Troop of Shadows

by Nicki Huntsman Smith

  “Or maybe he’s not trying to hit us,” she said. “You’re not going to like this, and it will take too long to explain because it’s all very mathy. But I’m going to do something and I need you to not freak out.”

  Bullets nine and ten hit the asphalt a few feet from the Toyota. From this angle, they looked like miniature bombs exploding. Before he could argue, she squirmed back out. Eleven and twelve struck the pavement two feet in front of her.

  With raised arms, she walked toward room 218. Pablo’s heart was in his throat as he crawled out after her.

  “Stay back. I mean it. You will not get any n-o-o-k-i-e tonight if you don’t.”

  He stopped. Maddie continued toward the source of the gunfire. The barrel still extended through the window, but was no longer firing now.

  She called out, “We’re no threat to you! We’re just looking for a place to sleep for the night!”

  No response, neither verbal nor ballistic.

  “We have a child! We’re two women and a child!”

  A voice came from the window of room 218, gruff yet frail-sounding. “I see a man too!”

  “Yes, but he’s a poet!”

  Pablo was too anxious to be offended. Ten seconds passed that felt like ten minutes. Finally, the door of room 218 opened and a white head poked out.

  Maddie stopped just below the balcony where an old man emerged, holding a hunting rifle pointed directly at her.

  A nauseating flashback of the Walgreen’s nightmare caused Pablo to break out in a cold sweat.

  “How do I know you’re harmless? I’ve met a lot of nasty people this past year.”

  “Do we look like nasty people?” She allowed the old man a long examination of her open face and guileless beauty.

  At that moment, Pablo knew she would be safe.

  “I’m Maddie. That’s Pablo. Amelia is there under the car with Jessie. Is it okay for them to come out?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ve never shot a woman or child, and I don’t plan on starting today. You there, poet fellow. You watch yourself. No sudden moves and put that shotgun on the ground.”

  Pablo nodded, feeling the sting now of the emasculating nuance.

  “May I ask your name?” Maddie said.

  “I’m Alfred. I don’t have much food or water, so don’t think you’re invited to dinner. You can stay here for the night but you’re gone in the morning. We clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Pablo could only see her backside from his vantage, but he saw the effect of her smile on the face of the old man.

  If Maddie carried a gun, she could have etched another notch in it.

  ###

  “Why the hell Oklahoma? There’s nobody there but goat ropers and shit kickers.”

  During dinner, provided by Alfred despite the earlier caveat, the old man showed himself to be cynical and somewhat racist, but also intelligent and kind-hearted. He shared room 218 with a tabby kitten he’d found near death the previous week and had been nursing back to health ever since. Nevertheless, his offhand comments regarding Pablo’s and Amelia’s ethnicity made it difficult to be in his presence.

  “We’re just looking for fertile farmland and a safe place to live. The farther away from people the better,” Pablo replied.

  Alfred’s faded blue eyes regarded him. “You ever do much farming, young man?”

  “A little. My family kept an extensive vegetable garden. In Arizona, no less. I figure the rich soil and regular rain in Oklahoma will provide conditions light years beyond what we had back home.”

  The old man gave a grudging nod. “You come across any troublemakers so far?”

  Pablo darted a look at Maddie. She nodded.

  “Yeah, there were some bad people in Prescott. So bad that they ran me out of town and into the desert for the last six months. They had Maddie for a while, but she got away.”

  “Ya don’t say?” The old man’s eyes were drawn again to her face. He reached out and gave her knee a grandfatherly pat. The light eyes became watery and he brushed at them with the back of a liver-spotted hand.

  “What about you, Alfred? Have any problems with troublemakers?” Amelia asked from one of the double beds in his hotel room. Curly Sue and Bruno were curled up on the bed next to her. Jessie and the kitten had fallen asleep an hour ago on the other bed. The naked Barbie doll was held in a tiny death grip.

  “Oh, yeah. That’s why I’m here, smack dab in the middle of nowhere. That’s also why I shot at you folks. Sorry about that, by the way.”

  “No problem,” Maddie said quickly before Pablo could get in a snide remark. “You didn’t know we weren’t unsavory types.”

  “Still don’t know about that poet fellow,” he said with an ornery grin at Pablo.

  Pablo sighed and shook his head in mock exasperation. “We poets get such a bad rap. So, how did you get here? We didn’t see any cars in the parking lot.”

  “Unloaded all my supplies then drove my pickup into the ditch a mile up the road. Didn’t want anyone to know I was here.”

  “What happens when you run out of food?” Maddie asked.

  The old man smiled, displaying teeth so pristine they must have been dentures. “Well, that will be the end of Alfred then.”

  “What do you mean? You’re just going to let yourself starve to death?” The distress in Maddie’s tone made Pablo cringe on the inside. He began tackling the logistics of squeezing an elderly man and a small feline into the overloaded SUV.

  In his gruff, quavering voice, the old man surprised everyone with a poem recitation. It was one Pablo knew well.

  “I said unto myself, if I were dead,

  What would befall these children? What would be

  Their fate, who now are looking up to me

  For help and furtherance? Their lives, I said,

  Would be a volume wherein I have read

  But the first chapters, and no longer see

  To read the rest of their dear history,

  So full of beauty and so full of dread.

  Be comforted; the world is very old,

  And generations pass, as they have passed,

  A troop of shadows moving with the sun;

  Thousands of times has the old tale been told;

  The world belongs to those who come the last,

  They will find hope and strength as we have done.”

  “Longfellow. Very nice, Alfred.” Pablo gazed at the old man with new respect.

  “More relevant now than ever.” He paused. “I’m not long for this world, Maddie. I’ve lived on this planet for eighty-seven years. I’ve kissed a lot of girls,” he winked at Amelia, “done a lot of bad things and then a lot of good things. I think I’m square with my maker, but if I’m not, well, at least living in the desert has gotten me used to the heat. ‘The world belongs to those who come the last.’ I just hope it’s folks like you and your poet fellow who rise to the top. Not the punks and riff raff I’ve seen so much of this past year.”

  “Me too, Alfred,” Pablo replied. “Me too.”

  ###

  “What do you think will become of him?” Maddie asked, scrutinizing the map the next day. They were entering the outskirts of Albuquerque, and it would soon be time to locate an alternate route through the city. People had resorted to using both sides of I40 in an effort to flee. Pablo hated this part, never knowing if there would be bodies inside or not. So far, about fifty percent of the time there were. Maddie could have provided the exact number.

  “He’ll die,” he said, steering the Toyota onto the shoulder to bypass a snarl of cars.

  “It seems wrong to die alone.”

  “It’s the way he wanted to go,” Amelia said. Jessie gazed at the older woman with a thoughtful expression as she stroked the kitten in her lap. Of course they’d allowed the child to accept Alfred’s gift; the alternative would have been a death sentence for the feline.

  A shy, peach-smooth hand reached across the back seat and grasped Amelia’s, encircling th
e brown fingers, slightly crooked from early onset arthritis. When the child released her grip minutes later, Amelia studied her own hand with surprise.

  “It just makes me sad,” Maddie continued.

  “I know what will turn that frown upside down,” Pablo said with an evil grin.

  “What? Chocolate? Tequila?”

  “Nope. Gas sucking. I was recently informed that this task does not require a p-e-n-i-s, so you’re in luck. All you need is good lungs, great lips, and a weak gag reflex. What do you say?”

  She punched him in the arm. “Fine. I’ll do it. And I’ll do it without all the girly complaining too.”

  As it turned out, she couldn’t make good on her vow.

  “Holy s-h-i-t! This is horrible!” she said ten minutes later next to a late model Suburban. On the eastern horizon the low skyline lay nestled against a backdrop of mountains.

  “Told you.” The visual of her sputtering and gagging would have been funnier if he wasn’t concerned about how her kisses would taste that night.

  “Well, I gotta give you this one, Poet Fellow. You’re right. Let’s hope it’s good this time.”

  They dribbled some of it onto the pavement. Per Alfred’s instructions, they touched the edge of the puddle with a lighter, transforming it into a miniature inferno.

  “If nothing else good came from our encounter with Alfred, this little trick will have been worth it. Houston, we have good gasoline.”

  Pablo was still kicking himself that he hadn’t thought of this litmus test before. Although he’d learned that the smell test was also fairly reliable. Good gas smelled like gas and bad smelled sweet. The Suburban’s enormous tank allowed them to top off the Highlander, plus fill their two dented cans. Maddie was elated knowing they could make it to Oklahoma on what they now had. Of course she could calculate it down to the yard, even switching to the metric system if asked. So far he hadn’t, but sometimes it was fun to throw her a mathematical curve ball just to watch the adorable process.

  “We should take the Atrisco Vista exit.”

  “I see a sign up ahead.”

  Jessie had fallen asleep in the back seat with the kitten on her lap, the dogs were doing god-knows-what in the third row, which had been folded down to accommodate them, and Amelia was wedged in between the supplies that wouldn’t fit in the back. They were crammed into the SUV like a box of human crayons.

  “I think I see...” Maddie began, just as something smashed through the windshield and silenced whatever she was going to say.

  After that, everything became hazy and dreamlike. Maddie slumped against the passenger side door, a rag doll dropped by a careless child. On some level he knew he was screaming, but the feeling was detached from himself, like it came from another Pablo in an alternate dimension. He could hear Amelia yelling now.

  Drive Pablo drive!

  It barely registered because it was directed at that other Pablo, the one who physically sat behind the wheel and was capable of movement and action. Not this Pablo who couldn’t take his eyes off the rag doll next to him.

  Then, like a soul crashing back into its body after a near death event, he returned to himself and followed the directive to drive Pablo drive!

  He couldn’t look at the rag doll. All he could do was drive and get them the hell out of there!

  Fifteen minutes later that’s what he’d done. They came to a stop on a residential street somewhere in Albuquerque, where there were no longer rough-looking men and women approaching them and brandishing a panoply of weapons and firearms. He still couldn’t bear to look at the rag doll, because if he did, he might see its lifelessness. So instead, he opened the driver’s side door and fell to the sidewalk of what was once a lovely ranch-style home with pale yellow siding and a cacti garden next to the front porch.

  He vomited by the mailbox.

  He lifted his head a minute later when all he could do was dry retch, to see Amelia tending to Maddie. He wondered if her midwife skills extended to neurosurgery because the bullet hole in Maddie’s left temple would require it.

  “She’s alive, Pablo.” There was an odd edge...a shading...to Amelia’s voice he hadn’t heard before, but his brain wasn’t functioning well enough to analyze what it meant.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a sob.

  “Pablo, get a grip. You’re not doing her any good now. Let’s get her inside. Now, young man!”

  The sharp words penetrated the fog, and gently-oh-so-gently, he carried his Maddie inside the ranch-style house with the pale yellow siding and the cacti garden next to the front porch.

  Per Amelia’s instructions, he laid her down on a tidy bed in one of the bedrooms. He was aware that the house smelled musty and stale, but his olfactory senses didn’t register the pungent, sour aroma of human decomposition. Was that because there were no bodies or because they were so far gone their odor was no longer off-putting? He found that it helped to wonder about such things at the moment, because otherwise all he could think about was losing his love. Again.

  “Pablo, listen to me. Go back to the car and get my pack and some water. Quickly now.” Amelia’s voice still carried that perplexing quality which he couldn’t be troubled to identify at the moment. He did as he was told without a verbal response. He didn’t want to hear the agony in his own voice.

  When he returned with the items, the strange little girl and the tiny braided woman sat on either side of Maddie. She looked less like a rag doll now and more like an angel who hasn’t had a proper bath in a while. The thought made him smile. What was the name of that old black and white movie? Angels with Dirty Faces? Something like that.

  “Now, leave us, please.” The tone was still strange, but he was more disturbed by the command itself.

  “I’m not leaving her. I will never leave her. Never again.”

  He watched the slow rise and fall of Maddie’s chest. It gave him minor comfort. He tried not to look at how starkly her lovely freckles stood out against the pallor of her face. Back to the chest. It was still rising and falling. That had to be a good thing, right? Her beautiful hair...that luxurious, tangled mess of red and gold, was so perfectly, exquisitely disheveled, lying against the powder blue pillow case. Who could die with hair that gorgeous? He smiled again. The Hair Gods wouldn’t allow it, was something Maddie would say. I am Folliculitia, the Angel of Fabulous Hair! I must stay on earth to provide an example for all those females who also desire fabulous hair! I cannot be summoned to heaven on a whim...my job here is too important!

  “Pablo, it’s not a suggestion. If you want to give her a fighting chance, you will leave now and shut the door.”

  That snapped him out of his reverie. The expression he saw in the old soul eyes was congruent with the curious voice.

  He didn’t know why he did so, but he turned around and walked out of the bedroom, closing the door behind him.

  Chapter 36

  Oklahoma

  Something had crashed down on Dani’s back, pinning her body to Sam’s. She couldn’t see his face in the dark bathroom. The flashlight had dropped from her grasp at some point in the last few seconds, but she felt him breathing. She could barely hear Fergus’s shout above the savage howl of the wind and the incessant pounding of debris.

  “Dani, are you okay?”

  “Yes!” she screamed, her voice almost lost in the storm’s cacophony. What was holding her down? Sheet rock? Cabinetry? It was heavy as hell, but she’d managed to wedge herself like a human gasket between Sam and whatever had fallen on them.

  “I think it’s passing! Just stay put!”

  Seconds later, the pounding tapered off and the shrieking wind subsided. The residual quiet so soon after the deafening noise of the storm was eerie but welcome. She could feel Sam’s steady breathing and enjoyed how it felt to just lie there, her body covering his, and their hearts beating close together. She had no idea how long it lasted. Five minutes? An hour? But the moment was shattered by the sudden lifting of weigh
t from her back and blinding sunlight in her eyes.

  “What the fuck?”

  “That’s right, Honey Badger. That glowing bright orb in the sky is, in fact, the sun. Why, you might ask, can one see it through the ceiling of a house? To which I would reply in that charming yet direct way I have, because a fucking F5, as you referred to it earlier, ripped the entire second story off our sanctuary. Kind of annoying since we’ll have to relocate now, but at least we’re alive, yes? I assume by the dreamy look on your face and the salacious manner in which you’re groping Sam that he’s still with us?”

  He continued the running dialogue while excavating them from a sea of splintered lumber, chunks of porcelain, mangled shingles and, oh my god, was that a dead Holstein in the destroyed living room?

  “Unlucky cow!” she said, with a manic chuckle.

  “Indeed,” Fergus replied. “I intend to capitalize on its bad fortune in the form of steaks for dinner. Help me with Sam, love. Careful, now.”

  In the sporadic way tornadic destruction results in one suburban house being demolished and the one next door escaping unscathed, Big Blue was parked where they’d left it and in good condition despite hail damage that looked like metallic cellulite.

  If anyone in the truck had glanced back at the mountain of rubble as they drove down the winding gravel driveway, they would have seen a figure: a ragged, frantic human rummaging through the debris. He? She? It was grasping at objects with filthy, claw-like fingers, then flinging them aside in anger. Just as the pickup turned left onto the road, it came upon the object it sought — the sentinel doll from the foyer. It pressed the toy against its bony torso next to a sheath containing a blood-stained knife.

  ###

  They found an intact house a mile down the road, although it took some stunt driving around uprooted trees to get there. While Sam rested in bed, Dani and Fergus sat outside in companionable, exhausted silence next to a charcoal grill. She had left the butchering of the unlucky Holstein to him. They’d found some Kingsford briquettes in a shed, and the aroma coming from the Weber mini Death Star was heavenly.