by Bolz, Stefan
Jennifer!” Kasey shouted. “Watch out!”
The biker must have heard her for he aimed his shotgun at her and pulled the trigger. Kasey managed to move into the aisle fast enough but whatever it was the shot hit rained down on her.
“Run!” She heard Jennifer scream.
“To the door,” Kasey shouted.
Aarika ran down the aisle and toward the back exit. Kasey looked back once. As Jennifer and Blair came toward them, the shotgun loads hit the shelves near them creating spectacular food explosions.
Aarika reached the door and barreled through it. Kasey followed. She held it for Jennifer and Blair. They each carried two rifles on their backs and another in their hands. Blair also carried a large bag. Kasey shut the door and ran toward the Jeep. They got in and Kasey drove along the wall toward the parking area. From there, she steered the Jeep into the lot.
“Go left and to the exit at the end,” Blair said.
Kasey pushed the pedal down as they passed the entrance. One of the bikes drove through the remaining glass door, shattering it into a thousand pieces. From there it made a left turn and now rode parallel to the Jeep down the row of parked cars. The first load from the shotgun hit the rear of the Jeep, smashing the window of the trunk.
“Shit!” Jennifer said. She sat in the passenger seat next to Kasey but now climbed into the back. She aimed through the window, pulling the trigger every second or so. The biker was hit several times. He held his course, aiming the shotgun again and firing. This time he hit the driver’s side door. Kasey had ducked behind it but she could feel the vibrations when the small pellets hit the metal.
Ahead of them, about forty feet away, the row of cars stopped.
“What am I supposed to do?” Kasey cried.
“Hit him!” Jennifer replied between shots.
“With the car?”
“Yes.”
There was no choice. The row of cars ended and Kasey accelerated while turning left and toward the bike. She’d been slightly ahead of him and when the bike passed the last car, Kasey hit it head on. She slammed into her seat belt and the Jeep’s rear wheels came off the ground from the impact. The rider flew off the bike and the Jeep came to a screeching halt half on top of the bike.
“Let me out!” Jennifer shouted.
Kasey opened the door and Jennifer climbed out behind her. The red glow was weaker now. Substantially weaker. The biker had trouble getting to his feet. In one second, Kasey put it together. It wasn’t something she thought about consciously. It just occurred to her.
“They can’t live without their bikes,” she said.
Jennifer moved past the motorcycle and shot the rider. He flew backwards. She ran toward him. Kasey saw the second bike leaving the store and coming toward them.
“Get back in the car!” Jennifer shouted.
Jennifer ran toward the biker on the ground, held the shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. Then she ran back. The second biker was about twenty feet away from the last parked car. Kasey realized that they wouldn’t make it back into the Jeep in time. When she turned her head, she saw Blair leave the Jeep through the passenger door and run along the parked cars toward the second biker. He passed Jennifer who turned and aimed, following Blair’s path.
Kasey didn’t believe her eyes when Blair, now running full speed, still wearing only one shoe, reached the bike the moment it passed the last cars. Blair jumped and smashed into the rider from the side, lifting him off the bike. Both crashed to the ground. Jennifer ran toward them. The rider came to his feet faster than Blair, who was struggling to get up. The rider reached for his sword. Jennifer shot him in the chest. He staggered backwards. That gave Blair enough time for his second tackle. He smashed into the rider, taking him down.
Jennifer was there and when the biker lifted his head, she shot him again.
“Move them away from their bikes!” Kasey shouted.
“What?” Aarika asked.
Blair had already grabbed onto the second biker. The man was still twitching uncontrollably. Kasey grabbed his other arm and together, they pulled the rider another ten feet away. Jennifer and Aarika had moved the first one and they both lay still. The red glow was gone. Kasey could see their faces for the first time. The masks of hatred and rage she had seen before were gone. What was left were just ordinary faces. One was older, possibly late fifties. The other was young, not much older than her. Both had the weathered skin you see in outdoorsmen sometimes. It occurred to her that they could have been father and son. The younger wore a wedding ring.
“What the hell is going on here?” Jennifer asked.
“I have no idea,” Kasey said. But inside, she began to connect the seemingly disconnected pieces. The puzzle wasn’t complete yet, but she was starting to build an image that was more gruesome than anything she could have foreseen.
“Let’s get out of here,” Blair said, holding his side.
“You okay?” Jennifer asked.
“Yeah. Not really.”
“Nice tackle,” Aarika said, a slight smile crossing his face. He was still visibly shaken.
“Brentwood high school class of 2002,” Blair replied.
“Football?” Kasey asked.
“Hockey.”
“Nice!” Aarika said.
“That was very brave of you, what you did there, Blair,” Jennifer said. “I don’t know many people who would have done that.”
“There was no choice, really.”
“There’s always a choice.”
Blair and Jennifer exchanged a glance. There was respect in Jennifer’s eyes and for a moment, Kasey realized that the things Jennifer must have seen, the sacrifices, the pain, but also the courage and the love for her fallen comrades, was far beyond her own scope of experience.
The Jeep’s left front tire rested on the bike’s rear wheel and seat. The four of them gathered around it.
“Blair, can you give me your knife?” Kasey said.
When Blair handed it to her, she knelt down and began to scratch the paint off the side of the tank.
“What are you doing?” Jennifer asked.
“I don’t know,” Kasey answered.
The paint peeled off slowly, revealing a black surface.
“I’ve seen this before,” Kasey said. “One of the men who took Jack had a tattoo on his chest that looked just like this.”
She didn’t mention that it was the exact negative opposite of her own amulet. The coiled dragon was of deep black, the edges tattered and burned, as if the symbol had been permanently branded into the metal of the tank.
“I counted forty-four,” Aarika said into the silence.
“And we’re assuming this was the only group,” Blair replied.
“Let’s go,” Jennifer said.
Kasey brushed the shattered glass from the driver’s seat. She had felt something when she’d touched the bike. It was subtle but unmistakably there. Her mind couldn’t process the information, though. It was too far removed from what she could accept as reality. She’d taken many riding lessons as a child. If her mind wasn’t clouded with fear and the terror of things to come, she might have been able to make the connection. But she didn’t. Not yet.
She backed the Jeep off the bike and drove around it to the exit and from there onto the road. The distant glow of the fires that had broken out everywhere was their only source of light as they drove slowly through the night. Nobody spoke. It was as if they were trying to wrap their minds around what had happened and somehow prepare for what was still to come. For Kasey, whenever bits and pieces of an image or a recent memory rose up inside, she pushed them back down. She was afraid that it would open the door to a tidal wave of emotion that was waiting at the threshold of her mind to rush in and overwhelm her.
“Stop the car for a second,” Blair’s words broke her train of thought.
Kasey stopped the Jeep and turned toward the others.
“I was thinking about the address you gave me on Corbin Avenue. If
I’m not mistaken, it might be an abandoned warehouse behind all the other businesses off of Corbin. I’m not completely sure, though. I spent a lot of time there as a kid. We rode our bikes through the sand pits and got into pretty much every building that wasn’t locked. A lot of the buildings were built during that time and the construction site was mostly left open at night. That particular one has been empty for a long time. Over the years, several people wanted to buy it, I believe, but nothing ever happened. Whoever owns it always paid their property taxes so the town couldn’t do much. I looked around there about a year ago and it looks the same.”
“Aren’t there a lot of other buildings like that around here?” Aarika said.
“Yes,” Kasey replied. “But we got that address off a license plate from yesterday morning. And it’s not like we have any other leads.”
“We’re about two blocks away,” Blair said. “We should park the car here and walk the rest of the way. We can go through the sand quarry and approach it from the back. We’ll take a look around and see if anyone’s there.”
“And what if he is?” Jennifer said.
“What do you mean?” Blair replied.
“Let’s just say Jack is there, is being held there. We can’t just walk in and ask them to give him back to us. We need a plan. There’s four of us and we have no experience in this kind of a situation. At all. What we really need is a S.W.A.T. team.”
“Where would we get one?” Aarika asked.
Jennifer shook her head no. “There is another possibility we have to consider.”
Kasey looked at her and saw the truth in her expression.
“Jack has been gone for about eighteen hours now,” Jennifer said. “Under normal circumstances, you’d wait for a ransom note or some sign from his captors. But this is different. Kasey, I hope he’s alive but there’s a good chance he’s not and if we go into that building we don’t know what we’ll find.”
“Hey, as long as we don’t know whether or not he’s dead, we shouldn’t assume that he is!” Blair’s words carried his own pain with them, his own hopes and fears about his wife. “We should hope he’s alive.”
“It’s all right,” Kasey said. She knew she needed to face the possibility of Jack’s death. But the impact of the thought came with such power that she couldn’t shield herself against it.
“I just met him at this party on the beach,” she said. “He was nice and he wasn’t pushing me and we talked for a long time. I fell asleep with his arms wrapped around me and it was warm.” She couldn’t stop the tears. They dripped onto her legs and left tiny clean spots in the smears of dried blood.
“I liked him,” she continued. “I thought I might ask him to meet me the next day for a swim. I thought he might want to learn how to surf. I could teach him how to surf. Or maybe we would just lie on the boards in the water and talk some more. But then my mother died. She killed herself. Why would she do that? She was like the opposite of someone who’d want to kill herself. But she lay there on the kitchen floor in all the blood and all I could think of was why didn’t we get there earlier? If we had gotten up earlier that day or if we had just driven a little faster, we would have been there in time. And she wouldn’t be dead now and she would be here. With me. She would be here with me.”
Kasey’s voice abandoned her. She wept, and Jennifer held her and said something to her that she couldn’t understand, but she was comforted by the sound. And through the tears she felt Aarika’s hand on her arm awkwardly caressing it. Blair cried too, she saw.
“I’m sorry,” was all she could say. “I’m very, very sorry.”
“We might not be able to get him out,” Aarika said into the silence. “Your friend. Jack. We might not be able to. There’s only four of us, and except for Jennifer we don’t know much about weapons and strategy and hostage negotiations. But we’ll try. We’ll try to do whatever it takes to get your friend. Okay?”
Kasey looked into Aarika’s face and from his toward Blair and Jennifer. Blair nodded. Jennifer grabbed one of the rifles. Even though she hadn’t been on active duty for a few years, Kasey could see her determination, her intention to see this through.
“Okay,” Kasey said. “Okay.”
“We’ve got six rifles,” Jennifer said. “Two Sig Sauer M400 semi-automatic, three Remington 870 twelve-gauge and plenty of rounds for both. And a Colt M4 Ops with a thirty-round magazine. I’m gonna hold on to that one. Blair, have you used a gun before?”
“Yeah. Kind of.”
“Where?”
“Ahem.”
“Spit it out.”
“Call of Duty.”
“The game.”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Well, at least you know where to aim it. I’ll give you one of the Sigs. Aarika and Kasey, you’ll each get a twelve gauge. Now, you gotta prepare yourself for a bit of a recoil, so hold on to it.”
“Sure,” Aarika replied.
“Kasey, give me your backpack. You’re gonna carry your ammo in it.”
Kasey nodded and took the clothes out.
“You’ve got about a hundred rounds and I’ll show you how to reload, okay?”
“Yes. Sir,” Aarika said. He smiled but Jennifer didn’t smile back. The soldier in her had taken over. Kasey recognized it, saw how her strength and confidence in what needed to be done extended to the others. She must have been an excellent leader, Kasey thought. She was glad that they had found her.
For the next ten minutes, Jennifer methodically went over each of the weapons, explained how to aim and shoot them, change the magazine on the Sig and put shells into the shotguns. Meanwhile, the sky began to lighten. In a half hour, the sun would rise.
“You ready?” Jennifer asked.
They nodded quietly. None of them were.
Sunday, 4:30 a.m. to 5:42 a.m.
Kasey decided at the last minute to change from her shorts into the long pants Jack had packed for her. They were comfortable and had a few side pockets for ammo. She was contemplating taking the baseball bat as well but decided that she had enough to carry as it was. The twelve gauge was heavy and the backpack easily had fifteen pounds of ammo in it. She used the back seat to change. Blair climbed up front and Aarika made a point of looking out the window.
“Anything interesting out there?” Kasey asked.
“Not really. I just want to give you some privacy,” Aarika answered.
“That’s nice of you. But I’m sure it’s nothing you haven’t seen already.”
“I work a lot,” Aarika answered after a while.
“What about in college?”
“I… I don’t know. It just never…. I never had time…”
“You’re a virgin?” Blair asked.
“Blair!” Jennifer said. “Leave him alone.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“To answer your question.” Aarika hesitated for a moment. “Yes. Yes, I am a virgin. So now you have it. It’s out. Anything else you need to know?”
Kasey tightened the belt and put on her boots.
“There’s nothing wrong with that, Aarika,” Kasey said. “And whoever gets you will be one lucky girl.”
“Thanks,” he said. “See! Blair! That’s what you’re supposed to say. That’s what a normal person says.”
Blair chuckled. Jennifer shook her head.
“I could tell you about my first time—”
“No!” Jennifer interrupted Blair. “I think we’ll all be able to live without that information.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m pretty sure yes.”
“Your loss.”
“Let’s go,” Jennifer said as she climbed out of the car. The others followed and were soon crouching behind a low wall that surrounded a parking area.
“If we move along the wall, we’ll get behind that building,” Blair pointed at the commercial two-story building in back. “From there, it’s only a block and a half to the sand quarry.”
They wen
t past the parked cars along the low sidewall. The shotgun felt cool and heavy in Kasey’s hand. Jennifer had given back Officer Carpenter’s handgun together with a box of ammo, and she had put the belt and holster on as well. They had loaded all the rifles in the car. Jennifer had removed the plug from the Remington she’d given to Kasey. The store-bought shotguns only held two rounds. With the plug removed, they held six. In addition, she had about fifty rounds in her backpack and ten in each of her side pockets.
With all the additional weight, Kasey felt heavy on her feet. It was harder to move, but the additional ammo did give her a sense of security she didn’t have before. At least now she was able to defend herself.
As they passed the building, several helicopters flew overhead.
“What are those?” Aarika asked.
“Blackhawks,” Jennifer answered. “Within the next couple of hours, the Island will be completely shut down. They’re putting Army troops and Marines on the ground to handle the population, to ensure safety, and they’ll have blockades on all the major roadways. There’ll probably be detention camps and a curfew.”
“Detention camps?” Aarika asks.
“Yes. Crime increases exponentially during times of uncertainty and fear.”
They reached the end of the low wall.
“We’ll go right and behind the building over there,” Blair said. He was already crossing the street.
“What road are we on?” Kasey asked.
“East Industry Court.”
“I’ve heard of it. Doesn’t that lead to Grand?”
“Yep. But we won’t go that far south.”
“I don’t know about you guys but… I was wondering if we shouldn’t wait for someone to help us?” Aarika said as they ran behind a flat building. The sign on the front said Radiators.
“We could,” Jennifer said. “But I wanna see if they’re even in that building. If they are, we can still go and try to find someone. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it was days before anyone would be able to do anything.”
“It’s us then,” Aarika said.
“Looks that way,” Jennifer replied.
They ran along the flat building. A few tractor-trailers were parked in a corner at the end. Next to them stood about a dozen containers. A rusty fence ran behind the containers toward the other end of the lot.
