by Schow, Ryan
He was suffering in spades. She saw this. He was also bigger than her, and much stronger by the look of him. He lunged at her, swinging his hands around, trying blindly to grab at her. She stepped off his forward line of attack, blasted him again with the pepper spray. When he stopped thrashing, she soccer-ball kicked the side of his knee then watched him go down.
Looking around, she didn’t see anyone. But then she saw a couple of kids deeper in the nearby apartment’s parking lot. If they were playing before, they weren’t now. Three little faces were merely watching her assault a man who technically did nothing but scare her. Was the punishment worthy of the crime? He’d committed no crimes so far, so no, what she did was neither fair nor worthy. But what she felt from him scared her. It scared her plenty.
Holding his knee, crying, his face red and burning, she withdrew her Glock, dropped to a knee before him, pressed the gun into his eye.
“You can’t see this, but it’s a Glock 43 and it’s loaded. There’s a round in the chamber right now. It has your name on it. That means, if I see you again, I’m going to give it to you. Right here.” She leaned on the gun a bit, pressing it into his eye. Tears streamed down his face. Even his burning skin was shaking.
“If you understand, just mouth the words.”
I understand.
“I see you, I shoot you, got it?”
Got it.
With that, she stood up, turned, and continued up Sunset, passing the entrance to the apartments where the kids were playing before all of this started. They weren’t there now. She did look back and see a few people on their apartment balconies, leaning on the lattice-lined railing, smoking. Did they see what happened? Did they know what she had done? She wasn’t sure how loud Aaron had screamed, only that the two of them had scared off the kids. So maybe she drew some attention to herself, but maybe she made people think twice about coming after her, too.
“Put your hand on me,” her uncle Walker had said, “watch what I do to it.”
His voice wouldn’t leave her mind, but she didn’t want it to. The pack on her back might save her. The Glock, too. But maybe his memories and the few things he taught her would help save her as well, for the road ahead was long, sure to be fraught with peril, and terrifying.
That’s when she saw the sky deepen in color, the clouds looking more menacing than ever. There were threats everywhere, she realized. They were on the ground behind her, on the roads ahead, and in the sky above.
Pulling her pack tighter, she picked up her pace again, fear serving as the consummate motivator.
Chapter Nine
Niles Bennington
The second the power went out, Niles left their quarter horses—Buckeye and Bolt—in the six-stall barn and checked the breakers. He had no luck. When he walked outside, he looked up at the sky and stopped. The storm was officially here. Bracing himself against the bitter, now whipping winds, he hurried to the house, covering his eyes with his arm to block what had become the start of rain.
Inside, wet and shivering, he helped his parents light several candles in strategic locations throughout the house. His father was already starting a fire.
“Dad, don’t start that yet,” Niles said.
“How come?”
“We might be leaving.”
“Leaving to go where?” his mother asked.
“We might need to go underground to ride out the storm. We’ll see though.”
He could see the pain in both of their faces. They weren’t young anymore, but that didn’t make them old either. It just meant they were slowing down. Now, talking to them about climbing down into a storm shelter inside the barn, he could almost see them aging before his eyes. Then again, his father kept telling him he was treating them like they were ninety and that wasn’t the case at all. The mid-sixties wasn’t the end of life. His mother said it wasn’t even close.
Still…
“Let me grab some dry wood, just in case,” Niles said as the weather continued to intensify. If the storm ended up burning itself out, they’d need a fire to warm the place until the power returned. But if a tornado did indeed drop over Melbourne, a fire would do them no good.
He peered through the back window, the driving rain now hammering the side of the house. The cold pulsed off the glass windows, cooling his cheeks. He took a deep breath, then opened the door and hurried out back. The elements pushed him around, pummeled him.
At the covered stack of firewood, he drew the tarp aside, then loaded up his arms with dry wood to carry back inside. The rain turned to hail, the hailstones quickly doubling in size. With the wind slashing at his hands and face, he glanced up and saw that the sky had dropped and was now turning a slight shade of green.
The second he got inside, he put down the firewood and said, “We need to go now.”
“Now?” his mother asked.
“The sky just went green,” he said. They all knew what that meant. Tornado. With the winds now howling outside, and the house slightly colder with the chill, the three of them gathered what they could quickly and efficiently.
His father, Will Bennington, was still spry, but he was a little underweight and not as strong as he used to be. Niles knew he’d have to help his mother so as not to burden his father. “Get in the truck, Dad. I’ll help Mom.”
“I’m fine,” she said.
Ramira Bennington was two years older than Niles’s father and slowing down significantly. Niles waited impatiently as she went for her coat.
She was taking too long!
“Normally I’d agree, Mom,” he said, biting his tongue, “but the winds could almost tip a steer, and it’s hailing outside. Not to mention the sky is probably churning right about now.”
Outside, the sounds of hail pelting the roof and decks were like gunfire. Inside, the temperature continued to drop.
“I’ve dealt with hail before,” his mother said like it was nothing new.
Niles fought hard not to raise his voice, to tell her to hurry up. First off, he would never disrespect his mother, and second, he knew shouting would stress her out and ultimately slow her down even further, which would be counterproductive to his aim.
To his father, he said, “Dad, I think maybe you have to get Mom in the truck while I grab some food and blow out the candles. Protect your heads, the hail sounds huge.”
The second his father opened the front door, the wind shot inside, thrashing through the interior like a banshee. Two of the four candles were extinguished immediately while the flames on the other two blew sideways and crackled.
“Get to the truck!” Niles shouted.
The instant his father pulled the front door shut behind him, the craziness inside the house stopped. Wasting no time, Niles stuffed bread, peanut butter, and a small jar of honey into a Kroger shopping bag. As an afterthought, he then added some bananas and a couple of granola bars in case the storm persisted. From the cabinet, he grabbed three plastic cups, dropped them in the bag, then lugged all of that and a three-gallon jug half-filled with filtered water outside to his parents’ truck.
By the time he climbed inside the truck, he realized things were shaping up to be worse than he had feared. He sat in the driver’s seat, dripping wet but stoic and filled with resolve. With the keys in the center console, he pressed the 2016 Dodge Ram’s push-button start. Nothing happened. The dash itself was completely black, as was the double-din radio.
“Did you run the battery out?” he asked his father over the noise.
“No,” he said, offended.
“We’re going to have to walk.” Hastily, he said, “Let’s go!”
They all piled out of the truck, leaning into the shifting winds as best as they could. The air had warmed a bit, replacing the hail with heavy raindrops, but it was still miserable.
They trudged sixty or seventy yards through mud and the wet grounds, his mother stumbling and twisting in the gusts. His father linked arms with her, pulling her close as if they were a single, stable force against
Mother Nature.
They managed to walk the distance to the barn safely, but it took its toll on their energy stores. By the time Niles pulled open the barn door and hustled them inside, the three of them were wind shorn and soaked to the bone.
In the barn, Bolt and Buckeye were restless, the two of them whinnying and stomping around in response to the storm’s roaring violence. As his father pulled up the storm door in the floor—which was built by the original owners and not necessarily smart in its location, in his opinion—Niles tried to settle the horses. When they were close, he used a grease pen to write their phone number on their bodies, then made sure there was nothing to hang them up if the tornado hit the barn.
He knew he should set them loose in the pasture, but with so many trees around them, this presented its own dangers. This was their shelter, the place they were least restless.
“You’ll be okay here,” he said, looking into their wild eyes and trying to pet their noses. If the tornado tore through Melbourne, if it hit them directly, he knew the horses could die.
Unable to turn away from them, their big brown eyes locked on him, Niles knew the quarter horses were fickle, every bit as unpredictable as the storm.
At that moment, he felt so bad for them.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said, even though he wasn’t sure if that was truth or a fabrication of it. Did wishful thinking and reassurance count as a lie? He hoped not.
The noise inside the barn forced him into the shelter with his parents. Down inside the cool, dark hole, Niles was deeply upset that he had to leave Bolt and Buckeye up top. His father found the crank flashlight, spun up some light, then got his wife settled into one of the two emergency cots. Niles took the chair while his father pulled his cot beside Ramira’s cot. He wasn’t sure if it was the dim amber light or the harrowing journey through the storm that aged him, but his father looked tired, as if he’d aged a few years in these last few minutes.
“You doing okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Will replied. “Just gonna lay down for a bit, catch my breath.”
“Yeah, well, don’t breathe too deeply in here,” Niles said. “It smells a bit musty.”
The winds seemed to die down for a brief spell, but then he thought he heard something, the crack of gunfire maybe. He couldn’t be sure. It could be a tree breaking under pressure, or a peal of thunder. Of course, it could also be the roof being ripped off the house.
He glanced over at his parents, understood their vulnerabilities, tried to still his erratic heart. He hadn’t worried about them much before, but under such harrowing circumstances, he had come to realize just how fragile they were. Then again, he’d underestimated them before, and he could be doing so now. They made it through the market crash of 2008, and they survived the unrest of 2020, so he let himself believe they would survive this as well.
By the time the crank-flashlight dimmed, then winked out, all three of them had already closed their eyes. Exhausted from the fear and the struggle to safety, lulled by the weightlessness of the dark, the damp smells of earth, and the stale cellar air, Niles felt himself drift off.
When he later woke, it was to a pressing silence. How long had he been asleep? He shivered from the cold, felt a stiffness in his lower back and thighs. He was twenty-two years old, too young to feel so out of shape.
The crank flashlight sat beside him. He turned it enough to get a low glow.
His parents were still sleeping, both relaxed despite the turmoil that had befallen them. Niles stood and stretched. Thinking of the storm cellar as a form of solitary confinement, he wondered how prisoners did it.
“Niles?” his mother whispered.
“It’s okay, Mom. I’m going to check outside, see how we fared.”
Climbing up the ladder, he pushed open the door leading into the barn. There were no obstructions, which he was thankful for, and he heard the sounds of heavy rain, as well as the occasional gust of wind rippling through the trees. In their stalls, it seemed Buckeye and Bolt had even started to calm down.
Outside, several trees had been pushed over, one of them tilted forty-five degrees, the strongest of its roots keeping it from toppling over on its side completely.
Down the long driveway, across the street, Niles saw a couple of older trucks, one of them a classic truck from the fifties (as far as he could tell) and the other an early-seventies Chevy dually. From what he could see, the crew-cab dually was filled with several rough-looking men, but no one was in the driver’s seat.
A moment later, one of the guys waltzed out of the Murphey’s front door, shielding his eyes from the light rain and carrying a rifle at his side. He sidestepped a few deeper puddles, then climbed into the driver’s seat of the truck. The engines of these two vehicles suddenly chug to life, then both of them rumbled off.
He made a note to check on the Murpheys later. Right then he had to assess the damage, if any, to his parents’ property. He slogged through the mud and pouring rain and found that the tornado—if there had even been one—hadn’t touched the house, the trucks, or any of his neighbors’ houses as far as he could see.
Back inside the house, he got the keys to his truck, a 2008 Ford F-150 crew-cab, decided it was time to get into town and gather up what supplies he could before the next wave of storms hit. He also needed to check on Leighton, make sure she was safe. Niles got into the truck, slid the key in the ignition, and gave it a turn. Like his parents’ truck, nothing happened. No lights, no power, nothing. He tried again to no avail, then sat back, took a breath, and tried to calmly understand what was happening.
“It can’t be,” he mumbled to himself. “But maybe it is,” he reasoned out loud as he got out of the truck and headed inside the house.
Using what natural light he could from the open windows, he located his cell phone, tried to turn it on, then groaned when the screen remained a perfect black. He grabbed the fast-charging cable, plugged it into the wall, and waited. Nothing.
“What am I thinking?” he muttered to himself.
The power was still out.
That’s when he considered the state of his cell phone. He’d charged it earlier, hadn’t he? He distinctly remembering pulling it off the charger that morning. It had a full charge. He searched the kitchen, the bathrooms, and then the bedrooms. He finally found his father’s cell phone. It was dead. His mother’s phone was dead, too.
Now he was worried. If the phones didn’t work, the power didn’t work, and the trucks were dead, could it be that everything electric was dead? He went after his Kindle, which he knew for certain was at seventy-eight percent. When he found it, it was also dead.
Standing there, he felt like the wind had been knocked out of him.
“No way,” he said. He didn’t want to believe it, but if they’d been hit with an EMP, the storm would be the least of their worries.
He went back down to the barn, checked on the horses—who were now settled down completely.
He opened the cellar door and said, “Dad?”
“Yeah?” his father asked from deep in the darkness. He suddenly appeared down below, the soft amber light of the crank flashlight giving his face shadows and texture.
“If there was a tornado, it didn’t touch us, but the trucks are dead, as are the cell phones, my Kindle…”
He saw the look on his father’s face. Frowning, he let Niles know he had his own suspicions. But why would someone set off an EMP? That made no sense.
“I’m going to check on the Murpheys next door. I saw some guys out front. They looked shady.”
“Take the guns with you,” he said.
Guns, not gun.
“I will.”
“Do you want me to go with you?”
“Stay with Mom,” Niles said. “I’ll be back in a few.”
“Be careful.”
“Will do,” Niles said.
Chapter Ten
Niles Bennington
The Murpheys were a strong Irish family with even str
onger Irish roots. The head of the family, Seamus, drank a lot, cursed a lot, and smiled a lot. Niles liked the Murpheys, but he was also smart enough to steer clear of their bad side. Seamus Murphey had been to jail twice this year for bar fights. And when Niles ran into the fiery ginger a few weeks back, Seamus simply said, “People and their opinions,” as if the entire topic was the subject of substantial ire.
Niles let out a knowing smile. “One of these days, people will learn to see things your way.”
“You’re a good kid,” the stocky forty-something said with a grin. “Smart for being from here.”
“You’re from here, too,” Niles said.
“Yeah, but I never said I was smart,” he joked, knocking a fist on his forehead. “Just stubborn and right all the time.”
Niles walked up to the quiet-looking house, saw the front door slightly ajar. He drew his handgun, pulled back the slide, confirmed the chambered round.
He knocked on the door, slowly pushing it open. “Seamus? It’s Niles from next door. Niles Bennington. I’m coming inside, so don’t shoot me.”
There was nothing but silence in the house. Dead silence. Were they even home? He stepped inside the foyer and saw a huge pile of food, blankets, medicine, and weapons on the family room floor. Someone had gathered all these things into the center of the floor. Had the guys in the trucks done this? Why hadn’t they taken it already? Maybe they were planning on taking everything when the storm broke. Maybe they were waiting for the cover of darkness.
In the kitchen, he found Shannon Murphey face-down on the floor. Someone had clubbed the back of her head. He leaned down, checked for a pulse, found none. Standing up, he wiped his mouth, felt his stomach roll at the smell of blood and perspiration.
He found Seamus in the back room. His long-time neighbor and friend had his throat sliced open, the gash stretching from ear to ear.
