Siege of Station 19
Page 13
—and then Juanita was diving down, grabbing for something at her feet, and in the next instant she came up, her arm extended out the window, and she had a submachine gun in her hand.
She pulled the trigger and held it and the entire remaining contents of the magazine spewed from the barrel and peppered the beast. The creature danced and shimmied in the hail of gunfire, eyes popping like ripe berries, wings flung out and then torn to shreds by the brutal barrage of bullets.
Love tumbled into the passenger seat. Torres stomped on the accelerator and the El Dorado tore away, tires kicking up a plume of yellow dust mixed with swirling gray ash. Torres had it up to fifty by the time he turned onto Concorde, squealing the tires as the big car slewed around the corner.
Juanita peered out the shattered back window, making sure they weren’t being followed. The road behind was clear. And then suddenly, it wasn’t, as a flying fiend landed on the trunk, clawed feet digging into the metal. Its hands crashed through the remaining shards of glass in the broken back window, reaching for her, and Juanita clubbed it with the MAC-10, using the heavy sound suppressor threaded to the barrel like a baseball bat. She battered the head like a piñata, all the while yelling savagely, until its crushed eyes spewed florescent glop and it tumbled away, leaving long scratch marks on the trunk.
The El Dorado whipped down the road, tires screaming as it took a corner at sixty miles an hour. Torres clipped a garbage can and it flew into the air, to crash down behind them.
“Take it easy, Speed Racer!” cried Juanita, bouncing around in the backseat.
Nothing else came at them from the darkness, and the car zoomed through the abandoned district unmolested. They drove for fifteen minutes, twisting and turning through the neglected and empty neighborhoods of the Devil’s Triangle, before Torres found an on-ramp to the Interstate and aimed the car south. Each of them was coming down from an incredible adrenaline high. A feeling of unreality, of disassociation, overcame them.
“My wife,” Love blurted suddenly, and then felt absurd.
“What about your wife?” asked Juanita hollowly from the back. Her voice had a dazed quality, like someone just starting to peak on LSD, a spaced-out numbness.
“I—I need to let her know I am okay...” his voice trailed off.
Torres understood combat shock. He knew what they were feeling. He was feeling it himself. Sometimes in Vietnam it took him days to come down from a firefight. Sometimes it took longer than that.
“Sure been a strange night,” he said laconically.
Juanita and Love had to laugh at the understatement. The laughter broke the psychic dam and suddenly all three of them were laughing. Laughing so hard they were crying. Because they’d made it. They were alive. They had come through the blood, the craziness, the fear and the horror. They had survived.
“I need to let my wife know I am okay,” Love said again, when the laughter had finally subsided. “I was supposed to be home three hours ago.”
The assassin kept his eyes on the road and the speedometer at eighty. It didn’t look like he was going to slow down. He didn’t say anything, just squinted at the road ahead. Maybe he expected Love to jump.
After a few more miles, Love settled back in his seat and ran a hand over his face, wiping ash and gory grime away with a sweaty palm. It just made the mess worse.
He adjusted the rearview mirror and frowned at his disheveled appearance. Then he sniffed, wrinkling his nose. He looked at Torres. The man’s orange prison coveralls were now stained an ugly dark brown, encrusted from head to toe in filth, layers of it, from the sewers, and from the body fluids of the beasts he’d killed.
Love twisted around and gave Juanita a glance. She was tousled and dirty, ash-smeared and red-eyed, but she looked the most presentable of them all. Love chuckled under his breath. They were going to be quite an odd-looking trio crossing the border. He knew that was where Torres was taking them and he had no intention of trying to stop him. Torres had saved his life and Juanita’s too.
“I guess I can call my wife when we get to Mexico,” he said finally. He looked out the window and saw that the sun was just starting to peek out over the horizon.
Torres smiled. “I like your style, Lieutenant.” He frowned. “Hey, what’s your name, anyway?”
“Devalerie Love,” said the cop.
“A cop named Love,” mused the killer, shaking his head. “It has been a strange night.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Poet, novelist, singer, actor, ex-convict, and underground cult figure, Raegan Butcher began writing at the age of 14. His first collection of poetry, End of the World Graffiti, was published in 1991. In 1994 he appeared in the Seattle Indie film The Year of My Japanese Cousin. In 1996 he was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to 8 years in prison. During his incarceration, he composed the poems that would appear in his next highly regarded book of poetry, Stone Hotel: Poems from Prison, published by the anarchist collective, CrimethInc in 2003. Two years later, while living in Cuernavaca, Mexico, he produced a second book of poetry titled Rusty String Quartet, again with CrimethInc. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with five ferrets and a dog that looks like a coyote.