by D. J. Molles
“Hank,” Virgil whispered. “You hold onto Getty when we get inside, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Tria, Walter, we’re going to need to clear.”
“I don’t…” know how to clear, but Walter bit himself off with a clack of teeth and just nodded. “Okay. I’m ready.”
They hauled Getty as quietly as they could up the steps to the front door.
Walter had his rifle to his shoulder, pointing at the window.
That window.
Was someone watching him from the other side?
Virgil shoved Tria at the door. “I’ll breach. You’re first through. Okay?”
Tria just nodded, her mouth open, lips tense.
She squared herself to the door, rifle pointing at it as though it wasn’t there and she was already aiming for a target just beyond it.
Virgil put his back to the side of the door where the knob was. He nodded to Tria, then gave Walter a cold evaluation that seemed to say, I wish you were someone else, and then he reared one foot back and slammed it into the door.
The impact was loud and jarring.
The door rattled in its frame, but didn’t open.
Virgil didn’t miss a beat, almost as though he had expected it. He pulled his leg high again, knee almost to his chest this time, teeth bared white in the darkness and he hit the door again, and this time it splintered inward and the second it was open, Tria started moving forward.
Somewhere in the house, someone was already screaming.
“Daddy! Daddy!”
Tria went through the door.
Virgil twisted, brought his rifle up. He rolled his shoulder across the jam, then through the door.
Walter’s legs moved underneath him, carrying him through the door. He took a glance over his shoulder and saw Hank standing there with Getty draped over his shoulders staring at them with that same expression of wide-eyed and wondering fear that had invaded his face and occupied it ever since the mini bombs disintegrated their safehouse.
“Mommy! Daddy!” A child’s voice.
Then just screaming. A high-pitched wail.
Walter moved into chaotic darkness.
A stranger’s house.
No lights.
Furniture in places that Walter didn’t think it would be.
He saw a living room ahead of him. Wasn’t sure where the hell he was supposed to go, so he just kept going straight, his cheek pressed so hard to the stock of the battlerifle that it smarted, but he was barely able to process all of that, it was just a background of pain.
He cleared the entryway. Into the living room.
Tria was cutting left. Virgil was to his right.
The sound of a door slamming open.
Walter spun.
A bedroom door, with a light on.
The silhouette of a figure standing there, and Walter could see the big long gun in his hand, the hunting shotgun, the only weapon people were allowed to own anymore, and it was sad in comparison to the firepower that it faced.
Virgil had already peeled to the left of the open bedroom door.
The stranger whose house this was stood there, barechested, skinny, white legs protruding from the flared bottom of a pair of rumpled boxers. The man’s hair was wildly askew on his head, his eyes were wide, his teeth bared like a startled dog. The man said nothing, didn’t challenge them, didn’t yell. Walter didn’t think he could.
Across the house there was still the sound of screaming, but now Tria was also shouting, “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”
The man in the doorway locked eyes with Walter.
Walter realized, just a bit too late, that he was standing stupidly in the center of the living area, standing there with his shins up against a coffee table, and he just stared back, and he realized that he still had his rifle up, it was still pointing at the man, right at his chest.
“Drop,” Walter gasped nonsensically.
Drop your weapon was what he wanted to say, but it didn’t come out.
“Drop!” Walter repeated.
Virgil was out of the man’s line of sight, and he was edging forward as the man stood there in the doorway, his skinny legs beginning to prance with indecision, and behind him, in the bedroom, Walter saw the flutter of covers and another face, a woman’s face.
The man started to bring the shotgun up.
Why? Why are you doing that?
Virgil hit the man from the side. He had his own rifle tucked in tight with one hand, and with his free hand, he stiff-armed the shotgun, slamming it into the wall, and simultaneously buried the muzzle of his battlerifle in the man’s neck.
The man jumped back, but found only doorway to meet him.
Virgil pressed him hard into the doorframe. “Don’t you fucking move! You drop that fucking weapon! Drop it or I blow your fucking head off!”
The woman in the bedroom started screaming.
Not like the kid was screaming. Not a long, siren-like wail.
The lady was gasping out shouts: “Ah! Ah! Ah!”
Virgil kept his pressure on the man, but Walter saw his head stray just a bit to the side, taking in the bedroom and the woman who was flying across the bed and clammering for something, clammering for one of the dressers…
“Walter!” Virgil shouted. “Get her!”
Walter jumped forward, barked his shins on the coffee table but didn’t feel it. He pressed passed Virgil and into the doorway.
As he passed, Virgil kneed the man hard, grunting out, “Drop that thing!” as he did, and a second later, as Walter made it through the door, he heard the man cry out and the shotgun rattle to the floor.
The woman.
The woman.
Get her!
She was at the dresser now.
She wore a shirt that hung down below her hips. Walter wasn’t sure if she had anything else on. Just two people, asleep in the middle of the night, and now she was here, in the middle of a nightmare, trying to get to something in the dresser and Walter found himself shaking his head and saying, “Don’t don’t don’t” as the woman ripped open the top dresser drawer.
“Stop!” Walter said, but it came out a plea, rather than a command.
She didn’t stop. She was reaching into the drawer.
He couldn’t shoot her.
It wasn’t words that entered his brain. He didn’t consciously think them. It was just a heart-knowledge that was indisputable, didn’t need language to articulate itself. Walter launched himself forward and did the next best thing he could come up with, which was to kick the woman hard in the gut and send her careening off the dresser and blessedly away from it.
And then Walter said the most ridiculous thing. And as the words exited his mouth, he realized how ass-backwards they were, standing over this woman with eyes the size of dinner plates, hair tossed into her face, bare legs pushing her backwards against the edge of the bed, her hands uplifted as though to ward off blows.
Walter stood over her, pointing a rifle at her face, and he said, “It’s okay, it’s okay, ssh, we’re the good guys!”
Chapter 15
The man in the hallway was screaming at them, making wild animal sounds, and Walt heard what sounded like the hardened polymer end of the battlerifle hitting a face, and then the man was silent.
“Shut up!” Virgil shouted. “Just shut up!”
“Frank!” the lady shouted across the bed, scared eyes tracking between the muzzle of Walter’s rifle and the man who Virgil had just shut down temporarily. “The kids! My kids!”
“We’re not gonna hurt your kids,” Walter said earnestly, but he didn’t know if she heard him over her own shouting.
Outside of that bedroom, somewhere on the other side of the house, the children were still audible, but gone was the siren wail, and it was replaced by loud crying, and Tria’s voice, still telling them to be quiet.
Then the scuffling of feet from somewhere near where Tria was.
A man’s voice that Walter didn’t recognize s
houted: “Who the fuck are you?”
And then Hank yelped out, “Virgil! Help! She needs help!”
Virgil was halfway out of the door by the time Hank called for him. He pointed quickly to the man on the ground that he’d just laid out. “Watch him!”
And then it was just Walter, standing there in a stranger’s bedroom, a room that smelled thickly of sleep, of other people’s skin, other people’s breath, and it was oddly, eerily intimate, and Walter felt like he had perverted this room, he had tainted it by being there, like he had violated them…
Walter took a step back from the woman, instinctively putting his back to the corner of the room. The man named Frank was on his bottom, just in the doorway, his back against the wall, holding his face, his nose, which was red and bleeding down in sheets that covered his upper lip.
Two to one, Walter thought.
He gripped the rifle tighter and swung it back and forth between the two of them, the woman and the man, who looked at each other secretively, knowingly, even in their panic, and Walter did not like that look.
“Y’all don’t move,” Walter said shakily. “You hear me? Listen to me. I swear to God. I will kill you both. I don’t…I don’t want to hurt anybody, okay? But I will kill you.”
He wasn’t even convinced of the words that he was saying.
He wondered if they were.
“Don’t hurt my kids,” the woman said. “Don’t you do it.”
It was a warning. Not begging. Demanding.
“Nobody’s gonna hurt your kids,” Walter said.
Out beyond the bedroom door, there was a giant crash, a grunting growling sound like two beasts locked in combat, and the children started screaming again. Something shattered. Something cracked. Something broke into pieces. Virgil and Tria and whoever it was they were fighting were all shouting, but Walter couldn’t hear a goddamned word anybody was saying.
The woman was crying.
Walter watched her, trying to think of something else to say, something that would make everything just so abundantly clear that everyone would throw up their hands and say, “Oh, well, if you’da told us that sooner…”
His eyes jagged to the right, to the man at the door.
He saw the man’s eyes, lingering on the floor just outside the door.
Then they jerked back to Walter, guilty.
What was on the floor?
The shotgun.
Walter started shaking his head. “Don’t do it,” he said. “Don’t, mister. No one needs to get hurt.”
Movement out of the corner of his eye.
The woman.
Walter jerked back to her, saw her fingers perilously close to her PD, the little black square on her otherwise bare arms. “No!” he shouted. “Don’t touch that!”
Back to the man.
“Sir, I’m telling you not to reach for that shotgun. You do it and…and…”
Peripherally, the woman’s hand, getting closer to her PD.
Walter put the rifle on her, indignant now, speaking through his teeth: “Lady! You wanna kill us all? What the hell do you think is gonna happen if you call? Do you have any idea what’s going on out there? ‘Cause it ain’t gonna be the police that show up. It’ll be the New Breeds, and they’d just as soon wipe this whole house out as filter through the bad and the good.”
Walter switched the rifle back to the man. “Do you know what’s going on out there?”
The man was still holding his face. He didn’t seem to be planning a go for the shotgun. But Walter’s brain was so frazzled in that moment, there was no telling how much of what he was interpreting from their body language was accurate and how much was just wishful thinking.
“We heard the shots,” the man said, unsteadily, his voice slightly muffled behind his hand, slightly nasally. “Was that you?”
Walter nodded quickly. “That was us. Okay? That was us. And we are in a world of shit. Not just us. But everyone in Eighty-Eighty-Nine.”
“Wha…what’s going on?” the woman stammered.
“They’re purging the District,” Walter said. “They’ve blocked all the roads out and they’ve cut off the network.” He nodded to her PD. “If you tried to call any number but emergency services you’d get a message telling you the network was down.”
“Are you resistance?” the woman asked.
“Beverly!” the man said sharply. “It don’t matter who they are, they’re not supposed to be here!”
“Listen…” Walter tried.
The man was raising his voice now. “You’re putting us all in danger!”
Walter felt the rising tide of his anger getting the best of him. Patience wasn’t his strong suit, and his faculties were so worn thin at that precise moment, that even if he’d had a conscious mind to control his anger, it probably wouldn’t have worked.
He shook his rifle in the man’s direction. “You a loyalist?” he demanded. “That what you are?”
The man flinched away, but didn’t answer.
Walter was feeling hot. All that hot lava in his bloodstream again.
“You like the Chicoms and the Russians here?” he shouted at the man, stepped closer to him. “You like the CoAx? You okay with everything they do? Huh, motherfucker? You okay with the fact that they can do whatever the fuck they want? You okay with the fact that they could swoop in here right now and kill everyone in this house and never have to answer for it?” Walter wanted to kick the man, just barely restrained himself. “You think it’s okay that they disappeared my wife?”
“Walter!”
The shout obliterated his anger like a wrecking ball through old, moldering brick.
Walter jerked himself back from the brink and blinked rapidly. He looked first at the woman, saw the fear in her eyes, fear of him, and he did not like that, it soured in his gut.
Then he looked to his right and he saw Virgil standing there in the doorway. He raised his chin and clenched his lips down to a thin line and met Virgil’s judgement with defiance. “What?”
A few seconds passed. The two of them staring at each other.
Then Virgil looked at the woman and the man, and he stepped into the bedroom and he waved his rifle. “Get up,” he said, sternly. “Go into the living room. Your children are waiting for you.”
The woman got up eagerly. She shuffled her way out of the corner of the bed, struggling a bit and Walter caught himself before he leaned out to offer a hand to her. Maybe it would have been nice, but they were passed nice, weren’t they? He hadn’t forgotten the anger. It was still down inside. It was there. It would always be there.
The woman edged passed Walter, who refused to make room for her to get by him. She slid across the corner of the bed, flinching away from him like he was a six-foot saw blade whirring away, and whatever piece of her accidentally touched him would immediately get lopped off.
Walter stared at her as she went. The man rose up and followed his wife. He cast a look over his shoulder and caught Walter’s eyes for a moment. Walter stared balefully back at him and the man looked away. He and his wife shuffled themselves into the living room like beaten sheep.
Walter shifted his hot gaze to Virgil.
The other man stood there directly across from him, his rifle hanging in his grip.
“What was that about?” Virgil said.
Walter took an aggressive step towards him, closing the distance, entering that portion of airspace that you might call “personal.” He stuck his chin out and looked down his nose at Virgil, and the feeling of revolt was uncomfortably addictive.
At this distance, Walter could smell Virgil. He could smell the sweat and the body odor, and the woody, dirty smell from running through the forest and the field, and hiding beneath it, the floundering remnants of Virgil’s cologne which seemed so strange and out of place in that moment, like it should have belonged to someone else, not this dirty bastard holding a rifle.
“Who do you think you are, Virgil?” Walter said, barely more than a whisper
between them.
Virgil’s jaw worked, indignant. “I’m—”
“Listen to me!” Walter spit at him. “You walk around like you can barely support the weight of your own swinging cock, but do you wanna know the truth, Virgil? The truth is that you rely on me.” Walter shook his head so hard that sweat flung off his nose. “You can pretend all you want that you’re doing me a favor, looking out for me because that’s what Roy asked you to do before they got him. But you and I both know that you couldn’t interrogate your way out of a paper bag. So don’t stand there and act like I’m still the tagalong kid. You’re not doing me any favors. I don’t owe you a goddamned thing.”
Virgil’s face had gone beet red. His eyes like embers. He opened his mouth to retort, but Tria yelled at them from outside the bedroom.
“Virgil! Can we get some help here?”
Virgil gave Walter one last, hard look, and then turned and stepped quickly out of the bedroom.
Walter took a deep and shaky breath, and he wasn’t relieved, didn’t feel good. Felt angrier than ever. He stalked out of the room after Virgil and entered the living room.
The living room was a small square of space with an ancient couch and a few chairs that were no better. The chairs were empty, but on the couch was huddled the entirety of a family: The mother and father, a man who seemed too old to be one of their children, and was possibly a brother, and then the two children themselves—a boy and a girl.
A boy and a girl, Walter thought, absently as he looked at them and they looked back at him.
A boy and a girl, because that is what you are allowed to have.
Maybe.
If you’re a “match.”
What a lucky couple.
Directly behind the couch was where the kitchen and dining room began, all one room, it seemed. The dining table was a small, square thing, and Tria and Hank were pulling Getty laboriously onto the table, Tria madly swinging her hands across the table surface, sweeping off placemats and a cup that had been left there from an earlier dinner.
Walter watched the cup fly off and crash to the floor. He expected it to shatter, but it held and simply gonged thoughtlessly across the floor and rolled into a corner.
