by Schow, Ryan
Leaning forward, right into Skylar’s face, Blane pushed a finger on a gumball-sized knot one of the two ingrates had left on her forehead.
Squealing with delight, he said, “That hurt?”
“No,” Skylar said.
He frowned.
In the back room, Rowdy was really screaming up a fit.
“That baby needs to shut up!” Sludge roared, turning toward it.
“Let it scream,” Blane said, standing up, eyes on the two women before him. “We gonna eat it later, so the more wasted it is, the faster it’ll die. And we’re gonna kill that damn dog. We’ll kill ‘em and eat him, too.”
“I ain’t eating dog or baby,” Sludge said.
“They took Daddy and our stuff, so we’ll take their baby and that mutt and we’ll eat ‘em both, and that’s that. Payback’s a bitch, ain’t it?” he said.
Blane’s eyes moved from Skylar to Felicity. Through cracked eyes, Logan appraised the two women. Where the twenty-two year old was scared, Skylar looked like she wanted to tear out this kid’s heart. Blane must have seen it, too. He stood back and struck her in the head with the butt of his shotgun. Skylar fell over, out cold. Logan tried scrambling to his feet, but it felt more like a drunk trying to drag himself up off the barroom floor than him saving the day.
“Hey, NO!” Blane roared, seeing Logan. He racked the shotgun and raised it up to fire on Logan, but a deafening blast came from the hallway and the side of Blane’s head erupted in a spray of red gore. The kid dropped like a sack of rocks and Sludge started screaming.
Logan fought the dizziness and pain, but it did not help him get up fast enough. Sludge turned his weapon on him, and then on Orbey in the mouth of the hallway, just past him. Logan turned, saw the woman’s face, then was rocked by the echoing blast of the shotgun. Logan heard a loud oof, and a body falling. He turned but didn’t see Orbey.
Bucking against their restraints, and from behind their gags, everyone started to hop around and scream. Logan fought to get to his feet just as the back door was kicked open. Sludge spun around fast, but Barde had the gun on him faster.
“Get your finger off that trigger, boy!” Barde thundered. He was a scary individual when he wanted to be.
“She killed him,” Sludge said, quiet, stricken.
“If he dies, you die,” another voice warned. Sludge turned and saw Jin. He’d come through the front door, had a pistol trained on the unkempt maggot.
“You killed my brother!” Sludge screamed this time. It seemed he had two volumes: regular and enraged. He’d hit full volume with the realization that he was all alone.
“He killed himself a long time ago,” Logan said, managing to get to his feet, still holding the wall for support. A helping hand under his armpit kept him upright. He turned and saw Longwei.
To Ning, Longwei said, “Free them.”
Ning unsheathed a knife, started cutting away the zip-ties, undoing the gags, pulling off the blindfolds. Skylar was still unconscious.
Longwei went to Felicity, bent down and handed her the shirt that had been cut away from her. Kneeling down, he said, “Are you okay?” She nodded, but her eyes were flooding and she was shaken. Seeing her struggling with her emotions, Longwei’s hands became fists and a hostile red glow lit his cheeks.
Instead of comforting her, Longwei stood and walked to Sludge. The kid was still aiming his shotgun; Longwei snatched it from his hands fast and hard. The unsightly kid fell forward, but didn’t put up much of a fight. He was looking at his brother, dead on the floor, a crimson pool spreading out around his head.
“What were you going to do here tonight?” Longwei asked Sludge. The kid was starting to tremble all over, unable to tear his gaze off Blane. Longwei slapped him hard enough to rock him. “What were you going to do here?!”
“We were gonna kill everyone and then make love to the girls,” he said, a sob caught in his throat. “I wasn’t gonna eat the dog or the baby, though. I promise.” When Sludge said this, he looked down at the shotgun Longwei had just snatched from him. He was holding it by the end of the barrel, his hatred for Sludge plain as day.
With the admission, however, Longwei stepped back, spun himself around three-hundred and sixty degrees with the weapon now acting as a bat, and hammered Sludge so hard in the side of the head with the stock, the kid dropped over dead.
The sudden crack of violence stopped everyone in their tracks. All eyes were on Sludge, rather, his left eyeball, which had popped out of his head a good inch and a half. When everyone began sneaking glances at Longwei, he pretended not to notice. It didn’t matter though, because he couldn’t stop staring at the kid.
“Is he dead?” Longwei finally asked.
“Why don’t you ask him yourself,” Ryker said, getting up.
“His freaking eye,” Ning said, horrified. “What about his freaking eye?”
The first thing Logan did was go to Orbey. He prayed she wasn’t dead, but there was a ferocious bite out of the corner of the wall, and beyond that—embedded in the hallway’s opposite wall—was a half spray of double ought buckshot. When he found her, she was sitting up.
“Are you hit?” he asked.
The older woman shook her head and said, “I saw the barrel coming up and stepped back wrong. I hit the wall and my head.”
He gave her a hand, gently pulled her to her feet and said, “Can you stand on your own?”
“Can you?” she countered.
“Barely.”
Stephani rounded the corner, saw her mother and gasped. “Mom, are you alright?”
“She saved our bacon,” Logan said, giving her to Stephani.
“Is everyone else okay?” Orbey asked, taking in the scene with a flutter to her voice. “Was anyone hurt?”
“Looks like the two degenerates are toast,” Logan said.
He saw Skylar coming around; Harper and Ryker were looking at her. Clay took Felicity back to her room, and Boone had gone to check on Rowdy. So far, so good, he thought.
Logan went to Barde and shook the man’s hand. “Sorry we didn’t get here sooner,” Barde said. “Ning saw the light go on, but we didn’t hear them come in.”
“They crashed a car into the side of the house,” Logan said. “But you woke to the lights?”
“What?” Jin asked. “We’re heavy sleepers.”
Chapter Seventeen
Logan’s head hurt, but after four ibuprofen, an apple and a glass of water, the pain began to fade. The commotion never stopped, though. No one could go back to sleep. Felicity’s home had been breached, there were dead people in her house and they had decisions to make. All of them. Big decisions. Namely what to do about their Roseburg headquarters.
“I don’t want to leave,” Felicity said. “I can pick things up here.”
“You can’t be in this,” Clay reasoned.
“But this is my house!” she countered.
Harper stepped forward and took Felicity in her arms. This stilled the girl some, but not enough.
“This world will take everything from you, if you let it,” Harper said, so low Logan almost didn’t hear it. “It’s time we start taking some of this world for ourselves.”
“I’m not leaving,” Felicity said, pushing out of her arms.
“I’ll stay with her,” Stephani said. “I’m not anywhere near fighting condition, plus you can’t take Cooper or Rowdy into a war zone.”
Boone was shaking his head, holding the boy—who wasn’t crying anymore—and looking at Stephani.
Logan knew exactly what he was thinking. He didn’t want to say good-bye to his son, but he didn’t want to say good-bye to Stephani either. War was war though, Logan thought. You don’t go expecting to die there, but it happened. It happened all the time.
“She’s right,” Clay said. “As much as I hate to say it—because we need every fighter and every gun we can manage—Stephani’s right to stay.”
“They don’t have to go all the way in with us,” Boone said.
> “We don’t know what’s ahead,” Clay replied, “only that we’re chasing the SAA and they killed the town and half of Five Falls’ fighters.”
Logan didn’t want to stand around planning; he wanted to do something. So he fished the keys out of Blane’s pocket, walked out to the car the mother Fickers drove into the house, and got in. He turned the key and the beast started right up. He put it in reverse, then fought to get the thing free of the debris. The big rumbling engine was strong, and even though the interior was dusty and old, the gauges looked new and the seat was comfortable. There was even a full tank of gas.
When he managed to back it out of the house and park on the front lawn, he shut off the car, pocketed the keys and started to walk back inside. But then he stopped. Turning around, he went back to the trunk and opened it with the key. What he saw inside…now he had cause to smile! The smile faded. There was no one to share his joy with. Sitting in the big trunk was a cardboard box full of ammo and extra large grenades. Plus a crap ton of guns.
“Did someone say they needed guns?” he said to himself. Then: “Baby, we got guns.”
When he walked inside, he heard Orbey talking to Stephani. They looked like they could be arguing. He plopped down on the couch, felt his head where it had been cut open, felt the blood drying. He closed his eyes, but the pain did not go away. He just seemed to notice it more. Same thing with his chest where he’d been shot.
“What do you want to do?” he heard Stephani ask Orbey. “Really, what do you want to do?”
“I want to get back to your father,” Orbey said.
To this answer, Logan opened his eyes. He quietly took in the sight of the two women, and wondered if there was a way to comfort them. Some pain just won’t burn out or die, and that’s the pain that will drive a person mad.
“Do you want to get back to Dad….even if it means leaving me?” Stephen asked, her eyes filling with tears.
“I don’t want to leave you,” Orbey said, wiping her eyes.
“But you’re going to.”
Logan turned away from them, lowering his gaze. It was a private conversation, but with so many people around, and no place to talk alone, nothing was really that private anymore.
He wanted to get up, but his back was hurting from where he’d been thrown off the bed and into the wall when Blane drove the souped-up muscle car into the house. So he stayed put, and played the role of the wall flower to the best of his ability.
“I’ve only ever tried to live a good life, but this war has brought me to places I don’t like, and now it’s left me widowed and angry,” Orbey said. “Very angry. I want retribution, sweetheart. If I stay here, I can’t get that. But it will be all I’ll be dreaming about.”
“This isn’t you, Mom.”
“This isn’t who I wanted to be,” she said. “But it’s who I’ve become.”
Orbey leaned in and kissed her, held her, and then they found themselves crying together. It felt like she was saying good-bye, that she wasn’t coming back. And with that, Logan quietly got up and went back to the bedroom to check on Harper.
“Are you okay?” she asked, seeing him.
“My back’s a little sore, but the ibuprofen is chasing off the headache, so there’s that.”
“After we get gas and drop everyone off at the alternative house, is there anything left to do?” she asked.
“No, just go win a war,” he said.
“Well in that case, the sun’s about to rise,” she said, “so maybe we should load everyone up and hit the road.”
“Sooner’s better than later,” he said.
They managed to drop everyone off at the new house, including Felicity—who decided it was best to leave the scene of the crime, and the ghosts of her past behind—then they topped off the tanks at the recently vacated Fick Ranch. They made one last search of the house before leaving, found some dried jerky, a crate of canned fruits and vegetables, and a six pack of warm Corona.
After loading everything into the vehicles, Ryker fed the dogs, then let them loose when their appetites were satiated. Logan and Clay had guns on the dogs, in case they attacked Ryker, but that proved unnecessary. The second Ryker had moved in to untether their collars, they’d started to lick him. A thank you for the food, perhaps.
The next stop before they headed out of town was the most important one. Rather it was the one Longwei said would be most important. That’s why he took the lead. The caravan of Jeeps and the Fickmobile pulled into Zeke Jeffers’s driveway. Zeke was out front with a pack of guys who looked like ex-bikers and vets. Logan counted seven of them. He smiled. It wasn’t much, but each of them looked capable.
“The Five Falls Militia joins forces with the Roseburg Rebels,” Logan said in a sportscaster’s voice and speaking into an imaginary microphone, “to take on the Chicom Cocksuckers in a epic battle for the rights to the once great United States. This is going to be a drag-down, all-out, knockdown war.” He put the invisible mic in front of a drowsy Harper and said, “What say you, Ms. Whitaker?”
Leaning forward into the fake mic, she said, “I think you bumped your head and didn’t get enough sleep.”
“And now a word from our sponsors,” Logan said into the air mic. Picking up the dented, blood stained can of Del Monte Sliced Peaches, he said, “When your belly is full of meat and canned vegetables, when you’re still starving because there isn’t squat to eat in this entire freaking state, take the time to savor a delicious can of Georgia Peaches. Sliced and dumped into a syrupy sauce with enough sugar to give a bull moose diabetes, this wonderful dessert serves as the topper to any meal.”
“Whose blood is that?” Harper asked, pointing the smack of red just above the dent.
“This is a Fick family favorite, so it’s one of the deceased.”
“Can you believe Longwei?” Harper said, not giving him the attention he needed. “The way he swung that shotgun…”
“It was an eye-popping display of violence,” Logan said, dropping the peaches next to a few other canned goods they grabbed.
She hit his arm, causing him to wince and pull back. “What was that for?” he asked.
“The kid probably had a hard life,” Harper said. “Now you’re cracking jokes about his death?”
“When your sister is your mother, or your uncle is your dad—which I’m sure that’s probably the case with Sludge—life isn’t supposed to be easy. He probably screwed up big time in his last life. We just put the cherry on top of that crap cake.”
“Do you really believe that?” she asked as Zeke and his guys piled into an old Camaro, a rusty white and red Ford pickup truck and what looked like a pea green and white Scout 80 International—the predecessor to the K5 Blazer Boone and Clay were driving. The Scout was smaller, slower, and less roomy than the Blazer, but if it got all four burly men to Yale in one piece and battle-ready, he didn’t care what it looked like or how slow it was.
“I absolutely believe that,” he said. “The Fick family might as well be the Manson family, as far as I’m concerned. Why, are you feeling bad for them?”
“No,” she said. “Just curious about what makes people the way they are.”
“Are you thinking of us?” Logan said, turning to her, more serious than before. “I mean, the way we are, how we…no longer get bothered by the things we do?”
“Oh, we’re bothered,” Harper said.
“Yeah, but not like before,” he replied. “Not like when we first started killing.”
“I wanted to do what Longwei did, putting that kid out of our misery. But I would have shot him with his own gun. I actually saw it in my head. Me doing it. Is that wrong, Logan? Are we…broken people now?”
“Yes,” he said. “But in a good way, I think.”
“Why, because we’re surviving?”
“Exactly,” he said. “But this isn’t the time to think about that.”
The Camaro roared to life, as did the Ford pickup. The Scout was loaded for bear, but the engine wa
s slow to turn. Then a putt, putt, poof of smoke coughed out of the mufflers and the engine finally turned over. The driver gave Zeke a thumbs up. From inside the Camaro, Zeke returned the gesture.
Repeating the thing Logan always told her, Harper said, “When the war is over, we’ll rectify the past and pay for our sins, but until then, we’re killin’ commies and SAA swine hand over fist.”
He turned and smiled at her; she didn’t smile back. The Harper he knew from San Francisco was a beast, the way she moved from body to body, slicing open throats like it was nothing. Getting out of the city, no longer running comms for the Resistance, it was like that part of her was getting harder and harder to access.
“You’d better harden your spine,” he told her.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said, turning to stare out the window. “Just don’t turn bitch in the battlefield and leave me on the front line alone.”
He backed the Fickmobile up and followed Longwei out. The rest of the caravan fell in behind them.
“It’s not the start I wanted,” Logan said to Harper when they finally merged onto the 5 heading north, “but we’re all alive and in reasonably good spirits, so I’ll take it.”
He looked over and Harper was already asleep. “Lucky you,” he said under his breath.
By the time they reached the outskirts of Portland, it was time to call Quan, see where he was, and how they were faring.
Logan reached Quan right away, and though he sounded a bit sleepy, he told Logan what he needed to know: the SAA slithered like a snake into the city and were now either pinned down or about to gut the city.
“Did you at least get a piece of them?” Logan asked.
“Indeed we did,” he said. “But it was at the cost of a life.”
