by Justin Bell
“Oh yeah, nothing to get worked up over,” Phil said in a hushed whisper.
“Okay, yeah, that was not good,” Rhonda said.
“Where are they going?” asked Tamar, trying to lean forward in his seat.
“Just sit still,” Rhonda said. She continued watching, but saw no sign of the Humvee. It had turned left, heading back toward the turnpike, and didn’t reappear. She turned to face the others. “We need to warn Angel and Rebecca before they come back around.”
She started opening her passenger side door when another low rumble of diesel engine echoed to the right, signaling the approach of another, heavier vehicle and she drew herself back in, shutting the door behind her. They froze, waiting for another shoe to drop.
***
“Did you see that?” Rebecca asked, huddling behind the glass counters near the gun rack inside Lenny’s Sports Emporium. As she glanced back, she saw Angel also crouched low to the ground and knew that he had.
“Was that what it looked like?” Angel asked. “Military Humvee?”
Fields nodded. “That is what it was.”
“We should get out of here. We need to get scarce before this place becomes another Toledo.”
“And what exactly do you two know about Toledo?”
The voice was swift and shrill, an accusatory chide, splitting the silence to the rear of the sports store. Angel spun as he stood, stumbling backwards from the surprise of the new voice and even as the man in the camouflage uniform stepped into view, flanked by three others, Angel tripped over a box of t-shirts and spilled backwards onto the floor.
“Whoa, whoa whoa!” Rebecca shouted, holding up her hands. “Who are you? Who do you represent?”
The man was tall and thin, his head shaved clean bald, eyes two narrow, gray slits underneath deeply grooved lines in his forehead. His uniform was full multicam digital camouflage, neck to ankles, wearing Army issued combat boots, and a worn-out fatigue cap, also in digital camouflage. Fields’ eyes scanned the man as he approached, seeing no rank insignias or identifying badges, though he did carry a SIG Sauer P226 pistol in a holster strung over his chest, and even wrapped in leather she could tell it was a Legion RX modified with a ROMEO1 reflex sight.
Not government issue.
Her stomach twisted into a coiled rope, tying around her organs and tugging tight. Something about this situation was all wrong. Behind the bald man, the three other camouflage garbed soldiers wore Rothco tactical cross-draw vests with pistols in holsters, and all three of them clutched AR-15’s in gloved hands. They almost looked like three brothers dressing in the same outfits for Halloween.
“Who do we represent?” the bald man asked. “We’re not the ones breaking windows and stealing weapons. That would be you.”
“Hey, we didn’t know,” Angel started to say, reaching out and pressing a hand to the glass cabinet, then picking himself up. His head turned briefly, and he didn’t even see one of the soldiers take two swift steps forward and drive the stock of his AR-15 into his left kidney. Angel shouted and crumpled, stumbling forward and onto the floor.
“Hey cut it out!” Rebecca screamed, taking her own short stride toward them. Two of the AR-15’s swung up, well-practiced hands clutching trigger guards, second hands wrapped artfully around front-mounted tactical hand grips. Just by their posture and shooting stances she could tell they knew their way around a weapon. They either had been military, or were trained by military… her mind snapped to the battle at the parking garage, and she wondered, just for a moment, if these guys just might be Ironclad.
“I’m thinking maybe you need to calm down, just a little bit, young lady,” the man said in a low, soothing voice, not losing one ounce of composure over the fact that two of his men were aiming automatic weapons at a potential American citizen.
“Hey, I’m calm,” Rebecca said, keeping her hands elevated. “Totally, completely calm.”
The bald man gestured toward Angel and one of his soldiers maneuvered toward him, then helped him up from the ground, lifting him into a low standing posture, then rammed him face first into the glass counter, holding him down there.
“Seriously,” Rebecca said, “we’re not your enemies!”
“You think you know our enemies? Who do you think we are?”
“I have no idea. But if you don’t want us to be here, we’ll leave.”
“It’s a little late for that,” the man in the fatigue hat replied. “Toothpaste is clear out of the tube.”
“What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is that this store is under our control and our supervision. We can’t just have people breaking in and stealing our guns. We’ve been stockpiling here, preparing for the war that’s coming.”
Angel was pulled from the glass counter and half escorted down the length of the cabinet and released next to Rebecca. He ran one hand over his head and massaged his chin with the second.
“War?” he asked. “Same war we saw in Toledo?”
The man didn’t answer, he merely narrowed his eyes and glared at both of them.
“Look, we’re just passing through,” Rebecca said. “We want to move on. We have no business here.”
A brisk nod of his head shifted the brim of his fatigue cap and he walked out into the store, hands clasped behind his narrow waist. He purposefully didn’t look at them, instead scanning the walls of the store as in mock contemplation of the world at large. Reaching the right side of the store, he halted and turned toward them.
“So… what? I just let you go? Let you and your boyfriend wander away?”
“What’s the harm in that?”
“And what if others are watching? What if these other street people, these other intruders, what if they see me pay you a modicum of respect and then believe they will be treated the same? An example must be made.”
Fields glanced at Angel who met her eyes. His look matched hers—this was a bad situation and didn’t seem to be heading in a better direction.
“Is there really a civil war going on?” Angel asked, wondering if diverting the attention to different topics might even the playing field.
This caught the man’s attention as the three soldiers moved forward toward the two.
“A civil war?” he asked. “Because of what you saw in Toledo? That constitutes civil war?”
“Full blown military combat operations within the borders of the United States seems to qualify,” Rebecca said.
“You know nothing of what you speak.”
“So educate us.”
The man lowered his gaze slightly, drew in a long deep breath, then lifted his head again, his face clenched into one knot of rage-infused muscle.
“What in God’s name makes you think I owe you any kind of education or explanation? You break into my store and dare to demand education from me? What world do you think we live in right now?” His voice rose with every spoken word and by the end, he was screaming, his neck flexed into thick strands and his mouth twisted open into an oblong “o”.
“Look,” Angel said, but one of the soldiers moved first, coming toward him and raising his weapon. Rebecca had had enough. They were focused so tightly on Angel, they hadn’t been paying quite so much attention to her. She charged forward, wedging between the man swinging the rifle and his target, pistoning her arm out in a lock-straight forearm block. Her arm struck the soldier’s wrists with a dull whack and his fingers sprang apart, releasing the rifle he’d been swinging at Angel. Fields rotated, moving into his space, drove her hip deep and whirled, throwing him over her shoulder in an effortless chain of sweeping, graceful maneuvers. He launched sideways for several feet, then punched through the large picture window at the front of the store, shattering the single pane of glass into an outward explosive spray of jagged daggers of glass.
“Take her down!” screamed the bald man, pointing directly at her.
Fields didn’t have time to think, she could only act. She’d spent the past several minutes wondering i
f the men were actual soldiers, members of the United States Army, and if they were, she was hesitant to open fire on them.
But this group was not military. Maybe they were at one point, but that point had long since passed, and she had to let her hesitation pass as well. Her arm snapped up and around, the Glock 32 clenched in her tight fingers. The weapon barked and kicked in her hand, her first three shots flying wide and high on purpose, driving the soldiers back and down, keeping them away. Angel ducked down to the floor and swept the Bushmaster ACR from the floor, swinging it up and over the glass case, slamming home one of the magazines that had been displayed with it. He fired a handful of times, the weapon’s noise and flash shattering the inside of the small store, throwing the still air into a deafening echo chamber of noise and light. Soldiers scattered again, but the bald man was moving forward now, pulling his own pistol, firing, and the entirety of his conscious world swirled into chaos.
***
“Is it just a Humvee?” Phil asked as Rhonda leaned forward, looking right toward the end of the road. They’d heard the approach of the diesel engine, a low, cloudless thunder and it sounded huge. Rhonda saw the nose of the vehicle ease to a stop by the end of the road cutting between their place in the alley and the sports store, and it looked like a dull green pickup, though she couldn’t see the back half of the vehicle.
“I think it’s just a pickup truck,” she replied in a whisper. “Just a transport or something.”
“What are they doing?” Winnie asked.
“Just sitting there. Like they’re on guard.” Rhonda pulled out her pistol and checked the magazine, somewhat satisfied to see that it was almost full. She was fairly sure that they had no other ammunition for the weapon, so if anything did go sideways, they had very few resources to work with.
“Are they waiting for something? Like people to come out of that store?” Phil asked.
“I don’t know, Phil. I have no idea what to think.”
“We can’t just sit here,” Max said.
“Look,” Rhonda hissed, turning around in her seat, “I don’t know what options we really have right now. We don’t even know what’s going on in there, things might be fine!”
The explosion of glass begged to differ with Rhonda’s assessment. There had been a dull, pervasive silence along the road outside Lenny’s Sports Emporium, a decidedly still air of nothingness beyond the rattling chug of the diesel engine. An abrupt snap of glass cracking followed by the spraying shower of broken plate window scattering across the sidewalk and pavement drew Rhonda’s head around in a frantic spin.
“I don’t think things are fine!” Tamar shouted just as the soldier struck the sidewalk spine-first, rolling clumsily into the drain.
“You may have a point there,” Rhonda replied quickly, then drew in a swift breath, pushing herself from her seat. “Phil, go!”
Her husband didn’t hesitate, didn’t ask, he just acted, slamming his foot down on the accelerator and driving the van forward in a leaping lurch, charging from the dark alley, hurtling across the street, and swerving just left of the fallen soldier. The blunt hood of the van crashed into the second plate glass window, splintering it and blasting a hurricane of ragged knives of busted glass into the store beyond.
***
Angel back pedaled as the bald man fired, his first three shots searing the air wide right of him as he moved away from the glass cabinets. An autographed and framed poster of LeBron James exploded as one of the bullets rammed into it, splintering the glass and sending it crashing from the wall down to the grimy floor.
To the man’s left, the other soldiers started to recover, bringing themselves upright and swinging their weapons around, and then the second window blew inwards, a black shadow crashing through, chasing an outward arc of razor shrapnel as it cut through the inside of the store. Angel and Rebecca lunged backwards, but the bald man was caught directly in the spray of flying glass and screamed, throwing his arms up, lurching to his left, his pistol firing three more times into the floor.
“Grab a box!” Rebecca yelled to Angel as she brought her pistol around and fired at the other two soldiers, not coming close to hitting them, but trying to drive them back. There was a scraping slide of van door and Rhonda jumped out, the SIG battle rifle in her capable hands.
“Get the ammo in the van!” she shouted, swiveling to stare down the two soldiers near the rear of the store, then she fired single-shots, just over their head, three of them consecutively. Angel looped his fingers around the handle of the banker’s box and ran past her, angling toward the van, then tossing the box inside. Max and Brad moved to the box immediately, snagging it and dragging it deeper inside. As Rhonda fired on the two soldiers, Rebecca handed off the second box to Angel and scooped up the M4, both of them moving back toward the van, the pop pop pop of the battle rifle keeping them charging.
Rhonda looked back. “Everything in?” she shouted over the barking of her own weapon.
“We’re clear!” shouted Fields back, tossing a thumbs up.
Rhonda nodded and ran backwards, keeping her weapon pointed at the soldiers deeper inside the store until she was next to the opened van door, then stumbled left into the vehicle as the AR-15’s returned fire with sharp chatters of weapons fire.
“Shut that door, shut that door!” screamed Phil as he slammed the van in reverse, glancing in the rearview mirror and seeing the military pick up swing around the building and come hurtling down the road toward them. Hitting the brakes, sending rubber screaming against asphalt, he rammed the shift lever into drive and leaped forward just as Rhonda reached up from the crowded floor of the van and lunged, slamming the side door closed.
“Kick butt, Mom!” Max shouted.
“Score!” Brad followed up, looking at the two large boxes of ammunition.
“We’re not out of the woods yet!” shouted Phil from the front seat. “That truck is hot on our heels!” He barreled forward in the van, cutting a tight right-hand turn, curling around into a narrow one-lane road. The truck navigated the turn perfectly and remained in pursuit. Up ahead there was an intersection and as Phil focused his eyes on it, the Humvee they had seen before pulled up, blocking their path.
“Oh that’s no good,” Phil muttered, easing off the accelerator and guiding the van left. Tires thumped over a curb and he punched the gas again, smashing through a decorative tree which once cost tax payers hundreds of dollars, but was now caught underneath the van and dragged across the sidewalk. Phil squeezed the van between the hood of the Humvee and a tall brick building to his left, a metal-on-metal scrape on the right side, throwing sparks up into the air. The van thumped down onto the road on the other side of the intersection just as the pursuing pickup truck tried the same maneuver, but didn’t quite make it, bashing the side of the Humvee with a twisting crunch. Jagged metal tore from the broken grille of the pickup, but it kept moving forward, large tires carrying it toward the van with impressive velocity.
Phil turned a tight left, bringing the van onto another narrow road, drawing away from the downtown area, then hurled right and ducked just under a shallow underpass, but with every turn the truck matched them pace for pace. They drew onto a straightaway and Phil eyed the on-ramp for the Ohio turnpike up ahead.
“Are you sure you want to get on right here?” Rhonda asked, pulling herself back up into the passenger’s seat.
“I think we can outrun them on a straightaway,” Phil replied breathlessly.
A chattering bark of gunfire echoed from behind them and Phil ducked, glancing in the rearview mirror. He could see one of the soldiers from the truck leaning out a side window with an assault rifle in his hands, firing long and loud toward the rear of the van. Rapid thunks of bullets hitting van hide resounded from behind and Phil leaned into the accelerator as the van hit the on-ramp, screaming up the gradual incline. The truck followed their path.
“The turnpike won’t even take us to Philly!” Rebecca yelled. “Where are you going, Buffalo?”
“You want to drive?” Phil screamed as he merged onto the northbound lane, throttling up the accelerator, the truck coming up behind them.
Rhonda glanced back at Fields. “You guys grab some 7.62 millimeter?” she asked, looking down at the SIG SG716 leaning between her legs, against the driver’s seat.
“You know we did!” Rebecca replied, leaning down and fishing through one of the banker’s boxes. She withdrew a small rectangular box and tossed it to Rhonda who had already removed the magazine from the battle rifle. She punched in all of the 7.62 rounds she could fit, then rolled down her window, holding the weapon in two hands.
“What the heck do you think you’re doing?” Phil asked.
“Trying to save our bacon,” she replied. Drawing in a single long breath, she threw herself forward, leaning out the passenger window, her foot locked around the passenger’s seat belt buckle to hold her in place. Twisting as she leaned out, she drew the rifle close to the side of the van, trying to ignore the wind battering at her back and the back of her head. She pressed her arms tight to the van’s hide, using the wind to hold the weapon steady rather than break it loose.
“Give me a sharp right!” she screamed loudly at Phil, yelling into the wind so he’d hear. Phil nodded and cranked the wheel right, sending the van lurching. As he did, Rhonda sighted down the barrel, dropped the weapon a bit and fired twice, three times, four, then five, keeping the weapon still and steady as it tried to thrash out of her grasp. The first shot shattered the right headlight, the second tore at the right fender. The third shot wanged off the metal of the truck and rounded around the tire, but the fourth and fifth shots punched deep into the thick rubber tire of the pursuing pickup.
