by Schow, Ryan
Now she grinned. Leaning forward, she took his face into her hands, her mouth ready to receive his. But the second he leaned forward, she drove her knee right up into his throat, crushing his Adam’s apple. He shot back in his seat, squirming and gagging.
She took a step back, whipped around and kicked him in the chin so hard, his neck actually broke. Walking back to the couch, she picked up her fallen robe, slid it on, then sauntered out into the hallway where Dulantha waited.
“Senator Eichmann needs you to get in contact with the troops again,” she said. “He is not as adept as you in setting the receiver’s frequencies.”
Without question, Dulantha turned and walked into the bedroom. The Senator was laying back on the seat, his head flopped over so far, there was a clear, horizontal fold in the skin.
The second Dulantha registered his boss’s death, he froze. Hwa-Young punched him in the spine, giving it everything she had.
The Sri Lankan arched his back, wheezing. His knees went weak, but they did not buckle. Hwa-Young frowned, bothered that Dulantha was still standing. She grabbed him by the shoulders, yanked him back, then drove her knee into his spine. Now he collapsed forward, his body not working right.
Kneeling down, she rolled him over and said, “While you lay there unable to move, unable to eat, unable to call for help, I want you to know that no one is coming for you.”
“Please,” he whispered, his pain naked.
“You think you and your cocksucker boss can kill this country? That an EMP is a death sentence? Maybe it is for all of us, but before we fall, you fall.”
“But I am innocent of your charge,” he said.
“No one is ever really innocent.”
Hwa-Young grabbed a rope from the Senator’s garage, tied it around Eichmann’s neck, then scrawled “TRAITOR” across his bare chest in thick, permanent ink.
She tied the end of the rope to the bedpost, dragged Eichmann to the window, then broke out the glass using a heavy, metal sculpture. With what strength she could muster, she wrestled his body up onto the window ledge, then pushed him over.
The body dropped, the rope pulling taut around Eichmann’s neck. She looked over the edge with satisfaction. When the body finally stopped swaying, she felt content that the message beyond the word “traitor” would be seen and understood: If you betray America, you get a death sentence.
When she was done, Hwa-Young walked into the bathroom where she readied an alcohol-based solution she would use to clean the hideous tattoo off her chest.
She took a breath, then used a sponge and the custom solution to wipe away the temporary ink. The solution burned, as she had been warned, but as promised, the ink began to lighten and flake off.
By the time she successfully removed the rest of the upside-down cross from her body, her skin was red, practically rubbed raw.
The next mixture she pulled from her backpack would hopefully soothe the affected area, thereby lessening the sting. The cream worked as promised, but she did not want to hang around this perverse home for long.
She put on her clothes, then pulled out a small tear of paper from her pocket. On the paper was a single, scrawled out name: Rowan McDaniel. The address was in the heart of Columbus. She was hoping not to have to go there, but she was happier killing the Senator than she would have been trying to drag a dozen details from him.
In the mirror, she put on her black HR outfit, donned her mask and backpack, and then she pulled the hoodie over her head and grabbed her sign. It read, Death to America.
Chapter Fourteen
Hwa-Young Tae
Hwa-Young reached downtown Columbus just before nightfall. What she saw startled her to her core. There were hundreds of Hayseed Rebellion degenerates, most of them dressed in either all black, or wild colors. Cautiously, she walked into the fold of rioters, posing as one of them. She hadn’t been in a crowd this size before, but she moved like she belonged there. In the middle of them, mingling, she overheard a few guys talking about how the people in the buildings have been holed up for days now, and that when they burned them out, they’d mass slaughter them.
There was a sick delight in these people she could only describe as evil. The fact that they were at the address that her hacker had given her was deeply concerning. One they had targeted happened to be Rowan’s office building.
Her mission changed yet again. Her new objective was to protect the building from the outside until it was time to attack these parasites from the inside out.
She slipped out of the crowd, dipped into the trees around back, then sat her backpack out of sight. Inside the pack, she had the most important part of The Dissident Weekly. She took the papers, folded them, then tucked them inside her jacket pocket.
Hwa-Young didn’t need these papers right away, but she had them for when she did. If her hacker friend from California was right, if the prodigy known to most as Enigma—or Brayden James to her—was worth the money she paid him, she would find Rowan McDaniel in the fourth-floor offices.
She slipped out of the trees, moving behind the crowds until she saw what she needed—a girl with a knife. She punched the girl in the back, drilling her hard enough to cripple her. The girl staggered forward, but Hwa-Young grabbed her by her hair and pulled her back onto the lawn. Hwa-Young then controlled her fall, lowering her gently to the ground.
“Give it to me and I’ll let you live,” Hwa-Young told the girl.
“Give you what?” she moaned, barely able to breathe from the pain.
“Your butterfly knife.”
The girl had been playing with it the same way people with butterfly knives always do. She had just done so at the wrong time in front of the wrong person. A hand came out, the closed weapon in hand. Hwa-Young grabbed it, then pocketed it.
Looking up at the building, Hwa-Young thought she saw faces in the windows four floors up. She thought the same thing about the third floor, too, but she couldn’t see anyone on the second or first floors. She understood. People were scared, and these anarchists were insane.
They were now chanting “Burn them out! Burn them out!” The noise was boisterous and overwhelming.
Hwa-Young opened the blade, then sliced the girl’s neck wide open. She quickly shoved her head to the ground where the spurting excess would puddle into the earth rather than spray all over the place.
“Burn them out! Burn them out!”
She saw many other human outliers—people hanging back from the crowd, people like the dead girl. Hwa-Young made her way down the back row of them, stabbing them in the kidneys or cutting their throats as she went.
She reminded herself that these were domestic terrorists, the same type of people who stole a good cause from good people just trying to stand up for their race and their freedoms.
A few of these anarchist pukes caught sight of her right before she hit them. To her, this meant she had to either attack quickly and risk drawing attention to herself, or fade into the shadows and remain inconspicuous.
She opted to take cover, but the closer she got to Rowan’s building, the less she found she could hide, for the glow of firelight was all-consuming.
The good thing was that she didn’t need complete darkness to remain hidden. She could think like them, move like them, and talk like them. This was her hiding in plain sight, something she’d done for years. With her anonymity preserved beneath the hoodie, she walked into the middle of that anarchists’ hell, bumping past bodies, not excusing herself, threatening a few of the more stubborn ones. They all acted like this, so she acted like this. Her ability to blend was what made her invisible.
She finally made her way around the front of the building where she saw some lunatic beating on the building’s glass door with a crowbar. By the look of it, the building was about to be breached.
The glass finally broke to immense cheering. Guys started kicking away the broken glass while pushing their way inside. Gunshots went off and the masses backed up. There were a few brave souls, though,
guys with the vision and the balls to storm the building despite the danger.
Next to her, someone picked up the crowbar and tried breaking out the larger windows so they wouldn’t bottleneck at the door.
“He’s running for the stairwell!” someone shouted. “Get him!”
Hwa-Young pushed and shoved her way inside. When the kid in front of her wouldn’t move, she punched him in the spine so hard he arched his back and fell into the doorway. She stomped on his neck, stepped over him, then grabbed the cautious guy in front of her.
Reaching around, she cupped the second guy’s forehead enough to draw him back and expose his throat. She then hammer-fisted his Adam’s apple, causing irreparable damage. Grabbing hold of him, she spun his slight frame around and tossed him onto the now-crippled kid blocking the door. His frail body struck several people trying to get inside the door. He lay there, holding his throat, gagging.
A beastly-looking girl managed to get over both victims and grab Hwa-Young from behind, but the North Korean threw an elbow, catching the pink-haired girl right in the mouth. She elbowed her again, splitting her lip open all the way to her nose. The girl staggered backward on unsteady legs, and when Hwa-Young had the right distance, she threw a donkey kick, catching this creature just under her breastbone. The pink-haired freak tumbled backward into the growing pile of bodies while gunfire erupted in the stairwell.
The mob converged on other parts of the building, but no one could break the larger glass windows, or quickly get through the pile of bodies she left piled at the front door. More of these deviants tried, of course, but others still pulled them aside, fighting to get in first.
One girl finally got through, stepping on the bodies while hunched down to avoid the door frame. But when she jumped down and landed in a blood slick, she slipped and fell sideways, landing on her hip.
Hwa-Young shot in and heel-kicked her in the crown the second she tried to get up, which put her down for good. Inside the stairwell, more big echoing booms of gunfire rattled the walls. This was the new bottleneck. Should she proceed forth, or hang back where it was safe and risk these fiends getting to Rowan first? Was he even there?
She shoved her way through two of the bodies outside the stairwell, but when she hit a deeper wall of bodies blocking access, she withdrew the butterfly knife and began stabbing people. Now they started moving. Rather she stabbed them, then pulled them aside, and then they moved.
The burning fires and boisterous chanting (“Down with America, Down with God!”) gave Hwa-Young cover to move, and cover for the cries others made when she punched holes in their kidneys. She didn’t exactly blend in with the rest of these freaks, but there weren’t that many of them willing to charge into a stairwell where an active shooter was taking them down.
As she made her way forward, she heard screaming coming from behind her. At first she wasn’t sure if the people were screaming in pain or crying out a warning. Then it became clear. These were warnings.
“I just got stabbed!” one of the guys shouted.
Another said, “She frickin’ stabbed me!”
Hwa-Young was too deep in the crowd to turn back, and for the first time, fear overtook her, prompting her to move at a more reckless pace. The answer to fear was more violence. She just stabbed and stabbed and stabbed. A hand grabbed her; she stabbed it. Fresh screaming erupted behind her so she turned and stabbed throats and faces, all the while continuing to plow through the bodies, pushing, shoving, and cutting her way through the unsuspecting masses.
More gunfire erupted in the stairwell, the twin concussion blasts deafening to her ears.
Ahead of her, at the foot of the stairs, a few bodies lay dead in the glow of a burning red flare. When she looked up into the stairwell, she saw a scared guy at the top of the stairs. He was holding a long revolver, his eyes wild.
He fired another round, hitting the lead guy in the side of the neck. Blood misted her face, the droplets catching her eyeball. She blinked, then wiped the blood away, and then she stepped into the enclosed stairwell and started stabbing the four remaining maniacs.
When she had killed them all, she moved cautiously up the stairs, her eyes locked on the shooter’s eyes. With the revolver pointed right at her, the guy looked like he didn’t know whether to shoot her or thank her.
She lifted her hands up, the knife in one hand, the other an empty palm. The shooter was staring at her, scared, not speaking. She was looking at him as well, poised but just as silent. She didn’t expect him to pull the trigger, for he had to have seen her clearing the way. Finally, when she was close enough, she smiled, and he pulled the trigger.
She blinked as the hammer clicked before an empty chamber. Frowning, she turned and looked at the bodies stacked up in the hallway. She then turned back to him to see if he was sliding fresh rounds into the cylinder.
He wasn’t.
He just stood there scared, staring at her.
She turned and hurried back to the two guys still alive at the bottom of the stairs. She stabbed them, as well as a girl who made her way inside the stairwell, and then she stalked back up the stairs like a territorial panther.
The shooter started to back up. When she got in front of him, she said, “Where’s Rowan?”
“F…Fourth floor.”
She brushed shoulders with him on her way past. “Asshole,” she said before starting up the next flight.
Chapter Fifteen
Constanza Navarro
When Constanza woke up, she had no idea how long she had slept, but the idea that she missed any time looking for Rose ate at her, left her feeling not only a bit manic, but like a bad parent.
She tried to sit up. Where before she was dizzy and weak, now she felt better, stronger. The women who cared for her before were there to greet her.
“Before you go after your child,” Sheridan said, “take these with you.” She handed Constanza a small bottle of pills and some gauze. “It’s some old amoxicillin. Hopefully it’ll stave off any infection. And the gauze is for when it gets too wet down there.”
She stood, stretched, then thanked the woman. Sheridan unzipped the tent’s polyester flap, then stepped outside and held it open for her. It looked like it was midday.
“How long have I been asleep?”
“The night and then some,” Sheridan said. “Your body needed it.”
She thanked the woman, then set out on foot to find her child. Later that day, exhausted, her legs, back, and everything else hurting, she walked into a homeless camp. Blood was pooling in her underwear again, her pants clearly stained red. She didn’t let this deter her. Faithfully, desperately, she asked the vagrants who would speak with her the same question every time.
“I’m looking for my friend,” she said. “She’s wearing a Cincinnati Bengals jacket and a green beanie I gave her for her birthday last year. Plus she has a newborn, a little girl.”
Most people said they hadn’t seen her.
Then one woman said, “How loaded are you?” She stared at the woman, not sure how to answer that question. “A cracked-out girl like you needs to be careful. The guys here…some of them see a pretty little thing like you…trust me, you’re gonna need to hide that face.”
Constanza didn’t realize how low her energy was, or how much she was slurring. Despite her much needed sleep, she still felt so damn tired.
“Come here,” the woman said.
Constanza took a reluctant step forward. The homeless woman then lifted her foot, wiped her fingers over the dirt and grime off the bottom of her shoe, then reached up and smeared it across Constanza’s forehead.
Constanza backed up a step, fell down, slammed her tailbone. Fresh pain shot up her spine, but the jarring hit also hurt her torso, her pelvis, and her stitched perineum.
“You okay?” the woman asked. She bent down and looked Constanza’s eyes, studying the girl in the firelight.
“I don’t know,” she said, biting back the tears. “I hit my tailbone pretty good.”<
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“You have no pores,” the woman said astounded. She felt Constanza’s skin with the back of a dirty finger. “I would kill for your skin. What did you do before this?”
“I was a beauty influencer.”
“What the heck is that?” she asked standing up tall.
“I got paid to do my makeup on YouTube. People watched and YouTube paid me a cut of the advertising dollars. I was doing this before the economy turned last year.”
“Did they give you a lot of money?”
Yeah, it was a ton.
“Enough to get by,” she said.
“How did you end up on the street?”
“The power went out, everyone’s cars and cell phones died, nothing works.”
“Really?”
She nodded.
“Hold still,” the woman said.
She wiped more shoe grime all over Constanza’s face and behind her ears.
“Close your eyes,” she said. Constanza did. The woman then spit in her face and started to rub the smelly saliva in. “This’ll hold it in place.”
Constanza started to cry, to which the woman said, “Even better. You look like one of us now.”
The woman patted the tears all over her face, then said, “Keep up the act and you’ll fit in, except for that pretty face.”
Looking down, she said, “You’re bleeding.”
“I’m on my period,” she said.
“One more thing,” the woman added. “And this’ll save your life.”
She pulled the hairpin from Constanza’s hair and fluffed it up. Then she wiped even more dirt and grime off her shoe, spit on it in her hand, then rubbed it out to a smeary paste. Wasting no time, she ran the filthy concoction through Constanza’s hair, using it like a pomade, or some kind of an ass-nasty gel.
When the woman had messed Constanza’s hair up to its worst, she then tried patting it in place, fixing it like she might if she couldn’t run her fingers through it.
