by James Sperl
Slowly and shakily she got to her feet. In the queerest sensation, she felt no threat from the person with the rifle and when three more black-clothed figures donning ski masks appeared out of the darkness, each with a rifle of their own, Catherine experienced an overwhelming wash of relief course through her body.
Two of the figures moved past Mattias and stepped rapidly towards what Catherine could only assume was the location of the downed and crippled Muttonchops.
Crack. Crack.
Catherine jerked her head savagely at the noise, much louder this time, fully aware now that the sound she was hearing were rifle shots.
Clutching Tamara snugly, Catherine peered over her shoulder at Adidas Man who had yet to move. She saw the flap of bloodied scalp lying like a discarded yarmulke over his cheek and ear and discovered in an instant why.
Jesus Christ, she thought.
“Josh!” she yelled, bursting into a sudden surge of speed that spooked the Person in Black holding the gun to Mattias. Catherine clung to Tamara and ran in the direction of the shot. What if Josh woke up? He wouldn’t know who was who and could very likely misinterpret the People in Black as similar criminals bent on terrorizing innocents.
Josh was still unconscious and as Catherine knelt down to examine him heard footsteps approaching from out of the darkness. The People in Black all turned and trained their weapons into the shadows as Abby materialized.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” Catherine shouted. “She’s my daughter!”
The People in Black lowered their rifles as Abby slammed into Catherine, hugging her and Tamara fiercely and crying uncontrollably. Catherine held them close, looking beyond them at the faceless body of Muttonchops as he lay sprawled on the cement, two People in Black standing over him, their rifles still smoking.
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Catherine said, tears spilling from her own eyes. “Everybody’s okay. We’re okay.”
Catherine glanced up at the People in Black just as one of them knelt down beside Josh and inspected his head wound. And in a move that surprised her, the person reached for his mask and pulled it over his head revealing a grizzled man in his fifties with welcoming, kind eyes.
“I think he’ll be all right,” the Grizzled Man said as he pulled a cloth from an ammo bag and applied it to Josh’s temple. “Probably gonna need some stitches, though. You all okay?”
“Yeah. I think so,” Catherine managed to croak out.
Another person in black strode purposefully up to the group and stared down at Grizzled Man’s activities over Josh.
“He gonna be all right?” a rough, but distinctively female voice said.
“He’ll live. They’re okay. And I’m hungry.”
The Woman in Black then took two steps toward Catherine and pulled her own mask back exposing a rugged looking woman in her mid-forties. “Ma’am, will you come with me? You’re safe now. Your kids can stay here with Charlie.”
“That’s me,” Charlie the Grizzled Man said, indicating himself with a wave of his arm.
Under any normal circumstances, Catherine would have never even considered leaving her children in the care of strangers with guns let alone those who had just killed people. But their miraculous arrival, which had undoubtedly saved her and her family, instilled in her a level of trust never before attained even with some of the folks she used to call friends. Besides, what was normal these days anyway?
“Uh, okay,” Catherine said, turning to Abby. “I’ll be right back. Just stay with your sister. Everything’s fine.”
“Mom, don’t leave,” Abby pleaded. “Please, just stay here.”
“Yeah, mommy, don’t go,” Tamara said, eyes already welling.
“Are those Skechers?” Charlie asked Abby, his soothing, whiskey soaked voice usurping the conversation.
Abby turned and looked at Charlie then down at her own feet. “Yes,” she finally said, wiping her tear stained face.
“What are they? Dream Street series?”
“Yeah,” Abby confirmed, turning just a bit to face him.
“My daughter had a pair of those and loved ‘em. Where’d you find ‘em in turquoise?”
“They were a limited edition run. My mom and I found them at an outlet store.”
“That so,” Charlie said, turning his attention to Tamara. “And you, little miss. If I’m not mistaken those look like Merrells.”
Tamara’s eyes brightened at Charlie’s accuracy. “These weren’t the ones I really wanted. But they were all out of the cinnamon.”
Charlie’s eyes darted briefly to Catherine just long enough for her to catch the flutter-like wink of his right eye.
“That’s too bad,” he continued with Tamara. “But I think sage suits you better anyway.”
“How’d you know they were sage?” Tamara said, turning more to him, her back now completely facing Catherine.
“Oh, I know lots of useless stuff. Shoes just happen to be one of my most useless. You ever tried DC Kids? Or the new line of Kitsons?”
“No,” the girls said in unison.
“Aw, they’re really neat. I’ll have to show you a few. What’re some of your favorites...?”
The girls began to answer simultaneously, their words overlapping one another in growing enthusiasm as the woman, picking up on Charlie’s provision of an exit, grabbed Catherine by the elbow and escorted her in the other direction.
Catherine looked at the woman. “Look, I don’t even know how to begin to thank you for what you’ve done. We owe you our lives.”
“It’s all right. Really. The way things are nowadays, we’ve all gotta look out for one another,” the woman said.
“You couldn’t be more right. I’m Catherine.”
“Janet,” the woman said shaking Catherine’s extended hand.
“What happened here?” Catherine asked.
Janet whipped her head suddenly in Catherine’s direction, a look of utter confusion mixed with mild disgust scrawled on her face. “What happened?”
Catherine immediately regretted this question and wished desperately for a time machine to go back and redo the previous ten seconds. It was extremely premature to be fishing for answers. And the thought of having to explain how she and her kids had been so fortunate as to not be present on the day the world collapsed had never occurred to her.
Janet looked Catherine up one side and down the other, silently assessing her. “We’ll talk later. Right now, we have something to attend to. Or rather, someone.”
Catherine scrunched her face at this and as she rounded a disheveled clump of brush realized with heart sinking dread that, after Muttonchops, she’d heard no more shots.
Mattias was on his knees now, one of the People in Black standing directly behind him with the barrel of his rifle jammed so hard into the nape of his neck it forced his head forward in a contorted manner.
Janet stopped Catherine and looked down on the man as he craned his head up to meet their condemning gaze.
“I guess this means the wedding’s off,” Mattias giggled, his gapped, stained teeth visible for the first time.
Janet said nothing as she withdrew a nine-millimeter SIG-Sauer from a holster, drew back the slide and let it snap dramatically back into place. Without her eyes ever leaving Mattias’s twisted gaze, she handed the gun to Catherine and stepped back.
Catherine couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d just been given a jar of pickles. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” she said, shocked.
“Make it right,” Janet said coldly, matter-of-factly.
Catherine held the gun firmly, seating it in her palm. The weight felt good and she imagined the recoil was tolerable. She looked at Mattias who glared back at her with nothing short of contempt. It made her want to put an end to his miserable life all the more with his smug, insidious sneering. To shove the barrel into the greasy, sweat-soaked ridges of his brow and pull the damn trigger. And after all was said and done he’d see who had contempt for whom. B
ut as much as she wanted to be the angel of vengeance for her daughter and vanquish the vile cockroach of a man kneeling before her, the irrepressible moral dilemma of the moment arose in her like a Phoenix from the ashes: She wasn’t a killer.
Catherine took a step backward and returned the weapon to Janet. “I can’t.”
Janet took the pistol in her right hand and clutched it by her side. “If you’re gonna live in this world, you better learn.”
“Ooooh, sugar mama don’t have the cajones,” Mattias said tauntingly, turning his attention to Janet. “But we got us a new player in the game. What’s your name, sweetheart? You need some help figuring out that heavy gun? I can show you a thing—”
Stocky Man’s brains blew out the back of his skull onto the pavement in a Jackson Pollack-like splash. His body crumpled and fell onto its side in a lifeless pile. His feet twitched lightly as his head bled out into a crimson puddle.
Catherine stared in horror at the man she had wished dead no more than five minutes ago, feeling no particular sense of gratification at it having come true. She turned from the forever-dead Mattias and looked over at Janet, the gun hanging limply at her side, tiny wisps of smoke escaping from the barrel.
Janet tucked the firearm back into her holster then spat on the ground near Mattias’s body. “The name’s Janet, asshole.”
8
The Heroes of Bayview
It took six stitches to sew up Josh’s head. The man doing the detail, Dr. Elliot Shavers, a thirty-three year old veterinarian, was upfront about his relative inexperience with human patients. But since there were no doctors of the medical variety to be found, he had qualified as ranking surgeon.
Catherine watched him perform the procedure and was impressed both with his quick and precise stitching skills as well as Josh’s ability to undergo said treatment without a drop of topical anesthesia. The stitches would be able to be removed in a couple of weeks and as Catherine ran her fingers a hair’s breadth away from them in her post-op inspection, still found difficulty in accepting how everything had turned out.
Lying back on a cot blanketed with a nylon sleeping bag, Josh swallowed a couple of Tylenol with a glass of water. He lifted his head and winced, making short work of the Gelcaps with a swig of water before returning to the cot.
“How you doing, kiddo?” Catherine said to him as she brushed his sweaty hair from his forehead.
“All right, all things considered.”
“You can say that again. How’s your head?”
“The stitches are okay. It’s the frickin’ throbbing in my temple that’s killing me.” Josh clenched his fists. “Damn, I wished I would’ve seen that guy coming. I would’ve—”
“You would’ve what?” Catherine intercepted. “I’ll tell you. You would’ve been beat to hell, then probably...” She swallowed what felt like a golf ball. “Probably the best thing that could’ve happened to you was getting an unwelcome nap.”
“Yeah, whatever,” he said with a smirk. “I guess the good news is that we made contact. These people should be able to help, don’t you think?”
“One could only hope so,” Catherine said with a tiny smile. “Listen, I’m going to go check on your sisters. I think Tamara is working on her third ice cream cone and I’ll bet at this point Charlie needs some rescuing. You just try and get some rest, okay?”
“All right,” Josh agreed as he turned and stared at the ceiling. Catherine got to her feet when Josh said, “Pretty amazing what they’ve done here, don’t you think?”
Catherine glanced over her surroundings and couldn’t help but agree. “Pretty amazing,” she said.
But amazing didn’t do it justice.
It was spectacular.
Walking back from the attack, Catherine got a first look at her temporary new home in the predawn darkness, having been told that they had “just made it back in the knick of time.” Making it back from what she was unsure, and the opportunity to follow this statement with the obvious question had eluded her.
She’d wanted to laugh at one point and worked hard to suppress a giggle when she saw the edifice come into view. George A. Romero would’ve been proud, she thought to herself. As she and her family entered the heavily fortified front entrance of Bayview Mall, she became tickled at the notion of life imitating art—a pop cultural institution inspired and re-envisioned by pop culture.
But whereas Romero’s particular premise had involved only a ragtag group of survivors left to contend with the idea of life amid mass consumerism, the scene before Catherine suggested a much more dire and desperate plea for survival. One that wanted to cling to the tenets of what it meant to be a civilized human being back before those unwritten social mores were sent packing.
The main headquarters had been situated in a dramatically reorganized and redeveloped Sears department store. To Catherine, it seemed a stroke of genius. Entire departments had been moved and reallocated to accommodate for a small population. The sporting goods and exercise equipment section had been completely removed and in its place were as many cots, sleeping bags and tents as the store could provide.
In the appliances section, useless and resource wasting devices such as dishwashers, washers and dryers had been shoved into an out of the way corner. But in their space, refrigerators had been lined side by side in varying models, each plugged into an orange extension cord which snaked along the back of the unit and into the ceiling, disappearing into what Catherine could only assume was a room full of generators running from somewhere.
Adjacent to the fridges were makeshift wash stations comprised of several brands of camping kitchens, Coleman being the predominant winner. Some appeared to be equipped with pressurized faucets while others had to rely on suspended or shelved water jugs operated via stopcock. The wastewater for each sink was directed by hose into a large drum not unlike the ones found on Four Star Retreat. Portable workbenches had been assembled and placed beside the sinks along with an array of cutlery and cooking utensils. Shelving had also been erected and served as a storage area for pots and pans, dishware, glasses and mugs.
Rounding out what Catherine would eventually learn was called “Hell’s Kitchen” were propane camping stoves arranged in a small semi-circle. Frying pans, boiler pots and even teakettles hung from wire racks fastened to each stove.
The efficiency and organization was on par with military execution. And for a bunch of scared, struggling civilians that said a ton. Catherine marveled at how so much had been accomplished in so short a time. Never underestimate the will of man, she thought. He can be a stubborn breed.
She weaved her way through the cluster of patio furniture and picnic benches that now served as the dining and commons area. And if there were any question as to its purpose, a hand painted sign which read “Boston Common: We Got Good Eats!” was suspended over the centermost table.
She could see Tamara and Abby sitting at a glass-topped patio table, the umbrella to it erected in a mocking gesture to what seemed a mostly nocturnal lifestyle—another in the list of a thousand questions she had for Janet. Charlie sat with them, one foot on the table as he pointed out some interesting tidbit on his left boot.
Heading towards them, Catherine managed an escape from the maze of tables and found herself at their perimeter, standing directly in front of what would be considered by most people a fully stocked grocery store. Shelves were filled with food of all types and all storage mediums—boxed, canned, freeze-dried, bottled or bagged—and, amazingly, very little space went unused.
Catherine walked past the mini-mart and nodded amiably to an armed man who seemed to be positioned there solely to guard the stores.
She wound her way to Abby and Tamara who were clearly in much better spirits. And Catherine was glad for it. Tamara waved enthusiastically at her mother as she approached. Reaching the table she sat beside them.
“Charlie, I hereby relieve you of duty and nominate you for the Congressional Medal of Honor,” Catherine said.
&nb
sp; “Now don’t you go wasting another second thinking about what happened tonight,” Charlie said with a wave of his hand. “I’m just glad we was able to get to you all in time.”
“I was actually talking about you spending time with my daughters.”
Charlie gawked at Catherine like a deer in headlights, then erupted in a contagious belly laugh. “Well, they been tough, but I managed to get by all right. Now don’t forget,” he said, turning to Tamara and Abby, “tomorrow we’re gonna see about getting you all some of those DCs. I know a great store near here.” Charlie smiled and rose to his feet just as Janet sauntered up to the table.
“He’s not boring you all to death over here, is he?” Janet said with a grin.
The entire table snapped their heads up at Janet’s arrival. Catherine almost didn’t recognize the woman in front of her as the same person who had not so long ago ended the life of Mattias with a single bullet between the eyes. The color black had always had an ominous psychological effect and seeing Janet in blue jeans and a simple t-shirt seemed to place her back on equal ground.
“Hey, now, what’s that supposed to mean?” Charlie quipped jovially.
“Quite the opposite,” Catherine replied. “I think he may have even been initiated into the sisterhood by now.”
“He knows a ton about shoes,” Tamara began.
“Yeah,” Abby continued, “and his daughter has a pair of Vans like mine, mom. Only hers were imported from Europe and have gold trimming along the...what did you call it, Charlie?
“The throat, darlin’.”
“Yeah, the throat. They sound so cool. She’s got great taste in fashion. I bet we’d really get along.”
