by Ryan Schow
Another man tried to break free of one gunman’s grip only to be shot in the throat for trying. Some woman began screaming, but a fist shut her mouth and buckled her legs. The evidence of cruelty, of mercilessness, was everywhere.
“Keep moving unless you want me to do to you what was just done to that poor bastard,” their gunman said.
Marley and Kennicot were hustled out front through the north-facing portico, dragged across the circular driveway, then shoved out onto the front lawn with everyone else. There were dozens of people crowded together, all of them scared, many of them beaten up or grazed by bullets. Surrounding them were armed men who looked a lot like the Hayseed Rebellion, but with a more militant edge.
Marley tried to get her bearings, but it was Kennicot who spoke first. “These barbarians breached the Northwest and Northeast gates.”
Marley looked at her, saw the woman had regained her composure.
That was quick.
A fleet of old-as-dirt prison buses were now rumbling their way down Pennsylvania Avenue, moving stalled cars out of the way. Ahead of them, a Humvee with a big brush guard helped clear the path leading to the White House grounds. If there was an EMP, she thought, these vehicles somehow managed to survive.
When the busses started turning into the two entrances, Marley said, “Where could they be taking us?”
“I’m not sure,” Kennicot answered. “COVID centers, warehouses outfitted for the re-education of political dissidents, one of any number of dark sites.”
“Dark sites?” Marley asked.
Kennicot shook her head and said, “You don’t have the clearance for that.”
“If that’s where they’re taking us,” Marley said, “I’m going to have clearance of the more intimate kind.”
“We’ll cross that bridge—”
“Shut up!” one of the gunman roared. He pushed through a group of older men and women, then shoved Marley and Kennicot to the ground. The man stepped on Marley’s face, squashed it into the lawn and said, “You talk, she dies, get it?”
“Yes,” Marley managed to say.
“Same goes with you, you old goat,” he said to Kennicot. “Tell me you understand or she gets a bullet.”
“I understand,” Kennicot said, none of her fear showing through. Or maybe she was never that afraid. Was the sobbing wreck the president portrayed herself to be earlier just an act? Did this woman even have a real personality?
A few moments later, the captured were told to stand and line up for the busses. If she’d done what Savannah had asked, Marley should have killed Killian by now. If she’d done that, would things be different? Would everyone somehow be free right now as opposed to being corralled onto prison buses on the White House lawn?
A young boy was shoved in line behind Marley. She looked down at the kid and said, “You alright?”
He ignored her.
Kennicot looked back at Marley, almost like she wanted to say something. But then they were told to move, so they all started walking to the nearest bus.
Overhead, a huge jet cruised by, no sound at all. The engines were out. The altitude was dangerously low, like the others. Marley followed its trajectory, saw dozens of pillars of smoke deeper inside D.C. and wondered if those were crashed airplanes or burning buildings.
A few minutes later, the plane disappeared from view. In the distance, a huge fireball erupted into the sky, the rumbling sound of the explosion following shortly afterward.
How many people died just now? she wondered. She was suddenly overcome with a great and terrible sadness, one that left her speechless, stricken, weak. She tried to rein in her thoughts, which was a challenge in itself. Unfortunately, her situation was getting worse by the second.
With each step, Marley felt herself getting further away from the route Savannah told her to take. She wasn’t a killer. Hell, she couldn’t even keep herself out of harm’s way, much less defeat a bunch of men with guns and bombs!
She glanced behind her and the East Wing of the White House. It had caved in and was on fire. Marley imagined this was where the earlier bombs had gone off. Taking in the wider picture, Marley saw dead bodies strewn out everywhere, many of them likely burned beyond recognition. In the distance, there was another plane headed their way.
More future dead bodies.
They were loaded single-file onto the bus. Marley hid her eyes from the gunman standing guard at the bus’s front door. As she passed him, she noted two spare mags in a mag pouch, plus the weapon he held securely on his person.
When she climbed inside the bus, it smelled stale, like ancient rubber and sweat. The bus was as old as time itself, the seats hard, cracked, and ground down to the ugly yellowed foam in some places. Most of the bus’s painted metal was seasoned and worn to the bone, but otherwise the structure appeared to be fine. There were some places where it was rusted through, though. Those places were really rusted. Looking up, Marley saw a rather imposing gunman standing guard at the emergency door at the rear of the bus.
Kennicot sat down next to a man in a suit, one she didn’t know by the look of him. Marley took a window seat across the aisle and the blond boy sat down next to her. Outside the dusty glass, she startled as she watched Killian O’Brien approach the cluster of busses.
The Irishman was armed and looked like he was in charge. He whistled to the guys, then waved everyone over, gathering the troops around him. Obviously he had something he wanted to say.
Marley had barely cracked open the window when the guard in the back of the bus said, “Blondie, four rows up. If you touch that window again, I’m going to shoot you and the kid next to you.”
Marley lowered her hands, but by then she had managed to get the window open enough to hear Killian addressing his troops.
“When you find that scared bitch, I want her myself,” he said. “Dead or alive, it doesn’t matter. We just need her head in a bag!”
Another shooter trotted over to the group and said, “What did I miss?”
“Killian wants Kennicot’s head in a bag if you can’t bring her in willingly,” one of the guys said.
“Roger that!” the guys echoed, a few of them giving him a thumbs-up.
Kennicot started to pull on the blond boy. The kid scooted toward Marley, trying to keep from getting yanked out of his seat.
“Stop it!” he cried out. “Let go of me!”
“Change seats with me, kid,” Kennicot was saying.
Marley hit the president’s hand, then pulled the scared kid back and said “Get your hands off him!”
“Back in your seat!” the guard yelled.
Outside the bus, someone was making a scene—a young female yelling for someone, a boy. There was a man following her, also calling the boy’s name.
Adelard.
The boy jumped up and started slapping his hands on the window Marley had just opened. He began screaming at the frantic couple in German.
The guard screamed, “Sit his ass down!”
Marley tried to restrain him, but the boy fought her, his wild eyes on the people Marley assumed were his parents. Outside, the woman saw him, her eyes charged with fear as she headed right for the bus. She tried to get on, but the guard at the bus’s front door shoved her down. She scrambled back to her feet and tried again, but the guard wasn’t having any of it. He pulled his weapon and shot her in the head.
Marley’s breath caught; the boy started to scream. The guard just shot and killed the woman!
The man coming after the boy was close enough to the guard to smash him in the helmet with an elbow. The shot was solid enough to stagger him. The attacker went for the guard’s gun, pummeling him with fists and knees as a distraction to snatch the weapon. When he got it, he stepped back and fired three rounds into the guard who just killed the woman he was with.
Someone from Killian’s group then shot the man in the back, hitting him just below the shoulder. The boy beside her screamed bloody murder, killing her ears. The man Marley assumed wa
s the boy’s father dropped down, spun around, and opened fire on two more guys rolling into the fight thinking they had already won.
“Who is that?” Marley asked the boy.
“My father!”
The advancing gunmen went down, but then a bullet caught the boy’s father just below the cheek, wrecking half his jaw. Despite an unsettling amount of damage to his face, the man was alive and active. With gore slopping out of his face, he opened fire, catching another guard in the chest.
Killian moved in fast, shot him in the shoulder and collar bone. Adelard’s father swayed and tottered, his eyes locked on Killian in a dead stare.
The boy stopped screaming and started sobbing. Marley pulled him close, not wanting him to see this bloodshed.
Weary and dying, the boy’s father lifted his arm and fired on Killian, but he didn’t have the strength or the aim.
Before Killian could fire off a third shot, the boy’s father squeezed off a final round. The bullet was low and wide. It skipped off the top of a young woman’s head who had ducked down when all the chaos broke out.
Killian saw this and grinned, and then he fired a third, hitting the man in the forehead and ending his struggle.
Beside her, the boy started screaming again, this time so loud and with so much agony, the end-of-show fireworks went off in Marley’s brain. She let go of him, clapping her hands over her ears to stifle the shrieking. It was no use.
Next to them, Kennicot started yelling at the boy, telling him to shut up. She tried to grab him again, but Marley turned and punched the president in the mouth.
“Sit down and shut up!” Marley roared, talking to them both.
The guard grabbed Kennicot, threw her back into her seat and pistol whipped the top of her head. The sobbing, screaming boy, however, still had his hands and face smashed against the glass. He couldn’t take his eyes off of his dead parents.
The guard was standing in the aisle over her. He had his gun aimed at the boy. Adelard. The boy Savannah told her about. She was supposed to save him.
“Shut him up or I’ll shut him up myself!” the guard said, his face all business.
“He just watched his parents die, you asshole,” Marley hissed.
He aimed the weapon at the kid. “I mean it.”
Marley took the boy into her lap and said, “If you don’t stop crying, the man behind us is going to kill us both.”
The boy turned his strained, anguished face to the shooter, saw the weapon pointed at him.
“If you don’t stop crying, kid, I’m going to put a bullet into your mouth and make you stop. So do what the nice lady says and shut your mouth.”
The boy somehow managed to bite down on his grief. Marley held him close in measures of restraint and consolation. When he realized what was happening, that Marley was holding him too tight, Adelard broke free of her grip and sat down in his seat.
Marley watched Kennicot make a slow return to consciousness. A trickle of red ran down the front of her face from where the guard opened up a small cut on her hairline moments ago.
When she finally got her eyes opened and realized where she was, Marley said to her, “The last thing we need right now is for you to lose your head.”
Outside, everyone started to scream. Marley turned and looked out the bus window. Those people who were not already in busses started running like stampeding animals toward Pennsylvania Avenue. Gunfire took a few of them down, but then the shooters started running, too.
What people hadn’t started to run were busy looking up into the sky. Someone finally screamed, “Plane!” Was one of those planes heading right for the White House? Everyone’s faces were glued to the windows, and that’s when all hell broke loose inside the bus.
One guy got up to get out, and then everyone got up. In the back of the bus, the guard’s gun starting barking out shots. The smart people sat back down; the brave ones fell down dead in their seats and in the aisle.
“Stay down!” the guard in the back of the bus shouted.
The two closest guys didn’t listen. The taller of the two sucker-punched the guard while the smaller man went for his gun. Marley saw this happening, knew it was her only chance at escape. She shot out of her seat and hustled back to the fight. The gun went off and one of the attackers fell back into his seat, losing color in his face as he held his gut.
The other guy grabbed the guard’s throat and started to squeeze. The guard was having trouble with the big man, a younger Hispanic man blessed with both size and vigor. With bulging eyes, flaring nostrils, and the popping-out of his veins, the gunman moved his gun to shoot the man, but another man jumped up and grabbed his arm, stopping him. Marley was almost there to help when a brunette in a pantsuit stepped in front of Marley to help the second man control the guard.
Instead of working to incapacitate him, this would-be heroine decided she’d help wrestle the man’s gun away from him. She didn’t realize she’d pulled the barrel up toward her until it was too late. The struggling guard squeezed the trigger, sending a bullet blasting right through the woman’s face.
The explosive, echoing sound practically crippled Marley, but the blood that sprayed warm all over her face shook her to her core. Instead of running, Marley stepped over the dead woman and managed to get a hold of the weapon.
The guard fought her with what strength he had left, but she wiggled the gun loose, pried it out of his hand, then spun the barrel around and shot him in the head. The report rocked her skull, as well as everyone else’s, but the threat was neutralized.
Despite an intense ringing in her ears, she saw to the dying man in the seat, the one who’d been shot in the gut. She was wavering until he reached out to stabilize her. She took a breath and thanked him. Looking down at his stomach, she saw it was bad.
“Can you move?” she asked him. He gave her a sad, empty smile, then shook his head. “What do you need me to do?”
“Run,” he said.
She gave him a melancholy nod, then forced herself to do exactly what he suggested.
Marley moved through the busy aisle, heading back to the boy and Kennicot. She saw the boy. He was on his knees on the seat watching her.
Marley saw him and said, “We need to go, kid!”
Outside, the guard who ushered them into the bus was crumpled up and dead. Overhead and losing altitude quickly, Marley saw a burning plane heading right for the White House.
“Run!” someone running past the bus screamed.
The boy tried to go to his parents, but the plane was too close. Marley grabbed the boy by the arm and hustled him toward Pennsylvania Avenue.
They hadn’t even made it twenty yards when the burning jumbo jet struck the White House. A wash of heat and force blew over them, the awesome power of it slamming them face-down on the ground.
On the street ahead, gunmen opened fire on the masses. Through the chaos, Marley picked herself and the boy up. Not too far away, Kennicot was getting up as well.
“Back to the bus,” Marley hissed.
“No!” Kennicot said.
“Suit yourself,” she said, taking the boy with her. Adelard willingly went along. Whether it was because he had no one else, or his parents were back there, he didn’t put up a fight. Marley simply refused to run away from fire into a hail of bullets.
A bulldozer then crushed the White House fence and the people getting shot at spilled in, all of them running for the cover of the boiling clouds of smoke.
The shooters looked like Hayseed Rebellion the way they were dressed. Marley had been hoping the militia took over the White House and would shoot these Marxist/Leninist scumbags, but they were apparently on the same side.
“Get down!” Marley said as bullets peppered the lawn beside them. She and Adelard dropped down. But then the winding roar of a big engine had them looking up. An old secret service Suburban was barreling down on them.
“It’s one of ours!” Kennicot cried out.
Marley startled. She hadn’t realized
the woman had followed them. “Did you EMP proof a Suburban?” she turned and yelled at Kennicot.
The president nodded and said, “Last year.”
“Why didn’t you say something earlier?!” Marley yelled over the noise in the war zone. More gunfire erupted, but the smoke from the plane was now blanketing them.
“That’s why I asked for my detail, you fool!” Kennicot screamed before breaking into a fit of coughing. She disappeared for a moment in the smoke, then reappeared.
The HR fired on the Suburban instead of them, causing the SUV to change course. The beast of an SUV mowed over half a dozen of those HR cockroaches, forcing the other half to turn and flee for their lives.
The driver gunned the engine, spun the back end around, and trenched the lawn, sending a rooster-tail of grassy chunks into the air. He was changing direction, heading back for Kennicot.
“Who’s driving?” Marley asked, suddenly afraid they would be next if the driver wasn’t on their side.
“I don’t know,” Kennicot said, her eyes on the big SUV.
The boy started crying again, his body shaking so badly with fear Marley’s heart broke. “It’s okay,” Marley said, grabbing his hand, preparing to run again.
“They shot my parents!” the boy screeched.
A hail of gunfire had bullets plinking off the Presidential Suburban. Instead of bearing down on them, the SUV changed direction yet again, heading for the remaining HR, who now had reinforcements. A second later, the SUV blew through the wall of smoke, disappearing out the other side.
The darkest clouds of smoke from the burning White House finally boiled over them. Marley pulled the boy close, taking in the gray-out more in a state of paralysis than fear.
“Get down, dammit,” Kennicot said from somewhere near, but the smoke was thick and choking as it rolled over them.
“We have to get out of here,” Marley said, coughing, her eyes burning.
Kennicot appeared and then disappeared from view. At the same time, Marley closed her mouth and eyes, but she hadn’t done it soon enough. Her coughing got worse and she started to feel claustrophobic.
