by Schow, Ryan
“Sack the hell up,” he growled to them.
Turning back to the buildings around them, seeing the faceless windows reflecting the night sky, he didn’t know if anyone would join him and he was scared.
“On the count of three, every red-blooded American body will act as one driving force. We will charge down our stairs, burst through those doors, and kill every single one of these maggots!
“One!”
He felt his stomach clench.
“Two!”
His bowels were locked in a fist, his heart like a racehorse.
“Three! GO!”
Turning, they all rushed down the stairs only to find the people from floors three and one were pushing through the open door in the same mad rush. They exploded into mobs of people, into fists and feet, elbows and punched heads. Spit flew, mixing with blood, and there were grunts and pounded flesh sounds so loud they were hard to ignore.
Rowan cracked one guy in the chin and he dropped like a stone. Someone hit him from the side, but he scrambled to his feet and kicked the guy. But then a glass bottle broke on the side of his head and it was light’s out for a second, but not long enough for him to fall. He was tackled into a mass of bodies, thrown like a rag doll, pounced on by a guy twice his size. The guy grabbed his neck to choke him out, but then a big girl jumped on the guy and sunk her teeth into the back of his neck, ripping at it like a rabid dog. The brute tried to buck her off, which gave Rowan the room and the right distance to pull his weapon and shoot the man in the face.
Blood and brains blew up into the girl’s face. She pulled her head away, gore dripping down her chin, but she was smiling, alive for the first time.
Clair. Clair?
Just then a creep in a black Purge mask hammered her on the head with a bat so hard her skull split and she fell over dead. He shot the kid in the throat, then got out from under the dead guy and Clair and grabbed the bat.
Enraged, broken hearted, he went on a killing spree the likes of which he never imagined. He took out his rage and his grief over Clair on every single person he could. And then the energy left his body. That’s when he resorted to the gun, pumping round after round into those demons still left standing. When he was done, he stood there dripping blood and looking around until he felt his body break out into goosebumps.
They showed up!
All of them!
Men, women, children were on the streets with him—all of them fighting like caged animals. He’d waged a street war and it was working! This sight alone refueled him, made him want to work harder, to be the last man standing. Charging back into the chaos, he swung the bat, feeling like each metal clank on the skull of one of these idiots was a prize won.
Thirty grueling minutes was what it took to finish them off. Thirty minutes and they were wiped out completely. Every last one of them. Dead, dead, dead.
He walked the battlefield, however, searching for movement. He had no arm-strength left, and his back was a torrent of knots. He’d been punched, beaten, tackled, and kicked, but dammit he was alive!
Glancing around, he saw everyone breathing heavy, taking stock of their injuries, trying to understand what was happening, how they did what they did.
The rush of emotions hit him too hard and too fast, so massive in fact, that they all but exploded out of him. Throwing his head back, he let out the deepest, most triumphant howl.
All around him, people stared.
Then a bloodied young girl did the same thing.
And then everyone joined in and it became the victory cry of the disenfranchised, the victory cry of America.
They were suddenly a hundred wild animals, each of them finding their spirit—maybe for the first time. Better still, they had found the fighting spirit of America. It was like a hive mind for love of country, and for freedom.
When the howling finally stopped, he walked the battle field looking for his friends. Most of them were dead. Tommy, Dhanishka, Clair. Only Brian remained. Rowan found him fairly quickly. He’d been stabbed in the neck, and he was holding the wound. Rowan dropped to a knee and said, “Oh, no…no, Brian.”
His friend saw the writing on the wall. Pale features, blood pulsing through his fingers, his life force draining all over the ground.
“Did we win?” he asked, two of his teeth knocked out.
Rowan nodded and said, “Hell yeah, we did.”
He laid his head back and smiled. “Good.” Brian’s smile faltered, and the fight abandoned his body. He just gazed up in the night sky, his eyes losing life, his mouth finally going slack.
Reverently, Rowan closed his friend’s eyes and stood up. Hwa-Young was right there, hoodie pulled back for the first time.
“I didn’t expect you to be pretty,” he said.
It was almost like he was angry at her for pushing him to this. Yet looking around, all these people were alive. ALIVE!
“When they realize what happened to their country,” Hwa-Young said, “when they start to die one by one of starvation, they will look back and remember this moment. This was the moment they stood up and said ‘No more.’ This was the moment they became bigger than they ever were and they will have you to thank for it.”
“What do you want from me?” he asked, unmoved.
“We need to find out who is above Senator Eichmann. Which means we need to find Diesel Daley.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“We go to his last known associate.”
“Who’s that?”
“Walker’s landlord, the Sheriff of Jessamine County. His name is Lance Garrity and he might be able to help us.”
“I know Sheriff Garrity,” Rowan said.
“I know you do.”
“Why didn’t you just ask Eichmann?”
“I probed him for days, but he was just a cutout.”
“They compartmentalized each other?”
“It’s the safest way to operate,” she said. “You should know this.”
“What do you even hope to gain from this?” he asked.
“It’s simple,” she said. “I want a chance to save this country, but mostly I want revenge.”
“Even if it’s not your country?” he asked.
“It is, but it isn’t,” she said. “This was never a country to me. This was a dream. My parents in North Korea, and my sisters…were slaughtered. We did not cry hard enough when the supreme leader’s closest confidant died. My mother didn’t cry at all.”
“So they just killed them?”
Her eyes got extra shiny and she looked down for a moment. Then she looked up, her face hard, cold, resolute. “They killed them after they finished with them.”
“Why did they let you live?”
“To carry the pain of my entire bloodline.”
He could not imagine.
“How high up do you want to go with this thing?” he asked.
“You mean my revenge?”
He nodded.
“I want to go all the way up, or as far as I can get before they kill me.”
“If we’re going to Nicholasville, I’m going to need to get my fiancée. She’s eight months pregnant and probably scared out of her mind.”
“Lead the way,” she said.
Chapter Seventeen
Constanza Navarro
Constanza woke up, not knowing where she was. All she knew was that she was lying in the dirt and it was dark outside. She climbed to her feet, stood there feeling woozy and directionless. When everything came back to her, she looked around, then found the tent. She started walking toward it like something out of Night of the Living Dead. But the tent was empty. Even worse, some homeless man was looking at her, curious but unconcerned.
“Where is my baby?” she asked.
“It ain’t yours.”
She was bleeding again, dizzy.
“She is.”
“Where do you live?” he asked. “Because you need to go home.”
“I need to find her.”
The guy fixed h
er with a look. “You’re not going to find her. When Barb wants to be gone, she’s gone.”
“Why would she take my child?”
“Why does anyone take anything?” he asked with a shrug of the shoulders.
This couldn’t be the explanation. This couldn’t be the reason she lost Rose. But without reason or an explanation—other than maybe this guy was being a Good Samaritan—the vagrant began removing his things from a wagon he had been sitting beside.
When he had emptied out the wagon, he looked up at her and said, “Get in.”
The wagon had fat rubber tires, which was better than the hard plastic tires of days gone by, but she didn’t want to sit in there.
Finally, he shook his head, then grabbed a couple of blankets from his tent. He showed them to her, almost like getting them had put him out. With an audible huff, he packed them in the wagon for comfort. Reluctantly, she sat inside, her head still smarting. She felt like a battered child as this man tied a rope to both the wagon handle and his rickety bike.
He got on his bike, then looked back and said, “Alright, good-looking, tell me where we’re headed.”
“You’re taking me home?” she asked. He nodded. “What’s your name?”
“Reuben.”
“Thank you, Reuben.”
The second they took off, she started thinking she was willingly leaving her child behind. The revelation of this was so astounding, and so heartbreaking, she felt the world starting to tilt, and then spin.
Reuben looked back at her, then stopped the bike. The world faded out as she started to fall over. He grabbed her and propped her up long enough to see she was having issues.
“Where do you live?” he asked one more time.
She rattled off her address, and the next thing she knew, he was adjusting her position in the wagon.
She didn’t remember anything after that.
When she woke, she wasn’t sure how long she’d been out. She had the sensation of moving, but there was pressure on her hands as well. They didn’t hurt, but they were making a constant, scraping sound. She went to move her legs, but even her feet were propped up and loosely tied to wagon’s handle so they wouldn’t hit the ground.
She looked up to darkening skies and felt so weak. She lifted her hands but they were heavy. On closer inspection, each hand was stuffed into an old dress shoe, the laces of each of them tied to her wrists to hold the shoes in place. That’s when she realized the scraping sounds had been the soles of the shoes dragging over the pavement.
The bike stopped and Reuben said, “Oh, thank God! My feet are killing me!”
He’d been pedaling barefoot this whole time.
“Where are we?”
“Getting close to your home,” he told her as she tried to sit up. “Don’t do that. Just lay back down until we can get you someplace more comfortable. But now that you can hold your arms over your chest, I’m going to need my shoes back.”
When they finally got her home, Reuben helped her out of the wagon and to the front door. She realized she didn’t have the keys.
“It’s okay,” he said.
He reared back and kicked in the door. She thanked him, then staggered inside. She thought she would be thrilled to be home again, but home was an empty place where good things happened once upon a time. Nothing good would ever happen again if she couldn’t get Rose back.
“I have food in the fridge and the pantry, so please take what you’d like. There’s bottled water as well.”
She sat down on the couch and closed her eyes, not meaning to fall asleep. She drifted off fast, hearing Reuben’s voice, but only faintly. He sounded like he was a million miles away.
When she woke up some time later, the door was shut and Reuben was gone. It was dark outside, and she was still so tired. The idea of feeling narcoleptic, even after her pregnancy, was concerning. She’d never been like that before. But now, in light of everything she’d been through, perhaps it was just exhaustion, both mental and physical, taking a toll. She went back to sleep, waking up the next day because she had to pee. She hobbled into the bathroom, pulled down her pants—which were ruined for sure—then she took a handheld mirror and examined herself. The sight of her stitched up skin had her in tears.
The perineal tearing wasn’t as bad as she thought—it felt a lot worse, actually—but the flesh around the stitches looked angry. From her pocket, she pulled out the bottle of expired amoxicillin, opened the lid, saw a dozen or so pills inside. She shook out two of these ugly-colored pills, dry-throated them, then pulled a big brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide out from underneath the bathroom counter. Bearing down, she unscrewed the lid, took a deep breath, then leaned back and started pouring the liquid over the infected area.
Surprisingly, the pain was searing and immediate, like hundreds of little claws tearing at her privates. Looking down at the pink foam boiling just under her vagina, grinding her teeth to deal with the pain, she felt fresh tears leaking from her eyes.
Crying became sobbing, and sobbing turned to a complete meltdown. Some time later, she went and lay back down, not even sure she could walk back to the homeless camp where she last saw Barb and Rose. Before she knew it, she had cried herself to sleep.
She woke again, right back to the nightmare that was her life. Sitting up, halfway rested, but fully depressed, she told herself that every minute she sat there doing nothing was a minute Rose was out there in the hands of a woman who could not feed or properly care for her.
She walked to the bathroom again, peed, and then dried and bandaged herself. In the other room, she found fresh underwear and new pants, then decided that doing something—even if it was to her own detriment—was better than doing nothing at all.
Before she set out into the night, she ate what food she could stomach, giving her body back some of the precious energy she’d lost. As she sat there letting her food settle, she wondered where the hell Rowan was in all of this. Had he gone out looking for her? And why hadn’t he left a note? Was he hurt? Dead?
Before leaving, by the light of a tall candle, she left him a quick note describing the location of their car and the homeless camp where she’d last seen Barb. After that, and after some contemplation, she added to the note, telling him that someone had stolen Rose and she was going to get her back.
That’s when the sound of an engine broke the silence. She waited quietly for it to pass, but whatever kind of vehicle the engine was powering didn’t pass her by. It stopped at the sidewalk and shut down. A few moments later, there was a knock on the door.
She froze.
Who could be there?
Rowan wouldn’t have knocked; he would have come right in. This was someone else. She slid a knife from the butcher’s block, blew out the candle, then held her breath as she crept to the front door. She reached out to lock it, but then she remembered that Reuben had broken it earlier. This realization sent shockwaves of terror through her.
What if they tried to come in? Could she just stab someone? What if it was a neighbor, or a friend checking in on her?
In that moment, she said a frantic prayer, hoping to God that whoever was out there would just go away. That’s when the door knob turned, and whoever this was decided they had every right to come inside.
Sliding behind the opening door, she lifted the knife over her head and flexed her fingers, preparing to stab whoever it was making their illegal entry.
BOOK 2
Chapter Eighteen
Colt McDaniel
For Colt and Faith, the bad things didn’t happen right away, but when they did, they were worse than either of them expected.
Their tepid drive out of Nicholasville and into Lexington was relatively peaceful in light of the entire world being pitched into electronic darkness. That’s not to say they didn’t run into people. They did. Most of them watched Colt and Faith pass with interest, a few people took chase, and one person actually got a hold of the Jeep’s door, but Faith kicked it open on the guy, causin
g him to twist an ankle and road-rash his way down about six feet of coarse asphalt. Of the people they’d seen in and around their homes, there were quite a few trying to figure out why their cars didn’t work, or they were doing things like fiddling with their breaker boxes, or their window-mounted a/c units. Others, still, were gathered with their friends or neighbors, most looking like they had no idea what had happened or why their electronics had stopped working.
Colt almost felt bad for them. Had he not been so consumed with worry for his own family, he might have pulled over to explain the situation to some of them.
When they successfully reached Man O War Blvd on the outskirts of Lexington, the scenery was soothing to a degree. The green lawns with blossoming trees and wide streets had that big-city feel Colt sometimes longed for.
“When you look at all these stopped cars,” Faith said, “how they all just died at the same time, you have to be wondering what everyone thought.”
“It’s a good thing the EMP didn’t hit in rush-hour traffic, otherwise the going would be a lot slower.”
“I know, but you know what I mean, right? One minute they’re sitting there, thinking about work, or shopping, or little Johnny or Sally doing whatever, and then it all just shuts off. Everything in the snap of a finger, just gone.”
“Yeah, well, thank God we weren’t here when that happened, or out of town. Things could be a whole lot worse than they were for us.”
“We killed people, Colt.”
“That’s on me.”
“Yeah, but you know what I mean,” she said. “Keaton was…he was a different breed of individual.”
“He was a scumbag and the world’s better off now that he’s not in it.”
She laughed to herself, then said, “Isn’t that the truth?”
They were able to navigate around some of the traffic, but there were times when they were forced to drive up on the curb, cutting tire-tracked trails across all of that beautiful grass.
Back on the road, as they approached Saron Dr. and Man O War Blvd., Colt spotted a crowd of people that were congregating in the main intersection. He and Faith had just driven through a long residential stretch of road and were emerging into a brief commercial stretch, complete with a Shell gas station, a Burger King, and a Chase bank. Many of the people they saw were in the streets, stomping around with flags, or shouting at each other in brotherly fashion. Some were even pushing and shoving each other the way guys do before a big game, or after a shared victory.
