The Slab

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  Soon…soon enough, listening to the complaints of whiners would be a thing of the past for Franklin Wardlaw. He reveled in the roar of the jet as it banked toward the west.

  Toward the Slab.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Keep your head down!” Ken shouted. Hal did as he was told, though it seemed like somewhat vague and unhelpful advice when he’d just seen one man torn almost in half at the waist by a shotgun blast, the homes of friends and neighbors flattened like used cardboard boxes after a move, and bullets flying every which way from every corner of the community he’d called home for so long. As he ran—head down—he could barely believe that this was all really happening. But the hammering in his chest was real. So was the ringing in his ears, and the furious, inescapable noise—guns, bulldozers, the screaming and wailing of people he knew, the faint, faraway-seeming patter of his own feet on the cement, running at a speed he hadn’t been able to attain in years, if not decades. All those things were undeniable.

  He and Virginia lived on the third of the various Slabs. Ken knew the way, and as fast as Hal was, Ken was faster. So Ken led the way and Hal followed. He stayed on the dirt path, at least at first, Hal guessed because the big machines were sticking to the concrete and most of the gunplay seemed centered around those.

  Most, but not all.

  After a couple of minutes, their familiar Minnie Winnie loomed ahead, a dark island in a sea of concrete dotted with mushrooms, like whitecaps on the ocean of night. No lights burned inside, and in the dim, crazy illumination of flames and reflected headlights and what moonlight could penetrate the haze of smoke and dust overhanging the Slab, he thought he could make out a bullet hole in the Winnie’s outer skin.

  When he saw that he pushed harder, passing Ken and barely slowing in time to keep from slamming into the RV’s door. The screen door confounded him for a moment, as he tried to open it and succeeded only in bouncing it off his own leg and face, but then he got it wide, and he shoved through the inside door, trying to look everywhere at once in the dark interior. “Virginia!” he called. “Gin!”

  The world seemed to go silent for a moment, and his heart rose to his throat, but then he heard a rustling sound and Virginia’s voice, speaking through a quiet sob, said, “I’m in here.”

  The voice came from the head, the only space inside with no window exposure to the mad world beyond. Hal crossed to it and gently tapped on the door. “It’s okay, Virginia,” he said. “You can come out.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked him, her voice plaintive. “I don’t…”

  “Come on out, Gin,” he said. “Please. I just want to see you.”

  He heard the door latch work, and then it opened and she rushed out and into his arms. He wrapped his arms around her. Her back hitched as she sobbed, great, sorrowful noises that shook her and made him feel regret that he had ever left her side. He moved his hands in a slow, circular pattern that he hoped was comforting. It’ll be okay now, Virginia,” he said. “Now we’re together.”

  “But—” she began, and her voice caught, and she had to start again after two more racking sobs. “But I was so scared. And I didn’t know where you were. And I thought the most horrible things…”

  “I know,” Hal said soothingly.

  “No, I mean, before, the things I was thinking about…”

  “I know,” he said again. “I really do know.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything. Don’t worry. It’s not your fault.”

  Outside, the racket continued. It had never stopped, but he felt that it had, that the whole world had dropped away when he’d come inside and couldn’t find Virginia, when he had feared that she was already gone. The magic that had happened to him hadn’t changed anything; he still wanted to go first, didn’t want to live on an Earth that didn’t have Virginia Winfield Shipp on it, and when he heard her voice it was like a wish granted, a miracle.

  The screen door opened and he started, but it was just Ken and Penny coming in. The RV dipped a little as they stepped up into it. “Everything okay?” Ken asked.

  “Fine,” Hal said. “Just fine.”

  “I’ll see that you two are safe in here,” Ken said.

  “Don’t you worry about us,” Hal argued. “We’ll be fine. We’ve got the magic on our side, remember?”

  Ken took a step closer, and Hal felt Virginia shift in his arms, backing her face away from his chest to look at the lawman. “Harold’s right,” she said. You don’t need to worry about us. I’m sure you have much more important things to take care of.”

  “There isn’t anything more important,” Ken said. He reached out and stroked the exposed skin of Virginia’s arm, as if to reassure her, but when he touched her, Hal thought his face clouded over for a moment. Lowering his hand, Ken looked straight into Hal’s eyes.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll leave you here for now, while I try to go stop whatever it is that’s going on here tonight. But when this is all over, Hal, you and me, we need to have a talk about some things. A serious talk.”

  Hal knew what he meant. He knew about the bodies, somehow. The dead women. His horrific legacy. “You’re right, Ken. We do.”

  “Stay with them, Penny,” Ken said on his way out the door. “I’ll be back soon’s I can.”

  “You can’t do everything by yourself, Ken,” she argued. But he just pressed his pistol into her hands.

  “You know how to use that,” he said. “If you need to, don’t hesitate.” Armed now with only his service shotgun, he tromped down the steps and banged the door shut.

  Penny shrugged and went to the window to look outside. “How do we even know who the good guys are?” she asked.

  Hal gave a deep-throated chuckle. “Good guys?” he echoed. “There aren’t any good guys. You saw it yourself.”

  “What do you mean?” she wondered, turning away from the window to regard him. “You mean that vision or whatever? The Indians?”

  “I wouldn’t call it a vision,” he said. He and Virginia sat down side by side on the living area’s sofa, holding hands. “You were reading the pictographs on the walls, and you saw the story in your head, that’s all. And what you saw may be what was written there but it was filtered through your own brain, your own perceptions. You saw a guy who was, you said, maybe the personification of evil. But he was gray, right?”

  “Yes…” she said hesitantly.

  “Because it’s not a black and white world. Evil isn’t absolute and it lives in all of us. So does good. Those bastards who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center had some good in them somewhere, and the cops who gave their lives to save others, they were heroes but they were human beings, they had some evil too. You said yourself that some of the victims you saw in that Indian camp had been killed by one another, not by the gray guy, right?”

  “Well, yeah…I think they were under his influence, but…okay, I see your point.”

  “It’s simplistic as all heck, but it’s always been true, and I expect it always will be.”

  Virginia squeezed Hal’s hand with her own. “Whatever are you two talking about?” she asked. She always had possessed a streak of curiosity as wide as the Mississippi, he thought.

  “I guess there’s a lot to tell you,” he said. He leaned over and kissed the soft skin of his wife’s cheek. “Now may not be the best time, but soon, okay?”

  “Real soon,” she said with a laugh. “Or I’m going to start thinking you two are keeping secrets from me.”

  “Never,” Hal promised. “Never again.”

  ***

  Virginia Shipp tried to join in the conversation, tried to get Hal to share some of what he’d obviously been through with this young lady and Kenneth Butler. But she could only force herself to be mildly interested. She was relieved that he’d come back, relieved and happy. But those emotions warred inside her with another one, an urge so strong that she could barely suppress it.

  She wanted to get her hands on the gun that Penny
held. Ken’s gun. That was her overwhelming priority at this moment. She could almost feel its cool steel skin, the way it would buck in her hands as she discharged it, the jets of flame that would erupt from its barrel, the matching jets of blood that would erupt from those she pointed it at.

  Including Harold. Oh, God, especially Harold…

  ***

  Vic writhed on the cement slab, trying to drag himself away from Rock’s trailer to someplace he might reasonably expect to get some help. Better yet, to someone who could find Cathy for him.

  The bullet had smashed his left hip and he couldn’t even raise himself up onto hands and knees, could only tug himself by pressing his hands against the flat concrete and pushing as much as he could stand with his right leg. The more he moved, the more it hurt, but he had to move, couldn’t just stay where he’d fallen so whoever had shot him could finish him off at will.

  When he’d heard the firefight start up in earnest, he was heartened, thinking that maybe it wasn’t the Dove, maybe it was Muslim terrorists or something. But he gave up on that notion in a hurry, since there was nothing on the Slab to attract the attention or interest of terrorists of any stripe. No, it was the Dove, he was sure. She was out there, down in the brush, most likely, where she couldn’t see him as long as he was flat and she didn’t change her position. Not that she’d need to, she seemed to have a pretty good angle on the trailer’s door.

  Fucking Kelly, he thought, fucking Kelly had talked him into all this. If he could only walk he’d go back in there and kill the bastard himself.

  But even as he thought it, he knew it wasn’t true. Yes, Kelly had brought him in, had persuaded him to join in the fun. But there was something inside himself that had responded to the offer, that had made him think that rape and murder sounded like a good time. Killing Kelly wouldn’t kill that. Vic thought it was already dead, thought that it had died in the moment at the cabin when he’d first realized that it lived. But he couldn’t be sure. Even now, crawling like a slug because he couldn’t stand up, as helpless as a newborn, he couldn’t deny that it would feel good, someplace deep inside that he didn’t want to examine too closely, to hold a gun to someone’s head and pull the trigger and breathe in the rank odors of blood and brain and smoke and lead and death.

  Biting his lower lip until it bled, trying to stifle the pain, Vic dragged himself forward another foot.

  ***

  Mikey Zee and his men had no casualties other than one man with a cheek scraped by shrapnel, metal chips that had flown when someone’s bullet had struck the Multi Terrain loader near his face. The men moved with the loaders, always staying behind the cover of the heavy metal equipment, and used their shotguns sparingly to guarantee the safety of the vehicle operators. So far more than a dozen of the ramshackle residences had fallen before their onslaught, and Mikey estimated that they’d only had to shoot six of the locals.

  Nick had anticipated armed resistance, but not on this level. From listening to Nick’s comments in her ear, he had the sense that his friend would rather be out here with them, where things were happening, than back at the car with the principal. But Haynes was his job and he had to stay with the man no matter what.

  Mikey Zee himself had yet to shoot anyone. He carried his favorite big gun, a gas-operated, semi-auto Benelli Super 90 M3 12 gauge with the shoulder stock/pistol grip combination, and the more he was out here, breathing in the sharp-edged smoke and listening to the lead fly past him like so many mosquitoes, the more he longed to unload it on somebody.

  He poked his head above the edge of the big track loader and saw someone running across in front of them, pistol in his hand, firing one shot after another toward them. Good enough, he thought, raising the Benelli to his shoulder. He led the runner and fired. The runner stopped as if he’d encountered a brick wall, jerked to his right, and the middle part of him disintegrated in a fine mist, black in the smoky light. Mikey liked the shotgun’s kick against him, like a punch to the shoulder, and liked the way it had done its job. Nick hadn’t promised this would be as fun as it was turning out.

  “Another one down,” he said.

  “Copy that, Mikey,” Nick replied.

  The track loader’s massive blade struck the front surface of yet another old RV, and whatever else Nick might have said was lost in the squeal and shriek of twisted metal.

  ***

  When he was out from underneath the double-wide, Billy ran across an open stretch of Slab toward a trailer where a short wall had been built around a picnic/patio area with what looked like found bricks and desert stones all piled up around a base of old tires. There were fucking tires everywhere on the Slab, used to mark “property” lines, driveways, picnic spots—anything that might need marking. Sometimes on a summer’s day all you could smell was old rubber cooking in the desert sun.

  He leapt the wall and crouched behind it, his Glock out, looking back toward the double-wide and the trailer from which someone had fired on him. He held the gun sideways, even though Ken had repeatedly warned him against it, because it just looked so awesome in The Matrix. Ken claimed that it might be fine for one shot but accuracy would suffer if he had to fire multiple shots at that angle. Maybe yes, Billy thought, maybe no. But Ken wasn’t here now.

  There’s something hinky about that trailer, he thought. There hadn’t been any gunfire in the immediate vicinity, so it was almost like whoever was inside there—and he was sure no one had come out yet—was waiting for him, or for a uniform, since he didn’t even think they’d have been able to get a good look at him in the dark. And if they fire at any uniform that comes around, he reasoned, that must mean they’re up to something. He wondered if there was a way to get a better look inside that trailer without getting his head blown off.

  For now, though—as long as no one popped out from the vehicle he had his back to—he was relatively safe behind this wall, shadowed by the big RV from the moonlight and the flames that licked ever higher into the sky a slab or two over. He’d just stay here for a bit, catch his breath, and shoot anyone who showed himself.

  Lucy Alvarez was running out of patience. She knew where those guys were, still hiding inside the trailer she’d seen them enter hours ago. One had come out, and she’d nailed him. Maybe he was dead, maybe just wounded, but she’d put the hurt on him and that was good. But it left three to go, and that was not good. The whole freaking world was falling apart, it sounded like. Flames brightened the night, guns were going off everywhere, and occasional crashes like the world’s biggest demolition derby sounded over everything else. Earlier she had thought there was no way she’d get her revenge and not have to pay the price in jail time, or maybe even the death penalty. But the way things sounded up on the Slab, on this night, of all nights, she stood a good chance of being able to murder four men in cold blood and just walk away from it all.

  But she had to drive them out of that trailer, or go into it herself. That latter option held limited appeal. If she had more bullets—or if she knew how many bullets she had, or even how to find out—she could just start shooting into the walls of the trailer, figuring that her shots would penetrate its thin skin and either cause some damage or chase them out.

  On the other hand, maybe creating the impression that she could do that would serve just as well, she thought. There was that one window facing off this way, after all. She hadn’t seen anyone at the window for a while, but if the intent was terror, then that might not matter. The biggest drawback she could think of was that shooting through the window might pinpoint her own location for them—because she had to shoot uphill, a shot through the window would likely go above everybody’s head and into, or through, the ceiling. From that they’d know about where she was hiding, and with more people and more ammo they might be able to finally finish their ungodly hunt.

  Hell with it, she thought. It was a chance worth taking. She took careful aim, blew out her breath, held steady, and squeezed the trigger firmly. As before, the gun sounded very loud to her, e
ven though the night was full of gunshots and the general din from the Slab. But the bullet sailed true, shattering the small window in this end of the trailer. She heard a shouted curse, but there was no immediate visible response.

  A moment later, she heard a gunshot, loud, from the direction of the trailer. But she didn’t see a muzzle blast, just a bright flash of light inside, through the window.

  She was lowering the weapon when the door burst open and men piled out, crouching to minimize the targets they presented, and carrying guns of their own. As quickly as she could, she raised the rifle and fired again, but her shot went high. She pulled the trigger once more. It clicked on an empty chamber.

  “There she is!” one of them shouted. Suddenly the air around her was alive with the buzz and whine of bullets, thudding into the dirt and chopping bits of brush. She dropped the rifle and ran, back down the slope, the way she had come from. She had no goal in mind, just away, anywhere away from them until she could regroup and arm herself again.

  It didn’t take them long to realize what she was doing and to give chase. A moment later, she could hear them crashing through the brush, coming toward her. She didn’t know if they had flashlights, or simply followed her by moonlight or by the sounds she made. They were back there, that was all that mattered.

  After running blindly for a few minutes, she realized that there was someplace she could go, someone on the Slab who would offer shelter and probably had a gun of his own. A friend of her brothers.

  Eddie Trujillo would help her.

  ***

  When the bullet shattered the glass window of Rock’s trailer and ripped up through the roof, Kelly had just polished off the last of Rock’s beers and was about to stand up to throw the bottle out the door, in the general direction in which he’d last seen Vic Bradford trying to crawl toward the loving arms of his wife.