by Bolz, Stefan
“Down at the Venetian.”
“That’s close to Good Samaritan Hospital,” Jennifer said.
“Yes.”
“There’s gonna be chaos down there.”
“I know. It’s that or we lose the amulet and hunker down in a house somewhere until this blows over.”
Kasey and Jack exchanged a glance.
“I think that’s a bad idea,” Kasey said.
“I don’t see any other option at this moment,” Jennifer replied.
As they drove through the streets, the normalcy of the residential neighborhood was interrupted by cars that were crashed through white picket fences, the broken windows in the houses and the doors left open. At one point they passed an abandoned stroller left on the sidewalk. Kasey could only imagine the tragic events that must have taken place here. When they reached the ambulance, the back doors were wide open, and the inside had been ransacked. Not even the gurney was left.
“So much for antibiotics,” Jennifer said.
“Now what?” Aarika asked.
“You know how to drive this thing?” Blair asked.
“I do,” Jennifer replied.
“This is probably the fastest way to get to the hospital.”
She didn’t say anything, but for Kasey, giving up the Jeep was more than abandoning a vehicle. It was as if she had to let go of her life and the sum of all that this summer would never be.
Jennifer opened a small locker and took out a jacket. “That should do it. At least until someone looks a bit closer.” She handed the blue EMT jacket to Blair.
They moved the weapons, Kasey’s backpack, her baseball bat and Aarika’s food bag to the back of the ambulance. When Jennifer climbed into the driver’s seat, they heard the first motorcycle engine. It was far away but it was coming.
“Hold onto something!” Jennifer said when she started the truck. Blair sat down on the passenger seat. Kasey could see the pain in Jack’s face as he crouched down, trying to find something to hold on to.
“Come here,” she said as she sat down, leaning against the corner and spreading her legs to either side. “You can lean on me.”
Jack didn’t have much opposition left in him and sat down between her legs, his back toward her.
“Lean back,” she said.
Jack did and she held him, as gently and as firmly as she could. Aarika was at the door watching through the tinted glass for any signs of the riders. Across from Kasey there were two side windows. She saw the houses and trees rush by as they drove through the streets. They didn’t hit much traffic at first. Jennifer had turned the siren on. Before each turn, she announced which direction they were going and even though Kasey prepared for it, every move pressed her back and sides into the wall. She swallowed the pain. Holding Jack was probably more comfort for her than it was for him. He was a shimmer of sanity in a world that had broken apart at the seams.
She closed her eyes out of sheer reflex when one of the side windows blew out. The sound of the shotgun reverberated inside the ambulance. Instinctively, she turned to her side, covering Jack’s body with her own. Another shot took out the other window. She saw Aarika on the floor. He seemed to be unharmed.
“I didn’t see it!” he shouted.
“Hold on!” Jennifer said as the ambulance leapt to the left.
Kasey couldn’t see anything, but the impact of the ambulance hitting the bike slammed her into the wall and Jack into her. For a few moments she couldn’t breathe.
“Kasey, I need you to take one of the shotguns!” Jennifer shouted through the noise of the squealing tires when she made another turn.
Jack pushed his feet into one of the side walls and his shoulders into the other. He didn’t look very comfortable but at least he wasn’t sliding around. Kasey grabbed the twelve-gauge from between the two front seats. Blair had taken the other one. Kasey thought it would have been better if Blair drove. Jennifer was a much better shot. But then, bullets didn’t do anything against the riders anyway.
“There’s another one,” Aarika shouted. Kasey saw him through the rear window as he accelerated toward them. “I think they know where we are.”
Kasey didn’t have time to think. She dropped to the floor at the same moment the back window exploded in a rain of glass.
“Right turn!” Jennifer shouted. Kasey slammed into the wall. So did Aarika.
“How can we get rid of it?” Kasey shouted. She registered that she was bleeding from several wounds where the glass had cut her.
“I have no clue!” Jennifer replied.
“We gotta get back to Deer Park Avenue. That’ll cross the Southern State Parkway. They might have a roadblock there,” Kasey said.
“Why would we want to get to a roadblock?” Blair said.
“Because they’ll let us through but not him,” Jennifer said. “How do I get there?”
“Go right at the next intersection. You’ll hit it a half mile down the road,” Blair said.
Kasey watched through the rear window as the rider turned onto the street. After a few seconds, a second one appeared right behind it. And a third.
“Right turn,” Jennifer shouted.
Kasey braced herself. Jack was covered in pieces of shattered glass. Hang in there, she thought. We’ll get you to a hospital. They made the turn. After a while, the motorcycles appeared.
“Why aren’t they any closer?” she asked.
“What?” Aarika shouted back.
“They’re holding our speed. Shouldn’t they be closer by now?”
“Left turn!”
When they turned onto Deer Park Avenue, Kasey saw two more riders coming toward them from the north and joining the others.
“What’s going on?” Blair asked.
“They’re not here to kill us,” Kasey said.
“What do you mean? One of them just tried to!”
“Are you sure? None of us was hit.”
“What’re you getting at?” Jennifer asked.
“I don’t think they want to kill us. I think they’re herding us.”
“Toward what?” Blair asked.
Kasey didn’t want to say it. She’d much rather think of it as a trick her mind had played on her yesterday morning when she saw the red ship out at sea as it sat in a bank of fog.
“Toward what, Kasey?”
Jack and Kasey exchanged a glance.
“Toward the water. They’re pushing us toward the water.”
“Why?” Aarika asked.
“There’s the roadblock,” Jennifer said. “Let’s hope they let us through.”
Two Humvees stood about twenty feet apart. The top-mounted machine gun on each vehicle was pointed toward the other. As they got closer, Kasey realized that the forms on the ground were soldiers.
“They’re not moving,” Blair said.
Jennifer slowed the ambulance down. “They’re dead!” she said. “They’re all dead!” She looked behind her and through the rear windows. “Blair, can you drive a Humvee?”
“I… I’m not sure!”
“You can now! We gotta switch vehicles!” she said while she opened the door of the ambulance. “You gotta hurry!”
Kasey helped Jack scramble to his feet. The riders came around the bend in the road. They had fifteen seconds, maybe twenty before they’d be here, Kasey thought. Aarika opened the back door and jumped out. Kasey and Jack followed. When they ran around the ambulance, they saw Jennifer pulling one of the soldiers out of the Humvee.
“Get in!” she shouted. “Jack you go in back with Aarika. Kasey, passenger seat.”
“What about you?” Kasey asked.
“I won’t need to sit!”
Blair started the Humvee. The others climbed in. Jennifer came in through the round opening in the roof.
“Drive!”
As Blair steered the Humvee around the two dead soldiers ahead and accelerated across the bridge, Jennifer moved the machine gun around so it pointed behind them. Suddenly the loud staccato of the bul
lets ripped through the air. Kasey let out a startled scream.
“I think you hit one!” Aarika shouted.
When Kasey looked through the rear window, she saw one of the bikers topple over and slide across the pavement. He got back up a moment later, mounted his bike and continued. The others didn’t show any signs of slowing down either.
“We’re gonna run out of bullets!” Jennifer shouted. “I’ve got about three hundred here but they won’t last that long.”
“There are more coming!” Aarika said.
Now Kasey could see them. Five, maybe six of them appeared behind the others.
“Can you go faster, Blair?”
“I don’t think so,” he replied.
“How about we go slower,” Kasey said.
“Slower?”
“Yes. If they want us to go toward the water, and as long as we’re going in that direction, couldn’t we drive slower?”
“Why would you do that?” Blair asked.
“To save us time. To come up with a plan.”
“Once we’re on the water, there are plenty of places to hide,” Blair said. “Fire Island is long and they can’t get there unless they drive all the way around it. We have to get to the water as fast as we can. That’s our only chance.”
“Deer Park Avenue is continues on your right,” Kasey said. “That’ll lead straight to the harbor.”
There was a moment when nobody spoke. The riders had backed off and held their speed about a hundred yards behind.
“We can’t leave the island,” Jack said. “We have to find another way.”
“What are you talking about?” Blair said. “The boat is the only chance we have.”
“No. It’s not. You have no idea… You don’t know what all this is. Neither do I but I’ve spent the last sixteen hours tied to a pole around my neck and…” Jack looked at Kasey who held his gaze. She saw him struggle to say what he needed to say. “If this, whatever this is, wants us in the water, that’s the last place we want to go to. We should drive the opposite direction, away from the water, away from everything. We have to get away from it!”
Jack’s voice cracked.
“We’re on Long Island,” Aarika said. “We’re surrounded by water.”
“We’ve got nowhere to go,” Jack said quietly. “We’ve got nowhere to go.”
“Watch out!” Kasey shouted when a man walked into the road right in front of them. Blair pulled the Humvee to the left and missed him by an inch. The man screamed at them in utter rage as they passed. His face was bloody and his clothes were in tatters.
“This is not good,” Jack said. His face was a mask of terror. He began to shake.
“It’ll be all right,” is all Kasey could think to say. She didn’t believe a word of it.
“There’s something ahead,” Jennifer said.
As they drove toward an underpass that went below the train tracks, Kasey saw it.
“Oh shit!” Blair said.” Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.”
A person hung from the bridge’s supports, a rope around their neck. The body swung slightly in the breeze.
The Molotov cocktail missed the Humvee by a few feet and crashed into one of the cars on the other side of the street. The fuel ignited the car in a fiery explosion.
“Go!” Jennifer shouted.
Blair pushed the gas pedal down and the Humvee jumped forward. Behind them, a few people ran into the street. They didn’t see the riders behind them. The shotgun fire echoed eerily through the street as the riders shot them down.
There were several more abandoned and turned-over cars on the road. Some of them were on fire. From some of the houses, black smoke rose up into the sky. And then they saw them. A few hundred feet ahead, Deer Park Avenue ended in downtown Babylon. There were clothing stores and cafes, art galleries and gift shops. Because of its closeness to Fire Island, a large number of tourists visited it every summer.
They lay on the sidewalks and in the street. Some sat, confused and bleeding, others stood or paced back and forth. Children cried for their mothers, a man screamed the name of a woman over and over while looking around, dazed. Two men were fighting, punching each other and shouting.
“We have to walk from here,” Jennifer said. “It’s only a half mile to the harbor and we can’t drive through here.”
When Kasey looked up the road, she saw another group of riders approaching the underpass.
They grabbed the rifles. Kasey took her backpack.
“Can you walk?” she asked Jack.
“I don’t know.”
The two guys that were fighting stopped and looked toward them. They didn’t speak to each other. There was no agreement. The hatred and rage was simply redirected to someone else.
“They’re coming toward us,” Aarika said. “What are we gonna do?”
The man who was shouting his wife’s name stopped shouting. He turned toward them, too.
“You took her!” he screamed. “You took her from me!”
He ran toward them. Jennifer raised her rifle.
“Stop right there!” she shouted.
He continued as if he didn’t hear her. Jennifer fired into the air. He was ten feet away now and running directly toward Jennifer. Just before he reached her, Blair hit him with the baseball bat. He had aimed low and hit the man in the stomach. A couple of doors in the nearby stores opened. One man came out, shotgun in hand, aiming at Aarika who stood closest to him. Jennifer shot him before he could pull the trigger. More and more doors opened and people came out.
“Run!” Jennifer said.
Kasey and Blair flanked Jack and half carried him as they ran down the street. Jack could barely walk and they had to lift him up each time he used his right leg. The screaming intensified as the people attacked the riders who either shot them or sliced them open with their swords.
The intensity of emotion was overwhelming. The hostility was pure and powerful. Kasey felt dizzy and was afraid she was going to pass out any second. More and more people spilled into the street, their faces filled with rage.
Something caught Kasey’s eye on the left side. It was a sign.
The Surf
A door opened and a man appeared. He must have been in his seventies. His long white hair was thin and fell to his shoulders. When she looked from the man back up to the sign, she saw the second part.
The Loneliness of Time
She didn’t put it together consciously. She heard the screams behind her and Blair’s shotgun went off twice right next to her. The old man waved at her, signaling her to come inside. Instinctively, Kasey moved Jack toward the door. She didn’t know why. It wasn’t something she thought about.
“Jennifer!” she heard herself say. “Come this way!”
Jennifer looked at her in disbelief for a moment but followed her through the doorway and into the store. Aarika was next and Blair last. The man shut the door and pushed a massive steel reinforced bar into the brackets.
Sunday, 8:30 a.m. to 8:45 a.m.
The first thing Kasey noticed was that there was no window. From the outside it had looked like a regular oversized display window, like you find on most stores. From in here, she saw the windows were filled in with cinder blocks covered with large, colorful tapestries.
“Looks real from the outside, doesn’t it?” the man said.
Kasey felt a hint of déjà vu. It disappeared quickly.
“We need some water, and I don’t guess you have any antibiotics,” she said.
“Funny you should ask,” the man said. “But come this way. Unless you want to look for surfboards and vintage clothes. We’ve got shoes too.” With that, he looked at Blair. “Buy one pair, get the second one half off. It’s the deal of the day. Or week. Come to think of it, I believe that particular deal was always available to my customers.”
Kasey registered the English accent. She had lived in this town all her life, had walked this street hundreds of times but had never come in here. It smelled a bit like moth
balls. Her grandmother’s house in Queens had the same slightly sweet smell radiating from her bedroom closet. The man led them through yet another door into a dark room. He turned the light switch and closed the door. A heavy-duty steel bar reinforced this door as well.
“Bring the patient back here,” he said.
This room was twice the size of the store. The left side was basically a woodworking shop. There was a band saw, a large table saw, several work benches and wooden boards of all sizes leaning against the back. The wall on the right side of the room was covered in shelves. There were thousands of books, not only lined up on the shelves but also stacked on the floor, piled on top of each other. A few chairs stood randomly amidst the chaos. The wall adjacent to the door held another set of shelves. Those had everything on them from several dozen one-gallon water bottles to canned beans, toothpaste, boxes of oatmeal and large containers of spices and tea.
“What the heck,” Aarika said while holding an oversized can of tuna.
“You better ask before you take anything,” Blair said.
The back corner held a small half bath and another shelf. This one was filled with first-aid products. Everything from gauze to peroxide to antibiotic cream.
“Sit and let me take a look at you,” the man said. “The rest of you, take whatever you need. Eat, drink, use the restroom. We’ve got fifteen minutes. And then we’ve got another hour, roughly.” He looked at Kasey when he said it and at that moment she recognized him.
“You’re the man who gave me the amulet.”
It became quiet in the room. Aarika, on his way to the shelf of food, stopped and turned around. Everyone looked at the man who had taken a few items from the first-aid shelf and was spreading them out on a large book that lay on top of a stack of other books.
“Yes, I did.”
“I don’t understand,” Kasey said.
“Let me take care of this young man first, and then I’ll explain everything to you. Well, probably not everything but some of it at least.”
“I can help Jack,” Jennifer said. “I’m a doctor.”
He looked at her as if sizing her up for a second, then nodded.
“Why don’t you all take a seat.”
“I’d rather stand,” Kasey said. “But I’d really like to know what’s going on.”
