by Daniel James
“I thought these guys were his friends?”
“I only met that dickhead tonight and I already want to slap the shit out of him.” Fitzy ducked a little lower, listening to the high, screeching creak of another damaged roof support beginning to struggle in its purpose.
Through the glow of the barn’s smoky blaze, Grace saw the crazy stitch-faced surgeon keeping pace with his undomesticated pet wolf, both in pursuit of the Robin Hood fan and Wyndorf. “What’s the play? Find some weapons and kill all these freaks?”
Roach pulled Grace and Fitzy down into a squat, mindful of catching a stray bullet or, somehow more unpleasantly, an arrow. He watched Colquitt and Jensen trot past their pen, the doctor’s enforcer still peppering single shots at the archer’s back, trying to put him down before he made it out into the open. Roach issued an order which left no room for compromise. “No, I have something more important for you two. My kids and my wife are here, in the basement of the farmhouse, around the back. Get them and the nearest car you can find, and get the hell out of here.”
“And you?” Fitzy asked.
Isaac was squeezing his knife with restless pumps like a heavy beating heart, and watching Wyndorf slip out of the enclosure into the dark field. He could barely take his eyes off the ongoing feud to address Roach. “Last chance to leave. No sense in getting yourself killed. Kids need their dad.”
Roach held his solicitous stare, challenging him. “We both kicked this hornet’s nest. I need to see this through to the end, too.”
Isaac didn’t argue. He vaulted over the pen’s railing and went into the billowing smoke cloud after Colquitt and Jensen.
Grace nodded once, but clearly didn’t like bailing on Roach, even if it was for a good cause. “You watch your ass. I won’t be there to keep it from getting kicked.”
Roach tried to smile but it felt incongruous. “If my family get hurt, it’ll be me kicking your ass. Now go.”
Grace and Fitzy did as they were told, sprinting away from the hungry flames of the burning livestock barn, briefly stopping to collect a machine gun apiece from the grouping of bodies near the entrance, then back out to the battleground. Roach patted down Thurman’s corpse, hoping to find another gun, but if the gnarled gun-nut had been carrying another it was now lost to the blood-soaked farmyard. He checked Garland’s body instead, and as luck would have it, he found a 9mm sidearm with a full clip. The stench of smoke was stinging his eyes, the black tendrils pressing to his nose, suffocating him. He bolted from the pen, squinting through the fumes, catching up to the swift and fearless form of Isaac, who was carefully pushing forth beyond the spreading walls of flame. They were both knuckling hot, drifting grit from their watery eyes and trying to stare through the smoke when the archer spun on his boot heel and released an arrow behind him like he was attempting to slay the burning heart of the fiery beast. The arrow was set on a fatal trajectory toward Colquitt, yet he managed to dodge his fate, dropping to one knee, and thereby sealed the fate of another. Over the loud, hungry crackling of flame and groaning timber came a sharp gasp and the awkward tumble of a body collapsing to the floor. Jensen had been hit in the right shoulder, stuck clean through whilst in the middle of turning away from the speeding arrow.
Enraged, not from any sense of friendship or loyalty, but from a cold-hearted professionalism and the near-miss of his pending 50% payment, Colquitt fired off two more single shots, managing to take Schecter in the left lung and heart. The last of Chicago’s true-blooded Midnight Frontiers was dead before his knees hit the concrete aisle.
Colquitt had never had the thirst to heal: his former black-ops career was purely carnivorous, dismantling the human condition rather than mending it. Right now he cursed his skilful death-dealing. With some cursory examination, he was relieved to find that the arrow poking out of Jensen’s shoulder had cleared the top of his lung. It would hurt like hell but it wasn’t an immediately fatal wound.
“Dammit, Jensen. I told you, you should have stayed back at the house.”
Jensen was biting his lip into a white bloodless maggot, fighting back his searing agony. “No.” His eyes were feverish with lunacy. “It has to be me. I have to be the one to kill him. It’s all I have. Then I can die.”
Colquitt heard footsteps pounding through the heat haze and roiling black smoke. Isaac and Roach sped past the both of them without a word or thought, chasing down Wyndorf.
“Help me up,” Jensen demanded, a scorching spear of pain lancing through his shoulder. “He can’t have gotten far.”
Colquitt briefly considered forcing his employer to cough up the final instalment of his fee by brute savagery, then putting him out of his twisted misery. Alas, he was a professional. Scooping him up with one hand under his left armpit, Colquitt steadied him on his feet and hurriedly dragged him out of the conflagration, and not a moment too soon. A large section of the roof collapsed in with a demonic bellow, casting sparks and lung-coating poisonous carbon after them on a hot breeze. Up ahead, Colquitt, hampered by hobbling Jensen along, watched the blaze-borne silhouettes of Isaac and Roach trekking across the combat-ravaged field toward the vast structure of the pig polytunnel. He was going to call after them, make them wait under the guise of camaraderie, but really he was primarily concerned with preventing them from offing Wyndorf and costing him a much-needed wage.
“Hurry,” Jensen croaked, removing himself from Colquitt’s care.
The pair of them hastily continued across the grounds, mindful of the occasional dead soldier littering the blast-ruptured and scorched plots of land, heading for the cavernous tunnel.
Night Drive
Grace and Fitzy were knotted around Roach’s family as if they were impersonating secret service agents, their guns pointed at the ground but ready to spring up and put down any lingering threats. Grace had draped her denim jacket over the small frames of Vicky and Peter, winking at them and doing her best to play the superhero who will chase away any nasty evil wanting to snatch them back. Unable to find any cars around the house, Fitzy at least got them to the gravel farm path and away from the carnage, using the silvery moonlight to guide them to the property’s south gate.
Diane had resisted the rescue effort at first, telling Grace and Fitzy to take her kids far away from here. Their marriage may be over, but she needed to know Curtis was okay. At least for some form of closure, just in case the worst happened to him. The dilemma only worsened when Fitzy quietly took her aside and judiciously mentioned that the last thing she or Roach would really want was to separate two scared kids from their parents. She conceded his point after a moment, and they left that snuff room behind.
Grace wished she had her phone so she could find out which peckerwood backwoods-ass farm they were on. The nearest neighbor was probably miles away. She’d never thought she would miss that big, wonderful city as much as she did right now.
“Up ahead.” Fitzy’s voice jumped with a tremor of relief. At the other end of the dark, crunching path was a gathering of midnight black bulks. He instantly identified the sleek bodies of the Audis, but also the robust solitude of a van and a 4x4, both of which looked a bit rugged and incongruous. Maybe they belonged to the survivalists. A single short, sharp crack skittered the gravel in front of Fitzy, but there was no muzzle flash. The sound was the ricochet of a silenced projectile clashing with the hard white chips.
“Down!” Fitzy shouted, using his bulky body to block as much of Diane and the kids as he could.
The cars were only a short jog away. The alternative was to turn back and risk a shot in the back.
Crouching low enough that their chins were practically resting on the floor, Grace looked to Fitzy. “We making a run for it?”
“We can make it.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
Grace was up and blasting. She had no clear target, so she fired indiscriminately in a fan-spray toward the parked queue of cars whilst Fitzy made a chain of hands with Diane, Vicky and Peter, dragging them behind him as
he too took up arms against the darkness. They made it to the cover of the first Audi, a sliver of moonlight bouncing off the contours.
“Did you get him?” Diane asked, trying to keep calm for her children.
They hadn’t heard any returning fire hitting the cars during their sprint, but now wasn’t the time for risky assumptions.
Fitzy shrugged, then turned to Grace. “You out?”
Grace was already in the process of reloading. “Nah.”
“I need to start this thing up.” He patted the hood of the car. “Cover me.”
“Hurry up.”
Keeping the driver’s side between him and the night-concealed killers, Fitzy smashed the window, the glittering gems of glass dusting the black leather seat. He popped the lock and slid into the seat, mindful of the crunching glass, and set about hot-wiring their escape. More glass shards rained down on top of him, singing musically off the brim of his Celtics cap, another shot having punched through the rear window. Grace was returning fire, her gunplay providing enough ephemeral light to catch snatches of their enemies. Out of left field, a brief swirl of memories inspired Fitzy, harking back to his adolescence, when boosting cars was a knee-trembling, sweaty-palmed business. Twice in one night he had performed his best work whilst under duress. If only his young self could see him now, he seemed to smile at the delirious thought, just waiting to feel that first bullet punch into him.
The erratic back-and-forth exchange ceased with a cry of anguish, and a quiet personal celebration from Grace. “Got that motherfucker.”
The gunman had been caught running from the south gate’s stone wall toward the phalanx of cars, trying to get around to a better angle in order to hit Grace or maybe the Audi’s tyres.
Fitzy finished up, the car awakening with a triumphant, powerful purr. “Get in,” he blurted.
Grace pulled open the rear door and bundled Diane and the children in. As she slid over the hood to the passenger side, her ass clenched when several more shots aerated her door. She dived into her seat and Fitzy aggressively swung the car out in a hairpin turn with a spray of gravel, almost tossing Grace back out of her open door.
Keeping the headlights off, not relishing the thought of attracting any further attention, he used the diminishing glow of the cloud-obscured moon to thread his way down the farm road. Grace pulled her door closed and looked up in time to feel the car bounce over the wounded shooter she’d dropped. Two starbursts exploded out of the dark treeline, cutting through the air toward the sound of the droning engine.
“Stay down,” Fitzy yelled at his backseat charges, the bullets stitching across the hood and spiderwebbing the windshield.
Grace took aim at one of the flashing targets, took a breath, and squeezed the trigger out of her window. Several rifle shots went wide, the bullet wounding if not killing one of the paired shooters. Fitzy barrelled the car straight down the lane. One final gunman stood between them and freedom. The stars flashed in the darkness like Morse code, the bullets tracing toward them like amphetamine-charged fireflies, collapsing what remained of the windshield. Grace emptied her magazine, her final shots coming up short along their bumpy ride. Fitzy stamped down on the accelerator, gunning straight for their determined killer. He popped his headlights on at the last second, the retina-burning full beams stabbing the survivalist through his night vision goggles.
“Hold on,” Fitzy shouted to the back seat, and yanked on the handbrake. He lurched the vehicle into a violent whip, the rear left side of the car pulverising the hip and femur of the psychopath, flipping him over the roof where he landed in a bone-jarring heap on the grassy lane.
Waiting there, immobile for an unbearable moment, expecting more gunfire to take them apart like fish in a well-lit barrel, Grace listened to the sobs of the children and the ticking of the stationary engine. She looked at Fitzy like he was slow. “The fuck we waiting for? Go!”
Fitzy took three shallow, labored breaths. “You’ll have to take the wheel, pal. I’m done.”
In the sparse backwash of the headlights, Grace watched as Fitzy placed a hand to his torso and brought it away wet and dark as engine oil. Grace couldn’t get her mouth to work.
“C’mon,” he gasped and bubbled up some flecks of blood. “Help me out of this seat. You get them somewhere safe. Don’t want Roach kicking our asses, right?” His smile would have looked wan and deathly if not for the poor light.
Grace punched the dashboard twice. “Sonuvabitch, Fitz.”
“It’s not that bad … I cashed out behind the wheel.” With those final words, the lifelong getaway driver seemed to leave his body, growing limp, eyes closing.
“Dammit,” Grace whispered. She heard the sobs and muffled whimpers of the children in the empty silence, expecting their trauma to escalate into a shrill, haunting scream. She quickly checked on Diane and the little ones, asking if they were hurt, but luckily they were all unmarked. Unlike Fitz. Grace wanted to shout and pointlessly smash her empty rifle against the dash until her arms tired, but she wouldn’t dare do anything to frighten Vicky and Peter any further. “Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere. Just keep your heads down, okay?”
Grace switched off the headlights and their whole world drowned in the inky depths of a bottomless ocean, the patchy cloud banks smothering the moon like a chloroform rag, making that giant silvery stone slumber. Her front of protective calm felt as fragile as papier-mâché as they sat there in the naked, isolated danger. Moving as quickly and quietly as she could, she slithered out of her open window, not wanting the car’s courtesy lights to become a beacon, and used the awful, agonised gasps to guide her around the side of the Swiss-cheese car to the bundled ragdoll. Her eyes had dilated to their maximum circumference and yet she could still make out very little, letting her ears and hands explore the Stygian wilderness, an ill perspiration bubbling from her pores in anticipation of some unseen killer lining up her helpless form in his sights. Her searching hands found the hardened exterior of an armored vest, but the anatomy of this crash test dummy felt all kinds of wrong. The man wept in shock and core-deep physical torment. Grace reached for his head, finding goggles plastered to his sweaty, groaning face. She ripped them off in an awkward, vicious snatch and laid them over her own poor sight. The world turned toxic green. She spotted the soldier’s dropped rifle several feet away and scrambled over to it, spinning in a full circle, ready to cut down any newcomers. The meadows and copses were deserted. Slowly, she lowered her rifle and heard the paralysed man sputter something about ‘Help’ and ‘Sorry’, “Please’ and ‘I’m begging you’. Grace looked down at the blind man in disgust and thought about her dead friend in the driver’s seat. She didn’t waste the bullet. She stamped down on the beggar’s throat with a sick cartilaginous crunch, listening to him choke to death as she removed the goggles. Then she walked back to the passenger seat and opened the door, the interior light highlighting the strain on all of their faces.
Diane was shaking from the adrenaline dump. “I’m sorry for your friend. He saved our lives. You both did.”
Grace waved it off, feeling those same shaky effects of dicing with death and far too pissed to accept any gratitude. She was about to climb out of the car and deal with the morbid process of switching seats with a dead friend when Diane, stroking the heads of Vicky and Peter, stopped her.
“We’re safe now, right? Can we just wait here for Curtis?”
“There’s just been a whole lot of ruckus, and I may not know where we are but there’s a chance the cops are on the way. And I ain’t exactly a ghost to those guys, y’know. They’ll see a sister with a record, on a farm that looks like they’ve been growing corpses, with a mom and her two scared kids in the back seat, and another known felon dead in the passenger seat. Not a smart play.” She lowered her voice for the sake of propriety, but knew it was redundant under the circumstances. The kids couldn’t help but hear what she said next. “And Roach ain’t no saint, neither.”
“This is different. No
matter what you’ve done in the past, we’re all victims here. It was self-defence. The police will put that together themselves.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Grace intentionally sounded cynical. “Look, we can’t go anywhere driving this thing. Bit suspect, wouldn’t ya say? We’ll go back and see if we can find the keys to another set of wheels on one of those dudes, then I’ll drop you off at the nearest police station. Cool?”
Diane was digging her heels in, and not entirely sure why. Their relationship was over but she didn’t want Curt to die here in all this madness. Didn’t want their son and daughter to lose their father because she hightailed it out of there and left him.
Nevertheless, Diane considered the plan for a minute, and accepted.
Grace nodded like her head was on a spring, gearing herself up for what she had to do next. “I just need to move the body of my friend.”
Showdown
Isaac reached the mouth of the forty-foot-wide tunnel, the aluminium central staircase making him think of a large, lolling metal tongue. The sounds of the fat, agitated boars could be heard behind the walls of that giant warren network. The fire in the livestock enclosure had ended up destroying the shared junction box, robbing the tunnel of electric light, but Jensen had shrewdly topped up the backup diesel generator for his big night, turning the large structure into a channel of blood-red shadow. Isaac felt like pig chow in the making. Or maybe Wyndorf would eat him instead, put him in a sausage skin and cook him for fun.
He kept left, walking past the stairs that led up to the high central walkway—or as he now thought of it, a giant pirate plank—and down the maintenance passage between the tunnel and pen walls. Roach vigilantly crept along to Isaac’s right, his rifle stock still in his large hands. Fight-or-flight hormones had numbed him to his knife-slash, reducing it to a distant calling, losing out to the tidal smash of his head-pounding pulse. Isaac was moving on autopilot, his self-preservation now well and truly a long lost practice. He was a kamikaze pilot ready to crash and burn against the rocks of Michael Wyndorf. Maggie, his LeConte’s sparrow, and Will, their chick, fluttering after him in the slipstream, begging him to stop and turn back now, warning him not to seek gratification through vengeance. No matter what voice his subconscious trickster used to try to dissuade him, it was quickly hushed, silenced by graphic thoughts of Maggie and Will lying dead in their beds, being zipped up in body bags and going cold on some morgue chopping block.