Dawn of Destruction

by Ronald Williams

  Sam made an effort to stand and instantly doubled over again, pulling his shirt away from the sticky kitchen floor. Blood. It was covered in blood. His? Theirs? The two bodies were still lying where he'd shot them, slumped one over the other in the kitchen doorway. Their buddies had left them there like so much useless trash. Sam felt a surge of anger flow through him and used the rage, harnessed it, to flip over onto his back.

  In that position he was able to carefully touch his stomach with his hands. He winced. The pain was excuciating, but he had to know how bad he was. With two fingers, he gently felt along the left side of his abdomen, feeling the slickness of the blood, until he found the gash. It was large and circular, about the width of a quarter. Sam let his fingers slip down to his side and found a second hole there. This one was larger, with flaps of skin hanging loosely around it.

  The exit wound. The bullet had passed through him. Hand shaking, Sam raised his blood-covered hand to his face and sniffed. As a cop, he'd once been the first responder to a scene where a middle-aged woman had been shot in the gut. The bullet had punctured her intestines, and the smell of vomit and acid bile emanating from the wound had made him retch. He'd never forget that smell, and he didn't smell that here.

  No bullet to dig out and no stomach fluids leaking out of him. Was that karma going easy on him for whatever had happened to Linda and Jeremy? Sam squeezed his eyes shut and felt a hot tear roll down his cheek. He had to find out.

  Shaking violently with the effort, pushing the pain down as far as he possibly could, Sam rolled onto his stomach and began to crawl over the bodies heaped in the doorway. He made it to the carpeted living room and found that it was easier going without his elbows slipping in blood. A streak of dark blood marked his slow passage across the living room, the way a slug leaves a trail of slime. The room seemed to stretch on forever, but finally Sam reached the far wall. He reached up and fumbled at one of the electrical sockets set low in the wall. His fingernails scraped at the drywall and hooked in behind the plastic plate, sliding it out of the wall. It was a fake outlet, another little prepper trick that Linda had rolled her eyes about.

  Inside the fake outlet was a small compartment, just five inches deep, holding a Ziplock bag. Sam ripped the bag open, spilling a book of matches, a miniature, airline-size bottle of vodka, and a compact first aid kit. Sam put the first aid kit in his mouth, gripped the vodka bottle in his right fist, and painfully turned around and began crawling back through the living room.

  In the end table beside the couch, Linda kept a small sewing kit her mother had bought her several years ago. She never used it – Linda never sewed – and Sam prayed that she hadn't thrown it out during one of her occasional cleaning spurts. He reached up and slid the drawer out of the end table. It clattered to the ground, and Sam's breath hitched in his chest for a second...and then he saw it – a little blue plastic box with a snap lid.

  “You can do this,” Sam urged himself, spitting out the first aid kit and scooping both that and the sewing kit over in front of the sofa. Sam grunted and heaved himself up until he was sitting with his back against the front of the sofa. Only then did he notice the propane lantern lying on its side under the end table.

  “Damn it,” he whispered. He could see dim shapes, but for what he was about to do, he needed light. With a snarl that reminded him eerily of the intruders, Sam rocked forward onto his knees, gripping his side tightly. Icy pain lanced through him. He felt nauseous, but didn't dare vomit in case something inside him ruptured. Gingerly, he leaned forward until his fingertips touched the lantern, then sat back with another grunt and fumbled with the gas knob until the internal spark clicked.

  The sudden light seared into his retinas, and for the first time he saw the turmoil in the living room. The looters had ransacked almost the entire place, tipping over chairs and furniture as they went. He also saw the bright red blood trail he'd left across the carpet, and that weird, queasy rage came over him again.

  Grimly, he set to work. Using the small stainless steel scissors in the sewing kit, he cut away his shirt, exposing the two wounds. They were about four inches apart, a glancing blow that could have just as easily missed him as stuck him straight through the gut. He used an alcohol swab from the first aid kit to clean the entry wound, followed by an iodine swab.

  Then, he selected a long, thick needle. Fingers quivering, he bent the steel needle into a curve. It took him six tries to stick a piece of thread through the eye, then he twisted the cap off the miniature vodka bottle, took a swig, and used the rest to douse the needle and the spindle of thread.

  Sam took a deep, shuddering breath, thought of Linda, and plunged the needle into his skin.

  He had no way of telling how long it took, but Sam eventually got both of the bullet wounds sanitized and sewn shut. It still hurt like hell, but he wasn't leaking blood anymore, and he found that he could move a little more freely.

  He struggled to his feet, fighting the wave of dizziness that swept over him. With the lantern in one hand and the other hand firmly gripped on the railing, Sam started up the stairs. Possibilities swirled through his head. Maybe Linda had gotten Jeremy out of the house. Maybe they were still in the hideaway closet, never discovered. Maybe...

  Sam planted another foot, grimacing with pain. There were too many maybes.

  And yet none of them prepared him for what he saw when he rounded the doorway and stepped into the bedroom. He fell heavily to his knees. The lantern rolled away, still burning. A sob escaped him, and the lantern finally came to a stop against a small, pale hand, lying still on the carpet.

  For the second time that night, Sam crawled. He crawled to his wife and son and pulled them to him, and wept.

  When he could move again, he buried their bodies in the backyard.

  Dawn found Sam still struggling in the backyard. The agony in his side seemed strong enough to tear him in half, and still Sam pushed on, praying that it would. That it would split him in two pieces so that he could tumble into this grave and stay with them forever. He prayed for death, but mercy favors the weak, and so he kept right on living, kept shoveling mounds of dirt over the faces of his wife and son until there was nothing left of them but a raised mound of earth in front of him and an aching hole in his stomach that had nothing to do with a bullet.

  He sank to the ground and dug his fingers into the dirt. The wind whipped his hair around his blood-streaked face and he raised his face to the sky and screamed.

  “They'll pay for this,” he told the sky. “I'll pull them apart one inch at a time and they'll feel your suffering a hundred times over. I promise...” Sam's throat spasmed with a sob, “...I promise you'll get your vengeance. I love you, Linda Porter. I love you, Jeremy. I love you so much.”

  Chapter 4

  The looters had taken everything. The secret closet in the bedroom was picked bare, as was the stash of food and water in the garage. Some of it they'd eaten right there in the house, and Sam shuddered at the thought of those...monsters chowing down while his family bled to death just a few rooms away. All three firearms – the two nine-millimeters and the shotgun – had been carried away, including the boxes of ammo in the hidden closet cache. One of them had spray-painted a large, ugly patch of graffiti on the dining room wall, a splotchy blue circle with six lines shooting off from the center.

  Worst of all, though, Sam was weak. He stumbled into the bathroom with the lantern and nearly shocked himself into a faint when he looked in the mirror. His clothes were torn and caked with so much mud and blood he couldn't even read the lettering on the front of his shirt. His forehead was also smeared with dark red dirt, while a long, wide streak of blood had dried over his left cheek that had originated from an ugly gash on the side of his forehead. It was where the thug had bashed him with a crowbar, and he'd completely neglected that open wound while he was stiching himself up.

  The wounds on his stomach were angry and swollen, laced with thick sewing thread that looked like black teeth biting down
into his skin. The strain of digging the grave had caused one to begin leaking bright crimson tears. Sam looked behind the bathroom mirror for the first aid kit he kept there and found that the looters had also taken that.

  What scared him most, though, were his eyes. They shone pale white through the mud and grime, both insane and forlorn, and completely, chillingly empty.

  Back downstairs, Sam limped over to where the two bodies filled up the entranceway to the kitchen and dragged them one by one into the living room. He shoved aside the furniture to clear a wide empty space in the middle of the room and laid the bodies side by side and began going through their pockets.

  Nothing. Either their so-called friends had scavenged the corpses or they hadn't had anything to begin with. No weapons, no identification. Sam flipped the body with the sun tattoo over onto his back and kicked him in the stomach.

  “Who are you?” he roared, desperate. “Why couldn't you just leave us alone?”

  The man just stared at the ceiling blankly.

  Sam kicked him again, and saw a tiny scrap of white dislodge from the man's breast pocket. Sam bent with a grunt and picked it up. It was an old receipt, the lettering faded and barely legible. He held it down to the lantern. Even though daylight had filled the world outside, the boarded windows kept the interior of the house in shadow, as if this house of horrors existed alone in an entirely different realm.

  The lantern light glinted off the shiny receipt paper, and Sam was able to make out the words at the top: Helios Tavern, 324 Mission Street.

  Mission Street hadn't been part of Sam's beat on the force, but he knew the location well enough. It was downtown, part of a seedy neighborhood the local cops called The Devil's Watering Hole. Sam wondered what had happened to a place like that with no police to hammer down their doors. He doubted it was pretty.

  But that was the only clue he had to go on if he wanted to find these guys. Well...not quite the only clue. Sam closed his eyes, forcing himself to remember the horrifying night. One of the men had been holding his arm like it hurt. He'd been stocky, maybe five-foot-nine, with a thick, wiry beard that ran all the way down his neck and something...something else...something that had glinted in the light. An earring? Sam shook his head. He couldn't remember.

  The second intruder was easier to picture, since he'd bent down directly over Sam. Muscular and tall, he'd had a shaved head and a bent, hawkish nose that looked like it'd been broken a time or three in the past. And the tattoo – at least two of the men had sported the same design. Concentric circles drawn in wavy lines with a small star at the center of the circle. On the outer edges, more lines radiated outward, like the rays of a sun. It was the same design as the graffiti on his dining room wall.

  As for the third killer, well, Sam had only seen a hulking shadow on the wall of the living room. He might as well be a ghost.

  It still wasn't a lot, and Sam doubted the guys would be heading back anywhere near the Helios Tavern. But again, it was all he had. Sam got to work.

  First he changed his clothes. As bloody as they were, he'd never blend in. He winced as he pulled a clean pair of jeans on, followed by a plain gray t-shirt. He didn't have any water to really clean himself up with, so he wiped at his face with a towel and hoped the stubble on his cheeks would hide the rest. Finally, he stuck a black beanie over his hair. He wanted to look inconspicuous, and the outfit did the job well enough.

  Next, he rounded up what few supplies he could still find in the ransacked house. The first aid kit and the sewing kit went into his pockets, along with the book of matches he'd dropped over by the wall. Into a mesh laundry sack he put a sweatshirt and two t-shirts – he might need to change clothes to throw off pursuers – and dumped a plastic sheet, a mostly-empty roll of duct tape, and a tangle of thin green paracord on top of them. He tied it over his shoulder so that it hung at his back.

  In the garage he found a small, rusted chopping hatchet with a wooden handle and a steel multitool that the looters had missed (or just not cared about, Sam thought). He'd have prefered a real knife. Hell, he'd have preferred a gun. But what seemed to be his mantra today just kept coming back: it was all he had. The multitool had a screwdriver, a corkscrew, and a three-inch knife that wouldn't do much good in a fight.

  “But it'll slit a throat,” Sam muttered to himself, stowing it in his jeans pocket. For the hatchet, he fashioned a duct tape loop that he tied around his belt. The hatchet swung against his waist, slapping his leg with every step, but it would be close at hand if he needed it quickly.

  He left the lantern with a twinge of regret, but it would only get in the way. He needed to move fast and blend in. Instead, he walked up the stairs to the one room he'd avoided – his and Linda's bedroom. The closet door was still open, the bookcase swung back on its hinges, and Sam crossed the room quickly to avoid looking at the bloodstains on the carpet. From the small vanity, he pulled out a gold necklace with a tiny rhinestone set in the middle of a gold heart. It was cheap, a costume necklace painted to look like gold, but he'd given it to Linda on their second date over twelve years earlier. He gripped it tightly in his fist for a second, then slipped it into his pocket. He crossed the hallway to Jeremy's room and quickly found what he was looking for: his son's prized possession, a bent and faded Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card. The cretins had ransacked this room, too, but seemed to have left without taking much. Sam slid the card into his pocket next to the cheap gold necklace.

  Finally, he shrugged into a light brown jacket that hid the laundry sack and the hatchet, and stood at the blown-in door of his house. He looked around the dim interior, letting the memories wash over him. He might never walk over this threshold again. The house itself wasn't important to him. If they'd had the money for it, he would have happily moved the family to a ranch upstate, some plot of land with acres to themselves. It was the memories he cherished. This was the house he and Linda had bought together. It was where Jeremy had been conceived, where the boy had grown up, where they'd fought and laughed and cried as a family. Leaving this house was leaving his life.

  Sam brushed a hand gently down the now-scarred doorjamb, then set his teeth and stepped out into the front yard. The sun was high in the sky, and he had a long way to go before it set.

  Chapter 5

  By mid afternoon, Sam had worked his way out of the suburbs and into the metropolitan area. So far he hadn't run into any serious trouble. A small raiding party had nearly surprised him outside a mini strip mall, but he'd manage to slip around the rear of the building before they spotted him. He'd seen more marauding gangs in the distance several times. Once, he'd hunkered behind a dumpster and watched, heart in his throat, as a large mob of angry men and women streamed by, shouting and firing weapons into the sky and the surrounding buildings.

  While he was still surrounded by the grassy lawns of his suburban neighborhood, Sam had taken a moment to smear his clean clothes with a few handfuls of dirt, making it look like he'd been out on the streets for days. Hopefully, anyone who did spot him would think he was a bum, just an eyesore to be ignored, with nothing valuable worth taking. Still he wasn't taking any chances.

  On the outskirts of the city, Sam slipped into an alley and leaned against a brick wall to get control of his breathing. His lips were chapped, his head dizzy. His stomach was a tight, empty ball, and the sutured gunshot wounds in his abdomen were a constant ache that occasionally rose to screaming levels of pain if he accidentally twisted his torso the wrong way. He was hungry, but it was the onset of dehydration that scared Sam the most. If he didn't find water soon, he might as well be lying dead on his kitchen floor.

  Sam was increasingly awestruck by the level of destruction that had already descended on the area. In only a week, the city had been transformed into a wasteland. Buildings stood gutted along the roadways, some of them burned to soot-covered cinderblock shells. Vehicles lined the streets and driveways, most with the windows smashed in. While he and his family had been sequestered in the safety of their hom
e, the city had been self-destructing.

  Sam took another deep breath and heaved himself off the wall, then flinched as the loud pock-pock-pock of a handgun sounded from the street next to him. It was answered by a rapid-fire ratatatat of an assault rifle. Sam peeked around the corner of the alley and saw a man staggering down the middle of the street shooting a handgun. A moment later, the assault rifle returned fire and the man shook violently, geysers of blood erupting from his back. He dropped in a pool of spreading blood, the handgun clattering away on the tarmac.

  Sam eyed the gun hungrily. He angled farther around the corner and spied six men in gray camouflage fatigues kneeling a block up the street. They stood and, at an unheard signal, moved as a single unit out of the open street and under the protection of a low store awning.

  The National Guard, Sam thought. Damn it. Two days earlier, he would have welcomed the sight. Now, the last thing he needed was something else in his way. The unit had paused for a breather with their backs against the storefront, rifles lowered but heads swiviling vigilantly to keep an eye on the street. Sam let his gaze drop back to the handgun on the street. A rivulet of blood from the dead man had reached it and was pooling around the grip.

  It was tantalizingly close, just twenty feet away. But there was no way to get it without the Guardsmen spotting him. Up the street, the six-man unit had left the awning and were milling up the street in his direction.

  Then, shouts. A crash. More shouts. Sam risked a look and saw two men and a woman in grime-soaked clothes emerge from a building practically face to face with the Guardsmen. The men were turned toward the newcomers, rifles again at the ready, shouting for them to put their hands up.

  Sam didn't hesitate. He hunched his shoulders and lowered his head and assumed a shambling gait. If anyone looked up, they'd just see an unassuming refugee trying to get across the street.

  Halfway there. The gun was practically in his hands. Five feet away.