by Ryan Schow
Gunderson and the men walked back to the hospital. He was shot in the side, shot in the arm. The seven men he was with were grumbling about what had happened to De La Fuente, about the future of The Ophidian Horde.
Gunderson was now in charge. No one disputed that.
Thank God.
When he got back to the hospital, he sat there in De La Fuente’s office, now his office, contemplating the future of the organization. He thought about his dead child, his dead wife; he thought about his son and how maybe he was out there. Then he considered all the killing he’d done, not only in this life but in his former life as MS-13, and he felt ashamed.
The nightmares wouldn’t stop.
His life as an enforcer, a hired gun, that was a young man’s game and he was no longer a young man. In fact, he felt old and incredibly tired.
That life was over. A new life was emerging. He thought it best to be the one pulling the strings rather than the one pulling the trigger.
Night had fallen outside. He wanted to go to bed, but his mind was wired. He paced the halls of the hospital, taking account of the remaining men. There were still thirty or so in his charge, not enough to be a force to be reckoned with, but certainly not enough to feel broken.
Four of these men, hardened creatures like himself, were shot. God how he hated the pain! He’d only been shot once before, back in the early years, in his twenties. Now the pain gnawed at him, unrelenting. He acted like it didn’t hurt, but it hurt like hell.
He finally turned in for the evening, his body giving up on him.
Within hours, though, the first nightmare sunk its claws in him. It was the first of the night, but the fifth that week. He sat up in bed, sweating. Finally he turned, planted his feet on the floor then let his head fall into his hands. Sleep continued to pull at him, but he refused to give in. The idea of another round of horrors kept him from laying back down and shutting his eyes completely.
Finally he got to his feet, went to his belongings, withdrew his Glock.
In his closet there were four boxes of 9mm ammunition and three magazines, all of them packed and ready to go. From another drawer, there was a sound suppressor.
He screwed the suppressor on, chambered a round, then he walked down the hallways of the hospital. Their home base. Home.
He went to check on his most loyal men, the ones he trusted with his life. He found them all asleep. For a long time he stood in the silence of the hospital, dawn still hours away. He stood there thinking. One word left his mouth: “Yes.”
With that said, Gunderson went from room to room, killing nearly every single one of his men in their sleep. A bullet to the head. Just one. No one rose, no one cried out, no one fought back. They all just died.
When he was done but for one man, Gunderson stood over the last body, whispered a prayer, then begged God for forgiveness, for absolution.
Gunderson recognized that moment as the end of an era.
The end of the old Gunderson.
Standing in front of Lucian Tate, a former member of the Sureños, Gunderson stared down at the shadow, listened to the kid’s snoring and realized he was tying off something bad that started so long ago. Something that could not go on in this new world. Something that should not be allowed to go on in this world.
Clarity persisted: this had to end.
He put the muzzle to Tate’s head, then pulled the trigger. The Ophidian Horde was no longer. He was free.
Finally.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Stanton waited in the darkness with baited breath. Breathing heavy, sticky with blood, he struggled to stay quiet. Rider, however, was perfectly poised. Barely even winded.
The instant the upstairs guy descended the stairs, Rider was tucked around the corner with his knife ready.
Stanton heard his foot hit the ground floor. It was over before it started.
One swift movement, a cut and thump, and the guy grabbed his throat with both hands and a gurgle. Rider caught him from behind, clamped a big hand over his nose and mouth and held him through the fight as he slowly bled out and suffocated to death.
He wobbled and staggered, then his knees buckled and his hands sunk to his sides. Slowly Rider set him down, easing him to the floor before pulling him behind the couch. Rider glanced over at Stanton, waved a hand then moved silently up the stairs. Stanton’s knife was ready, but Rider was out front and he felt better because of it.
Upstairs, there was another set of shot out windows with three guys in seated positions, their guns mounted on coffee tables.
Next door, a couple of shots popped off.
Inside the room, two of the guys shot once, then twice. The return fire came quick, two slugs burying themselves in the wall behind Rider and Stanton.
Stanton’s heart was officially thundering in his chest. Rider held up two fingers, then pointed left and to himself. He then held up one finger and thumbed it back to Stanton.
He understood perfectly.
Rider planned on taking the two on the left; Stanton would hit the guy on the right. Rider held up a fist, waited. When another volley of gunfire started, the hand went down and Rider moved swiftly across the room. Stanton followed his lead.
Rider was as light as a nightmare on his two; Stanton let the notion that he was murdering a human being die off in his mind. He wasn’t killing someone. He was saving lives. That was the distinction he had to make to do what he needed to do and stay sane. He told himself his wife and daughter were in that college and the college was under siege by criminals, killers, animals. These were men who didn’t deserve to live. Men who needed to die.
So when he drove his blade into the wiry side of his guy’s neck, it was with the savage understanding that to beat the monster you had to become the monster. He pulled the blade back through the stubborn flesh. Then, grabbing onto the man’s face, he hooked his fingers under a strong chin and yanked the head backwards. With a swiftness he dared not consider, Stanton tore the blade across the throat, opening it enough to insure the animal would not fire another round into the college or at his family.
Juiced full of adrenaline, his heart galloping like a stallion, he watched Rider finish the job. The man finished, then turned and appraised Stanton’s work. Did he measure up? Could Stanton have taken two men by surprise the same way Rider did?
No. Most likely not.
But someday he might have to, and this both startled him and gave him direction. Rider cleared the house with Stanton in tow. They took the guns and headed downstairs.
“Ready?”
Ready for next door? Ready for round two, the final round?
“Locked and loaded,” Stanton said.
“First floor we stay quiet. Knives only. Second floor,” he said, holding up the semi-automatic rifles, “we empty these things into whomever is up there. We’ll go loud, turn that place into a bloodbath. That’s our sign.”
“Sign for what?”
“Lets the guys next door know we’ve eliminated the threat.”
“So a bunch of shooting lets them know we’re done?” he asked.
“No, the shooting indicates the final war is waged, and then there’s a sign. The final sign that says the mop up is complete.”
“What’s the sign?”
“Don’t want to jinx it,” Rider said. “Let’s go.”
They head next door, but as they’re reaching for the door, gunfire blasts through it, splintering glass and wood, shrapnel catching them both in the necks, chests and arms.
They both back off, even as the door is kicked wide open. A huge man with a shaved head, muscles like truck tires and hands big enough to crush a human skull bounds barefoot down the stairs like a demon coughed out of hell.
They’d stashed the guns off to the side of the door where they could pick them up for the second story attack, but those were now behind the charging man.
This bull was going after them both, but Rider broke left and Stanton broke right. Under the moonlight, in the b
ackyard that was just dirt and a month’s worth of overgrown weeds, the Guy grabbed Rider. He was at least a foot taller than Stanton’s friend.
The second he latched on to Rider, the old guy began stabbing the absolute hell out of him. Stanton refused to be a spectator to his friend’s death. He rushed the beast, drove his knife in and out of the man’s kidney, ducked a flying elbow, then hit the other kidney. The beast now had Rider by the throat, those big hands starting to crush everything valuable in Rider’s neck.
That’s when Stanton dropped low and sliced through both Achilles tendons. The man dropped to his knees, but he still had Rider by the throat. His friend’s hands hung limp at his sides, barely any fight in there.
Letting go of whatever inhibitions he had, surrendering to the animal instincts inside him, the brutal rage, that something wild and untamed and aching to defend what was his, Stanton drove his blade into the side of the man’s neck. As quickly as he’d driven it in, Stanton jerked the blade out soundlessly, violently. He did it again and again, three more times before that giant hand let go of Rider and the beast toppled over sideways.
Seeing Rider reach for his throat, but still in a wash of near insanity, Stanton turned and sprinted for the door. If there was one, there would be more. He was racing inside the house at the same time two more men were pouring out.
A gunshot went off, but he didn’t hear it or feel it; he simply drove his knife into anything in front of him.
The first man got a knife in the gut, then in the throat.
Behind him, in the hallway where he first attacked, another man was trying to push his way through, but his friend was in the way and getting stabbed to death, so he didn’t shoot.
The second Stanton was done with him, he shoved the guy away only to see the weapon in his face; gunfire behind him didn’t even startle him. The man facing him, his head snapped back and he fell down dead. All Stanton knew at this point was charge forward.
He’d seen what the gigantor nearly did to Rider, and now it was Rider on his heels watching his six. The rushing, beating, tramping sounds of feet coming down the stairs didn’t faze him.
The layout of the house was exactly like the last one, so he didn’t have to think of where to go, only how to kill as quickly and as efficiently as possible. He’d lost all sense of self. It was only move forward, kill, move forward, kill.
He rushed up to meet the first man on the stairs in the dark. Stanton turned him into a pin cushion. The second one was suddenly there. Rider unloaded three rounds into him and both corpses fell on top of Stanton.
He wrestled them off of him, scampering out of the blood soaked pile, stabbing and cutting his way out, just to make sure they were dead.
Three more shots and another man dropped face-first off the stairs into the pile. Stanton reached up, his energy suddenly waning, and he stabbed the man in the side of the neck, just to be sure.
Rider moved past them as Stanton got to his feet. He hurried up the stairs behind his friend, listened as Rider emptied one of the guns into one last man. He finally pulled up behind Rider, panting, sick on adrenaline and tasting blood. Right then he realized he was covered in the carnage of those last men and it made him want to hurl.
Rider turned and looked at him and, in a raspy, almost-choked-to-death voice, said, “Jesus Christ, son, what in the blue hell was that?”
Heaving, struggling to breathe, his limbs still high and wild with energy, he said, “Thought you were dead. Thought if I didn’t stop them we’d both be dead.”
Moving across the upstairs living room, Rider sighted down the stop sign on the corner of Ashbury and Grove. He put a round right through the O in STOP, then waited. A second later another shot went off and the overhead streetlamp on the other side of the street shattered.
Rider turned around and said, “We’re clear.”
“It’s over?” Stanton asked.
“Yeah.”
Stanton quickly slipped out of the fog of what he’d done, who he had become, and he almost couldn’t stand it. As he traipsed past the pile of bodies at the foot of the stairs, and the two dead guys in the hallway, it hit him with brutal force. Everything he’d just done came rushing back at once.
Out back, he staggered off the porch, dropped to a knee and began to puke. The convulsions rocked him over and over again, unrelenting. He wretched and gagged, he spit and blew his nose, and then he dry heaved some more. When he was finally done, he blew his nose one last time into the weeds and stood up, embarrassed that he’d cracked with Rider watching.
“You saved my life,” Rider croaked, while rubbing his neck and looking at the dead animal in the weeds further into the back of the yard.
“You’d have done the same.”
“Damn right I would have,” he said. “Can’t always say I feel good with someone on my six, but with you, I’ll take you to war with me anytime.”
Moved by the compliment, Stanton nodded his head and for the first time felt like maybe he could do this life. That he could be someone in this world. Respectable in a time when your baseline instincts and your ability to act without hesitation in the midst of the impossible cut a clear line between life and death. He was no longer a white collar worker. He wasn’t a stockbroker or a millionaire. He wasn’t a husband or a father or a failure. He was simply a man and a man protected those he cared about, those he loved most.
“What’s cooking in that dome of yours?” Rider asked.
“Just thinking about who I am in all of this,” he said. “Where I started out in life, where I’ve come, who I am now.”
“Well don’t overthink it, my friend. This is but one skirmish in what will surely be the war to end all wars.”
“The last war,” Stanton said.
“And the most important. Let’s go get the kids.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
When they rode their bikes with now two wagons in tow, they went slow and he stopped often to make sure the girl was okay. There was a steadfastness inside her he admired. He was beginning to wonder if he possessed the same resolve. After killing the boy, after watching Bright die, he found himself losing optimism by the day and he didn’t think he could stop it. But they rode, and they rested, and they made their way through the traffic jam of abandoned cars and sometimes dead bodies.
As the afternoon sun climbed into the sky overhead, it got hot. He felt his skin starting to burn. He pulled the hats and sunscreen out of his backpack, put the hat on the girl’s head, dried the sweat from her face and shoulders, then applied the sunscreen.
She didn’t say a word.
She just looked at him and he just looked at her, each of them feeling the other’s pain, each of them too destroyed inside to even summon the words.
He gave her an apple, which she ate. They shared a bottle of water then got back on their bikes and got moving. Somewhere in between Vacaville and Vallejo, on highway 80 three guys on bicycles were riding from car to car, looting the insides of them. They saw Jagger and the girl and started riding toward them.
His senses flared and he studied their movements, their expressions as they approached, what they did with their hands and arms. They rode by, eyeballs glued to them, these three thirty-somethings with sneering grins. Like everyone else, the trio was dirty and unkempt. One of them was missing his two front teeth and all of them were ugly in both their looks and expressions.
Jagger turned his head, saw the three clowns riding behind the girl. She looked scared. Circling around, they caught back up with them, fell into stride on either side of Jagger.
He looked back and forth between them, saying nothing, giving nothing away in either his eyes or his countenance. Why the hell were they riding beside him and saying nothing? They just rode, smiling their dirty teeth at him, saying nothing.
This is too weird, he thought.
Lightening quick, he drew his weapon, shot the one next to him, then swung his pistol around and shot the other two. All head shots. All of them flopped sideways,
their bikes losing balance and crashing to the asphalt. He slowed to a stop, the girl pulling up beside him.
“You okay?” he asked.
She just looked at him, no expression.
“Good.”
They ran into plenty more scavengers that day but none as weird as the three he killed. That night, he stopped under an underpass and made camp. He sat beside the girl under two blankets next to a fire and wondered what he’d done.
He killed those three louts because they were intimidating. Did he have to do that? Was there another way?
He couldn’t stop wondering if they were thugs or just three guys whose minds went soft. Were they trying to harm him? Were they dangerous? The questions persisted, yet he was no closer to a definitive answer than when he first pondered the question. Even worse, he couldn’t make himself feel bad for it either.
That worried him the most. When life no longer had any value, did humanity stand a chance at survival?
He slept fitfully next to the girl, who hadn’t changed positions all night. She was snoring loudly, her nose plugged, and he couldn’t seem to get comfortable. He finally sat up and re-stoked the fire. The bitter cold found the insides of his bones, but the heat chased it away allowing him a better night’s sleep than he’d anticipated.
They woke the next morning to the sounds of big trucks driving by. Two Humvee’s roared by; three more came minutes after that.
National Guard.
He and the girl got back on their bikes and rode off and on until they hit the Bay Bridge. The traffic was stacked up there. It was a war zone. Bodies and burnt cars everywhere. Plus there were huge holes in the suspension bridge from where it was attacked.
They wheeled their bikes and wagons through the chaos, watching where they went. At one point, Jagger had to lift everything over a huge pile-up of cars. He helped the girl over the vehicles, got her safely on the other side. The other side, however, was hit so badly by munitions most of it had crumbled into the level below and didn’t look passable.
