by Greg Jolley
Jame grinned.
“You use it for dial-up net access. It’s slow, but I think you’ll have a lot of time until I finish 42A.”
“Internet? I have my iPad. It’s in the car. Excuse me, but fuck.”
“Gimme a sec,” Jame replied and crossed to a desk against the far wall that had a sign that read, “Splicers Only.”
“They get all the cool toys first,” he said over his shoulder. The drawer on the side of the desk was locked. The key was in an ashtray. When Jame turned around, he held a very old and heavy looking laptop. It was beige and hand-smeared and Jame looked pleased.
He set the laptop on her desk and opened it. Wiki watched him connect the laptop power, retrieve a squat black box, and set it beside the computer. He used small hand tools and lengths of thin cables with connectors. He worked quietly and methodically, and Wiki watched without saying anything. When he was done, the laptop started up, very slowly. The following display was nothing like she had ever seen. Some of the icons looked a bit familiar, but she had never heard a modem dial or seen Netscape on a screen.
“There you go. You can browse while I finish up. Oh. Wait.”
Jame went back to the splicers desk. Wiki studied the screen and the keyboard.
He returned with a small beige box that had a ball set in its top. “A mouse,” he explained. Wiki gave the ball a spin and nothing happened. She saw two fat buttons on the beige box and decided they were for mouse clicks. She placed her hand on the ball-mouse as Jame connected it to the back of the laptop. When his hands rose, she touched the ball and the arrow on the screen moved.
“Enjoy, I’ll be done soon,” he told her.
Jame headed out to the frame with his binder. Wiki started to turn to watch him leave, maybe say, “Thank you,” but she didn’t. She guided the arrow up into the search line in Netscape. When she got a cursor, she typed in the name of her email service and hit enter. The pace of the blinking lights on the modem changed, and she smiled. With each click of the mouse button, she got an infinitely long spiraling hourglass icon, but eventually she had her email account on the screen. She scrolled through the spam and messages from family and acquaintances. She focused on looking for a new message from Sara.
The bad thing about the pawnshop was that it had a rolling metal front door. The good thing about the pawnshop was that it had a rolling metal front door—when Wesley struck it with the butt of his Glock, it made great echoing booms. He stepped back from the wobbling metal grates, listening to the reverberations. He looked up into the security camera aimed downward from the top of the door. He started to offer a smile, but that hurt the side of his face—the gash and those long splinters still sticking into his flesh.
He heard the lock being keyed and stood perfectly still as the door rolled up and there was Ode, the pawnshop owner, hastily dressed and looking befuddled and unhappy.
“Wesley? Do you know it’s ten in the morn—” Ode stopped. Wesley had a rifle on his shoulder and a black Glock in his gloved hand.
“Hey. What’s this about?” Ode asked, trying to sound somewhat friendly.
“Bullets.”
“You can get ‘em at—” Again Ode ended a sentence unfinished. Seeing Wesley in his old uniform placed a yellow flag on the beach. A few flags. Ready to turn red.
“Lower the gun, please, and come on in. Lemme open up.” Ode reached over and flipped one of the light switches. “That’s fucked up,” he muttered and tried another. He tried the third switch.
“Power’s out,” Wesley told him.
Ode wanted to respond with, No shit and duh, but he knew better.
“Yes. Lemme start the gen,” he said. He did not like turning his back to Wesley, but he did, offering, “Come in out of the cold.”
Hearing Wesley’s boots on the plank boards, Ode went behind the counter, opened the electrical panel, and flicked the generator ignition switch. A low rumble began and a moment later, the lights came up. Not all of them, just the important lights over the front door, the two display shelves, and the rear door to Ode’s attached home.
“Better?” he asked Wesley. The furnace began blowing heated air.
Wesley stepped up to the glass display cases. “How’s the missus?” he asked, not wanting an answer.
Ode saw the wounds on the side of Wesley’s face and looked away.
“Are you—” he started and stopped. He opened the lockbox and selected the key for the ammunition safe.
Wesley leaned against the glass case watching Ode with no expression.
Ode knelt down before the ammo safe, unlocked and opened it. When he turned around, Wesley raised the Glock and pulled the trigger twice, shooting him in the face. Ode was launched over the safe spraying blood and brain bits everywhere. Wesley circled and knelt before the open safe.
He left the pawnshop with a fresh box of ammo in his coat pocket. In the old days, his prior life, he would have simply signed out a box from the station, but nowadays he was on his own dime.
“My own dime,” he repeated aloud. He grinned because it was not his dime, not really. The grinning hurt so he stopped doing that.
He looked east, across Main, through the clearing between the telephone building and the church. The sun was up somewhere in that gray mess above.
It was approaching noon, time for his planned break. His blood was pumping and his mind was nicely flickering, but he needed some sleep, some dreaming. His eyes felt heavy and had started to sting as he crossed the street and jimmied his way inside Mary Cowel’s enclosed front porch. He took a chair and closed his eyes while fat and retarded Mary Cowel slept in the room behind him.
When he awoke, he felt better. Rested. Clear. He walked into the center of Main Street. The midday sky was turbulent with a few thin smears of silver. Snow was falling again and he paid it no mind. A pack of teenagers ran across the road up near the Quickee and he ignored them. None of the teens were on the list.
The list. He didn’t need to unfold it from his pocket to see it. He saw the black lines through tasks and people’s names. No need for ink. He and God had drawn them.
He heard the distant voices of the teenagers. They were crossing across the snowy road with a kid following the pack. The shape of the kid’s head was odd looking. He raised his rifle and used the scope to see better.
The kid entered Wesley’s cross hairs. He wore a metal bucket over his head. As he ran, his hand angled the lid and he paused, looked, and continued.
Wesley’s finger slid to the trigger with a non-list decision. He wanted to ventilate the bucket. He twisted a grin to the good side of his face. It was not an easy shot with the kid running low and bobbing, and that made it a nice challenge.
As his finger tightened, there was a blink of sunlight in the top left edge of the scope. It was enough of a distraction to effect the sighting as he pulled the trigger. The rifle gave off a harsh crack, and a puff of snow exploded off cottage steps to the side of the kid’s helmet.
“I don’t own that miss,” Wesley growled, lowering the rifle.
The next list line was Kill the Quickee gen. He raised the rifle and used the scope to look at the gas station and market. He panned round the view, measuring the distance as the black circle slid from right to left.
The sun had risen up over the lake, a dim bulb in the gray sky. Abel watched the whiteout rolling away from town to the west. Standing in the middle of Main Street, she could see a hundred yards into snow swirled and silent Dent. Further up the street, the light spilling from inside the Pawn & Gold was hazy.
Abel slid Jame’s rifle from her shoulder and raised it. Looking through the scope, she focused on a black form stepping from a cottage to the left. When she saw who it was, her father, she leaned her head back and looked up into heaven. She was angry. She was so tired. She had no hope, or did she? Not for herself, for sure, but those relieved and happy voices from inside the warm mayor’s house. She could harm herself, deservedly so, but hurt others who had done nothing to her? To t
hose on father’s list.
“A list of my own?” she breathed into the frigid air.
She thumbed off the safety. She felt a full-body flush of uncertainties. Then came a choice—her choice. No, a decision. It would be an act for herself, an action that would possibly free her.
She placed her right eye to the scope and steadied the crosshairs. No more thinking, wondering, or questioning. There was a comfort in the familiar actions of operating the rifle.
Distant and cold.
The black uniform was moving, starting up the middle of the road. She adjusted and tracked the shape. When the shape stopped, Abel took in a well-trained breath of calm. There was no rush—her target was still. She counted to two, silently. At three, she pulled the trigger.
All Wiki could hear was the clacking of her and Jame’s snowshoes as they left the C.O. When Jame changed their course out on Main, she lowered her head and continued to watch and listen to their snowshoes.
It was slow going before Jame stopped. Wiki saw Pawn & Gold—We Buy! etched on a storefront window. She took three carefully placed steps in virgin snow and stood beside him.
There were bars inside the window and a rectangle of yellow lay on the snow. Beside it, a second leaning square of light extended from a rolled-up metal door. The front door inside the grating was open, and she saw shelves of junk.
Jame said slowly, “I don’t like this. Ode doesn’t do mornings.”
Wiki had no idea who Ode was or why anyone would have a junk store. She didn’t reply. Instead, she stood still beside Jame, waiting for him to do or say something else.
Jame neither spoke nor moved. After a minute of that, Wiki felt impatience. She acknowledged that feeling, waited another half minute, and took a carefully placed step forward.
“There’s light and warmth. I’m good,” she said over her shoulder. Two minutes later, she was inside Ode’s store. There was a dusty pale placard in the open door that read, “Closed.”
Wiki wasn’t sure what “pawn” meant, but seeing the used house and garage stuff filling the crowded shelves, she decided it meant trying to sell junk no one wanted. “Bet this is a thriving business—cough,” she said, stepping further inside. There was blowing heat; most of it going right on out the open door.
To her left were glass display cases full of more crap. Everything was old and looked worked over. She walked deeper, clacking in her snowshoes and looking at the stuff on the shelves. She stopped at a row of chained rifles.
“Oh,” she heard herself say.
She turned around and watched Jame getting out of his snowshoes. He was kneeling just inside the front, looking back and forth, into the store and then outside.
“Come inside and close that door,” she told him.
Jame pulled off his second snowshoe, nodded, and did not move closer. Instead, he stepped back out through the door and trudged to a bundle of black clothing laying in the street.
Wiki wanted the room warm and warm now. Stop dicking around, she thought and turned away.
Jame crossed to the dark object partially buried in snow. A few feet further, he saw a raised black boot heel. He jerked back, slipped and fell, clouting his elbow on the buried pavement.
As he got to his feet, Wiki looked deeper into the store, over an open metal crate, and started to scream.
Sitting on the silent snowmobile, Cain and the vehicle were shrouded by snow. He had been watching all the scurrying about over the past half hour. Parked out on the turn into Dent, he had watched the mayor’s wife leave the Quickee and enter town. She had clumsily made her way out into the road and down its center. He saw her meet up with the high-school punks using the scope to see their faces.
He had sat perfectly still, feeling strong and sure—in control—as that bunch crossed to the house and went inside. Then he had waited.
Abel entered the mayor’s property. Nearly five minutes passed with no rifle shot. She was there. The mayor’s wife was there. And nothing.
Then Abel stepped out from the front of the mayor’s cottage.
“She’s off-list,” he breathed through frosted lips.
He watched her walk up Main until she was a ghost in the gray. It looked like she raised her weapon. She fired, and the frozen air was shattered by the sound. Lifting his rifle, Cain looked through the scope in the same direction she was targeting, deeper into town. He saw faint light from a shop window. She had now gone off-list twice. Cain had the ingrained, drummed-in response to that.
He was gonna miss the old days, old ways in their home. Forcing his way into her showers. Visiting her ice hut by opening the small door with his boot. Even the fucking that she deserved.
How dare she go off-list? he thought, not considering that he was doing the same.
He didn’t aim at her trunk or head. Better to put a bullet through her cunt. He placed the crosshairs on the spot just above her legs, and pulled the trigger.
He turned the scope to the light of what he then saw was the Pawn & Gold. There was no movement. He was briefly curious about who his ex-sister had shot at. He watched and waited. Within the crosshairs nothing changed, nothing moved.
Now he had to finish Abel’s List. “The fucking dummy,” he breathed through chattering teeth.
He climbed off the snowmobile and started for the mayor’s house. He was thinking through how he was going to take out the mayor’s wife among the punks with their own rifles. Drop her first. Perhaps a window shot. Complete that line on the list and then take on the punks. Or, better yet, run and hide.
He approached Abel’s squirming, flopping body in the snow. He yanked her rifle from her hands. He saw that the idiot had let snow get in the barrel. He dropped it beside her. His sister’s eyes were wild with shock and pain. He stood watching her struggle and enjoyed the moment. She was ranting, and he heard “Jame” repeated twice in the midst of her nonsense.
Cain thought of her hut, no, that picture above her bed. That mud fucker Jame. Listening to Abel gurgle and babble, he added Jame to the revised list. Except it now seemed more like a menu. Glossy colored pictures and all, like they have in diners. Instead of the image of a French dip with pickle and chips, he saw that fucker Jame on the shiny menu.
He kicked through the drift in front of the mayor’s place and selected a window shot from the menu. Drop her in that circle jerk of high school punks. He raised his rifle and aimed the crosshairs at the weakly lit front room window.
Jame brushed away enough snow to see Wesley’s disappointed dead face. Then he spun around and headed for Wiki. As he crossed the threshold, a rifle fired; the report muffled by distance. He moved fast, slamming the door closed and setting the deadbolt.
Wiki was on her rear in front of the open ammo safe. Her hand was out in front of her body, palm out, in a stop gesture. She had stopped screaming, but when he brushed her shoulder with his hand, she jerked and screamed again. Jame pulled his hand back. Wiki cowered and scooted toward the display cases, her eyes wide. He tried to catch her gaze, but she was scanning the pawnshop. Jame turned from her and saw Ode. He was pretty sure it was Ode because they were in his shop, but Ode’s face was destroyed, punched in, and covered with blood. There were two bullet holes in the man’s face, one to the mouth and the other to his left eye. A spray of blood and bits splashed out from the man’s head. Jame turned away. The shop was silent save the furnace rumbling from underneath the floor planks. Wiki was between two glass displays, watching the front door.
“Jame?” her voice sounded wet with fear.
“Yes?” he moved to her.
“I think it would be a really, really good idea to turn off all these lights.”
Jame looked up at all the fluorescents. He scanned the wall behind the cash register and spotted the breaker box. He moved around Wiki and killed the lights. He heard her sigh with relief and felt her hand grip his leg and give it a squeeze. He lowered to the floor beside her.
“What we’re going to do is sit right here until this madness en
ds,” Wiki said. “Let the whole town shoot each other. We’re going to be the smart survivors, telling the papers and the police all we saw and heard. Did you lock the door?”
“Yes. It’s got a deadbolt. I set it.”
They were sitting close, side by side. Wiki didn’t lean into him as he would have liked. She was shaking when he first lowered beside her, but was now still.
“Jame?” Wiki asked.
“Yes?”
He leaned forward and tried to catch her eyes. No deal, her gaze was set on the front door.
“I think…I want a gun.”
Jame looked around the store and to the front window. Wiki’s hand came out swiftly, took his chin, and turned his eyes to the gun case. Underneath them, the vibration of the furnace was fading. When Jame had killed the lights, he had also turned the generator off, having swept his hand down on all of the switches. He stood and went to the gun case behind the counter.
He found a rifle that was a different brand from his, but the caliber was the same. The rifle did not have a scope. That should be okay, he thought.
He pulled the rifle from the rack. There was another rifle shot from out in the street.
“Fuckers,” Wiki yelled in low, throaty voice.
Jame instinctively ducked. Neither of them spoke or moved until the echo faded.
Inside the gun case there was a handgun at Jame’s eye level. He reached in and turned the price and info tag tied to the trigger guard. He read .33 and pulled the gun out, now knowing what kind of bullets to look for. He went to the ammo safe in front of Ode’s body and sorted through the stacks of small boxes until he found a box of .33’s. After loading the handgun, he went back to Wiki, bent over, staying low.
Jame explained how to release the safety and aim.
Wiki watched Jame’s finger slide into the guard and rest on the trigger. His other hand cocked the gun. He was talking, and she wasn’t listening—learning by watching. He aimed the gun outward in both of his hands with his arms extended.
