The Age of Hysteria

by Ryan Schow

  He wasn’t excited about the choices or their consequences.

  With only a few rounds left in the mag, he could not waste them on the kid. He might need them. And he had no time to break his neck, because in a gun fight, with things moving so quickly, seconds were the same as hours.

  He had to go.

  On his way out of the house, he gave the body a mighty kick that hurt his already battered leg, then hobbled next door, praying Diaab was okay. One glance at the truck showed him an empty cab. He looked up to the Dimas’s front porch and saw the broken front door. He swore under his breath.

  He’d expressly wanted Diaab to wait for him.

  Inside, two teenaged girls were squirming on the floor, writhing in pain. He wasn’t sure if they were beaten or shot. He didn’t care. Further back in the house, Okot heard screaming and cursing. He found them in the kitchen. The Dimas wife had a knife in hand, her hair looking pulled, her eyes alight with rage. She wasn’t the one Okot was worried about. An older boy, presumably one of their boys, was fighting with Diaab.

  The second the lovely, ragged woman with the knife saw Okot, any glimmer of hope left her expression. He sneered at the woman and it damn near broke her. The defeat sat heavy in her eyes.

  That’s right, he thought, everything has changed.

  Okot went straight for the boy, tore him off Diaab, then drove a fist in his stomach so hard the kid buckled. He stepped back, drove a kick into his hip. The kid fell down; Okot mounted him. Two ferocious shots to the face and it was light’s out.

  “If she doesn’t give me that knife, Okot, break his neck,” Diaab said, looking at Brooklyn’s mother. Okot stood and went to the other room, grabbed both girls by their hair and dragged them into the room kicking and screaming.

  “If she doesn’t give you the knife,” Okot said, “I’ll kill all three of them. And when we get that knife, I’ll gut them while she watches.”

  “Or you give me that knife and they live,” Diaab said to the rabid mother. “You don’t want them butchered, do you?”

  She looked at her children, at her knocked-out son and her screeching girls, and then she set the knife on the table and backed away from it. Diaab moved forward, took the knife. With his eyes upon her, he tossed the blade into the nearby sink where it clattered around with a fair amount of racket.

  Trapped between Diaab and her only exits, the woman’s eyes were wild, her hands clawed and rigid at her side. She was a cornered animal. Diaab’s prey. Her blouse was ripped, her face was blistered with aggression, and three fingernail lines raked down the side of her neck where Diaab first tried to grab her.

  Diaab put up his hands, shushed her, then said, “I don’t want anyone to die. I just want a child for a child. This seems like a fair trade. An amicable trade.”

  “Leave my daughters alone,” she said, her voice sounding like utter weakness. “Especially the one with the glasses. She’s not…she’s won’t be able to handle this. Please, just leave her with me. Take the other one.”

  He turned and looked at the girl with the glasses. She didn’t look like Brooklyn or her mother.

  “Adeline?” the nerdy girl said, confusion in her eyes.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart,” Adeline said with a shaky breath. “He won’t hurt you. You’re safe with me.”

  “The girl isn’t hers,” Okot told Diaab.

  “I know,” Diaab said. “This one is allergic to telling the truth. That’s why instead of taking Brooklyn, we’re going to take them all.”

  Adeline moaned, and the second her eyes went to the kids, Diaab drilled her with a right hook. Her knees buckled, but he caught her in time. When she could stand, he grabbed a hold of her blouse, ripped it open, then tore it off her body. Diaab liked the struggle, but he enjoyed humiliation even more. That’s why he ignored her bra and went for her sweats. She scratched at him—which he didn’t mind—but then she saw his bandaged arm and started pounding on it.

  His response was ferocious.

  Okot knew it was best not to interrupt Diaab while he was at work, so he just stood there with the girls on their knees bawling, pleading. One of the girls suddenly tried to get free. Okot tightened his grip on her hair then kicked at her.

  That stopped it.

  When Diaab finally got Adeline’s sweats off, it was because he managed to get her down and pin her to the wall by the throat. Standing up, tossing the sweats aside, he said, “Get up!”

  When she didn’t move fast enough, he grabbed her by the hair and stood her up, same as he always did when he first broke in the girls.

  She complied, but then she took a weak swing at him that he ignored.

  “Grab the bag on the couch,” he told Okot.

  With a mighty force, he slapped the girl with glasses (she fell over, lifeless), then dragged Brooklyn with him into the other room where he retrieved the burlap sack. With the cuffs, he linked all three kids together. When Diaab secured Adeline to the chair, he took a deep breath, looked at Okot, then coughed out a heartless laugh and said, “I guess I should have waited for you.”

  Okot nodded in acknowledgement, but said nothing.

  Using one last strip of duct tape, Diaab covered Adeline’s mouth. She bucked and fought and cried, but to no avail.

  He won.

  She had lost.

  Diaab then pulled open Adeline’s bra, peeked inside, and said, “I told you I’d come back, did I not?”

  Bawling, red faced and unheard, she sat there, a helpless woman about to lose her children. Those were big moments for Diaab. Hard fought victories.

  “For what your husband did to my eldest son,” he said, standing back, “I’m going to take these kids and do unthinkable things to them. Especially the girls. You know, a girl like Brooklyn can take ten, maybe twelve guys a day for years.”

  The woman’s soul withered and shrunk, her body reduced to fits of sobbing. Okot watched Diaab drink this in. The man knelt down, got face-to-face with her. He peered deep into her eyes, silent, reticent. His expression was one of grim satisfaction. Adeline’s eyes were shot through with pain, the tears rolling over the duct tape and down to her chin where they dripped onto her bare thighs. In this, he took great pleasure.

  “Okot,” he said, not blinking once as he stared into the woman’s eyes. “Would you like to break these girls in?”

  Okot looked down at them, the knocked-out girl finally coming around. “Yes,” he said, “but I will take the boy first.”

  Diaab laughed out loud. “I knew you’d say that.”

  “He’s cute,” Okot lied.

  Okot knew what this was doing to the woman, but he didn’t care. Whatever heart he might have once possessed was corrupted by the time he was twelve. He didn’t know why. He only knew that was the last time he ever cared about anything.

  “Time to go,” Diaab said, eliciting another frantic, jumpy response from Adeline. In a ferocious display of dominance, he struck her face open-palmed, the hit so hard it slopped a line of snot across the side of her cheek.

  Diaab grabbed her face, gave it a mighty jerk. Eyes wobbling in her sockets, Adeline refuse to look at him.

  Growling, he said, “Your little pale-skinned dogs, your kids, will pray for a thousand deaths. They will not be so lucky. They’ll hurt. I will hurt them. So much so, they’ll never know a moment’s peace. And when I’m done, when they’ve had ten thousand perverts run through them, and they can’t earn me another dollar, I will kill them without grace or pretense. You tell your coward husband that. You tell him so he knows that while I’m suffering the loss of my son, I’m also steeped in the pleasure of his family’s infinite suffering.”

  The sheer horror in her eyes was enough for him.

  Okot dragged the three kids out of the house, got them in the bed of the truck, then cuffed them to a rung.

  When he and Diaab climbed into the cab, his friend and employer looked over at him and said, “Time to go home, my friend.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Wit
h the kids in the truck and this city still fighting for its life, Diaab felt the risk was manageable.

  “Let’s take them to holding.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to do that during the day?” Okot asked.

  “Now is fine.”

  “The other side of 290 is a nightmare, sir.”

  “Time is of the essence, I imagine,” Diaab said, checking the skies for drones. The skies were filled with soot, the haze of falling ash. It could be snow if it was not so drab looking, or so dry.

  They crossed the 290 and W. Harrison was a graveyard, the entire street filled with burning cars. At the corner of S. Kenzie and W. Harrington, the large brick police station had been bombed and was sitting in rubble. Even the radio tower hadn’t survived the assault. It was laid out across W. Harrington, sitting atop a crushed eighteen wheeler making the road impassable.

  “Go back to Kenzie, take Flournoy and double back on Albany.”

  “Flournoy is a one way street.”

  “Then use the sidewalks,” Diaab said. “The sooner we get there the sooner we can go.”

  Okot took them on the route Diaab mentioned. It was in bad shape. He used the sidewalks, just as his boss suggested. When they turned on Albany and headed back to W. Harrison heading for the railyard, he said, “Where are we going, sir?”

  “Back home to Sudan,” Diaab replied, looking at his friend. “We must first attend to our cargo.”

  “How much of it?” Okot asked.

  “All of it.”

  There were two large passenger vans at the railyard warehouse. If they packed the children in tight enough, they could get maybe fifteen or twenty of them in. It would be uncomfortable, and the inside would smell like the inside of a filthy garbage can, but they could do it in two loads.

  “What about the flight out?” Okot said.

  “We get the first batch out using Don. He’ll fly.”

  “In these conditions?”

  “The airport has already been hit, so I don’t think the drones will be active.”

  “How do you know the planes weren’t hit?” Okot asked.

  “I don’t.”

  To get down W. Harrington to S. California Ave. (which took more than their fair share of creative maneuvering, namely the destruction of a gazillion chain link fences and the front end of the Ranger), they had to cross S. Sacramento Blvd. and S. Francisco Ave. This was no easy chore. S. Sacramento was an off-ramp from the 290, so it was congested with traffic. Even worse, one of the seven story Harrison Courts towers had been destroyed, half of it having fallen down into the street. This delay was what caused the bulk of the problems. The scattering of brick, bodies and broken glass all over Harrison was one thing, but the people’s possessions strewn out everywhere was another thing entirely. It was like a human/garbage/brick blockade.

  “Is there another way?” Diaab asked. In Okot’s rear view mirror, he saw the kids’ heads, but there were also two other cars that turned in behind him.

  “No, not now,” Okot mumbled, his pulse quickening.

  Diaab took his gun, drew back the slide, readied himself. Okot did the same. They were two dark-skinned men traveling with three light skinned kids, all with duct taped mouths, their hands cuffed to the truck.

  It didn’t present the best of images.

  As they bounced and shook their way through the rubble, past congregations of survivors, they drew more than a few suspicious glances. One of these survivors, a wily looking man with Albert Einstein hair, started walking toward the truck.

  “I think we may have a problem,” Okot said.

  Diaab looked behind them and frowned. As they inched their way through a thick layer of destruction, both men prepared themselves for the worst.

  “Why them kids’ mouths taped shut?!” the man shouted. To everyone else, he turned and started yelling. “Yo, these two mufuggas got these kids! Lookit they mouths! They being nabbed, yo!”

  “Do it,” Diaab said.

  Okot leaned out the open window and shot him. This ignited the masses. Fortunately gun laws and circumstance left the survivors unarmed, but guns weren’t the only tools a man could use in war. There so happened to be an abundance of loose bricks.

  They began to rain down upon the Ranger, the assailants careful not to hit the kids, which caused many of them to hit the hood, or miss the truck completely. A pair of heroes decided to run up on the truck, seemingly after the kids. Diaab slipped out of the seat, up through the window and shot them both, ducking out of the way of a few bricks being fired his way.

  “Idiots,” Diaab muttered.

  When they were clear of most of the rubble, Diaab looked down in the bed of the truck, saw three sets of eyes upon him.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “there’s no one coming to save you.”

  Sliding back in the cab, they continued on Harrison until they hit S. California. From there they turned right, smiling as the path to the railyard looked nothing like the road back to the 290. After suffering a few minutes of a choking haze, they entered the railyard, made their way to what Diaab thought of as a sealed box car garage, then pulled inside.

  This was simply and affectionately known as “The Warehouse.”

  Inside, there were four retired passenger cars, two on each side of the huge warehouse, with plenty of space between them. Overhead, the canopy endured some damage, but not enough to render the staging grounds inoperable.

  It was perfect for what they were doing. Perfect for what they’d done.

  They parked the truck, got out. Two men came to greet them, both large men, one white, the other Native American. These were Neanderthals in every sense of the word, men Okot found, men who could be trusted to both break in the children and guard the premises.

  “Charlie’s on his way,” Benny Breaking Balls said.

  Benny was a big Ojibwe Indian with a reputation for ferocious violence, a lack of respect for human life and a penchant for kicking people in the uprights in a fist fight. Hence the name “Breaking Balls.”

  Benny was not just a jewel driller, he was flat out lethal. The kicked nuts wasn’t the finishing move in this hulk’s game, it was the setup. When a guy bent over, when his world came to a stop, that’s when Benny pulled out his blade. He’d grip his victim’s hair, then start from just above the eyebrows and scalp you clean to the skull. And Benny? He wouldn’t care if you were six years old or one hundred. A head was a head and hair was hair.

  Needless to say, Benny Breaking Balls was a good find. When asked if his tribe shared similar attributes, the Ojibwe Indian said, “They are nothing like me. They are good and noble people.” And then he said something in a language no one understood. When he was finished, when Diaab was looking at him with confusion passing through his eyes, Benny said, “That is Anishinaabi, the language of my elders. I am asking that my actions not be held against my people.”

  “Why is Charlie even here?” Okot asked.

  “He just is,” Benny said.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” a familiar voice behind them said.

  Charlie.

  Okot and Diaab turned and saw the man who’d made all this possible. They met with a handshake. Charlie was the kind of guy you’d say was old before his time. His face was leathery looking and pocked, the insides of a few of his fingers crusty, charred and yellow. He was an avid smoker. If at first blush that wasn’t apparent, a mouthful of rotting teeth could make you think twice.

  “Only three kids?” Charlie said, referring to the kids handcuffed to the truck.

  Diaab smiled, then turned to Okot and gave the slightest nod. Okot took out his gun and shot Charlie. The man fell over dead.

  “Get the kids out of my truck, Benny. We need to start prepping the cargo. We’re leaving, but the three in the truck, they’re staying.”

  “How soon are we leaving?” Benny asked.

  By then, Talon James stepped forward. Talon was Benny Breaking Balls’ counterpart, a man every bit as big and every bit as mean. Okot vetted t
hem himself. Talon was the bastard product of a short relationship between Talon’s mother and The Butcher of Bakersfield, a man who went on a killing spree shortly after Talon was born.

  He was not from good blood, and it showed. Both men would be okay in Sudan, but he wasn’t sure they would want that.

  “We’re leaving today,” Okot said. “Now.”

  Talon looked down at Charlie, then up at Diaab with a question blazing hot in his eyes.

  “Yes, Talon, you’re coming with us if you want. Unless you’d like to stay here and deal with the drones.”

  “I don’t like flying.”

  “Do you like dying better?” Okot asked.

  “No.”

  “Good, then you’re coming with me and Okot. Benny, I’m presuming you’ll be joining us on the way out of this hellhole?”

  “I will,” Benny said.

  “Good, now get the vans and the kids and I’ll get them settled.”

  “Last car on the left,” Talon said.

  The sadistic fiend was referring to the passenger car with the most room. Okot went into the last car, came out with a small canister, then pepper-sprayed the kids, blindfolded them and unlocked them from the truck.

  He walked them to the last car, ushered them inside with the other kids, then left them there. By then the boys had driven the two vans inside the warehouse. For the next fifteen minutes, nearly thirty kids were packed into the vans.

  “You want us to go?” Talon asked.

  “We will be fine,” Diaab said. “Contact our pilots, have both of them meet us on the tarmac.”

  “And if they refuse?” Benny said.

  “First off, they won’t. But if they do, tell them Talon will be over to slaughter their wives and kids. Don has a new Beagle he loves, so make sure you let him know Talon eats dogs the same way his father ate his victims’ noses.”

  Benny nodded.

  Talon looked like he had something to say. “Spit it out, Talon,” Diaab said.

  “Can I break in the new girls?” he asked.

  He thought about it then said, “No. These are different. I think I’ll break them in myself.”