As they leave the bedroom, Mike pulls the door to where it is only open about one inch and pulls a pillow behind it to keep it open just that much. She tucks the 9mm into the front of her pants and a .45 down the back. She begins going through the clothes of her first – head-shot – victims and the girl asks what she is doing.
“I want their guns, cell phones, wallets, and money.”
“Money?” the girl asks. “You want to rob them? Is that why you are here?”
“No! I am here just like you are, but I am taking something with me to finish the job. You want to help?” Mike has dumped out a courier’s bag that had been used to carry drugs, leaving the drugs and weed on the floor, putting the money back inside, and now she is filling it up with the pocket contents of everyone, everything that is not soaked in blood. There are guns, cash, phones, and wallets. Mike takes one of the cell phones, switching to camera mode; she begins filming every room of the house, all the dead, and all the damage. She only wants a quick view, so it only takes a couple of minutes. She starts back in Tiny’s room, where he was attempting to rape her, then down the hallway, where the lower walls are damaged, and the blood bath begins, catching every face she can with cautious clarity. Just a minute more.
The girl has no idea what she is doing, who she is doing it for, or why, but what the hell . . . her life was saved, so this is a small favor. “What’s that smell?” she asks, reaching for the remote to turn down the game noise.
“Gas,” Mike replies, easing the remote from her grasp. “Leave the noise.”
“Shouldn’t we leave or something?”
“Soon enough,” Mike says calmly, looking in a ceramic bowl on the kitchen counter and finding some of the guys’ keys. She pulls out a Harley key with a rabbit’s foot, and there is a pewter flag of Mexico, which she rips off and drops on the floor. On a GM key chain, with a spark gap gauge, and house or apartment keys, there’s a leather “Chevy Truck” tag, and a blipper. She opens the door of the trailer, looking at the vehicles in the drive and on the street; she strokes the blipper and gets the chirp-chirp noise with flashing lights at the blinkers of a large, black, 4X4, Silverado truck.
“This one’s yours,” Mike says, tossing her the keys. She goes to the drawer by the stove and finds a box of kitchen matches, tearing it apart. As she closes the door, she folds a couple of matches in the striker strip, and wedges it in the door. The candle is burning, the stove is flowing, the trailer is fairly tight, so she estimates that in an hour or two the place should go up like a giant flash-bang. She hands the girl a twenty from the satchel and says, “Buy a douche.” Looking her up and down, she hands her a Benjamin and says, “Buy a few. And leave the truck running, with the radio playing, and windows down when you get close to home. Don’t worry. It’ll disappear.”
For a moment, she thinks to herself, “Someone else could get hurt when this thing goes up.” But then she re-thinks, mumbling her way to the bike, “Ratty ass neighborhood full of lowlifes, losers, drug dealers, drunks, hookers, and pimps . . . the world would be better off . . . naw . . . they’d never be missed.” So, her conscience is clear about this.
She switches on the bike, shifting the transmission into neutral, green light bright on the instrument panel, and even though there is a starter button, there’s also a kickstart, and she uses that to crank this iron horse into rumbling readiness. She mounts her phone on a Grip-Go after she checks to see if it is sticky enough, hangs her Jabra Supreme 3 on her ear.
The rescued woman starts the truck, watching as her saviour kicks up the bike, and thinks that she has “never met anyone so . . .” and then she realizes that she doesn’t even have a fitting adjective.
The bike leads the way by GPS, and the truck follows, out the trailer park, a few turns this way and that, so in a few moments, they are on the access road to Highway 90, the girl knows where she is, and how to get home. At this point, they part ways, never to see one another again; but Mike . . . well, Mike is on a mission.
The girl’s name is Susan Cullup, and she stops at the drug store as suggested, then drives the truck all the way to Our Lady of the Lake University, parks it on the far side of her dorm parking lot, leaves it open and running as advised. She has seen a few CSU shows, so she gets into her purse, pulls out a couple of wet-wipes, and goes over the steering wheel, shifter, door handle, keys, etc. She goes into her residence hall, wet hair, disheveled clothes, wearing signs of a struggle, and she heads for her room. Several people try to ask her where she has been, but she really isn’t in the mood to talk. After she empties a half dozen bottles of vinegar and water with a hint of springtime, she hits the shower and dries off, sobbing. She may never get over the sense of being so powerless in such a desperate situation, but for now, she is safe at home, revenge has been had, and on some level things are fine, so long as she doesn’t get pregnant or come down with some repugnant disease. She looks out her dorm window and watches as the truck speeds away.
Southwest of the school, there are those who are not so fortunate.
The Mess
You send one to the hospital, we send one to the morgue; THAT’s the Chicago way.[4]
E-Day Minus 7.5 Years
An hour twenty has passed since the truck and bike left the dingy trailer park at the edge of Lackland AFB. More importantly, to some people, it has been over two and a half hours since anyone at that house has checked in, or answered a call, from another house in the neighborhood called Loma Linda. Eight miles away the order comes to send a crew – three men – to check into why Tiny won’t answer his phone. They leave the little barbacoa place next to Mireles Ice House, and hurry in their five year old Escalade over to the hovel.
They notice that Chebby’s truck and Tiny’s bike are gone, but there are plenty of other boy’s rides around; so someone should be attending their arrival. They honk the horn on their Cadillac, two or three times, expecting someone to come out and greet them. Someone should have answered the phone at the very least, but that is why they’ve come. The three men are a little pissed about running all the way over here on this fool’s errand, checking in on these vatos.
There are two short men, one tall one, all Hispanic – Mexican in fact – and the short one in the front is ‘Duardo. He is the senior member of this group; three more of his soldiers remain at the restaurant, not needed for this petty errand. As the men approach the steps of the trailer, ‘Duardo asks, “What’s that smell? Dead gato?” He stoops down to see if there is something under the trailer. Having only broken skirting here and there, the smell could be something stinking dead underneath, and as he bends to look, BOOM! The bedroom explodes, blasting through the door into the living room, igniting the rest of the trailer in a ball of flames, expanding faster than the walls can contain. The trailer walls blow off, straight over his stooped down head and through his men, scraping them both right off of their legs – like scum from a swamp. The flying panels of trailer walls sever them at the hip, hammering their upper remains onto the walls of the trailer next door with a giant wham and a splat! ‘Duardo’s friends only had time to face the explosion before their meager lives were over. ‘Duardo is slammed to the ground so hard that he’s knocked unconscious for quite some time.
Being a trailer, these things are incredibly tight, so when the whole place had filled up with gas, and the fumes in the last room finally reached sufficient density to be ignited by the candle, the fireball and blast were enormous. It took a little under two hours, but it was worth the wait; and Mike had been waiting all this time. Nearly two thirds of the exterior walls had blown out onto the ground, into the next trailers, and into the trees. Shards of glass over a quarter inch in size could not be found from that back bedroom and the living, dining, kitchen area.
Mike had routed Miss Cullup to a familiar place, and when they parted company, she doubled back to watch. This particular piece of crap house was on the south most street of the trailerhood, backed up against an unintentional green space that was never fully de
veloped. Half of the area had been setup for trailers, still unpaved, but with water hook ups, when the investors ran out of money, or there was a family squabble, and it was never finished. It had all grown over, and it is now deep in young trees, brush, weeds, and wild animals. Mike has brought the bike in, down the back roads, sitting a couple hundred yards away or so, and she is watching when ‘Duardo and the guys showed up. She sits and watches as they check out the cars, present and missing, and as they approach the porch. She sees ‘Duardo duck down at just the right moment, but she doesn’t see the legs of his friends fall, lifeless to the ground. The blast distracts her from seeing by her need to turn her head in startled amazement, but she captures the video, and she will share it.
She is happy for what she has seen, and what she has done, but she is not yet satisfied . . . not yet content. Her sister is still dead, her family is still broken, and her parents will never recover from that. No one really recovers from something like that. No, she realizes that satisfaction and contentment may never come, but watching that piece of shit trailer go up in a fireball is the faintest hint of a glimmer of the light at the end of a tunnel, drilled though a mountain of stone hard rage. She smiles just a little as she drives around to the other side of the incident, photographing everything from the seat of the bike, then walking across the yard, getting pictures of ‘Duardo, the lifeless legs on the lawn, then up onto the floor of the burning trailer, until she hears the cops and ambulances arriving.
She uses the same phone from the trailer to shoot loads of pix, and afterward, she drives to the nearest Jim’s Restaurant, gets a cup of coffee, then she uploads them to the Facebook account of the phone’s owner. She captions all of the pictures with something telling the world that all this has been done to a bunch of drug dealing, rapist, pigs; all of whom needed to die. It is both a bold and a technically simple move to put it all out there on social media – trend a little – get the attention of those a little higher up the food chain, and the police. There is plenty of attention to go around, considering the pictures and videos included the images of the dead, and the splattered inside the trailer. Then there’s the explosion of the trailer, including the wall of the trailer being blown over and blown through those two gang soldiers with ‘Duardo. What exactly do you call it when a decapitation takes place at about the hip? Whatever it is, there are hundreds of thousands of hits on the thing within a day. News agencies in New York with three and five letter names have the story running almost all the time.
There are local reporters who are cutting their teeth on the network stage while a few networks send down some junior hotdogs to cover the Drug Den Detonation. Nine dead and one nearly deaf; the video includes close-ups, license plates, address, blood and flesh pasting the walls of the nearby trailer.
No one in this trailerhood gives a damn about the people in that hovel, but then again, they don’t give a damn about much at all. The call to 911 had come from the manager of the office of the park, Lilith, having just come through her own door as the fireball blew the roof into the sky. As inconvenienced as she is about having to call 911, she knows that if she doesn’t make the call, the cops would be all up into her business soon, and all the other operations of the place would undergo some additional and unwanted scrutiny.
Lilith doesn’t consider herself a bad person. She isn’t like those biker bastards, the types that really know how evil they are and like it. She still has some illusions that she is just a businesswoman, providing services to those who want them, opportunities to those who take them. In short, she runs a brothel in a trailer park. There are nearly a dozen “houses” with three or four women working in each, and when a customer comes into the office, she sends them into her other, more private office, where her assistant offers a secure online meeting with the girls, so he (sometimes she) can look over the stock and pick one out – sometimes two, and sometimes more. The customer’s credit card is then swiped, then batched for billing, he is escorted by one of the trailer park “maintenance men” to meet his girl, or girls, finalize arrangements, which are reported back to the assistant, again via video chat, and the arrangement is complete. Whatever kind of party he has paid for, he receives, and any additional services will be put on the card as needed. Believe it or not, she developed her business model from watching HBO, making just a few tweaks, due to the criminality of the operation. Prostitution still being illegal in San Antonio. She has security cameras throughout the neighborhood, watching for Johnny Law to roll up. Since she keeps to herself, and since no one complains about anything, she hardly ever has to put up with unwanted entanglements, and she has never had to call the cops herself . . . until today. It’s regrettable; however, it’s unavoidable.
The house that detonated had been rented by three airmen, on assignment at Lackland, being trained as Security Police. They rented it at $850 per month, seventeen years ago, and the rent has never increased. They, all three of them, managed to flunk out of school, even managed to get kicked out of the Air Force on drug charges, which the authorities could not establish sufficiently to allow solid prosecution, but the provable violations were sufficient to garner “Other Than Honorable” discharges across the board. They never left the area, finding their niche in the drug trades of the west side, having recruited dealers from as far west as Hondo, and as far east as Hackberry Street. Their empire reaches north to Highway 151 and Loop 1604, south to Somerset – but they prefer the urban areas most. Early on, they had decided to keep this trailer house as a distribution center for the motorcycle club they put together, giving a place for some of the guys to crash, relax, bring bitches, etc. Little did they know it would become their undoing.
The police arrive, and three or four minutes later, two trucks arrive from Firehouse 33. The police officers begin by grabbing the extinguishers from their trunks, blasting down the flaming walls of the next-door homes, especially protecting the propane tanks that are unlawfully attached to one of them. Fortunately, for the cops, the fire truck arrives with the cannon on top; quickly connecting to the fireplug on the corner, opening valves, and spraying down the building, immediately after shouting to clear the way. One of the more vigilant cops gets soaked before surrendering his post, but his more urgent task was trying to foam down that wall before the fuel tank could blow; and he was successful in that. The water blast knocked him to the ground, and later some of the others would make light of the dripping, draining officer, but in a couple of weeks, his heroism would earn him the title of Saturated Sergeant instead.
When the sirens wail their way into the neighborhood, ‘Duardo is yelling at his phone, unable to hear much of what was being said to him. With ringing ears, screaming through the sirens, and more, he folds up his phone, jumps into his Escalade, with it’s busted out side window and dented body panels, speeding away from any conversation that may be had with law enforcement.
It only takes the Thirty-Three’s about twenty minutes to get the hoses locked down and flames washed out, then another twenty of walking the burned out floor of the trailer, kicking couch cushions to the grass for a hose off, checking the bodies for signs of life, regardless of how stupid that may seem. There are no signs of life, and when the firemen get to remove their masks, get a better look at the corpses, they quickly realize that no one was alive when the fire began.
EMS, CSU, FBI, and an arson investigation team are onsite before sundown. The EMS is replaced by the coroner pretty soon, and CSU begins sifting through the rubble, trying to find what other kind of crimes had been committed, as police canvas the neighborhood to see if anyone saw anything at all, and consult with the arson boys.
The FBI had been listening in on all the calls in the area. Unknown to the locals, they had a trailer less than a hundred feet away, watching every move that Tiny and his friends made, including the two women they bagged last night. They didn’t have sufficient video angle to get a record of Mike’s sister, or they may have been able to get them for that. Still, their goal was the leadersh
ip of the organization, not the little fish, and not one at a time on a rape charge, which is all they could have gotten for the sexual assaults of Mae, Mike, or Susan. But, they will be looking into this as well. Their stake out is blown, and they are certain it was not done by a rival, or as punishment from above. The video data will be reviewed.
When some of the house blew off the frame and floor, the first inclination of the agents nearby was to run to the scene, but the higher-ups made the decision to watch it all play out, and see if anyone would be by to brag or boast. Instead, ‘Duardo woke up, shouted at his phone a little, got into his busted ass Cadi truck, and drove away. They had seen the woman drive off on the bike, return, take pictures, and drive away, but someone decided to try to identify her as a potential source of intel. They had her pictures from when she left with that other girl, and more pictures from when she dropped by after the explosion. They didn’t believe that grabbing her right away would be a good idea. She is gone, and no one knows where, but the face rec is running. ‘Duardo is gone for now, but the feds expect him to turn up at Willee Street, in Loma Linda, and they are right.
The Warriors' Ends- Soldiers of the Apocalypse Page 6
