by Schow, Ryan
So yeah, maybe it was a good thing.
Now she looked at the scared group of people. People run out of their homes by violence and fire. They were all standing around looking at the dead bodies in front of the school, looking at each other, rubbing their hands together and looking at Indigo.
She was about to take them back to the quiet neighborhood. The neighborhood they thought was empty. Atlanta’s neighborhood.
“How far of a walk is it?” a few of the people were asking.
It should have taken them about forty minutes to get there, but it was a large group of people, so accounting for slower folks, Indigo said, “Maybe an hour or so from here.”
Not too long ago, she remembered hunting down The Ophidian Horde, finding Cincinnati, Macy and Stanton and leading them back to her neighborhood as well.
Looking around, dead people in front of the burning building, the sky glowing with the fire, this was all so surreal.
“Let’s go,” she finally said. “Everyone stay together, and let me know if you need to stop or if there is danger. Don’t be afraid to speak up, okay?”
No one said anything.
“Okay?” she asked, a little louder.
Their voices rose and a low chorus of traumatized “okays” satisfying her.
She couldn’t believe her father was back. She found him, and he went into war, and now she was leaving him behind? This was crazy! How long had she gone on assuming he was gone? As in dead? Long enough to accept it as truth.
But her dad…
To just show up in the middle of a war and start knocking off people like that? Her mind grew fuzz at the mere thought of it! Who had he become since he left? And Bailey. What was up with Bailey?
With an hour to walk, breathe fresh air and think, her memories trailed backward in time, to the place where her father was so lost and shut down over Margot. A dark pall settled over her, dragging her mood down.
She fought hard to shrug it off.
Margot was finally becoming a decent person. And she was back with Indigo. Losing Tad did a lot of things to her. Reuniting with Indigo did more. Or was it the guarantee from doctors that she was losing her life to cancer? The very idea that she could now be in remission—for whatever reason—might have also worked to cement some kind of a positive life change.
They’d all changed.
Even Indigo.
Looking back, seeing Margot and Bailey walking side by side—along with Macy and Atlanta—seeing a long line of people with Cincinnati, Sarah and Rowan pulling up the rear, made her think this was almost too much to take.
Within an hour, they arrived at 23rd and Judah. Bailey showed Indigo where they’d put Maria and the kids. Atlanta was trying to keep it together. Her dead sister was still on the living room floor of their home. She refused to look at the house as she walked by it and she tried not to cry.
Indigo put her arm around the girl and Atlanta said, “Thanks.”
To Rowan, Indigo said, “Stay here for a second.”
According to Bailey, this Maria woman and her seven kids had just settled in, and of course there were no plans for such a huge influx of people, so it seemed only right to let her know what was happening.
Indigo knocked on the door, two light taps. A moment later she heard bare feet on the hardwood floor, the deadbolt being released. When the half broken door opened up, Indigo was staring at a gorgeous looking Hispanic woman.
“Yes?” she said, looking past Indigo to see a large gathering of people. If she was surprised, she didn’t show it. Bailey was at the foot of the stairs. She gave a wave of acknowledgement to Maria.
“I’m Indigo, Nick’s daughter,” she said. “He sent me here.”
“You’re Indigo?” Maria said, stepping out onto the porch. She nodded, and Maria smiled and said, “I didn’t expect you to be so pretty.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Your father said you were an archer, so I just expected you to be a nerd.”
“Clearly I’m not.”
“Who are all these people?”
She didn’t speak with much warmth which made Indigo wonder what must’ve happened to bring her to this point of near-inhuman behavior. Then again, no one survived anything without their fair share of scars and trauma, so perhaps there was a touch of PTSD at work here.
“Are the kids okay?” Indigo asked. “Everyone got to sleep alright?”
“They’re fine,” she said. “They’re all asleep.”
“What about you?”
“I’m too wired. After Marcus, Nick and Bailey left, I’ve just—”
Not seeing Marcus or Nick, Maria’s eyes fell down on Bailey, who walked up the steps and said, “There’s some bad things happening. I didn’t want to startle you, but these people need a place to stay. Some clan of ex-gamers or freaking basement dwellers or whatever, they attacked the college everyone was living at. It’s burning down as we speak.”
“Yes, but what about Nick and Marcus?”
“You know those two,” Bailey said. “Especially Marcus. I’m okay, though. Thanks for asking.”
“I see you’re okay,” Maria said, coldly. “Why would I need to ask?”
Indigo looked back and forth from one woman to the other. “You guys on good terms or is this just something you do in the middle of the night?”
“We’ve only known them for a few days,” Bailey said, “but we’re on good terms. Maria’s had a long, rough journey. We all have.”
“So they are fighting then?” Maria said. “Is that it?”
“I already told you that,” Bailey replied, stifling an exhausted yawn. “Bad things are happening, that’s why they sent us back here.”
“I’m going back as soon as you get settled,” Indigo told Bailey. “Maybe sooner.”
“I’m going with you, then,” Maria said.
“Sarah and I can watch the kids,” Bailey said, reluctantly. “Cincinnati and Atlanta are locking down a few extra houses since they know the neighborhood, so if you want to go you should go.”
“I don’t exactly know what you know about combat,” Indigo said to the woman, careful with the subject because you never know, “but this is no joke.”
“She’ll be fine,” Bailey said, interrupting Maria. “You’ll be better off with her at your side.”
“Thanks,” Maria said, her appreciation for the comment barely audible.
“So do you have guns, knives, anything you can use in close quarters combat?” Indigo asked.
“I’ve got a few things,” she said. “Give me a few minutes, then we can leave.”
Maria closed the door most of the way, but not all the way. She disappeared into the darkness, moving like she’d been in the house her whole life rather than a few hours.
Bailey said, “I’m going to meet up with Cincinnati, see what I can do. It was really nice to meet you, Indigo. Your dad loves you so much, so I know you being here means the world to him.”
“I just wish we weren’t going through this,” Indigo replied. “That maybe he could’ve broken away and not risked his life getting here only to risk even more.”
“Is that why you’re going back?” Bailey asked. “To try to protect him? Because Marcus is a beast and your dad, he’s no slouch either. He got me out of some very hairy situations, situations where we almost died a couple of times.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely,” she said.
“I want to go because that’s where my dad is, and it’s where Rex is. I’m also going because those idiots damn near destroyed the cornerstone of our existence. That college was our community. It was everything to everyone, myself included. Plus it really pisses me off that this already happened to me once, as I’m sure you know.”
“Yours and your father’s house, yes?”
“Exactly.”
“You’d be safer here, though,” she said, cautiously.
“This world isn’t safe, Bailey. You know that. The minute we stop fi
ghting for what’s ours, the minute we roll over and let someone take what we’ve built, it’s over. We lost almost everything. We’re now homeless. No medical supplies, no food or water, no beds or toys, no roof over our head. It’s all gone. And the idea of having to start over because of these assholes makes me so frothing mad all I see is red. Do you get that? Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“I do,” Bailey said.
“You fight for every inch to protect what’s yours, and sometimes you fight because some people just need to die. Right now, I’m going to fight for the latter.”
“I’m just not sure that’s the wisest course,” she said, her voice smaller, the argument nearly settled.
“It’s not,” she said. “Will you do me a favor and tell Rowan what’s happening? He needs to stay and cordon off the street at both ends, plus keep watch until daybreak.”
Bailey didn’t say anything. Instead, she reached forward and gave Indigo a big hug. “I’m so glad Nick found you, and that I like you. Please bring your father back.”
When she stepped back from Bailey, not only did she like the woman more, she liked her enough to be honest with her.
“War is no place for promises,” Indigo said. “Just talk to Rowan.”
Right then Maria came out of the house, looked at her and said, “I’m ready.”
Bailey said good bye to Maria, then headed down to talk to Rowan. Indigo and Maria took off into the darkness. They were four blocks up when Maria said, “Someone’s following us.”
Indigo turned around and she saw the blonde hair.
The gun at her side.
That face.
“Are you kidding me?” Indigo hissed.
Macy stood there, then said, “It’s going to be boring back there. I told Atlanta to tell my mom if she asked, so it’s not like she won’t know where I am.”
“Go home, Macy.”
She broke into a trot, caught up with them and said, “I’m either going with you or on my own, and the only thing that’s stopping me won’t be you, or her.”
“I could stop you if I wanted,” Maria said.
“But you won’t because you know statistically three guns are better than two and we’re going to need every body we can spare.”
“If you get killed,” Indigo said, “your mother will never forgive me.”
“Spare me the lecture, we’re practically the same age. Plus my dad’s there, too, and Uncle Rex, so it’s not like you really have anything to say to me but thank you.”
“I’m not thanking you,” Indigo grumbled, not liking this turn of events.
“Not yet,” she said with a defiant smile.
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Six very pissed off men stalked through the night up Masonic Street, veered left on Turk, then walked up to USF Lone Mountain with their guns at their thighs and their eyes on the lookout. They were moving fast but not reckless. Rider, Marcus, Jagger, Stanton, Nick and Rex fanned out, Rider quickly taking out the two guards standing at the base of the long staircase with two well placed shots.
Two more guards appeared to be racing down the bullet riddled steps toward the echo of gunfire. Marcus stepped in and put both down. Rider collected the guns from the downed soldiers, rifled through their clothes checking for spare ammo.
Rider kept a gun, tossed the other to Jagger who stuffed it in his waistband. Marcus was checking the other two. He pulled two guns, too. Rather than keeping a weapon for himself, he tossed the guns and ammo to Nick and Stanton.
Nick caught the weapon, then handed it back to Marcus. “Here, you keep it.”
Marcus frowned at him, almost like his eyes could do all the scolding, and said, “Get your head in the game or you’re going to get us killed.”
Without hesitation or reply, Nick jammed the weapon in the back of his pants.
The six of them crept up the school’s one hundred and four steps, making the long, cautious trek from the street to the former Jesuit school’s front door. The opened the enormous front door and slipped inside the sprawling building where oil lamps hung from rudimentary spikes pounded crudely into the walls.
The air inside was dry but cold. The sounds of trampling feet heading their way gave them pause.
“Spread out,” Marcus whispered.
Everyone spread out but kept the same line. The instant this “second-wave response team” rounded the corner, these same six pissed off men opened fire.
Bodies started dropping.
The men behind them fell, too, and then they got smart. Their enemies took shelter and started firing back. From there it was the boisterous sounds of a war going on in a veritable echo chamber.
Several of the six were nicked here and there, but nothing lethal. A few of them were cut open by shards of plaster shrapnel and Stanton’s face was powdered with exploding drywall. Nick was holding his own until the wainscoting next to him was hit by gunfire. Splintered wood shrapnel bit into his cheek, the largest being about the size of a toothpick. He said nothing because things were moving fast and there was no time to complain. No one else cried out or stopped what they were doing. They ignored the pain, the surprise, or the disappointment and they kept shooting, ducking, moving, reloading.
“Don’t make yourself a target,” Marcus had said to Nick a week ago when he was trying to help him prepare for combat shooting. “Guys like you, if they get caught in the thick of it and they don’t know what they’re doing, they plant their feet and stay put, shooting, hoping to God they hit their target before their target hits them. If you’re going to do that, just eat a bullet and get it over with.”
So Nick moved constantly, his aim decent, his confidence climbing. He followed Marcus’s training because it was spot on, and as much as he and Marcus picked at each other, the man was in his element and Nick was better off for listening.
When the six started hearing the click, click, clicking of their enemies running out of rounds, Marcus said, “This ain’t no video game,” meaning when they were out of ammo, you didn’t press X to reload, or whatever.
Their almost reckless barrage of gunfire, matched by the precise and almost accurate shots of the invading six produced a tremendous amount of dead bodies.
“Where the hell do they keep coming from?” Nick finally asked under his breath.
“Just stay on them,” Rider growled.
Rider’s group must have taken out sixty or seventy of these paper tigers. Adult babies who didn’t know how to shoot a real gun, much less hit anything but walls and the outsides of a few shoulders and arms.
“Anyone hit?” Jagger asked.
“Yeah,” Rex said. “Grazed. Nothing solid.”
“Nick?” Marcus asked.
“Got Sherwood Forrest stuck in my face, but other than that I’m golden.”
No one else spoke up. As Rider stood there in the dim light watching this never ending pack of morons close in on them, he took a deep breath, readied himself for the next phase.
“Who’s out of ammo?” Rider said.
Everyone grunted and still there were twenty or thirty more men out there. Fortunately it looked like they were out of ammo, too. Rider stepped out from behind his cover into the dim lamp-lit foyer and stood there. He wondered, who’s going to shoot first? He knew there would be five guns on the first clown to pop off a round, but was there even a round left between them? Was the threat of guns officially over?
Marcus followed Rider’s lead. He stepped out into the foyer and not a single shot was fired. Both men dropped their guns, unsheathed their blades and let this clan of fools see it. The foyer was littered with the woes of the dying and the dead. Their pitiful dying. Their dead.
The six still stood.
All those eyes, Rider thought. Angry eyes, scared eyes, eyes with so many emotions running through them. These were boys against men. Would the numbers really matter? They might.
But if they played things right, they might not…
Several of Lone Mountain’s defen
ders inched forward with different weapons, many of them makeshift, all of them lethal by the looks of it. As the anxious masses stepped around the bodies, through the gore and began to close in around them, Nick stepped into the arena, cracked his knuckles and made them into fists.
Jagger, Rex and Stanton were there, too, all with knives at their sides.
“Never bring fists to a knife fight,” Jagger mumbled. He tucked a blade into Nick’s hand and Nick quietly thanked them.
Then it was on again: round two.
All new weapons.
The first few attackers rushed in, followed by seven or eight more and they all fell to blades. Rider’s six half-mooned their defensive position. After that, guys started coming in with do-it-yourself shields and metal pipes heavily wrapped in duct tape; one guy even had a sword, which he managed to stick in Stanton’s leg when everyone rushed in at once.
Stanton stepped wrong, saw the blade now stuck in his thigh and the look of surprise on the kid’s face. The ex-broker was no slouch though, and he wasn’t slow. He yanked his leg back, stepped in and sent the kid to meet his maker. When he was done, Stanton fended off two more guys, then snatched up the sword and pushed forward into the masses, his gait awkward, but his aim true. He was stabbing anyone who got close.
The clan eventually converged on them, getting past the six’s defenses enough for Jagger to fall, Rex to fall, Nick to fall, Stanton to fall, then finally for Rider to fall.
Marcus was the last of them. He was still standing, still fighting.
Struck mercilessly with swinging metal pipes and jabbing, cracking bats, Marcus’s irritation grew. Taking deep breaths, he assessed each strike against him on the fly, categorizing it in microseconds as either potentially lethal or as non-lethal. So far, in the frenzy, most shots hit his shoulders, his arms, his sides. These were all non-lethal, and he was no stranger to pain. But being clubbed in the fingers, on the wrists, cracked on the elbows and on the head…these once manageable strikes were now taking a toll.