by Ryan Schow
The loyalty of friends these days…
The clerk turned the weapon on Eric, who was still sitting in the stolen Kia Rio, the engine idling. He wasn’t sure whether the clerk could see him or not through the windshield, but he put his hands up anyway. A moment later, the clerk’s wobbly, bleeding body faltered. He sat down on the curb, the shotgun falling from his grip, a line of red rolling from the corner of his mouth onto his shirt.
Finally he slumped over, presumably bleeding out, maybe even dead.
Eric looked around, saw no one. He cautiously got out of the Kia, walked over to the guy, saw him breathing, but barely. There were three holes in the front of his shirt, the amount of blood staggering.
He picked up the shotgun, poked the clerk in the cheek with the business end of it, then said, “You dead yet?”
A single eye rolled lazily up his way, but nothing came from his mouth, or any other part of his body to acknowledge Eric. He might have stopped breathing at this point. That was Eric’s cue to go shopping.
With the shotgun in hand, he went inside the ransacked store, grabbed a basket and hurried as best as he could to get what he thought he’d need. He considered raiding the cash register, but this was a small store in a mediocre section of town and it wouldn’t be loaded with enough cash to warrant the risk, so he took what he could and left, giving the clerk one last look on the way out.
Yep, he was dead.
Chapter Seventeen
One minute Xavier, Ryan and I are talking, and the next minute the three of us see the Predator drones heading straight for us. As if everything is happening in slow motion, our brains fighting to catch up to reality, we watch the missiles detach from the drone’s wings and take flight.
The first pair of missiles hits the seven story Skytech Lofts in a massive explosion that rocks the ground beneath us. With only an open parking lot between the lofts and the OEM, the second drone drops two more missiles. They head straight for the ground floor of the Offices of Emergency Management building we’re standing in front of, and that’s when I scream out for the others to run.
It doesn’t matter that all of us are dead tired, we’re not so tired that we can’t turn into Olympic level sprinters long enough to clear the shadow of what could very well be a toppling building. The direct hit sends a blast wave of heat at our backs, one that literally shifts our organs and roars through our ears.
We get up and crawl behind an SUV only to see four more follow-up drones launching their payloads on both the Skytech Lofts and the OEM building. The lofts come down hard, the OEM a little harder. This whole time the three of us just cower there in the middle of this unfolding disaster, powerless to help, powerless to do anything but just watch and pray.
Ryan is now cursing up a storm, and Xavier is profoundly silent, his eyes wide, his brain clearly trying to comprehend all this. Before the dust even settled on the OEM, Ryan stands and says, “There have to be survivors, let’s go.”
Neither Xavier nor I object.
The three of us trot toward the building, half ducking, our heads on a swivel for more drones. The half of the building facing Skytech Lofts is sagging, completely collapsed. The other side is weak and crumbling, certainly unstable.
SAC Wright never hesitates, even though Xavier looks back at me with sheer panic in his eyes, the kind of panic that says, “We’re supposed to follow him into that?”
We find a way in.
Despite the incredible risks, Xavier and I follow Ryan’s lead because if you can save just one life, let alone many, what kind of a selfish jerk would even take the time to question it? Xavier never makes another face, and he doesn’t say a word.
With our hands covering our mouths so as not to breathe in the clouding debris, we make our way through a dark, half-collapsed hallway toward a broken water pipe that’s fountaining out. The lights are mostly out, but they flicker here and there giving us enough light to work with.
Up ahead, Ryan pulls to a stop.
From his pocket he takes out a knife, thumbs it open, then cuts a strip of his shirt away. He hands me the knife and I do the same. While I’m cutting away a square of my shirt, Ryan is soaking his in the spraying water. I hand Xavier the knife and he follows our lead.
With our wet shirt squares over our mouths, we head into the belly of hell, going office to office, seeing who we can find. The destruction is monumental. In some cases there are fires people are trying to put out; in other cases we see people helping each other. Too often, we see people crushed to death, or burned alive, their eyes lifeless, their bodies nothing but a shell for their former soul.
Xavier knows CPR so he’s on the scene for those survivors in bad shape. I quickly learn and begin to assist Xavier. Ryan never stops moving, and he never complains. The guy is like a robot in that sense.
Time slips away, our hearts and minds given to the task at hand. Our efforts, however, come at a price. I personally feel the toll it’s taking on my body, but my mind forges on, my body following, almost like the flesh and bones of me have been relegated to autopilot reliance.
As the night wears on, we manage to get most of the people out of the building, many of them cut or with broken bones, but many of them able to clean up and join the search effort. We hear so many people thanking us, but we can’t stop and we can’t quit.
We just keep going.
By the time the sun breaks over the horizon the following morning, someone rounded up some food and orange juice, and that’s when we finally stop. I don’t mind saying, right now I’m so bone tired and weary I don’t have the energy to get back in the effort. Ryan keeps going, but Xavier and I exchange weary glances.
“That’s why he’s the SAC,” Xavier said, clearly pooped.
“I’m going home,” I say.
“You want a ride?” Xavier asks.
“Naw man, the purple beast still has legs and a beating heart.”
We bro-hug and go our separate ways, me looking for a bed, Xavier anxious to get home to Giselle. He’s pretty sure she’s going to have a thing or two to say about him not coming home or even calling to let her know he was alive.
I know exactly what he’ll say and why it won’t make a bit of difference.
He’ll try to explain to her that life and death situations don’t allow you to break your focus, let alone leave room for a call to the wife. You just don’t do that while lives are on the line. He’ll say this, but she won’t be able to see past the fact that she worried herself sick and all that could have been avoided with a one minute phone call.
I know this because I’ve been that guy countless times, and Adeline ended up resenting me for it. Or maybe Giselle isn’t like that. Maybe she’ll see Xavier’s heroism for what it is and give him a sponge bath and tuck him into bed.
I start laughing at the idea of that, then hear myself peter out because, honest to God, if Adeline ever did that just once, the world would come to a grating halt. Then again, when I joined the Chicago PD, whatever humanity I had left in me quickly began to degrade and I realize now that none of this is Adeline’s fault.
By the time I get home, my second wind is coming on. Maybe because I know I’m heading inside to a violated daughter and a cheating wife who’s ready to divorce me, or maybe because I know Paco Loco will want my head on a platter. Either way, a hot shower and a bed sound like heaven right now. They sound like the perfect escape.
But alas, it’s not time.
I head upstairs, each step feeling like murder on my ankles, my knees and my back. As I round the corner to the master bedroom, I hold my breath for what’s to come.
Thankfully Adeline’s still asleep.
In the master closet, I key in the combination to my floor safe and open it up. Inside are three grenades, two Glocks and four mags, all loaded with 9mm rounds. I grab two grenades, two mags and one Glock, shut the safe, then get ready to head back out.
“What are you doing?” Adeline asks, drowsy, her voice scratchy with exhaustion.
/> “Don’t worry about it, just go back to sleep.”
I trudge back downstairs—my knees threatening to explode, my back all but wanting to crumble—fire up the purple beast and head over to the house Paco Loco set up for his little baby branch of the cartel.
Paco Loco isn’t very high up on the food chain, but he’s high enough that he has a small house they could call home base, courtesy of Dámaso López Núñez, better known as “El Licenciado.” El Licenciado is the successor to El Chapo as head of the Sinaloa Cartel and apparently he has big things in store for Chicago. Or as Paco Loco likes to say, “I’m slated for big things, so if you do things my way, we’re all going to the top.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” I mumble to myself as I drive through the devastation of more than a few communities now fraught with ruin.
When I arrive at Paco Loco’s crash pad, as Paco Loco likes to call it, there’s a white panel van out front full of bullet holes; one of the back doors is hanging open. Inside the van, there are huge swipes of red on the painted white walls, and blood all over the floor. There are also loose weapons and one of the guys. Arturo Plancarte. He’s dead as a door nail.
Cautiously I head inside through the open garage door to the sounds of panic and chaos. Someone’s dying in here. The second I show my face, Paco Loco wheels his gun around on me.
I raise my hands and say, “Whoa, man. It’s just me.”
Fortunately I look like hell gobbled me down then puked me right back up. Had I come in looking fresh and clean, he probably would have shot me.
“What the hell happened to you?” he barks, lowering the gun.
“One of the guys who took our drugs, he hid them at his place. I smoked his two friends, then made him take me to his place where I got the coke. I was still inside when drones hit the place. Half the tower went down. I was lucky to make it out alive.”
“You know how to do stitches?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I lie.
“Well get in here then! Jesus Christ, cabrón!”
I walk around him to Emiliano who’s stretched out on the table. He’s got a gaping knife wound up his side and the burn trail of a bullet that grazed the side of his neck. Nothing life threatening, although he’s got a heavy groan and a face full of sweat and pain. There are another six guys hovering around, plus Paco Loco. Every single one of them has blood on them, theirs or someone else’s.
It looks like they either took a beating, or created one hell of a bloodbath.
“My old lady was a nurse before she split,” I say. “I still got her emergency kit in the car. What happened, by the way?”
“What do you think happened, man?” he spat out. “We went to war! And we went four men light, if you catch my drift.”
“I do.” He thinks I cost them the war. Whatever war it was they fought. “Did we win or lose?”
“We won what we fought, now go get your stuff before Emiliano here meets his maker,” he grumbles. “After this, you and I are going to have a long chat about what went down.”
I head out to the car, grab a grenade first, then the Glock second. I chamber a round, but leave the two magazines behind. I wasn’t sure what I’d walk in to, but this…yeah, this I can handle.
Inside, I pull the pin on the grenade, roll it into the kitchen, then wait the three seconds for Paco Loco to register the problem and turn around. He only needs two seconds. The moment his eyes hit mine, I put a round in his chest then three quick rounds into the ceiling. Everyone’s scrambling for cover when I duck out the back door and sprint towards the street. The grenade goes off and presumably pulverizes the lot of them.
Before I have a chance to feel bad, or even consider the weight of what I’ve just done, I venture back inside, see the place smoking and half collapsed, then try to pinpoint a few mewling noises here and there.
Fortunately the whole place didn’t blow, but there are busted open water pipes and some sparking wires now exposed. Once I determine it’s safe, I head deep into the destruction, tromp through the clouds of dust and fallen drywall, spot the source of the noise. Three rounds later, the mewling stops and everyone’s dead.
I won’t go into detail, but it’s pretty nasty.
Tramping through the debris, I collect their guns and whatever ammo I can find and take it all to the car. I come back for the safe, but it’s locked and I don’t have the combination. I suspect all that’s inside there is coke and money anyway—two things that won’t matter if this attack on the city continues. Or maybe that will be the only currency. Who even knows anymore? All I know is I’m so damn tired, I can hardly stand on my feet anymore.
In the pantry are all kinds of dry goods. I shovel them into a big black bag, drag them out with me and muscle them into the trunk of the purple beast, which has officially seen way better days. I don’t care that there’s blood all over the trunk, or that three dead bodies were in here just yesterday.
The bag is going where the bag is going.
All I care about now is shower, bed, sleep. As far as I’m concerned, and this is the exhaustion talking, the rest of the world can just burn to the ground for all I care.
Chapter Eighteen
The problem with El Paso was Fort Bliss. Having worked for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement as an agent years ago, Isadoro knew enough about the border to know Fort Bliss had concerns with drones in their airspace. Recently he heard they’d built a secured drone runway with a five thousand foot hanger holding MQ-1 Gray Eagle Predator Drones. The now upgraded MQ-1C Unmanned Aerial Vehicles not only boasted a longer range and longer flight time, they were now fitted with the AGM-114 Hellfire missile or a GBU-44/B Viper Strike guided bomb for serious seek-and-destroy missions.
As he, Eliana and the nameless, speechless boy made their way through what looked like a war zone to Hwy 54, a catastrophic new nightmare was unfolding. Pillars of smoke boiled into the sky from dozens of different sources. Half the city was burning, traffic was a nightmare, and the sky was buzzing with the new Predator drones.
“Are they protecting the city or attacking it?” Eliana asked.
“I don’t know,” he heard himself say, his eyes half on the slow moving traffic ahead, half on the sky.
He watched one of the drones fire a missile and hit a 747 trying to land in El Paso International Airport right next door to Briggs Army Airfield and Fort Bliss. The commercial jet exploded in a fiery ball of destruction, the bits and pieces of it raining down in the open land just east of El Paso International.
“They’re attacking,” he said, thinking the 747 must have had no choice but to try to land. In the air, it was a sitting duck; trying to land in the desert would tear up the landing gear and leave them crippled and out in the open; trying to land at El Paso International left them vulnerable to attack.
“Did they just shoot that airplane?” Eliana asked.
“Yes.”
Looking ahead, Isadoro saw they were trapped. If one of those drones decided to hit Hwy 54, they were stuck in a kill zone and would need a Plan B. To the right, the El Paso Zoo was burning from some kind of a bomb, the highways were clogged with people trying to flee the city, and everything east and west of Hwy 10 ahead was engulfed in flames. Hwy 54 cut right through the middle of the madness, running parallel to Franklin Mountains State Park, right by Fort Bliss and the Briggs Army Airfield.
“This is going to get hairy,” he said, his eyes on the sky.
Several of these drones were racing around, Hellfire missiles firing from their massive wings, everything left and right of them blowing up. Eliana looked up through the dusty windshield and said, “Oh my God, those things are huge.”
She said it like she couldn’t swallow, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing.
“The Predator drones are almost thirty feet long with fifty-five feet of wingspan. They’re extremely proficient, lethally dangerous, and apparently able to fly without any kind of resistance.”
“What does that mean
for us?” she asked.
“It means they’re outfitted with either Hellfire missiles or guided bombs, unless they’ve been retrofitted with onboard Gatling gun pods. If they don’t have the gun pods, and it doesn’t look like it, they’ll hit big targets and not individual targets like us. We may be able to get past this, but we’ll see.”
They sat in traffic and slowly made their way up Hwy 54, passing Fort Bliss on the right and eventually the huge residential area of Northwest El Paso. He hadn’t been this on edge since he was shot and nearly burned to death fleeing Chicago a couple of years ago. But now, if Eliana asked, he wouldn’t say he was scared, but if had to take much more of this, swear to the good Lord above, he’d need what his former colleagues used to call a diaper change.
He discretely wiped his brow, rolled down his window, then rolled it back up because the air stunk like smoke. To the right, an entire whole neighborhood was in flames.
“Don’t look,” Eliana said to the boy. She twisted around in her seat, then turned the boy’s chin so he wouldn’t see.
The kid wouldn’t be able to help himself, though. As she was turning around, Ice and Eliana’s eyes met. She wore a grim look, a solemn look. It was the look that said she might have turned back had they not been stuck in traffic and pushing forward.
After nearly an hour of puckering, praying and praising Jesus, they managed to get clear of El Paso. The traffic was starting to thin out; Ice increased his speed.
“Do you know exactly where we’re headed?” Eliana asked.
“Tucumcari, New Mexico,” he said. “It should take us five hours, six tops.”