by Schow, Ryan
Settling into the dirt, burrowing into the rot of the fallen tree, he wondered what he would do to Leighton when he got a hold of her. Did he want to shake her? Break her? Did he want to have sex with her? Make her submit to him? No, he thought. No on all counts! He only wanted her to know him. He didn’t have a healthy mind, but his body was fit and he knew he could protect her from guys like himself. More than that, he and Leighton were alike in their limitations—she couldn’t hear and he had a hard time with his emotions.
They were both broken in their own ways, and if she knew this—if he could just tell her—would she finally see him? Would she finally know him? As he lay there, picking beetles and bugs out of the inner flesh of the fallen tree, he realized she wouldn’t listen, she wouldn’t hear, she wouldn’t see.
She had already hit him with pepper spray, smashed his privates, jammed a gun into his eye, and threatened to kill him!
“Just breathe,” he told himself, the sound echoing slightly off the flaky inner core of the tree.
He didn’t want to make any decisions about her just then, but he was pretty sure that when it was all over, he wanted to kill her.
He didn’t know why, it just felt right.
At that moment, lacking in direction, he realized he needed to pray over the subject, for the word of God was what he followed. Except for that one time. Well, except for those two times. For a second, he felt himself smile, but then a bug dropped on his face. He felt it flip over, get its balance. The bug’s many legs started walking, its antennae tap-tapping across his face like a blind man with two canes. Beneath the legs, Aaron felt the rigid structure of the bug’s body scraping slowly across his skin. He reached up and pulled it off his skin.
Holding it close to his mouth, so it could hear him if it had ears, he whispered, “I can feel your fear.”
He started to squeeze the body, felt the hardness of the outer shell, the wing covers. Inside, he wondered, was the beetle screaming? But then the body collapsed, the insides squirting through fractures in the outside shell.
Wet parts of the beetle hit his cheek and his nose, but something landed on the surface of his eyeball, too, which had him blinking hard. He put the bug in his mouth, then rubbed his eye as furiously as he chewed the bug.
“I’m sorry little donkey,” he said to the bug after swallowing.
In his mind, everything was a donkey. Even Leighton. Donkeys were mostly useless until they weren’t. The bug was a useless donkey, but it was a pillar of survival: food. Leighton was a useless donkey, too; still, he wanted to use her for something else. But what? What did he need from her? What did he want from her? Healing, maybe? He wasn’t going to heal. He wanted sex. Or did he? Did he know what he wanted? Did he ever? He rubbed circles into his head, tried to massage the craziness away. Why couldn’t he just make up his mind?
As the winds picked up and the rain fell harder, he realized he was there because he was broken, damaged, and ugly. He was the first donkey in a long string of donkeys.
He didn’t have plans for her before, but he was there now, and it was time to make plans. But what plans did he want to make? Before the sex, he just wanted to meet her. Maybe be the man a girl like her needed.
His mother had always said to dream big. He was dreaming. First, he dreamed of college, but then he saw Leighton and he dared to dream even bigger.
Leighton McDaniel was—
His train of thought was suddenly interrupted by a scream. Was it the big guy he’d seen on the street? The one with the crowbar that Leighton had run from?
Wasting no time, he scrambled out of the deadfall, then pushed through the brush toward the sounds of struggling, not sure what he’d see, but certain that what he needed to do, more than anything, was save her.
Chapter Seventeen
Hudson Croft
“What did you do?” Hudson asked Pete as the man stood in his doorway, bleeding.
Pete just stood there, dumbstruck.
“Get inside,” Hudson said, practically pulling the man in his front door. “What happened? Is Judy okay? Did something happen to her?”
“It’s my mother,” he said, his eyes misting over. “They…they burned her alive.”
“What?” he stammered, shook to the core.
“They pulled Judy out of the house, then set it on fire. I killed one of them for sure, but…” Slowly, he lifted his shirt to show Hudson a perfect hole in his side. With each breath, Hudson heard the soft sucking sound.
“That’s not good, Pete.”
“It’s not bad, either. I shot a few of them, but…”
“I know,” Hudson said, solemn. “Your mother.”
Hudson couldn’t wrap his mind around this. Had he done this? Had he provoked these monsters enough to come back and wage a war on the town?
“Yeah, but Judy, too. I lost my mind for a minute when I saw my house on fire. They pulled Judy out, thinking they’d saved her from the burning house. When Judy started screaming at her that my mother was still inside, they knocked her out. So I went inside after her and…I…I heard her screaming. Hudson, that scream, the pain…”
He broke down in tears, practically falling into Hudson, who pulled him into a hug. It had only been hours since he saw his friend. How had all of this gone down so quickly? His whole world had just changed on a dime.
“Is Judy still alive?” Hudson asked, a lump in his throat. He felt his friend shake his head back and forth, a sob causing his body to tremble.
“They shot her in the head,” he said.
“Why?”
“I…I saw my mom…burn. She was screaming, Hudson, and it was horrible. The most horrible sound I’ve ever heard. I guess I grabbed my rifle. I shot maybe seven of them. Maybe eight. But one was definitely dead, and there were too many for me to stick around without getting shot.”
“Where’s your rifle?” Hudson asked.
“A block back, I think. I couldn’t hold it anymore.”
“Are there any rounds left in the rifle?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, nodding. “I’ve got more in my jacket pocket.”
He shifted to make his pocket more accessible to Hudson, but then his knee gave and Hudson caught him, keeping him from falling to the floor.
“It’s okay, buddy.”
But it wasn’t okay at all. Blood had soaked half his shirt.
“I just need to sit down for a second, maybe sleep it off. I’m tired, Hudson.”
“No, you’re dying. It’s not the same thing.”
“They came for you, Hudson. That’s what this is about. You can’t hide in here, man, not with what they’re doing to everyone out there. It’s like something…out of…a bad Nazi Germany movie. If they don’t get you, they will burn this town down.”
He felt the blood drain from his face.
“They said that?”
“Yes.”
“You need to go.”
“You want me to turn myself in?”
“No,” he said, blood staining his teeth red. “I want you to kill as many of them as you can. With Emily gone, you have nothing left to live for. If we don’t stop this, none of us will.”
“You’re not going to live if I leave now,” Hudson said with a tremor in his voice.
“That’s the plan, Stan.”
“You want to die in my house?”
“I want to bleed on all your precious things,” Pete said with a lazy grin and heavy eyes.
Hudson watched him fade away, slowly but surely.
“Come party with me in heaven,” he finally muttered, bloody spittle misting his chin. Before Hudson could say another word, his best friend faded out, and then he died.
Laying him down, Hudson said, “Save me a drink, brother. I’ll be there in a few.”
Hudson fished three boxes of ammo out of his friend’s pocket, then quickly changed into his anarchist uniform, hoping to blend in with these monsters.
With his XD9 on his side and a blade on his hip, he took a de
ep breath and steadied his emotions. One solid blow to the head and he was dead. Should he mask up now, or when he got close? He wasn’t sure. He prayed everyone was indoors, hiding. If that was the case, he could mask up right away and not worry about being attacked. But if someone saw him in a mask, would they shoot him not knowing who he was? Perhaps.
From what he knew of the people of Silver Grove, he believed they were nice people who would not fight the way he’d fight. Dirty. And to win. If he went on a killing spree, he wasn’t only trying to avenge his friend, he was looking to protect his community, and to make a statement about how you keep these cockroaches from infesting your town, your city, your state, your country.
He went outside, locked his door, then masked up. It was cold outside, the skies dark, the air damp and smelling like rain. He started for Pete’s house looking for the Hayseed rejects as well as his friend’s discarded hunting rifle. As he jogged through the streets, the perpetually dark skies creaked open, the misting of rain building to a drizzle. The rain wasn’t miserable, but the skies would soon crack wide open, soaking the world below.
By the time the storm hit, if it was still on its way, he’d already be dead. The question of whether he’d join Pete in heaven or end up sipping diarrhea cocktails in hell would be answered soon enough.
He told himself he wasn’t a murderer, that he was saving lives by taking lives. Would that grant him entrance into heaven? He honestly didn’t know.
He hoped so.
Hudson found the rifle on the side of the road half-tossed into a bush. He grabbed it, loaded it, then headed toward the huge columns of smoke lifting into the sky. He heard the Hayseed Rebellion before he saw them. These Muppets were barking and shouting through makeshift bullhorns. Instead of confronting them directly—which would be stupid—he hopped a few fences, found an old ladder in the backyard of a single-story home, then propped it up and climbed on the roof. He walked lightly, then took cover behind the chimney. A couple of blocks over, he saw maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty men holding a dozen families hostage in the streets.
After loading the four-round mag, he drew a deep breath, lined his sights on the man behind the loudest cardboard bullhorn, then waited for the right time.
In the crowded streets below, the bullhorn guy had a pistol at his side and hostages on their knees in the streets. Half a dozen houses were already burning, the sight eerily familiar. Through Pete’s high-powered scope, Hudson saw Pete’s wife, Judy, laying face down at the edge of Pete’s yard. Her head was pulped and red. She was dead. Hudson’s stomach roiled, the sight itself causing his stomach to rise. Swallowing hard, he scanned the crowd, found who he suspected were a few low-level leaders of the—
A shot rang out, startling him. He moved the scope back to Bullhorn Guy. A woman he didn’t know got to her knees, sobbing, practically falling over her dead daughter. Bullhorn Guy shot her next.
The second Hudson put the crosshairs on this idiot, he fired a round. The bullet went right into the makeshift bullhorn and blew his teeth right through his neck, the bullet snapping the vertebrae in two.
He shifted the rifle over to the other leaders and started firing on them, too.
No one knew where the shots were coming from, but he risked another five shots before sliding down the roof to the ladder. He quickly scaled down the ladder and moved around the side of the house, watching both sides of the street for potential retaliation.
He hurled the ladder over the nearby fence, and then over the next nearby fence. Just as he’d climbed another roof, the mob descended on the house he was at mere moments ago.
He immediately shot the first three people leading the mobs, all three bodies dropping face down and tripping the others. He emptied the mag, slid off that roof, got halfway down the ladder, slipped, then fell awkwardly, landing on his back.
Getting up slowly, unable to breathe, he grabbed his weapon, hobbled toward the fence, then threw the rifle into the next yard and sloppily crawled over the fence. He fell over the side, landed hard. With his anarchist’s mask off, he grabbed the rifle, thumbed four rounds into the empty mag, then shoved the magazine in the rifle and slapped it home.
He used the butt of the rifle to break off the top of one of the older fence boards. He dropped the barrel in the hole, lined himself up for a shot, and fired on the first guy to hop the fence. He shot the kid right in the heart. The next thug to hop the fence was a psychotic-looking girl. He shot her in the head. She fell backwards into the yard she had been coming from.
People started shooting wildly over the fence. Several bullets slammed into the wooden slats all around him.
With two more rounds left, Hudson waited. One of the barking idiots peeked up over the fence; Hudson blew off the top of his skull.
Another unrelenting barrage of gunfire put Hudson in hot water. Frantic, he rummaged through his pockets for spare ammo but found none. Did he lose it in the fall? Without bullets, the gun was just a big stick he had no intention carrying. He ejected the mag, threw it on one direction, then tossed the rifle the other way, down the fence line.
He pulled his hoodie over his head, then jogged around the side of the house where he spotted a gate. The second he reached for the latch, however, a hand reached over the fence to open it. Breathless, he stepped backward, concealed himself behind the opening gate. Doing his best to regulate his breathing, he watched six guys rush into where he was only moments ago. When they were inside the yard, he pulled his mask up, then followed them in.
“Where is he?” the lead guy all but screamed. Gunfire broke out again, one of the guys getting hit before the lead guy started screaming over the fence about friendly fire.
Hudson was now in the mix of them. He withdrew his blade, stuck the leader in the kidney, then started slicing his way through the others as they began to panic. He caught several of them in the neck, trenching open carotid arteries and slashing open throats. When he was down to the last man, he blocked a wild punch, drove an elbow into his chest to create the right distance, then stabbed him in the eye, driving the blade straight into the brain. He judiciously finished off three who hadn’t died, then smeared their blood all over his face, pulled his hood back over his head, and dropped down all around the men he’d killed. He heard more of them moments later. Maybe ten or twenty of these clowns stampeding into the backyard.
“Did you shoot all of them?” one guy asked the other.
“No man, I stopped firing when someone screamed about friendly fire.”
“It was him,” a girl said. “It was the same guy who shot Mirabelle. There’s his rifle over there.”
Suddenly they started pulling masks off the faces of their fallen comrades. They weren’t gentle about it. They were enraged. When his mask was ripped off, someone said, “Who’s this guy?”
No one said anything.
“Anyone recognize him?” the girl asked.
“Too much blood,” one of the guys responded. “Plus, we don’t know half these guys.”
“He’s running,” the girl said. “I can feel it in my bones.”
“What if we don’t find him?”
“We burn this whole frigging town down, right down to the bones,” the girl hissed. “But we have to do it before another storm hits.”
“No,” a strong voice said. The man who spoke this one word sounded like he was nearby. His voice was pure resolve. “We had orders to take this guy’s head, so we find him, we cut off his head, and then we bring back that which we’ve been tasked to take.”
“What about the storm?” the girl challenged, bristling.
“His head comes first. He killed one of the founder’s top guys. You know that, which means we all know that, so don’t break rank. Got it?”
“Yeah, I got it,” the girl grumbled.
“Good,” he said. “Let’s go.”
When they took off, Hudson got up, snuck up to the fence, and watched the mob crash through the other houses in the neighborhood. When it was safe to co
me out, he pulled his mask back on and rejoined the mob from the rear. There he saw four men hanging back, looking between the houses, presumably checking for him.
Like before, Hudson started stabbing kidneys and necks, wasting no time in the assault, not even pausing as he worked through them with maximum efficiency. He took out all four quickly, then kept his head low as he mixed in with the crowd.
Hudson moved quietly through the masses, trying his best to stick a few of the more boisterous anarchists, but his luck wouldn’t last, he knew that. He was bound to be caught. In reality, though, he was already dead. He was a walking corpse the second he folded in with the horde.
Fortunately, he had a blade and a loaded XD. No sense in dying in vain. Not when there was close to a hundred of them and a lot of scared families in town. Truthfully, Hudson just wanted to kill the man in charge, the girl with him, and maybe their closest confidants.
After that, he’d accept whatever death he’d earned.
Chapter Eighteen
Leighton McDaniel
After the beast grabbed her from her lean-to and threw her into the tree, Leighton’s body felt boneless and broken. The bleeding starting immediately. Slowly rolling over, trying to get up, she winced at the pain. She had to move, run. RUN! But her forehead was a thousand bee-stings all at once, the feel of a hammer crushing half her skull.
Two monstrous hands grabbed her, threw her back down on her back. To her absolute horror, she found herself staring at the tallest, ugliest man she’d ever seen. He was pock-marked skin, scabs on his lips, a pinkish-white line of scar tissue over his eyebrow. His skull was large and shapely, like the genetics of this creep weren’t one hundred percent kosher. One eye sat a bit lower than the other, but both eyes danced with delight, much to the contradiction of his mouth. He didn’t smile, sneer, or frown. His mouth was just there, moving but expressionless, two teeth dutifully working a piece of lip-skin loose.
