by Schow, Ryan
Sheridan held the polyester flap back and offered her a hand, which she took. She stepped out into the morning, not realizing the entire night had passed. Turning to Sheridan, she said, “Are these dissolvable stitches?”
The woman smiled. “No, dear. That was my sewing needle and thread. You’ll have to cut them out later and maybe see a doctor.”
She nodded and thanked the woman. Then: “Which direction did I come from?”
Sheridan and Bernard both pointed down the road, but she had no idea where she was. She only knew she had to find the woman with the Cincinnati Bengals jacket and the green beanie. If she came home without their child, Rowan would just die.
She started walking, but she burned through her energy too quickly. Two blocks was as far as she managed to walk. She had to sit down on the roadside because of the dizziness. Then, falling over on her side, she lay there, too weary to cry. Was she in shock? She felt the big man’s hands pick her up and say, “It was too soon. Let’s get you back to Sheridan.”
“I have to find Rose,” she said.
“After you lie down for awhile and let your body do what it needs to do to heal, then we can go find her.”
She was too tired to argue, and too weak to protest any further.
Chapter Nine
Rowan McDaniel
The second Rowan squared up with these two knuckleheads in the parking garage, they charged him. He parried the fight-opening haymaker, countered with a big elbow to the first scumbag’s forehead.
It was an easy shot, but the other guy moved in quick, got him in a single-leg grab. He lifted Rowan’s leg then drove forward, putting Rowan on his back.
He landed with an oof.
Even though the impact was like getting hit by a truck, his training kicked in instantly. He pulled guard quickly, blocked a big punch, then tied up the attacker by sucking their bodies together.
The guy Rowan had drilled with his elbow got to his feet and started kicking him.
He needed to do something about the guy on top of him, so he pressed his forehead against the man’s ear and started to grind it. The man groaned and tried to pull away, but Rowan kept the pressure on. And then he let go. The man’s head popped up, instantly creating the space Rowan needed to attack. He grabbed the guy’s Adam’s apple, dug his fingers in, then pulled and squeezed.
The guy, who was just a kid really, started to gag.
“It’s game over, pal, and you don’t even know it,” he growled, weathering the unending kicks from this kid’s friend.
The guy tried to hit him, but Rowan only squeezed harder, and then he started to twist. That’s when this kid realized his fate. Rowan saw it in his eyes. The kid may have had the mount, but there he was, eyes bulging, his mouth open in a silent scream.
“Let go of him!” the other guy said, kicking Rowan’s ribs harder and harder.
“If you don’t stop kicking me,” he barked, “I’m going to kill him!”
The goon kicked him in the side of the face, which was the final nail in his buddy’s coffin. Rowan cranked his hand sideways, then jerked it back. He felt things breaking and tearing, and then the kid whose Adam’s apple he destroyed became deadweight on top of him. Rowan tried to roll the body off him, but he had lost a lot of strength. The other guy finally stopped kicking and said, “Kenny?”
The guy was staring at Kenny, aghast. It looked like his Adam’s apple was all wrong—like it had been pulled too hard to one side and wasn’t sitting in the right place.
Rowan pushed himself up and tried to get his balance. He was startled by his exhaustion, but still in the fight. But then Kenny’s buddy shoved him hard, which sent Rowan staggering backward. He lost his balance, rolled with the fall, then came up on his feet, wavering, his head throbbing but his hands up.
The other four guys ran up on the scene. They were out of breath, though, just like him. Rowan turned and walked back to his car as the five of them looked at what he’d done to yet another one of their guys.
“Where you going, asshole?” one of them screamed.
He turned, saw the guys walking after him.
“You killed Kenny! You bastard!”
“I said I would,” he barked over his shoulder. “Got that bitch, Owen, too.”
Someone caught up to him, spun him around, socked him in the gut. He knew the shot was coming, so he folded in hard, using the momentum to head-butt the top of the guy’s nose. The guy’s face turned into a blood faucet, just as Rowan had hoped, but the gut shot landed hard, enough that Rowan suffered the pain of it.
The screaming guy was now holding his nose, which was a gushing red fountain. Rowan smiled, then said, “You had to come after me, didn’t you?”
Of the four guys left in the fight, one of them grabbed him under the chin, lifted his head up, then stepped back. There was no more running. The four of them had him.
“Why did you come after me?” he asked before the HR scumbag could speak. “I didn’t do anything to you.”
“So why did you kill Owen, and Kenny?”
“You knew those guys?”
The second he took a breath to speak, Rowan kicked him in the nuts, folding him forward. The movement set up the next shot, which could have been anything, but it was the money shot that was needed most. Only the money shot would terrify the mob. That’s why Rowan drove his thumb right into the man’s eye. And then he turned to run.
Hands grabbed at him, but he shook them off, sprinting away from his car. He hoped to put some distance between them before circling back.
As he was running through the garage, it dawned on him that there was nothing to stop them from killing him. Of course—as they had already seen—there was nothing to stop him from killing them either.
Glancing back, he saw the four of them had fallen back, one of them out of breath completely.
Three were still coming.
Instead of running—because he wasn’t going to make it back to his car with enough time to safely fetch his gun—he turned and sprinted back at them. Two of them slowed down, but one tucked his head and charged harder. The second they clashed, he realized he had the upper hand. But damn, the impact was crushing!
They both went to the ground, Rowan landing on top of him. With no time to spare, he grabbed the man’s head and started slamming it into the concrete. Like a lunatic, he hit it seven or eight times before the guy’s eyes finally rolled up into his head.
He was pushing himself off the body when he took a kick to the face. He rolled away, ate another kick, then curled into a ball and took a few more kicks to the ribs, back, and head.
He couldn’t keep eating kicks if he wanted to live. So, when another kick came in, he timed it right, catching the leg. Catching the leg wasn’t enough, though. He had to grab the foot by the heel and the toes and twist the foot hard enough to turn the man around.
He did it just right, which was enough to put him on the ground. When that happened, he crawled up the guy’s back, drove an elbow into his spine, then rolled over and got to his feet. The second he was up, someone tackled him right back down. He managed to turn mid-air and land halfway on the other guy. Wiggling around, because he was dead if he got caught, he found a way to stuff his thumb in the guy’s eye socket. The screaming was shrill and guttural, like someone stabbing a cat.
With two more guys to deal with, he crawled backward, then pushed himself to his feet, took a very big breath, then focused on the more aggressive of the two.
“Look at my thumb,” he said to them both. There was gore streaked all the way up it. “How many eyes do you need? Because your friends’ should be fine, although a little blind. But me? I can do this all day long.”
One guy looked at the other, and then they picked up their one-eyed friend and backed away from him. When they were far enough away, they turned and broke into a jog.
Instead of fleeing the scene, Rowan dragged the guy whose head he bashed in to the edge of the garage, hoisted him up on the waist-high concr
ete wall, then shoved him over the side.
He hit the sidewalk below with a bone-crunching thump. In response, Rowan let out an animal shriek, letting everyone know what he’d done.
Moments later, he got to his car, grabbed the gun and a spare box of rounds for the extra mags in his duffle bag, then he started down the parking ramp heading for the exit.
Walking slowly, because he was hurt and bleeding, he thought back to his uncle, to what he had said about fights like these.
“If you’re alone, the only way to meet overwhelming force is to look like an unhinged lunatic,” he had said. “Whatever wild, insane blood you have coursing through you, let it embolden you. Then become that psycho.”
Rowan wanted to go back to the office, lay down, close his eyes, and sleep it off. But Walker wouldn’t do that, so he wouldn’t either.
On the first floor, the mob began pouring into the parking garage. He didn’t turn and run, or risk jumping out of the garage. No, he ran straight toward the crowd and opened fire.
Four men dropped right away, tripping the others. A fifth lowered his head and kept running. Rowan shot him in the crown, the bullet blowing out the back of his neck.
Seeing what was happening, the charging masses pulled to a stop. One of the guys in front wore a hoodie and had a balaclava. He wasn’t sure what to do, so Rowan shot him in the nose without hesitation or remorse.
Everyone turned and fled in a panic. One of the guys who ran was close enough for him to shoot, so Rowan shot him in the back of the head.
The rest of the mob filtered out of the garage’s exit. He thought about emptying his mag into the bottlenecked crowd, but decided otherwise. If he got outside, he didn’t know how many rounds he’d need to make it back to his office.
Enraged, juiced up and ready to rock, he walked around the scattering of bodies making and unmaking his fists. He was stewing, trying to figure out what to do next.
Looking down at one of the dead demons, he saw him wearing a black hoodie and black boots. He reached down, wrestled the hoodie off of the body, then he took his right shoe and tried it on. It fit comfortably, so Rowan kicked off his left shoe and put the other black cross-trainer on. He then slapped his hands in a puddle of blood and wiped it across his face.
When he finally walked out the exit, he staggered sideways into the gutter, like he’d been shot. With others watching, he fell into a nearby car, went to the ground. Rolling over on his belly, he had his gun in hand in case his charade didn’t work. But it did. No one bothered him but to say, “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I think I’ve been shot.”
The black hoodie covered him, but the black cross-trainers were the other half of the sell. He prayed no one looked twice at his dress pants. In truth, he was an imposter. But if someone rolled him over to find out, he was going to shoot them point blank and they’d know it for sure.
With his face turned sideways in the gutter, he watched the building across the street. Someone had tried to set it on fire. Rowan got up, staggered into the masses—which moved to a large degree like a mosh pit—then joined the screaming anarchists.
Someone was getting beat up, guys were pushing each other around, pounding their chests, and cheering as they immersed themselves in the spirit of rebellion.
People started to pour out of the building, smoke wafting out of the lobby. The awaiting HR mob started roughing them up, then forcing them back inside. These survivors had a stark choice: burn to death or get beaten to death. Most of them took the beatings, which only intensified the HR’s chanting.
“No quarter, you’re dead, a bullet in your head! No quarter, you’re dead, a bullet in your head!”
The noise rose to such a roar, Rowan wanted nothing more than to empty every last round he had into these assholes.
Instead, he thought of his fiancée and his little girl on the way, and he reined himself in. Turning, he pushed through the crowds, finding his way to the reinforced glass door leading to his office. Dave moved toward the glass, pointing the gun at him.
“Not here, scumbag,” Dave said.
Glancing over his shoulder, making sure he wasn’t drawing anyone’s attention, he pulled back his hoodie, causing Dave to let out a sigh.
He quickly opened the door, then said, “Hurry, hurry.”
When Rowan got inside, Dave looked him over and didn’t know what to say.
“I didn’t think it would be that bad,” Rowan said. His face was swollen and there was blood all over him.
“What the hell happened?” Dave asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Rowan replied, starting for the stairwell. Holding up his gun, he said, “Mission accomplished though, if you wanted to know.”
“If you lead any of them back to us…”
“They’re too busy starting fires and beating everyone to death.” Turning around, he looked at Dave, his eyes so empty they didn’t even feel real. “Half these people, if you walk among them, it’s like they’re possessed by something dark, old, and evil”
“It’s a takeover, man. You know that. You’ve written about that. No need to sensationalize them, or build them into something they’re not.”
“Trust me, I don’t want to believe it. But now that I see it, there’s no other explanation. This is a takeover of our country, but I’m not convinced that’s all this is. From where I was just now, this also looks a lot like a battle of good and evil.”
“Where is the governor on this?” Dave asked, ignoring Rowan’s bold assertions.
“In hiding,” Rowan said.
“What about Senator Eichmann?”
“Clause Eichmann?”
Dave nodded.
“I don’t know,” Rowan said. “At home maybe?”
“Do you know about him?”
Slowly, he started to shake his head. Then: “He got tens of millions of dollars coming from international sources, as well as inside the beltway and from large corporate donors. Nothing’s easily traceable, though, which tells me this isn’t some rinky-dink operation.”
“You know his house is only a few miles from here.”
“You ready to finally sack up?”
“This was an EMP, right?” Dave asked.
Rowan nodded. “It seems so.”
“Who would do this to our country?” Dave asked.
“Probably the same guys funding Eichmann,” Rowan said.
For a moment, he thought about killing the senator in his home, cutting the head off that snake, then getting back to Constanza. His concerns for both were equal but different. His head was with this city, but his heart was with his family.
Dave looked outside and said, “Is it smart to be here?”
“You see what’s going on out there, right? With the people trying to get out?”
“We don’t exactly have the best view, and we’re keeping our windows closed because they’re on the ground floor, but I see it. We all do.”
“Those people not trying to flee are being burned out.”
“Good God,” Dave said.
“I wanted to see if we could fight our way out of here, but I’m thinking that’s not possible anymore. And as far as I can see, we’re pretty much screwed.”
“What if they breach the building, or try to burn it down?” Dave asked.
“That’s exactly what they’re going to do. We need eyes on all sides. I have a set of four walkie-talkies in my duffel bag if you want to send someone up in a few minutes.”
“This was an EMP, Rowan. Your two-ways don’t work.”
“I’ve got an EMP-proof duffle bag, Dave.”
Dave laughed like he should have expected that. “I didn’t even know EMP duffle bags were a thing.”
“They are in the right circles.”
Someone burst out of the stairwell and said, “They’re coming this way!”
“And?” Dave asked.
“I think they’re going to set us on fire,” the guy said, breathless.
“That seems to be the theme!”
Without waiting, Rowan pushed past Dave and headed for the stairwell.
Chapter Ten
Rowan McDaniel
Several people from the first and third floors stood with Rowan at the wall of windows watching the anarchists gathering around the building. Several times they tried to set the four-story office building on fire, but the building was largely made of brick and they were having a hard time.
Day transitioned to night and everyone returned to their respective levels, with the property managers standing watch down in the lobby. He gave each of the floors one of the walkie talkies promising to let them know what was happening, if anything, but no one was communicating anything on their end, which Rowan found wildly unentertaining.
When everyone had left, and it was just his team, Rowan found himself pacing like a caged lion. These douchebags were going to burn the building down one way or another. When they figured out they couldn’t do it from the outside, would they breach the building and try from the inside? This is what left him so agitated. They would eventually turn the building into a chimney if they got inside.
“If anyone needs to go to the bathroom,” he said, “now is the time.” It had become too dark to see without candles, of which there were only a few, and mostly votives from Clair’s personal stash.
“Someone threw up on the floor of the women’s room,” Clair said. “Be careful not to slip if you go in there.”
“That was me,” Dhanishka confessed. “Everyone is now stacking their poop because there’s no water to flush it down. You push the handle and it’s like a mouth that can eat but not swallow.”
“At least it’s all collecting in one place,” Brian said.
“You can smell it down the hall,” Dhanishka said. “It’s not sanitary, and we’re running out of toilet paper. Just thinking about it is making me sick again.”
