by Lopez, Rob
“Nope. They’ve been out a while.” He looked out of the window. “Probably holed up someplace till this passes.”
*
Rick and Josh lay squeezed under a pickup truck, the rain hammering on the roof above them. Rivulets of water ran around them. Josh had the rifle out and aimed at the base of a tree some twenty yards away, waiting for a squirrel to be attracted by the acorns. There didn’t seem to be much chance of that as the rain bounced hard off the pavement, creating a hanging mist that, at ground level, all but obscured the target area. Fallen leaves flowed by in the gutter toward the storm drain.
Josh felt water creeping under his chest, seeping into his clothing. The back of his neck ached from maintaining the same position for too long, but he was stuck under the transmission housing and he couldn’t lift himself up to relieve the tension. Sighing with boredom, he scratched his nose.
“Don’t move,” murmured Rick. “Keep your eye on the scope.”
“Got an itch,” said Josh.
“I don’t care. Movement gives you away.”
Josh couldn’t see anything to give himself away to. The suburban street was empty. They’d spent the morning setting up snares along the branches of the trees near the house, Rick showing him how to loop the guitar wire to catch whatever bounded along, with the noose set at the right size for a squirrel’s head. Its own momentum would tighten the noose and its efforts to free itself would spell its doom. They set up so many that Josh felt sure they’d catch every single tree rodent in the neighborhood, but when they checked them some hours later, they remained as they’d left them.
This whole hunter gatherer thing was getting old real fast. It seemed to involve a lot of walking, a lot of work, and a lot of boredom while they waited, with not a lot to show for it. Josh’s stomach had long since ceased growling its hunger, and now he just felt empty and tired. It seemed stupid to be lying here on the off-chance that something would wander by at this exact location, but they’d already relocated a couple of times, with the exact same result. Josh couldn’t recall ever having been so bored, or so uncomfortable. His father, of course, didn’t seem bothered by any of this.
When do we quit? Josh had asked him. Nightfall, he’d replied.
Josh wasn’t sure if his father was trying to prove something to him. Maybe he knew they weren’t going to get anything and just wanted Josh to suffer a little. Because reasons. Maybe this was part of some macho cult thing. An initiation into being hardened and miserable.
Well, Josh had passed the latter requirement, no problem. He just couldn’t see the point of the former. If his father was so good at this, why didn’t he take the rifle and get them something to eat?
He felt a slight nudge in his ribs and looked toward his father, who rolled his eyes toward the target area.
While Josh had been daydreaming, the rain had slackened and a squirrel had simply appeared, sitting up with an acorn in its paws. Tightening his grip on his rifle, Josh peered down the scope. The magnified rodent looked huge in the crosshairs. Holding his breath, Josh squeezed the trigger.
It wouldn’t move. He pulled on it a couple of times before he realized the safety was still engaged. Thumbing the catch, he looked down the scope again.
The squirrel had turned around, but otherwise it hadn’t moved from its location. Josh wondered if this was the point at which he’d actually kill something.
The thought set his heart racing. His finger took up the slack in the trigger, and mentally he said goodbye to the squirrel.
When he pulled the trigger, the gun thumped and a small piece of bark chipped off the trunk of the tree.
The squirrel, unscathed, wondered what the sound was.
“Reload,” whispered Rick hoarsely.
Josh tried, but breaking open the barrel while lying under a pickup truck proved to be no easy feat. Rolling sideways, he slapped at the barrel, catching it on the exhaust pipe. Wrestling with it, he fumbled in his pocket for a pellet.
“Too late,” murmured Rick.
Josh looked up. The squirrel was scampering up the street, its prized acorn gripped in its jaws. With a leap, it bounded onto a mailbox, scanned the world around it, then leaped off and disappeared around a corner.
“You’ve got to be quicker,” said Rick, his voice laden with disappointment.
Irritated, Josh loaded the air gun and locked the barrel shut. “I can’t be,” he said.
His father looked at him. “Then you shouldn’t have missed.”
*
Rick read the resentment in his son’s eyes. They were the eyes of a child who was convinced that his assessment of him wasn’t fair. In other circumstances, Rick might have given him a lecture on life not being fair. Apart from this not being the time or the place however, Rick wasn’t inclined to give long lectures.
Maybe that was the whole problem. He’d never made his case to Josh.
A shot rang out in the distance. As Rick scanned the street, another followed. Sliding out from under the pickup, he motioned Josh out.
“Get behind me,” he whispered.
The shots came from the adjacent highway. Slipping off the safety of his M4, Rick moved swiftly between the houses and across the yards, straining his ears against the pattering of the rain on the trees. He halted in some bushes at the edge of a parking lot, behind an auto body repair shop. Looted vehicles sat forlorn on the highway, doors flung open, discarded bags and cardboard packaging strewn across several lanes. A semi-trailer had been particularly plundered, its tarp ripped and wooden pallets piled up around it. The charred remains of a camp fire gleamed wetly on the asphalt.
Beyond the semi, a guy with a hood and cloak fashioned from black plastic sheeting and twine stood, a rifle in his hands. His face was pinched with hunger and he was looking underneath and around the semi.
“You can come out,” he shouted. “It’s okay. I won’t shoot.”
Rick couldn’t see who he was shouting at, but it was obvious the man was agitated, and his finger was still curled around the trigger. The man crept forward to the rig. “It’s okay,” he reiterated.
From the pile of garbage at the back of the semi, a figure sprinted out. It was a girl, not much older than Josh, and she clutched a paper package to her chest as she ran.
The man lifted his rifle to shoot her in the back, and Rick, his rifle already aimed, fired twice at the man, double tapping him in the chest. The man staggered back, coughing up blood, then collapsed, his legs jerking in their death throes. The girl carried on running. A shot rang out from the other side of the highway and she fell, skidding across the wet pavement.
Rick broke cover and dashed to the semi, peering cautiously around. In the driving rain, he caught a glimpse of a figure running through the lot of a drive-in and plunging into some woods. The girl lay still, the top of her skull blown off. The wet paper package had burst open, revealing a small teddy bear, a diary and a picture frame with a photo of a man and a woman smiling on a beach.
Josh had his head lifted up, looking at the girl, and Rick motioned him down with an emphatic gesture. “Stay down,” he hissed.
With a last glance at the girl’s body, Rick sallied out from behind the semi and sprinted across the lanes. There was a flash from the woods and a bullet zipped past him, but his momentum carried him across a parking lot and into the wall of a white painted store. Before he’d even recovered his breath, he leaned out and pumped two shots into the location of the flash. Doubling back around the store, he ran into the trees, scanning the shadows for movement. Apart from the water dripping off the leaves, there was nothing.
Moving at a crouch, he reached the shooter’s location, seeing only footprints in the mud. He heard the rustling of undergrowth and the splashing of water, and took off immediately in pursuit. A stream ran through the woods, the footprints clear, and Rick leaped across. As soon as he caught sight of the running man, he leveled his rifle and snapped off a shot. The man stumbled and disappeared behind foliage.
Running blindly after an armed assailant, without backup, was a foolish thing to do, but Rick was caught up in the moment, angry at the sight of the dead girl and determined not to let his quarry get away. He sprinted a zig-zag through the trees, spotting the occasional blood trail. A yard fence appeared and he hurdled over, running past a house. There was a street ahead, with no sidewalks and large expanses of weedy lawns in front of the homes. With no cover nearby, the man he was pursuing slowed to a halt and turned around. When he saw Rick’s rifle pointing at him, he threw away a large caliber revolver and sank down to the grass, bleeding from a wound in his thigh.
“Please, I didn’t mean it,” he cried.
Rick approached him. The man wore a dirty ball cap and a trash can liner with holes for his arms. In spite of his down-at-heel appearance, he had the shoes and pants of an office worker or salesman.
“I heard the shots, I saw the movement, I didn’t realize,” continued the man. “I didn’t want to shoot her, please believe me.”
Rick kicked away the revolver. “Where are you from?”
“Concord. I met this guy who told me to partner up with him. He was bad, okay? This was his idea.”
Rick was uncompromising. “Anyone else in Concord?”
“No, they all went east. The guy I was with, the guy you shot? He came out of the east, said there was nothing there. People dying. We needed food. He shot the girl’s father. I didn’t have anything to do with that. Please, you’ve got to understand. I haven’t eaten in two days. I can’t think straight. I just saw the movement and fired.”
Rick lowered his rifle. “Are you going to ask how the girl is?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. How is she?”
“She’s dead.”
Rick took out his knife, gripped the emaciated cheeks and savagely drew the blade across the man’s neck, slitting his throat. As the man fell with a hoarse gasp, Rick turned, bloody knife still in hand.
Josh had followed him and was on the other side of the street, eyes wide in shock.
12
“I didn’t want to waste a bullet,” said Rick.
Rick and Lauren lay side by side in bed, staring into darkness.
“I knew one day it would come to this: you and the children seeing the kind of person I really was.”
“That’s not true …” began Lauren.
“It is,” interjected Rick. “I’m not the man I was when you first met me. I know that. You know that.”
“We’ve all changed, Rick …”
“I changed long before. Josh sensed that. Today, he saw that. That look on his face … I never looked at my father like that.”
“You’re not your father …”
“And that’s the problem.”
“No! No, it’s not.” Lauren sighed deeply. “Your pa was a real kind and loving guy, but he never had to do the job you did.”
“I never told him I transferred to special forces. I kept that back from him.”
“I’m sure he knew, really, deep down.”
“No. He was waiting for me to quit.” Rick shifted in the bed. “He was always ambivalent about me being in the army. He was surprised when I joined. He didn’t think I had the temperament for army life. For war. I remember once he pulled me out of school when I got bullied. I was no jock, and he didn’t think I could take care of myself – didn’t want me to try. Told me he didn’t want me to turn into a thug just to prove myself. Kept watching me when I got back from Basic, and I knew he was trying to see if I’d changed. That was his thing. He was always watching out for me. And I lied to him in the end.”
Lauren lay quiet for a while, trying to process. “It’s normal to feel remorse …”
“I don’t feel remorse. Not for that, nor for today. I’m not that guy anymore. I mean, maybe if I’d grown up the way he wanted me to, I’d have normal feelings and I’d feel bad instead of having to fake it, but I took a different path. Went into uncharted territory without a guide. Came out someone else, someone my father wouldn’t recognize.” Rick fell silent for a moment. “And someone my own son doesn’t recognize.”
“Everything’s changed, Rick. Hell, I don’t recognize myself. Josh has to grow up, and you have to teach him. Even he’ll see that makes sense.”
“You want me to teach him how to cut a man’s throat?”
Lauren caught her breath for a moment.
“Now you know what I mean,” said Rick.
13
The plants Lauren had brought into the house were dying. Even with her untrained eye, she could see that. Watering them achieved nothing. The library books she perused mentioned something about feeding them, but she had no potassium, and the techniques outlined for making compost were long-winded. Somehow she didn’t think the plants would wait for her to do that.
The fantasy of growing their own food looked to be just that: A fantasy.
“Goddamn rodents,” exclaimed April.
She was holding up a torn, soaking wet sheet – the one she’d used to hold the acorns while they leached in the creek. Coffee colored stains bloomed on the sheet, but the ragged tears showed where little teeth had broken through to help themselves to the conveniently stored bounty within.
“A whole day gathering and shelling, wasted. Oh my God, we’re going to be eating that dog food now.”
“I don’t want to eat dog food,” said Lizzy.
“We can get more acorns,” said Lauren absently. She was still thinking about the conversation with Rick the night before.
“I’m not sure it’s safe to take the children out there, right now. Not with the kind of crazies who don’t mind if they shoot kids. I’m not sure this is such a good place to be.”
“Rick said he’d try and find some place farther from the highway.”
“How’s about we get farther from everything? The mountains sound better and better every day.”
“It’s too late in the year for that. We needed to have started that months ago. Hell, years ago. Now I wish we’d bought that cabin in the woods.”
“You were going to buy a cabin?”
“No, never really thought about it. And never had the money. But I wish I could turn back the clock.”
“Girl, that kind of thinking’s going to get you down.”
“I know.” Lauren gazed wistfully out of the window. The rain had stopped. “Remember what I said about it being okay for children to change?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I was wrong.”
Lauren wondered seriously about what Josh would come back as. Would he rebel against his father, or was he on the cusp of becoming someone Lauren wouldn’t recognize? She understood Pa Nolan’s apprehensions, all those years ago. She kind of accepted the existence of another side to Rick – she knew him better than he realized, and the surprise wasn’t as deep as he imagined – but when it came to her boy, she didn’t feel half as sanguine.
Of all the fantasies that could be shattered, that one felt the worst.
*
“Wait,” whispered Rick in Josh’s ear.
The squirrel scampered back and forth across the ground, still small in Josh’s scope. The rodent had been shuffling about indecisively for too many minutes now, and Josh felt impatient. He had a clear line of sight, and he was getting uncomfortable lying under the bush. He just wanted to put a pellet into the damn thing so his dad could skin it and cook it and the whole thing would be over with. If he could kid himself that it was chicken, maybe he could even bring himself to eat it.
The squirrel, oblivious to its doom, circled closer, past the stick they’d stuck in the ground to denote the thirty-yard mark.
“Wait,” repeated Rick.
Josh wasn’t sure what he was waiting for. He was going to miss anyway. He hadn’t hit anything square since he’d got the rifle. The sooner this charade was over, the better.
The squirrel drew nearer and nearer, looming in the scope until Josh could see its whiskers clearly. Any second now, he thought, it would see them
and run.
“Shoot,” came the whisper in his ear.
The squirrel halted abruptly, like it had heard something. Josh held his breath, taking up the slack in the trigger. It seemed impossible to miss, the crosshairs embedded firmly in the squirrel’s chest. The scope trembled nonetheless.
The squirrel stared at him at about the same time the gun thudded and the pellet left the barrel. The creature did an immediate back flip and bounced up and down on the grass like a dropped ball.
“Good,” said the voice.
Josh stared. “It’s not dead.”
“It is. It’s just reflex.”
Rick slid out from under the bush and picked up the shaking rodent. When he returned, it lay dead in the palm of his hand. It didn’t look big enough to fill a sandwich.
“Come here,” said Rick, taking out a knife that dwarfed the rodent.
“It’s okay,” said Josh. “You do what you have to do. I’ll wait it out.”
“Come here,” said his father in a more insistent tone.
“No, really …”
“Come here!”
It was an order, and Josh responded, drifting forward against his will.
“We have to eat,” said Rick calmly, “and you have to learn. Watch carefully.” He pulled his thumb down along the squirrel’s abdomen, and a squirt of urine came out of the bottom end. “You do this before gutting it. If the bladder’s full and you burst it, it’ll contaminate the meat. Now take this knife.”
Josh took it, conscious that it was the same knife he’d seen being drawn across a man’s throat yesterday.
“Pinch the skin here and make an incision, Then, with the edge pointed away from the guts, increase the cut.”
Josh took the rodent. It was still warm.
“You sure it’s dead?” he said.
“Very. Make the cut. Remember, you don’t want to pierce the guts.”
Josh couldn’t see how it wouldn’t. Gingerly, he pinched the skin and began to saw gently.
“The fur protects the skin and blunts the blade. Press harder.”
Josh did so and felt the skin give way to a hole. He’d done about as much as he wanted to do.