Troop of Shadows

by Nicki Huntsman Smith

  At least he didn’t know where they were going, and eventually he would give up the chase. Surely.

  “Loved the Pear of Anguish thing, darling.” Fergus’s gravelly voice interrupted her thoughts, but had hit on the very subject of them.

  “I’m not surprised. You’re a freak of nature.”

  Fergus grinned from the back seat. She wondered how long he’d been without human companionship; he seemed to be enjoying himself. She could tell he had quickly become fond of Sam, which made her accept the red-haired oddity sooner than she might have otherwise. She speculated on how much, if any, of his autobiography was true.

  “Honey Badger, I’m trying to imagine you wearing overalls and chewing on a piece of straw while you plow fields. I have to say, I find the image implausible, somewhat disconcerting, and sexy as hell.”

  “Not nearly as disconcerting as imagining your plumber’s crack while milking the cows, grandpa.”

  “You’re a heartless woman. You remind me of the Grinch when his heart was two sizes too small.”

  “I love that show!” Sam said. “It’s not Christmas without watching the Grinch. I think I miss TV most of all.”

  “Me too. And movies,” said Fergus.

  “It sucks not having TV. Thank goodness for books.”

  The words came out before she could stop them, and the crestfallen expression on Sam’s face made her feel like the biggest jerk on the planet. Considering how few people there were left, she just might be.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. It’s not your fault that I don’t read well.”

  “What is this?” Fergus asked.

  Dani shot a covert look at her friend, gauging his reaction to the question, before she answered.

  “I think Sam has an undiagnosed reading disability,” she said after seeing his smile. “He had a hard time in school.”

  “Well, young man, your other attributes certainly make up for it. I’m imagining all the cheerleaders I could have nailed if I’d been as handsome as you back in my youth.”

  The color rose in Sam’s cheeks. She wondered if it were true for about three seconds before dismissing the idea. That wasn’t Sam. He’d surely had countless female admirers since reaching puberty, but she couldn’t see him taking advantage of his good looks just to bang a few chicks. He was not only a gentleman, but she suspected he would only be interested in sex when his heart was engaged.

  “Cheerleaders weren’t really my thing. Most of them were cute, but they could also be mean. I mostly just hung out in the gym and track field. I was good at sports.”

  “You know, there’s no reason not to enjoy books just because printed words seem wonky,” Fergus said. “Dani and I can take turns reading out loud from our novels every night before bedtime. What do you think about that, Honey Badger?”

  “That may be the best idea you’ve had all day. I get to go first. I only had room for two in my backpack so it was a difficult decision.” She found herself excited by the prospect of sharing her love of reading with Sam.

  “What a co-winky-dink. I have several myself. You’re lucky I didn’t have more room, or I’d have brought my entire erotica collection.”

  “No crap books. I’m decreeing that right now. No Fifty Shades of Grey garbage.”

  “What about Gaiman, King, and Tolkien?”

  “Now you’re talking. This will be fun, don’t you think, Sam?”

  “Just promise me none of that Shakespeare stuff. I can’t understand what the heck they’re saying.”

  “Duly noted. No Shakespeare.”

  “And no chick books,” said Fergus. “And by chick books, I mean romance novels, except for ones that contain off-the-chain sex scenes. And no sappy books about lady friendships...unless they’re peppered with lesbian sex. It can even be pedestrian lesbian sex, because two chicks having boring sex is still hot.”

  “You really are a pig.”

  “But I am a lovely pig with fabulous hair.”

  “So what about books where two dudes are having sex? Are you a homophobe?”

  For the first time, their odd friend appeared genuinely insulted.

  “Certainly not. I condone all acts of love between human beings, providing it doesn’t injure others. I just don’t need to read about dudes getting it on...doesn’t do anything for me, know what I mean?” The red eyebrows waggled. “Doesn’t summon the crotch zombie or wake the one-eyed Cyclops. The pink Darth Vader never shows up. The throbbing gristle doesn’t throb...”

  “Enough!” Dani shouted, laughing. “You’re disgusting. If I’d known you were such a little perv back at the bike store, I’d never have let you come with us.”

  Fergus chuckled.

  “We could use more water too,” Sam said, with an embarrassed grin.

  “Good idea. We have plenty of MREs, but now we have room for canned goods and other supplies.” Dani was feeling the effects of the heavy, salty food in her digestive tract. A nice can of carrots or green beans would taste heavenly for a change.

  “And toilet paper. The good stuff too, none of that motel tree bark.”

  “Agreed.” They had each stuffed a roll in their packs, but it was so thin it wouldn’t last long. And the baby wipes were dwindling rapidly. She’d brought a discrete supply of tampons from Colleyville, but they’d be gone after her next period.

  The planning she’d done before the end came had been painstaking and comprehensive, but was based on ‘bugging in,’ not taking her life on the road. This nomadic adventure was not only dangerous, but damned uncomfortable. She missed her bed back home, and her butt throbbed from all the bicycle riding. Still, for a former spoiled nerdy girl, she was doing pretty damn well.

  “We also need to find a map, even though I know it’s a straight shot up I35,” she said. “We might need to use secondary roads, and the GPS on your bike isn’t convenient.”

  “It would be good if we could find some gasoline cans,” Sam said. “That way when we find good gas, we can store extra for the times when we can’t.”

  “Great idea. Anything we can do to keep my poop chute on this cushy seat and off that two-wheeled torture device gets my vote.”

  “Uh oh, guys. Heads up,” Dani said.

  Two hundred yards ahead was a barricade of cars and trucks. This was no accidental twenty-car pileup. It was clear the vehicles were positioned for the purpose of blocking all through traffic.

  Dani slowed the 4x4 to a crawl as they scrutinized the scene before them. There was no movement, no people, just a blockade of metal, glass, and rubber starting at the crash barrier and extending twenty yards beyond the shoulder to a barbed wire fence line.

  There would be no going around it.

  “Who knows how long this thing has been here,” Dani said. “I don’t see anybody. Maybe they’re gone. Or dead.”

  “Or maybe they’re not gone or dead, but waiting for us inside or behind the rampart of vehicles, armed with bazookas and pointy sticks.”

  “I could flank them from the oncoming lane and do some, what’s that word?” Sam said, “Reconnoitering? See what’s what. They’re probably mostly just watching this lane of the highway, I bet. Most of the traffic would come from the south.”

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” Fergus said.

  She nodded. “I do too. Let’s think of something else. We could backtrack and use secondary roads.”

  Sam considered their words, then shook his head.

  “The last thing we want to do is go back to Isaiah territory. We need to go forward. I’ll be careful, don’t worry.” He was out of the pickup before anyone could argue further.

  “Damn it!”

  “Sam’s a big boy, Honey Badger. He’s smarter than you give him credit for too.”

  “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “You know what I mean. You may be an Einstein, but he’s intelligent in a different way. Much more so than you realize. What, no droll retort this time? Ma, grab the camera!”
r />   “Go fuck yourself, Fergus.”

  “If that were possible, I would have saved myself a boat load in alimony.”

  She was too worried to be amused. Sam was nowhere in sight. The idling of the pickup’s engine seemed loud now that the conversation had stopped. She glanced at the Casio on her wrist only to see that mere seconds had passed. Finally, he materialized out of thin air next to the truck, opened the passenger door, and slid inside.

  “Holy shit, son. You’re like Gandalf the Grey but with better hair.”

  Dani felt a wave of intense relief. Without thinking, she grabbed his bruised face between her hands and kissed him squarely on his swollen lips. Embarrassment caught up the next moment, and she pulled away, feeling her cheeks redden.

  Bushy red eyebrows lifted. “Clearly you were missed. What did you find out?”

  “It’s a trap. There are six guys with guns hiding behind the blockade. They look like badass dudes, too.”

  “Fucking great.”

  “Yeah, not really, but I also noticed that the highway crash barrier is in bad shape. There’s a broken section about a hundred yards ahead, like somebody rammed it with a car. There are still big chunks of concrete there, but in a 4x4, we might be able to go right over them.”

  “That would put us only a football field away from the badass dudes,” Dani mused. “Risky. They’ll be shooting at us the second they realize we intend to go around their little fortress.”

  “Yeah, plus they stuck a wrecked car there too, but I think I could shift it into neutral and roll it out of the way.”

  She shook her head. “So while we’re being sprayed with gunfire, you’re going to leave the dubious safety of our truck, hop into another vehicle, possibly get the transmission into neutral, push it out of the way, then dash back to our truck unscathed, and we drive happily away into the sunset.”

  “It’s only noon, Dani. Sunset doesn’t happen for six more hours.”

  “That’s a crazy plan. Way too dangerous.”

  “Hold on there, little filly,” said Fergus. “It is risky, but we have advance knowledge of our adversaries and a clear picture of what we’re facing. If we go backward, the scene gets fuzzy. Isaiah may be lurking under a rock and could leap out when we least expect it. Sam’s proposal is lacking in only one area: he didn’t factor in the help of a devilishly handsome fellow I know who has some minor skills with automobiles, as was evidenced earlier with the Coke trick. You’re welcome, by the way. I’ll go with Sam. One of us shifts and steers the barricade car while the other pushes. Perhaps you could position Big Blue here,” he patted the back seat, “in such a way as to deter some of the bullet spray while we’re exposed. I’ve grown distressingly attached to you though, Honey Badger, so please keep that exquisite head down whilst doing so.”

  “I don’t like it,” she said after a long minute. “But I don’t like the alternative either. I wonder why they didn’t bother blocking off the southbound lane?”

  “Don’t know.” Sam shrugged. “But other than the one car plugging the hole, that lane is pretty much smooth sail boating.”

  “Perhaps they’re a bunch of radical Oklahomans who don’t care if their brethren leave, but don’t want Texans coming in and tainting the bloodline,” Fergus offered. “Or maybe they just haven’t had time to obstruct both sides.”

  “Or perhaps they’re just not too bright,” Dani said.

  “Don’t be so quick to jump to that conclusion. It might come back to bite you in your extremely sexy backside.”

  She shot him a look of disgust, then shifted into drive. They crawled toward the road block at ten miles-per-hour, an attempt to convey trepidation which she hoped would gain them the element of surprise when they made their move.

  When they arrived at the damaged section of the crash barrier, Dani drove just past it, then pulled a hard left toward the breach. Big Blue was now positioned between the blockade and the place where her friends would be vulnerable while clearing the breach.

  Her friends leaped out and scrambled over the chunks of concrete, hunkering down to avoid the bullets that began to fly now, as expected. Dani did the same until her nerves got the best of her. She poked her head above the steering wheel to see Fergus open the door of the blocking vehicle. A bullet exploded through the passenger side window and whooshed past the back of her head, probably taking a few brunette hairs with it.

  She dived for cover, but soon anxiety forced her to peer over the dashboard again.

  Sam was nudging the car from behind while Fergus steered and pushed against the open driver’s side door. Excruciating seconds ticked by. Finally, it was out of the way, leaving just enough space to squeeze through.

  The next moment, her ecstatic squeal changed to a shriek as she watched blood spatter against the rusted trunk. Sam staggered and fell.

  “Sam!” she screamed as she opened the door and started to climb out.

  “Dani, no! Get back in and get through...NOW!” Fergus hollered.

  Tears of frustration made it difficult to see what she was doing. Exposed rebar clawed at blue steel as she rammed the pickup through the opening. Once she was through, she thrust the transmission into park and jumped out. Sam lay on the pavement. Fergus was lifting him by his shoulders while angry metallic hornets whizzed all around them. Dani barely noticed. Her eyes were focused on the expanding pool of blood. Too much blood.

  “Grab his legs!”

  Sam had been shot. He was bleeding out. All that blood. Nobody could lose that much blood and live.

  They managed to get him into the back seat, but later, she couldn’t recall any details. She had no idea how they’d done it without getting themselves killed in the process.

  “Drive! I’ll take care of these guys!” Fergus wriggled in next to a slumped over, unconscious Sam, then snatched the AR15 from the floorboard and fired at their approaching adversaries.

  “Damn it, girl, snap out of it!”

  His voice finally penetrated the mental fog. She tore her gaze away from the blood and slid behind the wheel. The all-terrain tires clambered over the concrete rubble scattered on the southbound lane. Bullets rained down on them, despite the lethal effects of Fergus’s assault rifle.

  “If we want to keep our pretty selves alive, you need to get us the hell out of here.”

  She gritted her teeth and punched the gas pedal, clearing the last bit of debris just as a bullet pierced the windshield. It left a jagged hole an inch to the right of her line of sight.

  The tires gave an exultant screech as they found good traction and the Raptor jetted past the road block five seconds later.

  An unknown amount of time passed.

  “Honey Badger, easy does it now. We’re well clear.”

  She ignored him, knowing that when she took her foot off the accelerator, they would inevitably stop. At that point, she would discover Sam’s condition, and she wasn’t ready to do that.

  “He’s breathing. Slow down, love.”

  The engine ticked in the sudden quiet. She had no memory of exiting the highway nor stopping on the shoulder. There was a vague notion that they’d crossed over the Red River, which meant they were in Oklahoma. Later, Fergus told her she’d driven like a NASCAR banshee for twenty minutes.

  “How bad?”

  “I’m not sure. Let’s take a look, shall we? You need to get a grip now. You’re no good to him all snotty and weepy.”

  Careful, steady hands lifted the bloody t-shirt from Sam’s abdomen. The bruises on the handsome face appeared darker, surrounded now by an alarming pallor. Blood pooled on the seat but not as much as she feared there would be.

  “The problem with the stomach,” Fergus said, his tone that of a trainer speaking to a skittish mare, “Is that if any of the vital organs were hit, it usually doesn’t end well.”

  Dani couldn’t respond. The lump in her throat wouldn’t allow it.

  “But if it missed them, it’s actually preferable to a bullet hitting other areas, like the l
egs or neck, where you have to worry about the femoral and carotid arteries. He would have bled out by now if that were the case.”

  Deft fingers wiped down Sam’s stomach with a sanitary napkin pulled from his backpack. Dani was so surprised at the sight, she found her voice.

  “A maxi pad? You had a maxi pad with you?”

  Fergus grinned. “I never leave home without them. Well, not now anyway. Before the plague, I’d been happily ignorant of their benefits. They’re the perfect field dressing, clean and absorbent. Plus they have a number of other uses I’ve discovered this past year. Now it gets even better.”

  He withdrew an even more familiar item.

  “You’re going to plug it with the tampon, right? I read about that before the internet went down.”

  “Exactly.” His nose was inches from Sam’s abdomen. With gentle movements, he lifted Sam’s torso just enough to study his back.

  “Good news. It’s a perforation wound, not penetrating. I bet you know the difference.”

  She nodded. “Perforation is a through and through. Penetration means the bullet hasn’t exited the body.”

  “Correct. I’m also not smelling any foul odors, which indicates the colon and intestines were probably not pierced. I’m somewhat optimistic.”

  She felt a fluttering of hope.

  “Assuming all the important innards were missed, the potential problems now are two-fold: foreign material left in there, like fiber from his clothing, and also secondary infection later on.”

  “I have antibiotics. I ordered them online before the end came.”

  “Aren’t you a clever little monkey? How did you get them? Shady doctors in Mexico?”

  “No, they’re for fish. But they’re the exact same as the ones prescribed for people.”

  “Interesting,” he muttered as he removed the wrapper from the tampon, careful not to touch the business end, and inserted it into the wound. The blood flow stopped instantly.