It had been looted down to the last drop of gasoline. Sitting in the middle of the parking lot was a generator hooked up to an electric pump. There was a hose snaking from it down into the underground tanks.
We should stop and check that place out, Ipes suggested.
Jillybean gave him an odd look. “Why? There’s nothing in there, and we can’t stop at every place ‘just in case.’ It would take us months to get to Colorado if we did. We got lucky that one time but…”
Trust me, Ipes assured.
She rolled her blue eyes and yet, she pulled the KIA over, steering with a markedly better hand. Because of the glass and the trash scattered around the front of the building, she parked closer to the generator than to the front of the station.
Stepping out, the first thing she did was to pick up a rock and drop it into the open intake port of the tanks. A clang ran up the pipe. “See? Nothing.”
No, duh, he answered. I meant check inside.
The dark hid a second eye-roll. “And what’s going to be in there? A buh-scetti dinner?” There was a diner attached to a convenience store. She had seen it when they first pulled up and the sight of it made her tummy growl.
Probably not, but maybe we can find something that might help you stay awake tonight and take your mind off of things.
With her curiosity up, she ducked into the store, her Keds crunching on tiny crystals of glass that reflected the meager light filtering in from outside. She pulled a small Maglite from one of her pockets and shone it around at the mess.
The place had been ransacked by desperate people searching for food and supplies. “I’m not seeing any buh-scetti, Ipes.”
Ipes looked around, nervous at first but then said: Ah, right there. That’s the rack I was looking for.
Jillybean bent down and inspected what had fallen from the rack. “CDs? I doubt they have any kid music.”
That’s not music, silly. Those are stories that someone recorded. Look, that one is about a white whale. And that one is about army-men fighting the Nazis, and this one is about a girl who likes men without shirts—we probably don’t want to listen to that one.
“Hmmm,” she said, picking through the mess. “This is sort of like going to the library. I miss going to the library. I mean I miss it when daddy used to take us and we got to spend, like an hour there.” She loved the library even more these days. Yes, they were always so dark and spooky, but at the same time, they were full of secrets, millions and thousands and tons of secrets that no one knew any more.
Jillybean felt that she could live in a library.
What about the hardware store? Ipes asked. You said before that you could live in one of those and be marvelously happy.
“I guess I did. Hey, maybe there’s a combined library and hardware store out there somewhere. You know, like this is a diner attached to a convenience store.”
I doubt it. Those two things don’t mix very well. You don’t generally see the same sorts of people in both. So, which one are you going to choose?
For a seven-year-old, the selection wasn’t the best. She chose Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, which, unfortunately had nothing to do with cats, at least the first thirty minutes of listening didn’t. Yes, they mentioned something called a cat’s cradle, but that had to do with string and the rest of the book had to do with atomic bombs and intricately bizarre forms of religion.
It distracted her as she drove, there was no denying that. But it wasn’t an enjoyable listening experience and so she popped it out after dodging around a number of monsters and discovering she had completely lost the train of the story.
“Let’s try the treasure one,” she suggested. She had picked up Treasure Island because the main character was a kid and it was about pirate treasure—it was almost a guaranteed good book based on that alone.
For Jillybean, it was only an “okay” book for a number of reasons: the pace was unnecessarily slow, and many of the larger words used seemed to have been wedged into sentences to suggest the author had a big vocabulary rather than to advance the story, and lastly, the pirates were depicted as really bad people in a way that struck very close to home.
They reminded her of the land pirates she’d been forced to deal with since the beginning of the apocalypse.
Still, she listened all through the night as she slipped into the northeast corner of New Mexico and then on into the desert region of Colorado, which looked nothing like the beautifully green Estes Valley. This part of Colorado was vast and empty and if there were mountains, they were so far to the west that they were invisible.
The land was dusty, as well. When the sun came up, she saw that she had left a fantail of brown particles lingering in the air. Despite the lack of monsters, she immediately slowed and began looking for a place to hole up for the day. It was a long search before she found a sad little ranch-house sitting on two-hundred acres of dull scrub unfit for anything save for rattlesnakes and browsing cattle.
For a long time, she stared at the lonely little house with tired, dreamy eyes, picking out its good points and its bad. Seeing it in a way that no one else could.
Since the land was wide open, she wouldn’t be able to run away if anyone happened to come by. She would have to fight or give herself up—or a combination of the two. In preparation for anything and everything, she hid the KIA in the detached garage and then walked around the house, seeing it as an attacking slaver might.
The emptiness of the land meant that it wouldn’t be easy to attack. There wasn’t a shred of cover whatsoever. The landscaping around the house consisted of a square of dead grass surrounded by sun-fried weeds. This meant that the slavers would have to come right at her and it would be best if they did with their intentions on full display. She didn’t want to kill any good guys by accident.
A smoke grenade with a blue dot on it would suffice to warn her—it would be hidden in the weeds by the side of the road, its discharge lever held down by a filament of wire so thin that it would be practically invisible stretched across the road.
Standing there on the drive, she could picture what would happen in stunning detail: the bad guys would be surprised by the smoke. They would gibber and point and they would stop fifty yards from the lonely house. If they were smart bad guys they’d leave as fast as they could and perhaps they would set up an ambush somewhere down the road or come back under the cover of night.
But they wouldn’t be smart.
They would pile out of their cars and aim their guns at the house, the sun glinting from their scopes. Maybe they’d yell threats up at the house or pretend to be nice, hoping to fool Jillybean into coming out for a “chat.” She wouldn’t be fooled. She would raise her voice, telling them to Go away! only she knew she was wasting her breath. They wouldn’t leave, now. They would hear the lone voice of a girl and they would figure they would have an easy time of it.
While some aimed their guns, others would make a break for the sides of the house. They would want to get in close where the weak little girl wouldn’t be able to shoot at them with whatever gun she had managed to scrounge up.
We don’t want to hurt you, they’d call out, when they were all up next to the house, leaning against the siding and grinning at each other, each picturing what they would find inside. Each fantasizing. We just want to make sure you’re alright. Why don’t you open up before someone gets hurt?
She knew that would be a lie. Someone who really cared, i.e. an actual “good guy” would have left to begin with or they would’ve come up to the house unarmed and only one at a time. They would smile and hold up empty hands. They wouldn’t skulk in the shadows and whisper plans.
No, these were liars and thieves and pirates, and they would get what they deserved as they tried to get at her.
Two would go around back as two others sidled up to the canted cellar door—these last two would go in first. Would they have flashlights? It wouldn’t really matter if they did. They wouldn’t be able to see the live grenade duct-
taped to a support beam at the bottom of the stairs, not until it was too late, not until they had already sprung the trap.
Even with a flashlight, the filament of wire stretching across the entranceway to the cellar would be hidden in the trash that Jillybean placed with artistic hands. The grenade would go off with a shockingly loud explosion in the low-ceilinged cellar. It would blast out flame and smoke and killing fragments of metal.
In a split second, the basement would go from dusty and humdrum to something more like a slaughter house: there’d be blood splattered on the walls, and it would run down the coarse wood in trickling streams, and there would be pieces of meat and chunks of entrails flung across the ancient washer-dryer set.
And in that split second, the two men would become two shredded corpses, their eyeballs ruptured by the concentrated force of the explosion in such a cramped area.
The sound of the grenade would trigger everyone’s next course of action. The pirates on the porch would freeze for all of three seconds.
What the fuck? one would ask, his once confident face suddenly shocked into a look of fright.
A moment later, the largest of them, a man with a mustache that seemed to fall off both ends of his lip, would yell: Hey, Kevin! You okay? Even if Kevin had been alive, the man with the drooping mustache wouldn’t have heard his answer.
There would be four, maybe five men standing on the long front porch with their backs to the siding, clutching their guns with sweating hands. They feared getting shot through one of the windows. What they didn’t suspect in the least was that they were all within the kill zone of one of the M18A1 claymore mines that Jillybean had found among Perry’s possessions back at Fort Leonard Wood. It would be sitting in an overturned clay pot that Jillybean had positioned at one end of the porch.
Deep within the house, at the end of a long wire spool, she would be holding the “clacker” that was attached to the wire. She would be nervous, but determined—she would be decided. She wasn’t going to die there and she wasn’t going to be taken as a slave.
The clacker would sit in her hands at the ready, but she wouldn’t be frozen in fear, she was only in pause mode, knowing that the slavers would have cringed and crouched because of the first explosion. Slowly, they would stand, once more. She would count to ten and only then would she press the clacker three times, her face screwed up in anticipation of the explosion that would send seven hundred steel balls flying in a tremendous broadside across the porch.
She knew that every window on the front side of the house would explode inward, adding to the deadly shrapnel of the flying metal.
The men on the porch would be torn to shreds by the blast and hurtled through the air to land on the drive or the strip of dead grass next to it. They would look more like scrap from a charnel house than humans and gradually, over the course of the day, their blood would trickle out of them and soak into the dry earth.
In the back of the house, standing on either side of the kitchen door, would be two men. They would be shaken by the back to back explosions, and afraid, both to go on and to stay where they were. They would wait with their heads cocked, hoping to hear something from the other men, but there wouldn’t be any sound save the lonely wind rustling under the eaves of the lonely ranch house and the endless echo of the explosion.
Finally, one would work up his courage and try the doorknob. He would expect it to be locked but it would turn easily under his hand.
Maybe we shouldn’t, the other said in a whisper, grabbing his friend’s shoulder.
They might not know we’re even here, the first reasoned. Besides, we can’t go back to the car. It’s sitting out in the open. We won’t get halfway to it. Trust me, we just have to be quick. We go in with guns blazing. Are you with me?
The second fellow would nod, lick his lips and then nod again. Now! he would hiss and rush in.
Trip wires could be funny things. Jillybean would have to set it pretty low so as not to be seen, and as she didn’t have a hundred bombs, she would have this one running to a pulley which ran to the trigger of a shotgun strapped to a chair. The chair would be on its back, anchored with a toaster-oven that hadn’t seen toast in a year.
Maybe the first man would miss the tripwire altogether. Maybe it would be the second man who hit it just as he ran into his friend, who would have stopped in his tracks upon seeing the gun and the taut string.
Understanding would strike that first man just as the gun roared. He would fly back into the second man who would be completely unhurt by the blast, except for a tiny nick on the bottom of his left earlobe which he wouldn’t notice until much later as he laid his head on a strange pillow that sat on a strange bed, later that night.
That second man, with his nicked ear, would run, now that his last friend was dead with his chest exploded by the shotgun. He would run straight away from the lonely little house with its dead yard and its dead bodies. He would run until his lungs burned and his feet stumbled. When he couldn’t run any more, he would march with sweat in his eyes and his chin thrust back over one shoulder, staring back the way he had come, afraid that someone or something would be following him.
He couldn’t imagine that the only thing in the house capable of following him was a little girl who was leaving little waffle tracks meandering through the blood of his dead friends as she went to each body, wearing a hard look on her face and thinking that they had gotten exactly what they deserved…
“Huh?” Jillybean suddenly said, her body giving a little shake and her eyes blinking rapidly. She was a little surprised to find herself sitting in her car, as the brightness of the day came more and more into focus around her. There was an echo of an image in her mind: the waffle tracks in the slowly congealing blood and the bodies…
The picture dissolved in her mind and reality sunk in. She was in the KIA, but it was facing the wrong way. Somehow it sat pointing away from the house. And that wasn’t the only thing that was different: in the weeds by the side of the road there was a strange swatch of blue. It looked as if someone had spray-painted the sun-browned weeds.
She had stopped next to it and who knew how long she’d been idling there. Turning off the engine, she took her foot off the brake pedal and it came away with a touch of reluctance, as if someone had pranked her, putting a film of glue on the stack of blocks.
“What’s on the pedal?” She bent in her seat and saw that there was something on the top block…something maroon and tacky that hadn’t been there before.
A surge of fear went through her and she sat up and stared again at the blue weeds, noting there was a little canister in the midst of the blue. It had been staked to the ground by a steel tent peg and there was a line of wire hanging slack from it.
Her eyes darted to the rear-view mirror where the lonely little ranch house sat in the middle of a great emptiness. In its driveway were two cars: a black Camaro and a Shelby Mustang with twin white racing stripes running right over its hood, across its top and down the back.
She followed the driveway with her eyes until she saw the front of the house. The windows were shattered and the siding was streaked with lines of crimson and there was something bent and twisted hanging off the side of the porch. It had been a man.
“Did that really happen?” she asked Ipes. “Did I really kill all those men? Was that a memory or was that a dream…I can’t tell.”
Maybe you should just get going, he answered, his words muted by a ringing in her ears that she was just noticing.
Her little hand shook as she reached down and pulled back the transmission handle, sticking the car in drive. She began coasting, not knowing where to go and not really caring. She was numb.
For her, reality wasn’t very real. She could only hope that the road, a strip of black cutting through a land of brown, was really there and not part of her imagination. “Maybe I’m dreaming this, too.”
You’re not dreaming, Jillybean, Ipes told her. Your imagination is greater than this. Anyone could ima
gine an empty blue sky sitting over an empty brown land. If you were imagining things, I bet there’d be a unicorn or two thrown in to the mix.
“I guess,” she said without much feeling.
Hey, how about you listen to more of that story. It’ll keep you awake until you find a new place to sleep.
“A new place,” she whispered, picturing the old one with all the blood.
She started the story again, noting that there was something more in view beyond the empty sky and the dead earth, something that caught her eye. Behind a distant hill, a far off trickle of smoke rose up, marring the perfection of the blue.
“The slaver’s camp,” she said, putting her bloody Ked back on the stack of blocks that was attached to the gas pedal. She should have pointed the KIA away from it. She should have gotten out of there as fast as she was able to drive, however Jillybean felt a burn of anger in her that thrummed along with the ringing in her head.
She’d been minding her own business, just driving through. She should’ve been left alone. If they hadn’t bothered her, she would have slept the day away and in the evening, she would’ve dismantled her traps and left. And no one would have had to die.
But they had come for her. They had seen the dust kicked up by her car and they had come to steal her and hurt her. So much was still such a vague blur in her head that she wasn’t quite sure of every little thing that had happened. She just knew that now she was as riled as a beehive some little boy had taken a stick to.
Maybe the slavers camp was empty. Maybe all the slavers were dead—but maybe not, and a strange, but familiar part of her hoped not.
Chapter 22
Neil Martin
Another meeting. This one just as long and pointless as the last twenty had been, at least in Neil’s eyes. He liked his meetings short and to the point, with no more than four people in attendance. His ideal meeting was thirty seconds long: What’s the problem? I see and what possible solutions are there? Okay, I like the sound of the third option, what are the pros and cons? Good. Make it happen.
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