by Jack Kilborn
At first Sara thought they were homeless people like she was used to seeing on the streets of Detroit, dirty and hairy with tattered clothes. But their snarls, and the crude tree clubs they brandished, made them look more like savages; some crazed prehistoric tribe of headhunters from an epoch long passed. Both of them were thin, bare arms rippled with muscles, wearing the same insane, malevolent expression, and it took Sara a moment to realize one of them was a woman—the only way to distinguish her from her partner was the lack of facial hair.
The man snarled, spit flecking his filthy lips, and then charged.
He kept his arm high, ready to bring down his weapon in a clubbing motion. Textbook attack, even if he wasn’t a textbook assailant. Sara went in under the arc of his arm, pivoted her body while grabbing him, and flipped him over her hip, hard, using leverage and momentum to her advantage. She turned on him quickly, kneeling on his ribcage, and cocked her hand back.
She’d thrown the killing blow a thousand times in judo practice, but always pulled the punch. This time she didn’t, giving it all she had, her fist connecting with his bulging Adam’s apple. She both felt and heard something crack beneath her knuckles.
Without pausing to reflect on what she’d just done, Sara whirled on the second attacker, who now stood behind Laneesha, a rusty kitchen knife pressed to the teen’s throat.
“Instep!” Sara yelled.
A small spark of recognition registered in Laneesha’s eyes, the intended result of the many self-defense classes Sara taught at the Center, and she lifted up her right foot and ground the heel down onto the woman’s.
The woman howled, stumbling backwards, and then limped off into the night. Sara didn’t pursue her, instead running to Laneesha for an embrace.
“Are you okay” and “I was so scared” came out at the same time, and then Laneesha began to cry. Sara held the girl, but it didn’t take long for her to calm down. Laneesha was made of strong stuff.
“I thought…I thought I was dead.”
“I know.”
“Why’d they grab me? What’d they want?”
“I don’t know.”
First they went for Martin, and now Laneesha. What the hell was going on?
Sara turned and looked at the man. He was still on his back, hands clawing at his throat. Sara knew she’d broken his trachea, cut off his airway. There was nothing she could do to help him. Sara watched him struggle, even though it was excruciating to see someone suffer so. Mercifully, he stopped moving after a very long minute, and the weight of her actions pressed on Sara like a crate of falling bricks.
I took a human life. I’m a murderer.
“He dead?”
Sara watched his chest, didn’t notice it moving. “Yes.”
She patted the girl’s back, then took a step toward the dead man. Laneesha grabbed her wrist.
“Whatchoo doin’?”
Part of Sara wanted, needed, to touch him, just so she could persuade herself this was all real, that she’d really done what she knew she’d done. Since high school Sara had been involved in the martial arts and self-defense—an obvious reaction to what had happened that fateful day at the mall. Every teacher she ever had, and even Sara herself when she began to teach, repeated time and again the importance of not holding back when in a real fight.
But none of her instructors told her how it actually felt. Part of Sara was exhilarated that she survived. But a larger part, the part that recognized how every human life was precious, made her feel like she’d just committed an unpardonable sin.
“I need to search him,” Sara heard herself say, “try to figure out who he is. I have to call the authorities, tell them what I did.”
“You saved me.”
Sara’s veneer cracked even further. “I… I just killed a man, Laneesha.”
“It was self-defense. You save my life.”
Sara managed a nod, then tried to pull away. Laneesha held her tight.
“Don’t go over there.”
“I have to check him for ID. This man might have a family somewhere.”
“Look at him, Sara. Any family he got don’t care he be dead.”
Sara stared hard at the corpse, his open mouth exposing a jungle of missing and rotten teeth, eyes bloodshot and staring into infinity. The shoes on his feet were battered old Nikes with the toes exposed, and his pants were held up with a length of rope. Even in death he looked fearsome. But still, he was someone’s son, and maybe someone’s brother, husband, father. Sara often felt she was put on this earth to help those in need, and here she’d just murdered one of them.
“You have to let go of my arm, Laneesha.”
“I’m afraid you go over there, he gonna jump up and grab you.”
“That isn’t going to happen.”
“I seen the movies. He gonna jump up.”
Sara tugged her arm away, a move both sudden and angry. “He’s not going to jump up! He’s not going to do anything ever again except rot! I killed him, Laneesha!”
Then the trembling started, and the tears came. Sara stood there for a moment, feeling alone and impotent and dangerous, and then she felt Laneesha hugging her, giving her comfort, and Sara regained control.
“There…” Sara cleared her throat, “there may be more of them, out there. Let me check the body and then we’ll get back to Martin, and the camp. Cell phones don’t work out here, but we have that radio the captain gave us. We can call for help.”
Laneesha released her. Sara approached the body reverently, kneeling next it and placing two fingers on its neck to feel for a pulse she knew wouldn’t be there. She jerked her hand back when she felt the broken windpipe beneath the skin.
Stay focused, get this over with.
Sara crinkled her nose against his odor and began to pat him down. His pockets were empty except for a rusty fork and a length of balled up twine.
The poor bastard.
She was putting the twine into her pocket when the man jerked up into a sitting position and lunged at her.
Tyrone wasn’t sure how they’d gone from being barely friends to holding hands, but he didn’t mind. He’d been with girls before, but never anything more than a quick lay at the club house. To bangers, girls were like liquor and drugs; a way to have some fun and kill some time. While Tyrone indulged, he was never really okay with the whole hooking up thing. Not just because of diseases and babies and stuff like that, but because two of the people he respected most in the world were his moms and grams, and if they deserved respect then other women did too.
So Tyrone never actually had what he could call a girlfriend. For him, joining a gang was a financial opportunity, a better way to make some cash than some dead-end fast food job. His family needed money, and Tyrone took on that responsibility. He lived the thug life, but didn’t breathe it like some of the other dogs in the club, and certainly wasn’t going to do it forever. Getting arrested for hitting a liquor store was probably the best thing that could have happened to him. It gave him a chance to reevaluate things.
Holding Cindy’s hand, simple act that it was, felt better and more real than anything he’d done while rolling with the People’s Nation. It didn’t matter that Cindy was white, or a drug addict. She radiated an inner strength, and had plans for what she’d do when she was released. Cindy was going to get a job waiting tables and save up money to go back to school. A simple ambition, but Tyrone had been without ambition for so long it made him realize the simple things in life were the ones worth doing. He’d always been good at math. Maybe he should try to do something with it. Become an accountant, or some shit like that.
“We should check on Tom,” Cindy glanced at the tent. “He shouldn’t be in there.”
“I think he’s lookin’ for his meds. Sara didn’t give him none tonight.”
“Still, he could be messing things up. Or stealing stuff.”
“True that, but we know what Tommy Boy is like when he’s off his pills. You wanna have to deal with him running around, trippin’ out
on everything, ‘specially when things are falling apart?”
Cindy shook her head. Tyrone gently rubbed his thumb over her knuckles. Too many people would rather fight to the death to defend their bullheaded positions. Tyrone was impressed whenever someone changed their mind. It meant acting on reason, and with reason came self-improvement, as Sara often said.
“Where do you think everyone else is?” Cindy asked.
“Dunno.”
“What happened to Meadow?”
“Dunno. Sounded like someone dragged him off.”
“How about Sara and Laneesha? And Georgia? And what about Martin?”
“Don’t do no good to speculate on what we don’t know. They either all okay, or they ain’t. We find out when we find out.”
“Wassup, bitches?”
Tyrone turned toward Sara’s tent, and saw Tom posing there. What Tom was holding made Tyrone’s neck muscles bunch up.
Where did he get a gun?
The first time Tyrone ever held a piece was at age thirteen. An old Saturday night special, thirty-eight caliber, with a history going back dozens of crimes. It was put in his hands by Stony, a cold-as-ice muthafucker who ran the local club like it was the Marines. To Stony, guns weren’t toys to play with or bling to flash. They were tools. Like any tool, it was only as good as the person who held it.
Tyrone learned to shoot in a slumhouse basement, blinking empty soda cans propped onto a stacked pile of dead sod from fifty feet away. There wasn’t no gangsta-style double gun shooting, and certainly no holding a weapon sideways, like Tom was doing now.
Aiming right at Tyrone.
“You never point a weapon at somethin’ you don’ intend to kill,” Tyrone said, keeping his voice even.
Tom laughed. “What’s wrong, brutha? Making you nervous?”
“Tom! Put that down!”
“You gonna make me, skank?”
Tyrone gave Cindy’s hand a tight squeeze, told her under his breath to be cool, then gave her a little shove to the side and took a step toward Tom. Tom switched his aim to Cindy, which wasn’t Tyrone’s intent. He wanted Cindy out of the line of fire.
“Tommy boy, put that shit down before you hurt yourself.”
Tom swung back to Tyrone. “You think you’re so badass, Tyrone. You and Meadow. Bangin’ and jackin’ and doin’ drive-bys and shit. Don’t look so tough now.”
Tyrone took another step forward. Tom’s aim was twitching back and forth. That sideways grip looked cool in the movies, but unless you were point blank it was real tough to hit anything. It was tough enough to hit anything with both hands on the weapon and a steady target. Aiming a gun was a lot harder than it looked. Tyrone had been in one firefight, him and a brother named Maurice against two boppers from a rival outfit. It went down in an alley, and they were twenty yards away from each other with no cover. Sixteen shots fired, no one hitting anything except for bricks and asphalt before both cliques ran off.
Still, Tyrone didn’t want to get ventilated by a lucky shot, and having a gun pointed anywhere close to him was a sobering situation. Time was moving so slow that Tyrone felt like he could sense each blood cell inchworming through his veins. He desperately wanted to get his life back on track, to live up to his potential, to make his mama and grandmamma proud. Dying out in the woods because some loony kid was off his meds was not the way he wanted to go out.
“You ever shot a gun before, Tom?”
Tom sneered. “Plenty of times.”
He was lying. Tyrone was good at spotting lies, but with Tom it was easy. Every third thing out of that kid’s mouth was BS.
“I bet you a ten-spot you can’t hit that log Martin been sittin’ on.”
Tom glanced sideways. “I can hit that, no problem.”
Tyrone put his hands in his pockets, all cool and casual, and walked two steps closer. He was fifteen feet away from Tom. As soon as the kid gave him a chance, he was going to bum rush the fool. No use trying to talk down a head case.
“I give you three tries to nail it.”
“You really don’t think I can hit that log?”
Tyrone took another step. “I’m puttin’ my money on it.”
“Log’s too easy.” Tom grinned, his eyes glinting in the firelight, and then he switched his aim. “How about I try for Cindy instead?”
Georgia walked alongside Lester, through the woods, barely able to see because of the darkness. The tall man had his hand under her armpit, gripping her biceps, and his fingers were so long they completely encircled her arm. It wasn’t a powerful hold, and Georgia probably could have twisted away, but to what end? She had nowhere to run to.
Besides, even though he was trying to be all scary, she sort of liked the guy.
He was all scary, no doubt. In a lot of ways, he reminded Georgia of her old nanny, the one who used to do those things to her and make her swear she’d never tell. Lester had the same powerful vibe, the kind that was ready to go full-blown sadistic when given the chance.
“Where are we going?”
“Lester is taking the girl to his playroom.”
“It sounds fun.” Actually, it didn’t sound fun at all. Georgia felt her whole body shudder, conjuring up images of what horrible things this man had in his playroom.
“It is fun. For Lester.”
“Maybe I’ll have fun too.”
He stopped and looked down at her. The moon peeked through the trees, silhouetting his massive form.
“No, the girl won’t. No one ever does. The girl will beg to die, like all the others.”
Georgia didn’t hesitate. She reached up her free hand and put it behind Lester’s neck—it was like hanging onto a tree—and then she leaned up and kissed him.
She’d never kissed a boy before, let alone a man, let alone a maniac. But she knew everything in life was about control. So far, he’d been calling the shots. But maybe she could confuse him a little bit.
Lester did seem confused, and when her mouth locked on his he pulled slightly back, lifting her up off her feet, her body pressing into his.
Georgia held on for a moment, couldn’t sustain her own weight, then dropped to the ground.
The rejection was almost as painful as the thought of what this psycho was going to do to her. She knew she wasn’t attractive. And even though she was seventeen, a year past the age of consent in Michigan, she often wondered if she’d die a virgin. Georgia preferred to remain asexual, and her fantasies were more about hurting others than getting laid.
But, still, her first kiss, and the creep pulled away.
“Don’t you like me?” she asked, trying to keep the disappointment out of her voice.
Lester didn’t reply.
“I like you.” Georgia reached for his pants, her hand brushing against him. When she touched his fly she lit up. He was hard.
Were men really that easy to manipulate?
“You do like me. So why can’t you kiss me?”
Lester bent down again. “Lester can kiss. But he might chew on the girl’s lips and bite off the girl’s pretty little tongue.”
“The girl’s name is Georgia,” she said, tilting up her chin and kissing him again before she lost her nerve. At first, his mouth was closed, his lips cool and still. Then he opened his mouth, just a bit, and she probed inside with her tongue.
His teeth were sharp, sharp enough to draw blood if she pressed against them too hard. If he actually tried to bite he could probably tear off her lower jaw.
She forced her tongue in deeper, touching his, poking against it. Lester’s tongue was wet and slimy like raw liver, but not unpleasant. Then his mouth closed a bit, the pointy teeth trapping her, exerting just enough pressure for it to just begin to hurt, for blood just to begin flowing.
Georgia didn’t pull away. Instead, she stuck her hand down the front of Lester’s pants.
Lester’s whole body went rigid, and Georgia thought she’d screwed up, that he was going to munch on her with those terrible teeth, gnaw every bit o
f flesh off of her face.
And then, unexpectedly, he moaned.
I actually made a man moan.
She felt almost giddy with power, kissing him even deeper, beginning to work her hand in a way she guessed a man would like.
Maybe it didn’t matter, and Lester would still take her back to his playroom and torture her to death. But at that moment, Georgia felt wonderfully normal, like those braindead cheerleaders she used to go to school with, or the old couple who lived in her mom’s apartment building that were always holding hands. She thought about returning to the campsite, and when those losers asked her where she’d been, she could them that she was in the woods, making out.
Georgia gripped him hard as she could, and then his huge hands were around her waist, making her feel dainty, and she might have even moaned a little too, and then she tasted something tangy and realized it was blood and that it was hers.
Sara jumped back so fast she fell onto her ass. The corpse of the man she’d killed flopped over onto its side. Then it was still.
Reflex action, Sara thought. Like a chicken still running around after its head has been cut off.
Sara had a pre-med roomie in college who told her all sorts of stories about dead bodies twitching, opening their eyes, even making sounds.
“I just had like fifteen heart attacks.” Laneesha had both hands clasped to her chest. “He really dead?”
Sara nodded. “Let’s go back, find Martin.”
“How many more of these crazies you think are in the woods?”
“I don’t know. That’s why we need to get back to the camp.”
They moved slowly, the flashlight so pathetically weak now that a match would have been brighter. Sara knew they hadn’t run far from Martin, and she felt they were going in the right direction, but the trees all looked the same and it was so easy to get disoriented. She considered calling out to him, but as badly as she wanted to find her husband she didn’t want announce their presence to whatever else might be lurking in the woods.
Movement, to their left. Something was rustling a bush.
Sara aimed the beam in that direction, and that’s the moment the Maglight finally went dead.
