by Schow, Ryan
The flames now rolled over the car, causing De La Fuente to make one last desperate attempt. Indigo raised her weapon, shot him in the shoulder. De La Fuente broke into a screeching wail. Spit and crass language spewed from his lips as the flames snuck inside the car and went for him specifically.
“Just shut up and burn, pendejo,” she said.
Rex turned and looked at Indigo with a raised eyebrow; she shrugged her shoulders in response, which made him smile inside. She shot the man to ensure he met his appropriate fate. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
As the flames enveloped De La Fuente, as they swallowed him, he bucked and screamed and thrashed until the skin began to bubble and melt, and the fire ate the last of the life right out of him.
The three of them stood a ways away even as the small engine exploded. The hood punched up off the asphalt a foot or so before slamming back down. They all turned and shielded their eyes, but the explosion was fairly self-contained.
“Well this is a fitting end,” Indigo said.
“Yes it is.”
Margot stood there in abject horror, silent, trying not to look, but looking anyway because she couldn’t seem to look anywhere else.
When De La Fuente was dead and gone, when the flames consumed the seatbelt and the roasted maggot dropped in a pile onto the overturned roof of the car, they returned to the Olds where Rex said to Indigo, “Give me a hand.”
The muscle car was on its side, nothing leaking too badly, and nothing on fire. Together they pushed the muscle car over. It bounced violently on its springs and all four inflated tires. Indigo appraised the damage. Despite nearly every square inch of the beast having taken an absolute beating, she thought it might still run. That’s how cars were supposed to be built. Back in the day they were all balls and grit with noisy engines and hard charging mufflers.
“Give it a try,” Rex said.
For the next few minutes, Indigo worked the ignition and the gas, flooding it half a dozen times. The engine coughed and sputtered, but eventually it showed signs of life. When it finally caught and kicked over, they were all exhausted smiles.
“Get in,” Indigo said to them both.
Margot and Rex piled back in; Indigo threw the beast in gear and headed back home. They found a few Horde stragglers, which Rex popped out the window and shot dead, but by and large, they’d all dispersed. Indigo’s home, however, was still burning, as were the homes next to it. By mid afternoon, half the block, if not all of it, would be one long coal bed.
They drove to Dirt Alley. Stopped right in the middle. When they got out of the car, there was no wind but the fires were spreading out on either side of her home. They couldn’t jump the alley, which made it safe. Indigo turned and looked at the house Cincinnati and her family had stayed in. It was untouched by violence. But more important, it was familiar.
“A quick nap and we’ll go?” Rex said, standing beside her all the sudden, looking at the same thing she was looking at.
“We should go,” Indigo replied, even though he could see she was aching for sleep right about now. “Then again, a cat nap might be great.”
They all headed inside the house, each finding a bed they could crash in.
Indigo woke up disoriented. Her body felt punched to all hell, and her arm stung in a dozen places. She was still picking glass out of her otherwise flawless skin.
Her mind began to clear.
Wrong house, wrong bed, pitch black outside, she thought. She got up, shuffled to the nearest window, looked across the way at the orange glow that was five and a half fire-gutted homes, hers included.
Her soul withered inside her. There was something truly awful looking at your childhood home like this. There was so much history. Her whole life was wrapped up in that house. Now it was gone. Reduced to nothing more than a glowing, orange ruin.
Her father would come home and see this and he would wonder if she died in the fire. She couldn’t let that happen.
She wouldn’t.
Downstairs, by candle light, she left her father an address, said to find her there. While Rex and her mother were still asleep, she slipped on her shoes and a coat, then walked out back and around the front of her house. The smell of charred wood hung heavy in the air, the lingering smoke burning her eyes and nostrils by the time she got to her porch stoop.
The only thing standing was the concrete staircase and the heavy ceramic pot on the porch, the one her mother used to plant seasonal flowers in before she ran off with Tad and left them all behind.
Can’t think like that anymore, she told herself.
She tucked the note under the ceramic planter, leaving out a small corner for her father to see. Hopefully he’d see. When she returned to the house, Rex was on the back porch waiting for her. Margot stepped out a second later.
“Ready?” Rex said.
“It’s the middle of the night,” she replied.
“So?” Margot answered.
“So I guess let’s go already,” Indigo said, eliciting a small smile from Rex.
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Gunderson and the men walked back to the hospital. He was shot in the side, shot in the arm. The seven men he was with were grumbling about what had happened to De La Fuente, about the future of The Ophidian Horde.
Gunderson was now in charge. No one disputed that.
Thank God.
When he got back to the hospital, he sat there in De La Fuente’s office, now his office, contemplating the future of the organization. He thought about his dead child, his dead wife; he thought about his son and how maybe he was out there. Then he considered all the killing he’d done, not only in this life but in his former life as MS-13, and he felt ashamed.
The nightmares wouldn’t stop.
His life as an enforcer, a hired gun, that was a young man’s game and he was no longer a young man. In fact, he felt old and incredibly tired.
That life was over. A new life was emerging. He thought it best to be the one pulling the strings rather than the one pulling the trigger.
Night had fallen outside. He wanted to go to bed, but his mind was wired. He paced the halls of the hospital, taking account of the remaining men. There were still thirty or so in his charge, not enough to be a force to be reckoned with, but certainly not enough to feel broken.
Four of these men, hardened creatures like himself, were shot. God how he hated the pain! He’d only been shot once before, back in the early years, in his twenties. Now the pain gnawed at him, unrelenting. He acted like it didn’t hurt, but it hurt like hell.
He finally turned in for the evening, his body giving up on him.
Within hours, though, the first nightmare sunk its claws in him. It was the first of the night, but the fifth that week. He sat up in bed, sweating. Finally he turned, planted his feet on the floor then let his head fall into his hands. Sleep continued to pull at him, but he refused to give in. The idea of another round of horrors kept him from laying back down and shutting his eyes completely.
Finally he got to his feet, went to his belongings, withdrew his Glock.
In his closet there were four boxes of 9mm ammunition and three magazines, all of them packed and ready to go. From another drawer, there was a sound suppressor.
He screwed the suppressor on, chambered a round, then he walked down the hallways of the hospital. Their home base. Home.
He went to check on his most loyal men, the ones he trusted with his life. He found them all asleep. For a long time he stood in the silence of the hospital, dawn still hours away. He stood there thinking. One word left his mouth: “Yes.”
With that said, Gunderson went from room to room, killing nearly every single one of his men in their sleep. A bullet to the head. Just one. No one rose, no one cried out, no one fought back. They all just died.
When he was done but for one man, Gunderson stood over the last body, whispered a prayer, then begged God for forgiveness, for absolution.
Gunderson recognized that m
oment as the end of an era.
The end of the old Gunderson.
Standing in front of Lucian Tate, a former member of the Sureños, Gunderson stared down at the shadow, listened to the kid’s snoring and realized he was tying off something bad that started so long ago. Something that could not go on in this new world. Something that should not be allowed to go on in this world.
Clarity persisted: this had to end.
He put the muzzle to Tate’s head, then pulled the trigger. The Ophidian Horde was no longer. He was free.
Finally.
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Stanton waited in the darkness with baited breath. Breathing heavy, sticky with blood, he struggled to stay quiet. Rider, however, was perfectly poised. Barely even winded.
The instant the upstairs guy descended the stairs, Rider was tucked around the corner with his knife ready.
Stanton heard his foot hit the ground floor. It was over before it started.
One swift movement, a cut and thump, and the guy grabbed his throat with both hands and a gurgle. Rider caught him from behind, clamped a big hand over his nose and mouth and held him through the fight as he slowly bled out and suffocated to death.
He wobbled and staggered, then his knees buckled and his hands sunk to his sides. Slowly Rider set him down, easing him to the floor before pulling him behind the couch. Rider glanced over at Stanton, waved a hand then moved silently up the stairs. Stanton’s knife was ready, but Rider was out front and he felt better because of it.
Upstairs, there was another set of shot out windows with three guys in seated positions, their guns mounted on coffee tables.
Next door, a couple of shots popped off.
Inside the room, two of the guys shot once, then twice. The return fire came quick, two slugs burying themselves in the wall behind Rider and Stanton.
Stanton’s heart was officially thundering in his chest. Rider held up two fingers, then pointed left and to himself. He then held up one finger and thumbed it back to Stanton.
He understood perfectly.
Rider planned on taking the two on the left; Stanton would hit the guy on the right. Rider held up a fist, waited. When another volley of gunfire started, the hand went down and Rider moved swiftly across the room. Stanton followed his lead.
Rider was as light as a nightmare on his two; Stanton let the notion that he was murdering a human being die off in his mind. He wasn’t killing someone. He was saving lives. That was the distinction he had to make to do what he needed to do and stay sane. He told himself his wife and daughter were in that college and the college was under siege by criminals, killers, animals. These were men who didn’t deserve to live. Men who needed to die.
So when he drove his blade into the wiry side of his guy’s neck, it was with the savage understanding that to beat the monster you had to become the monster. He pulled the blade back through the stubborn flesh. Then, grabbing onto the man’s face, he hooked his fingers under a strong chin and yanked the head backwards. With a swiftness he dared not consider, Stanton tore the blade across the throat, opening it enough to insure the animal would not fire another round into the college or at his family.
Juiced full of adrenaline, his heart galloping like a stallion, he watched Rider finish the job. The man finished, then turned and appraised Stanton’s work. Did he measure up? Could Stanton have taken two men by surprise the same way Rider did?
No. Most likely not.
But someday he might have to, and this both startled him and gave him direction. Rider cleared the house with Stanton in tow. They took the guns and headed downstairs.
“Ready?”
Ready for next door? Ready for round two, the final round?
“Locked and loaded,” Stanton said.
“First floor we stay quiet. Knives only. Second floor,” he said, holding up the semi-automatic rifles, “we empty these things into whomever is up there. We’ll go loud, turn that place into a bloodbath. That’s our sign.”
“Sign for what?”
“Lets the guys next door know we’ve eliminated the threat.”
“So a bunch of shooting lets them know we’re done?” he asked.
“No, the shooting indicates the final war is waged, and then there’s a sign. The final sign that says the mop up is complete.”
“What’s the sign?”
“Don’t want to jinx it,” Rider said. “Let’s go.”
They head next door, but as they’re reaching for the door, gunfire blasts through it, splintering glass and wood, shrapnel catching them both in the necks, chests and arms.
They both back off, even as the door is kicked wide open. A huge man with a shaved head, muscles like truck tires and hands big enough to crush a human skull bounds barefoot down the stairs like a demon coughed out of hell.
They’d stashed the guns off to the side of the door where they could pick them up for the second story attack, but those were now behind the charging man.
This bull was going after them both, but Rider broke left and Stanton broke right. Under the moonlight, in the backyard that was just dirt and a month’s worth of overgrown weeds, the hulking mass grabbed Rider. He was at least a foot taller than Stanton’s friend.
The second he latched on to Rider, the old guy began stabbing the absolute hell out of him. Stanton refused to be a spectator to his friend’s death. He rushed the beast, drove his knife in and out of the man’s kidney, ducked a flying elbow, then hit the other kidney. The beast now had Rider by the throat, those big hands starting to crush everything valuable in Rider’s neck.
That’s when Stanton dropped low and sliced through both Achilles tendons. The man dropped to his knees, but he still had Rider by the throat. His friend’s hands hung limp at his sides, barely any fight in there.
Letting go of whatever inhibitions he had, surrendering to the animal instincts inside him, the brutal rage, that something wild and untamed and aching to defend what was his, Stanton drove his blade into the side of the man’s neck. As quickly as he’d driven it in, Stanton jerked the blade out soundlessly, violently. He did it again and again, three more times before that giant hand let go of Rider and the beast toppled over sideways.
Seeing Rider reach for his throat, but still in a wash of near insanity, Stanton turned and sprinted for the door. If there was one, there would be more. He was racing inside the house at the same time two more men were pouring out.
A gunshot went off, but he didn’t hear it or feel it; he simply drove his knife into anything in front of him.
The first man got a knife in the gut, then in the throat.
Behind him, in the hallway where he first attacked, another man was trying to push his way through, but his friend was in the way and getting stabbed to death, so he didn’t shoot.
The second Stanton was done with him, he shoved the guy away only to see the weapon in his face; gunfire behind him didn’t even startle him. The man facing him, his head snapped back and he fell down dead. All Stanton knew at this point was charge forward.
He’d seen what the gigantor nearly did to Rider, and now it was Rider on his heels watching his six. The rushing, beating, tramping sounds of feet coming down the stairs didn’t faze him.
The layout of the house was exactly like the last one, so he didn’t have to think of where to go, only how to kill as quickly and as efficiently as possible. He’d lost all sense of self. It was only move forward, kill, move forward, kill.
He rushed up to meet the first man on the stairs in the dark. Stanton turned him into a pin cushion. The second one was suddenly there. Rider unloaded three rounds into him and both corpses fell on top of Stanton.
He wrestled them off of him, scampering out of the blood soaked pile, stabbing and cutting his way out, just to make sure they were dead.
Three more shots and another man dropped face-first off the stairs into the pile. Stanton reached up, his energy suddenly waning, and he stabbed the man in the side of the neck, just to be sure.
Rider moved past them as Stanton got to his feet. He hurried up the stairs behind his friend, listened as Rider emptied one of the guns into one last man. He finally pulled up behind Rider, panting, sick on adrenaline and tasting blood. Right then he realized he was covered in the carnage of those last men and it made him want to hurl.
Rider turned and looked at him and, in a raspy, almost-choked-to-death voice, said, “Jesus Christ, son, what in the blue hell was that?”
Heaving, struggling to breathe, his limbs still high and wild with energy, he said, “Thought you were dead. Thought if I didn’t stop them we’d both be dead.”
Moving across the upstairs living room, Rider sighted down the stop sign on the corner of Ashbury and Grove. He put a round right through the O in STOP, then waited. A second later another shot went off and the overhead streetlamp on the other side of the street shattered.
Rider turned around and said, “We’re clear.”
“It’s over?” Stanton asked.
“Yeah.”
Stanton quickly slipped out of the fog of what he’d done, who he had become, and he almost couldn’t stand it. As he traipsed past the pile of bodies at the foot of the stairs, and the two dead guys in the hallway, it hit him with brutal force. Everything he’d just done came rushing back at once.
Out back, he staggered off the porch, dropped to a knee and began to puke. The convulsions rocked him over and over again, unrelenting. He retched and gagged, he spit and blew his nose, and then he dry heaved some more. When he was finally done, he blew his nose one last time into the weeds and stood up, embarrassed that he’d cracked with Rider watching.
“You saved my life,” Rider croaked, while rubbing his neck and looking at the dead animal in the weeds further into the back of the yard.
“You’d have done the same.”