wiry and covered in tats to the top of his neck, kicked Jonathan hard in the stomach before he could get to his feet, and then looked Shauna up and down. “Oh, I think you do! I think you need to party with us for a while!”

  “You can have our money!” Shauna said, reaching into the handlebar bag. “There’s a lot of cash in here! It’s all we have left but take it! Please! Just let us be on our way!”

  His eyes followed her hand to the bag, interested, but then he was distracted by the sound of Jonathan gasping for breath after the vicious kick, still down and unable to get up. One of the other gang members pulled something from his jeans pocket and Shauna heard the loud metallic click as the blade of a six-inch folder snapped open in his hand. He took a step towards the kid, brandishing the menacing blade.

  “DO IT!” The big one ordered.

  Shauna knew then it was now or never. This man had just ordered his buddy to finish Jonathan. She would be next whenever they were done with her, that was inevitable. She might not be able to get them all before they got to her, but she knew she had to try. Eric’s patient instruction and hours of working with her, drilling the reflexes and focusing on the front sight replayed in her mind despite the years that intervened as she drew the Glock in one smooth motion and brought it into line with the knife wielder’s torso. A face shot would be better, as Eric always said, but the man was already bent over and turned to one side, having grabbed Jonathan by the hair to pull his head back and expose his throat. All four of the thugs were momentarily distracted by the spectacle, and that was their fatal mistake, giving her the split-second window that Shauna needed to aim and fire. She squeezed off a rapid double tap into the ribs of that guy and then moved her front sight in line with the big, tatted one as he spun around at the sound of the gunfire with a stunned look on his face. Shauna didn’t miss. He was less than ten feet away and this time she did aim for the face, needing only one round to ensure that she was the last thing that sorry excuse for a human ever saw. One of the remaining two was scrambling to grab his bike and get on it, but the last one was fumbling with something at his waistband. Shauna shot him twice as he tried to rack the slide to chamber a round in the little chrome-plated semi-auto he produced. As he fell, she put her sight squarely on the back of the last one, who was now up on the pedals, desperately trying to leave the scene. It would have been an easy shot, but Shauna couldn’t do it. The punk was no longer a threat and she doubted he would even think about coming back. She turned to Jonathan, who was getting his breath back while staring at her in wide-eyed amazement.

  “Damn! That was some awesome shooting, Shauna! I knew Eric taught you how to handle guns, but wow! I had no idea you were that good! That was like John Wick shit!”

  “It wasn’t anything special, Jonathan, just the element of surprise, like we talked about. Are you okay?”

  Jonathan got to his feet before she could give him a hand. She saw that his hands and elbows were bleeding from where he’d skidded on the pavement. It looked painful, but he shrugged it off. “Nothing’s broken, just a little road rash, that’s all. You saved my life, though! Thank you! That guy was going to freakin’ cut my throat!”

  “And mine too, I’m sure. They made the mistake of thinking I was easy pickings after they knocked you down. Thank God and Lieutenant Holton for this Glock, or we’d both be dead!” Shauna looked around, checking to make sure the bike path was still deserted. She’d just killed three men in broad daylight and didn’t know for certain that no one had witnessed it. But looking around now, it appeared they were alone. The one guy she’d let get away had turned off the path at the first opportunity and disappeared. She doubted he would go looking for the authorities if there were even any to be found nearby, but now that the shooting was over, she was shaken by the encounter and even more frightened for Megan. It didn’t bode well for what they would find at the university that something like this had happened so shortly after their arrival. Shauna ejected the partially-empty magazine from her pistol and slammed home a fresh one with the full 15 rounds. After this encounter, the paltry six mags that Lieutenant Holton had given her didn’t seem adequate at all, and she understood why Eric had insisted on carrying so much firepower when they first left Bart’s place. Jonathan had already picked up the small pistol that the third guy had drawn.

  “Lorcin L380 is what it says on here,” he said, reading the markings on the slide. “It’s a .380 caliber. That’s pretty small, isn’t it? It looks like it only holds seven rounds.”

  “See if he’s got another magazine on him. It’s not much of a weapon, but it might be better than nothin
g next time something like this happens. I’ll check these other guys too.”

  “Can you still ride?” She asked Jonathan, after finding no other weapons on them other than the big Cold Steel folder that she put in her bag with her magazines.

  “I think so but look at my bike! That back wheel is trashed!”

  Shauna knew this already. The bike was still laying in the road where it had slid to a stop. The stick going into the spokes at speed had broken nearly half of them before locking up the wheel. As a consequence, the rim was bent and twisted beyond repair. “What about their bikes? Will one of their back wheels fit yours?”

  “That one will,” he said, nodding at the one the guy wielding the stick had been riding. “It’s got 26-inch wheels. Those other two look like 29er’s to me. I could ride one those, but I like the way this Specialized is set up and I’ve already got my loading system figured out. I’ll swap the wheel, but I think I’m going to have to straighten out the derailleur too. It’s a wonder I didn’t break my neck after that bastard took me down like that. He got what he deserved, that’s for sure.”

  Shauna knew Jonathan was right about that last, but she was a little pale now after searching the bodies of the three young men, none of them much older than Jonathan or her own Megan. The bandage on her hand was a vivid reminder that this wasn’t her first gunfight since this surreal situation began, but this encounter was up close and personal. There’d been no other choice though and that she had to do it, or she and Jonathan would be the ones left there in the bike path. But the knowledge that she was right still didn’t make her feel particularly good about taking three lives. She wanted to get away from this scene and put it behind her now, so she did what she could to help Jonathan get his bike rolling again. The borrowed wheel worked, and after some adjustments, to the brakes and derailleur, Jonathan was ready to ride again.

  “Should we try to drag them off the path?” Jonathan asked, as Shauna was already mounting her bike and preparing to ride.

  “No. Let’s get out of here before more of their friends or the police come along.” Shauna considered trying to take a different route into Boulder, but the highway that paralleled this bike path was just as visible if not more so to anyone who might still be at home in the adjacent neighborhoods they had to pass.

  Sure enough, they had only gone a quarter of a mile after leaving the scene of the shooting when just such a neighborhood appeared on the left. Shauna glanced over at the nearest house and saw a middle-aged man staring at them where he stood in his yard behind a board fence. She wondered if he had heard the gunfire and was staring now to memorize their descriptions, so he could report them to the authorities, but he gave her a friendly wave when he realized she’d seen him, so maybe not. Shauna pretended to ignore him, keeping her head down so that her face was less visible until they were well out of sight.

  “I wonder how many more people might be around in these houses that we can’t see?” Jonathan said.

  “Probably not many, but you never know. I don’t like this though. It’s creeping me out, knowing we’re probably being watched and that we might run into another gang like that first one.”

  “Yeah, me too, but what can we do about it? Just keep riding, I guess.”

  “That’s all.”

  An hour after the attack, they passed a sign indicating they were in the city limits of Boulder and then another indicating the direction to the university. Thankfully, they were in a long, straight stretch of the route and could see a good distance ahead as they neared the campus.

  “That looks like a checkpoint,” Jonathan said, slowing and then stopping in front of Shauna.

  She pulled up beside him and they tried to discern what they were seeing; whether it was the military, or perhaps police or something else. “We’d better find a place to hide these guns before we ride any closer.”

  “You want to go up there?”

  “Of course. That’s the campus dead ahead. That’s what we came all this way for.”

  “We’ll be screwed if some thief finds your Glock before we come back for it.”

  “Then let’s find a really good place to hide it so that won’t happen.”

  They turned around and rode far enough back to be hidden from view of anyone manning the checkpoint who might be watching through binoculars and then turned off into a small wooded park, where they found loose rocks beneath which to conceal the handguns and magazines. She was quite sure they weren’t being watched, but she stretched and walked around like she was just out for her daily exercise, trying to draw the attention of any unseen prying eyes to herself while Jonathan quickly and discreetly tucked the weapons out of sight. Then, they remounted their bikes and rode in the direction of the manned barricades they’d seen in the distance.

  Unlike the bigger Army checkpoints they’d seen while in the supply convoy on the highways, this one appeared to be manned by civilian forces and it didn’t appear busy, as there was virtually no traffic on the road even here in town. Shauna felt her stomach twist into knots as she wondered whether they’d be allowed to pass and whether Megan was just over there, beyond that barricade on the other side. Anything could happen when approaching the authorities like this, and even though they’d ditched their firearms they could be arrested simply for being here, but Shauna was determined to explain her purpose and tell the truth to the extent it was required. The two of them pedaled until they were within hailing distance of the men manning the roadblock, and then they got off to walk their bikes the rest of the forward to the parked vehicles and barricades that blocked the road ahead.

  “There’s no access at this checkpoint,” one of the guards said when Shauna said they were trying to enter the campus. “If you’re seeking refuge, you’ll have to go to the main gateway. Turn back one block and go east on that road until you come to the second intersection. Turn left there and follow that road until you see a building directly ahead with posted guards outside. If you can show I.D. to prove you’re local, they may be able to process you today.”

  “We’re not looking for refuge,” Shauna said. “I have to find my daughter. She’s a student at the university and lives near the campus.” Shauna named the apartment complex.

  “The university is closed indefinitely and has been for months,” the guard said. “Most of the campus facilities have been converted in a refugee center for the students as well as local civilians. If your daughter was a student there, chances are, she’s either among the refugees or detainees.”

  “Detainees?”

  “Troublemakers. The category into which a whole lot of former students fell into, I’m afraid. Those arrested for rioting, looting and other crimes. If your daughter is among that group, she’ll be there until order is restored and trials can be held.”

  Shauna was lost in thought for a moment. This was something she’d feared all along when she hadn’t heard from Megan even before the hurricane in Florida made it impossible for her to call. “How do I find out if she’s there?”

  “I’m don’t know if you can. All I can tell you to do is go to the processing center and ask someone there. They may be able to help you, but we can’t here. My job is to prevent access, and I’m going to ask you two to move along.”

  “Wow, the freaking campus is a refugee center now? That sounds like some of the places I heard they were setting up around Orlando and Tampa before I met Eric,” Jonathan said, as the two of them turned back to follow the route the guard had given them.

  “They better not be holding my Megan with those detainees,” Shauna said. “I know she wouldn’t have been involved in violent rioting. At least not willingly.”

  “We won’t know until we get there. I guess they’ll ask us a bunch of questions, especially when they find out we’re both from Florida. Do you think they’ll believe our crazy story about how we got here? What if they lock us up too?”

  “I don’t know what they’ll believe or what they’ll say Jonathan, but I’m not leaving until I find o
ut about Megan, I can tell you that, no matter what I have to do. You can wait back at that park if you’d rather. There’s no need for you to go there with me.”

  “Oh hell no. I’m going. I didn’t come all this way for nothing. It’s just too bad you had to give that gold coin of Eric’s to those asshole soldiers back in Kansas. Something like that would probably get us in the door, or at least get us some answers. Now, we don’t have anything of value worth to bribe anybody with.”

  Shauna said nothing, but Jonathan had a point. If she could get to one person who could make a decision, the right offer might buy either access or answers. At this point, it might be all she had left to try. Jonathan didn’t have a clue about the gold she was still carrying, but it was something to think about. She thought about the questions she would ask as they pedaled, until finally they made the last turn and saw the building the guard had told them about.

  Twelve

  SHAUNA FOUND THE PROCESSING office of the refugee center easier to approach than she’d expected. The reason, of course, was that there weren’t any actual refugees wanting to get in at the moment, as most people in the immediate area were either already there or had left for other parts. Most of those inside were city and suburban folks with no safe place to go and no way to survive with the crippled infrastructure and lack of services and basic necessities. The female officer named Tonya that she and Jonathan found themselves talking to informed them that the refugee camp offered safety, protection from the elements, and food, which was something most of those on the outside didn’t have unless they were far more self-sufficient and prepared than the average citizen.

  The processing center did have an offline computer database with information on those inside, however, and after Shauna managed to convince the woman that she was indeed who she said she was, Tonya pulled up the list and searched for Megan, but came up with nothing.