by Lucin, David
A chain-link fence, like the one they’d walked along earlier, divided the yard from a swathe of sand maybe two hundred feet wide. Then another fence and more homes.
“Where to?” Sophie asked Jenn.
“I . . .” Jenn focused on the roads between their location and where they’d parked the trucks. When she looked up from the map, everyone was waiting for her. Sophie was toying with her necklace, and Jenn pictured Ed, his shoulder bandaged and his breathing heavy. She imagined him helping Dylan out of a shed and showing Carter around Minute Tire for his first shift. An image of Valeria at a desk, working diligently to balance his books, flashed in her mind.
“We could hide out here and wait for them to pass or hop the fence and keep moving.” Gritting her teeth, she added, “Forward to the hospital,” but it was mostly for herself.
Sophie answered by planting a foot into the chain-link fence, then pushing herself over. The others followed. Jenn went last. As she lowered herself onto the other side, she glanced at the house.
A thin, elderly man in pajama pants and a T-shirt stood in the patio doorway.
Her hands slipped on the fence, which caused her to stumble. Dylan caught her and scrunched up his brow when he noticed her expression. “You okay?” he asked.
The breath had left her chest. “Someone saw me,” she said. “In the house.”
Dylan lowered the brim of his cap. “It’s probably nothing. Let’s just keep moving.”
Across the stretch of sand between rows of houses, they climbed the fence and hopped into a yard with a garden filled with succulents and rough-cut stones. Jenn led the way onto the street, where they turned left. If she didn’t know any better, she would have thought that this neighborhood, with its generic brown homes, was the same one they’d just come from.
The four kept low, moving at barely shy of a jog. Ahead, the road straightened and terminated at a T-intersection. Right, Jenn reminded herself. They needed to keep going southeast. As long as they did, they would reach the hospital eventually.
When they were seven or eight houses away from the intersection, a truck, the same one as before, barreled around the corner.
Jenn’s body stiffened. Without her telling it to, her left hand lifted the Glock and aimed it at the oncoming vehicle. Her finger found the trigger and began to depress it as the crack of a weapon assaulted her ears.
Dylan had his rifle raised. The truck lurched to a stop, and he fired again, but the shot missed. Two figures with guns leaped out of the bed.
Another ear-piercing blast, this one from Valeria. A third shot echoed off the houses.
“Get to cover!” Dylan shouted.
Jenn’s legs took her toward the nearest line of homes. More shots pierced the air. Her vision narrow, she scurried behind a house’s stucco wall. The muscles in her abdomen knit together. She touched her chest and stomach to check for wounds.
Nothing.
Eyes wide, Valeria came up beside her and kept low.
“Where’re Sophie and Dylan?” Jenn asked. The words fell out so quickly she could hardly understand them. She tried again, more slowly this time, while haphazardly shoving the map into the pocket of her jeans.
“I don’t know,” Valeria said. “They’ve went a different way.”
Jenn brushed sweat from her brow. “We need to move.”
Valeria popped up, then moved between two houses, through a wooden gate, and into a back yard. A brown concrete wall enclosed the space. Valeria tried the patio door. “It’s locked.” The words came out almost as one.
They were trapped. Those men would corner them in here and gun them down like animals if she couldn’t find a way out.
“The fence.” Valeria pointed to a segment of the wall at the edge of the yard. She darted over, laced her fingers together, and held them out, palms open. Jenn planted her foot and Valeria hoisted her up and over. She landed on a sidewalk next to a side street. Valeria, taller and stronger than Jenn, pulled herself up on her own, then rolled off and hit the ground on all fours.
“This way.” Jenn started down the road, not daring to check behind her. She scanned the houses on her left and right. Boards covered the door and windows of one. The next had its curtains drawn. A black coupe sat in the driveway. Finally, they came upon a place that appeared empty but accessible.
Jenn cut toward the house and stepped onto the front yard. Her shoes sunk into the soft sand. Valeria followed.
The gate leading to the back yard hung open. Valeria closed it when she passed through. A tan-colored concrete wall surrounded this space, too, and it had a pool, which was empty. Jenn fiddled with the patio door. Locked.
“I’ll try a window,” Valeria said. “On the other side. Stay here and make watch.”
Jenn’s mouth tasted like sandpaper. She took her Glock in both hands and pressed her shoulder to the wall of the house. When she peered around, she expected to see the barrel of a gun but saw nothing.
She licked her lips with a coarse tongue and forced down an image of Dylan and Sophie lying dead in the streets, gunshot wounds in their chests. They escaped, she told herself. They were fine.
As she prepared to poke her head out a second time, Valeria said with a wave, her voice low, “It’s unlocked! Here, here, here.”
Jenn made her way to Valeria, who held out her hands again, beckoning for Jenn’s foot. “I won’t fit,” Valeria said. “You go in and open the door for me.”
With her weapon secured in its holster, Jenn planted a shoe on Valeria’s palms and climbed through the window. Halfway in, the bottom of the sill scraped her stomach and caught on the button of her jeans. Awkwardly, she wiggled inside and landed on a countertop near a sink. The room was bare, but the air smelled faintly of urine. In the open space beyond the kitchen lay two blankets, a pillow, and a stained mattress. There was an orange bucket in the corner.
Squatters.
Jenn struggled to the floor and took out her gun. If squatters were here, they would have heard her, so she cleared her corners on the way to the patio door. Outside, Valeria stood, her back to the house. She jumped when Jenn unlatched the lock.
Valeria inside, Jenn closed it and whispered, “Quiet. There might be squatters here.”
Weapons up, the two moved down a short hall. Jenn swung her Glock into a bathroom. The glass mirror above the sink was cracked, and the shower curtain had fallen into the tub. Next came a bedroom. It was empty save for a layer of dust on the floor.
“All clear,” Valeria said.
Jenn lowered her weapon and let her shoulders relax. “You have a radio?” she asked.
Valeria angled her hip to show Jenn the radio clipped to her belt. “I will call the others.”
“Okay,” Jenn said. “I’ll check to make sure we weren’t followed.” She left Valeria in the hallway and went to the living room. The smell of urine grew stronger with every step closer to the bucket in the corner.
The large front window lacked blinds or curtains, so she knelt below it to stay hidden, then peeked over. Nothing but the street and brown houses, so she fell to the floor. Her pistol stayed out and ready, just in case.
She stayed there for a moment, listening to Valeria trying to contact Dylan or Sophie. They were okay, she told herself again. They’d return the call whenever they had the chance. She recounted their engagement with the truck: Dylan fired, then fired again, and they split up. No bodies on the street, no cries for help, nothing. They must be safe.
As her heart rate normalized, she thought about the person who saw her from his patio door. Had he contacted these people who were hunting her and her group? What else explained the truck running into them like that? If he’d told someone about them, why? Fear? One of the thugs broke some poor man’s finger over taxes. Maybe the old man feared retribution if he kept quiet.
“Nobody’s answering me,” Valeria said as she appeared from the hallway. The words made Jenn sick. “Maybe they—” She cut herself short and jumped behind the wall.
&n
bsp; “What?” Jenn asked. “What is it?”
“On the yard.” Valeria’s voice was barely above a whisper. “Someone’s there.”
Jenn’s heart rate doubled. Outside, a man with a pistol knelt in the soft sand she’d trampled over on her way to the back door.
Her footprints. Had he seen them?
The man signaled to an accomplice, this one carrying a rifle, who stood on the sidewalk. Both men advanced toward the house.
Jenn dropped below the window again. Did she have time to join Valeria in the hallway? If they were quick, they could leave through the patio door, climb the wall, and escape like before. They needed to move now, though, or—
On her right, the front door burst open, spraying splinters of wood into the living room. The man armed with the pistol barreled through. When he swung it toward Jenn, his mouth hung agape.
On instinct, Jenn’s arms aimed her weapon at the man’s torso. Then her fingers pressed the trigger. Once. Twice. A third time. Each shot reverberated in her bones.
Seemingly in slow motion, her target dropped his gun and staggered backward, into the door, and collapsed. On the floor, he coughed. Blood fell from his mouth and spattered the front of his shirt. More trickled down his chin. There was a bullet hole in the drywall behind him, and the acrid smell of gunpowder stung Jenn’s nose.
She heard Valeria: “Don’t move!” she shouted. “Not a centimeter!”
Jenn rose on jelly legs, but her hands, both still on the gun, remained steady.
Blood soaked the man’s purple polo shirt, turning it black. One hand clutched his midsection. The other lay limp beside him, the fingers outstretched and reaching for a pistol a foot away on the hardwood. His chin rested on his chest.
Standing there in front of this body, Jenn expected her lizard brain to take over as it had when she shot Yankees Hat. She braced herself to become a passive observer as primal fear subdued all traces of free will. But it didn’t happen. Somehow, she remained in control. She understood what had happened and why. Everything made sense. This person would have killed her if she hadn’t killed him first. It couldn’t be simpler. The realization sharpened her focus and hardened her resolve.
She tore her eyes away from the corpse. The patio door was open. At the juncture of the kitchen, hallway, and living room was the second man, his rifle held out to the side in one hand. Valeria had her AR leveled at his back. How did he get in? In her haste to check the house for squatters, did Jenn forget to lock the door?
“Take his gun,” Valeria said to her.
She did, then laid it on the floor and stood between it and Valeria’s prisoner.
“Hands on your head,” Valeria ordered. “And go on your knees.”
“You don’t know what you’re up against,” he said. Patchy facial hair spotted his chin, and short, dark stubble coated his scalp. An intricate tattoo ran up the side of his neck. More tattoos covered his forearms. Beneath his black T-shirt, his torso rippled with muscle. “This is the Major’s territory.”
“Major?” Jenn asked him. “Who is it? Tell me about him. Is he some gangbanger or actual military?”
The man sniggered at her. He’d fallen to his knees, and his hands were locked behind his head. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
Jenn moved to the body by the entryway. With her free hand, she gripped the corpse’s shirt collar and dragged him inside, then shut the door. The jam was shattered, so she secured the deadbolt to keep it from blowing open. “Why did you chase us?” she asked. “What do you want?”
He only laughed at her. The sound stung Jenn’s ears, and she fantasized about turning the Glock on him and pulling the trigger over and over.
“I hope you know you’re dead,” he said. “You bitches? When the Major gets a hold of you, he’ll take his time. Make it go slow. You can count on that.” He turned his head and addressed Valeria directly. “And he got a special place in his heart for them sweet little Latinas.” He puckered his lips and made a kissing gesture.
Something in Valeria’s expression changed, and her eye twitched. Then she shifted her grip on the rifle and brought the butt down on the man’s temple. An “oof” escaped him before he collapsed, unconscious.
Her shoulders rising and falling, Valeria swore at him in Spanish. When she finished, she pulled the radio from her belt and spoke into it. “Valeria to Sophie.”
“This is Dylan,” came the answer.
A weight slid off Jenn, so she leaned onto the nearest wall and collapsed to the floor. Then she realized that Dylan had answered when Valeria called for Sophie. “Is Sophie okay?” she asked Valeria, who relayed the question to Dylan.
“Yeah, yeah,” Dylan said. “She’s fine. Where are you guys?”
“I’ll have Jansen tell you. But you must come here. We’ve taken a prisoner.”
17
Dylan picked the dead man’s pistol off the cheap laminate floor, retracted the slide to check the chamber, and stuck it into the waist of his pants. Then he cinched the corpse’s belt around the unconscious man’s ankles. He used his own to bind the hands.
Seated on the kitchen counter, Jenn sipped from her water bottle. The adrenaline had subsided, but she didn’t feel sick. Fatigued, sure, but no waves of nausea and no spinning rooms this time. And no Yankees Hat, either. Still, she appreciated that Dylan had moved the body into the bathroom, where she couldn’t see it.
As he leaned their prisoner against a wall, Sophie came over to Jenn. She sparked a cigarette and said, “You’re looking pretty composed. I had the shakes for days after my first.”
Jenn took another sip of her water. She could keep lying to Sophie, to Dylan, but why bother? This man had given her no choice. Neither had Yankees Hat. Jenn had done what was necessary to survive and protect her friends. That was nothing to be ashamed of.
“Who said it was my first?”
The cigarette almost fell from Sophie’s mouth. When she’d recovered it, she said, “Payson?”
“Yeah.”
Sophie tapped some ash into the sink. “I had a feeling something happened there. You were dodging the topic pretty well anytime it came up.”
Jenn told Sophie the story. It felt good to recount it in full and get it off her chest. She hadn’t realized how much it was weighing her down. Hearing herself speak, she saw the events from a different perspective: Yankees Hat was a monster, and he deserved to die for trying to steal their car and threatening to take Nicole. Jenn gave him every opportunity to leave with his life, but he refused. Pulling the trigger was justified.
Sophie listened and nodded at all the right times. “You did what you had to do,” she said when Jenn finished. “Years ago, I had to shoot a vagrant on our property. Real piece of scum. Probably cut from the same cloth as your buddy in Payson. Came at me with a knife and I put him down. It took me a while to get over it, but I did, obviously.”
Hearing that Sophie had killed was a relief. If she could move past it, Jenn could, too.
Sophie waved her cigarette at the unconscious man, whom Dylan had bound. A welt formed on his temple, and blood trickled down his cheek. “Valeria’s doing?” she asked Jenn. “Or yours?”
“Valeria,” Jenn said. “He blew a kiss at her and she clocked him. I think he was out cold before he hit the floor.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right for her.”
“How? It was like she flipped a switch. I mean, she’s always so neutral.”
Sophie put her cigarette out on the counter, leaving behind a black mark, and tossed the butt into the sink. “You’re a smart girl,” she started, her voice low. “You know what the Brazilians did when they took over Colombia.”
Jenn crinkled her nose. She was too young to understand Brazil’s invasion when it happened in the late 2040s, but she knew how the Second Empire’s soldiers treated the local population, specifically the women: mass rape. Worse than when the Russians invaded Germany in World War Two, Gary had said. She looked to Valeria, who stood guard at the front windo
w. Her traps and delts weren’t big, but they could have been chiseled from marble. Same with her legs. She was beautiful but as tough as any woman Jenn had ever met. Now she understood why.
“He’s waking up,” Dylan said. He almost sounded excited.
Jenn rushed into the living room with Sophie. Valeria didn’t budge from her spot by the window.
Dylan patted the man’s face with an open palm. “Morning, sunshine,” he taunted. “Have a nice nap?”
The man blinked as he came to. When he saw Dylan crouching in front of him, he jerked his limbs but realized he was bound. He tried to scoot away on his rear, but Dylan gripped him by the cheeks and held him in place.
“Easy, friend,” Dylan said, his voice laced with scorn. “We don’t want you hurting yourself. You’ve got a little bit of a bump on your noggin there.”
“What?” the man groaned, and his head bobbed to the side.
Dylan slapped him again. “Wake up. No sleeping.”
Life returned to the man’s eyes, which focused on Dylan. Then he spat in Dylan’s face and swore at him.
Without flinching, Dylan dried his cheeks with his shirt and peered up at Sophie and Jenn. “He’s a feisty one,” he said. Then he made a fist and struck his captive in the mouth. He toppled onto his side, but Dylan pulled him up. His lip had split open. The sight gave Jenn a measure of satisfaction.
Dylan reached into his pants pocket and produced a knife. He brought it close to the man’s face, then pressed a button with his thumb. With a click, the blade swung out.
The prisoner’s eyes widened. Jenn felt hers widen, too. The conversation she had with Valeria in the motel room bubbled up from her memory. Would Dylan really harm this man? Punching him was one thing, but carving him with a pocketknife was another. No, he was probably only trying to frighten him.
“You sure you want to try that again?” Dylan taunted. “Personally, I’d love it if you did. It would absolutely make my week.”
Dylan spoke without anger. Every word came out flat, almost conversational. It made Jenn uneasy. Sophie didn’t seem to mind. She stood casually, her knee bent and one hand on her hip.
