by Schow, Ryan
That was completely contrary to her instincts.
When they got near their house, her father said, “Stay here, I need to check on your mother.”
He moved swiftly down the hill and into the backs of the neighborhood, but before he could get to the backyard, he saw her. Rather, he heard her.
They both did.
The Chicoms were dragging her out of the house. She was screaming, fighting them. One of the men turned and punched her in the stomach, grabbed her by the hair when she buckled over and dragged her down the street to a van.
She renewed her fight at the van, but several men hit her again, all three punches focused and ruthless. Each shot she took was like a shot to Felicity. She dropped the dead rabbits, stood and started after her mother. When she got to her father, he stood there, anxious to go after them, but tempering himself because he knew they’d kill him just as soon as deal with him.
“Go after her!” Felicity hissed.
“No!” he said, grabbing hold of her.
“Then I’ll go,” she said, trying to shove him off. He tightened his grip on her arm, stopping her.
“I’m going to follow them,” he said. “Find out where they’re going.”
“You know where they’re going!” she said. The Chicoms had been building fences around the airport, its hangars, its buildings and the runway.
“That’s why we need to follow at a distance,” he said. He turned to her, a look of horror in his eyes. “If I’m not back by tonight, you need to go see your friend Clay.”
“I’m going with you,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.
“I’ll get her and be back in no time,” he said, his words hollow, frail. “Get that rabbit stew going.”
“I’m coming with you,” she said, weakness filling her.
He took her in his arms now, hugged her tight, then kissed her on top of her head and said, “If something happens, I love you.”
“I love you, too, Daddy,” she said, barely able to breathe.
He let go of her and took off running. She watched the Chicoms rounding everyone up. Her father had the rifle; she had the bow and arrows. She ran along the tree line, saw her father trying to catch up to the van. He went from a run to a sprint.
She did the same.
Felicity tried to keep up, but her father’s energy seemed boundless. Hers was not. Before long, she found herself winded and upset. How could her body forsake her like this?
She reminded herself these were her parents, so she kept going, even as a long stitch ran through her side and tightened. As she gasped for breath, her legs slowing down, her will diminished, the small knot in her stomach turned, then revolted.
She stopped, fell to her knees and puked. Before she’d even emptied out the last of a meager pre-dawn breakfast, she stood and tried to run again.
All along the streets, she saw people out of their homes, crying in the streets, talking to each other and lamenting the sudden violence taking place in the neighborhood. When later she reached the edge of the airport, she saw the long span of chain link fences, the people being pulled off the trucks and herded into the large pen and the hangars deeper in.
At the back of the airport, huge plumes of smoke rose into the sky, ash raining lightly around her. She pulled one of the flakes off her shoulder, smeared it between her fingers. It disintegrated, leaving a soft, grayish-black smear behind.
That’s when she caught sight of three soldiers dragging her father over with the rest of the prisoners, his rifle in their hands. Her breath caught, her heart racing dangerously fast.
Could a girl her age have a heart attack? Under normal circumstances, she thought not, but these were not normal circumstances.
They hit her father with the butt of his weapon, prodding him to move, hitting him again when he didn’t move fast enough.
There used to be over twenty-thousand people in Roseburg; now they were lucky to have half of that. Studying the chain link fences, she wondered if they could fit ten thousand people in there. For a second, she convinced herself they could.
She got as close to the airport as she could, not daring to cross over I5, not after they’d taken over the Department of Transportation in front of what used to be Roseburg Regional Airport.
Falling back, she worked her way up a grassy hillside, then walked along an access road cut into the small hill behind Walmart and the Oakridge Apartments. Her father was in there, but it was still light outside. He and her mother had been captured.
She wouldn’t be.
Felicity was heading home to round up something she could use to cut the fence. If it killed her, she was going to get into the camp and find her parents.
But she had to be smart about this. What could she do? First things first, she’d need her bow and arrows.
That night, Felicity returned to the airport as the moon hung low in the sky. She was dressed in all black, warm, and she walked a small length of the fence, trying to see what was happening inside. She ended up at the back end of the airport. That’s where all the smoke was coming from. That’s also where she saw a bright firelight glow. There was nothing to see at the front of the airport, but farther back, she had the chance to see something.
When she saw the stacks of bodies burning, she knew these were her friends and neighbors, and quite possibly her family.
Don’t think like that! she told herself. Just find a way in!
If she failed the way her father had failed, these murderous cretins would do to her parents what they were now doing to everyone else.
Standing in the night, she watched the man as he took one dead body after the next and tossed it on the long row of embers. The pile was two feet tall and thirty feet long at least. Corpses were stacked up behind him, a full night’s work by the look of it.
It’s just one man, the voice in her head said.
Standing back, she drew an arrow out of her quiver, seated it and pulled back, waiting for the man to toss the body he was holding onto the fire.
The second he did, he wiped the sweat from his face, then turned to grab the next body.
That’s when she let go of the arrow.
It flew true, hitting its mark: the man’s throat. As the Chicom steward wobbled this way and that, quietly gagging, his hands on the shaft, she watched him. When his knees buckled and he fell over, dying a long, painful death, she barely even blinked.
When he was dead, she slipped quietly into the shadows, waiting to see how many men would come. There were many men and the alarms had sounded. She turned and ran, but she’d left too late.
She was crossing the interstate when she heard the distant sounds of feet slapping the pavement behind her. She looked over her shoulder, saw someone had taken chase. She raced to the other side of the mountain, scuttling up the earthy sides of it, every last muscle in her body fighting her again.
She needed to get into the woods.
The soldier was gaining ground, the sounds of his footfalls tearing up the earth getting louder by the minute. It was just her heavy breath and his pounding feet. She forced another look over her shoulder; it cost her precious seconds.
She saw him clearly, the shadow against the moonlit sky.
Breathless, she tried to pick up her pace, but she barely made it to the top of the hill when he tackled her.
He ripped off her quiver, breaking the strap. She grabbed a handful of dirt, spun over and threw it in his eyes. The gun he’d pulled on her went off, the sound deafening.
The dirt hit his face, and eyes, and his instinct was to turn away and paw it out of his eyes.
She grabbed one of several arrows that had come out of the broken quiver and drove it into the man’s throat. He reeled back, but not before she could yank it out and stab him again.
The blood hit her in a spray, which gave her a shot of hope. She ripped it out again, stuck a new spot, his eye this time. This did the trick. Can’t see, can’t fight.
Die, commie.
Gagging, sw
earing and growling, the otherworldly sounds of him fighting the tears, the pain, were haunting. He fell to the ground, laid on his back, crying.
When she got up, she saw his pistol.
Picking it up, she thought of Clay, of what he told her about hesitation being the number one reason people die in a gunfight.
“Bye,” she said. And then she emptied the entire magazine into his face.
Sickened by the savage act, horrified at how quickly it had happened, she dropped the gun, gathered up her arrows and returned home at a brisk pace.
Inside, the house was dark and empty, the solitude so thick she all but choked on it. Having memorized the layout of the house in the pitch black of night months ago, she moved through the structure easily. Too sick to eat, too distraught to think straight, she only wanted to shut her eyes to this nightmare and pray that tomorrow she could plan a solid rescue mission.
Crawling into bed, she managed to get a few restless hours of sleep. In those fitful, tear filled hours when she’d awakened and couldn’t get back to sleep, she thought about how to break into the airport detention facility, find her parents, get them out.
Then sleep stole her away, her efforts all for naught, her haphazard plans washed away in the fog of sleep.
At the break of dawn, however, she knew what she needed to do. She had to follow her father’s instructions. That’s why she rolled out of bed, loaded herself up with food, water and a revolver, then went to the garage and opened the door manually.
Daylight flooded the garage.
She pulled her mother’s bike out, hooked up the Minnow bike trailer they’d found a few months ago. It connected easy. After that, Felicity loaded up the trailer as best as she could, then hopped on and set out for Five Falls with no time to spare.
Clay would know what to do.
He could help.
Chapter Eight
The knock on Clay’s front door stirred him from a difficult sleep. He opened his eyes, turned his head over on the pillow, wiped the sweat from his face and sat up. Was he dreaming? The knock came again letting him know this was no dream.
Getting up, he put on his jeans, grabbed the pistol off the nightstand, then plodded barefoot across the carpeted floor and peeked out the side window. Logan stood there like a zombie, no expression, just waiting.
He opened the front door and said, “Come in.” When Logan didn’t hesitate, Clay asked if he wanted some coffee.
“I’ll take a cup, but only if it’s brewed already, which it doesn’t smell like it is,” Logan said, all business.
“Let me start a pot for myself.”
He opened the pantry to the smell of fresh deer meat curing. The seasoning’s aroma was wonderful in the afternoon and evening, but not so much first thing in the morning. He started the coffee, using a small camp stove to warm the water.
Logan walked into the kitchen.
“We found the traitor,” Logan announced. Clay stopped his mental momentum, switched gears, then turned to his friend in disbelief. He continued. “It was Bronx McLaren. Found him in bed with the Taylor kid, both of them naked.”
Clay was trying to take all this in considering he wasn’t even awake yet.
“Naked you said?”
“Yeah,” Logan nodded. “I’m still trying to process that.”
“Them being gay or…”
“Bronx taking advantage of an underage boy, and the underage boy being okay with it. That just doesn’t compute in my brain. I mean, for heaven’s sake…if there’s one thing you’re going to work like hell to protect in this crappy, miserable world, it’s the kids.”
“I can have him arrested,” he said, already working out the details.
“Not really,” Logan replied with a dismissive wave. “We took care of it already. But like I said, the fact that he was a traitor, that he had secret dealings with the Chicoms? That’s a problem far worse than taking advantage of a fourteen year old boy.”
The water came to a boil. He poured it over fresh coffee grounds sitting in a pile on the filter, then turned and faced Logan while it drained through.
“What do you mean, not really?” Clay said, this time not as a friend, but as the Five Falls Sheriff.
“I mean Boone and I extracted the information we needed from him and then we killed him.”
“Boone did this?” Clay asked, suddenly forgetting all about his coffee.
“Well, technically Boone beat the crap out of him, then I cut off three of his fingers and shot him in the back of the head. That’s the details of the payback. As for the extraction of information, apparently Bronx had contacts in Roseburg, who had contacts all the way up to Yale, Washington. He confirmed that’s where the Chicoms are setting up their American HQ.”
“Bronx told you all of this?” he asked, rubbing the rest of the sleep from his eyes. Logan nodded. “So Quan is right.”
“Of course he is,” Logan said. “He was with us.”
“Quan was?”
“Yeah,” Logan said. “It was his contact from Yale that tipped us off. The same contact said it was time for Quan to come to Yale. Which means we’re going to lose him and Longwei, and their guys. I’m not really sure if this will be the case, but we’ll know soon enough.”
“So you cut off three of his fingers and shot him in the head?” Clay asked.
Clay knew when the Madigans, Logan and Ryker offered to be the enforcers in town that they were serious people. When Skylar openly admitted to having no problem killing a woman, this took things to a deeper level. But he never thought it would come to this. He hoped the threat was enough. Then again, if there was anything he knew he could treat as absolute, it was the Madigan Militia’s willingness to keep their word in all aspects of life.
“Where is he now?” Clay asked.
“Dead in his backyard.”
“We need to clear his things out of there and distribute what food and supplies he had to those families in need. And then we need to get him out of there and make the house ready for another family.”
“No,” Logan said. “We’re going to let people walk through the house and get what they want. They’ll need to know what happened, that Bronx was a traitor, and they’ll need to see his body. Word will spread, quelling any possible uprisings.”
“Absolutely not,” Clay said. He picked up his coffee, neither man saying anything. “You really want that kind of thing sitting in the backs of people’s minds?”
“We talked about this. Traitors in this town, conspirators against the community, they must be made examples of. There is no better visual to keep the peace than Bronx’s face lying in a puddle of his own brains.”
“What exactly did Boone do?” Clay asked. “How did he handle everything?”
He was worried about his brother. He had been ever since the attack that took Miranda’s life. There wasn’t a single day that went by that Boone didn’t seem to sink deeper and deeper into that awful, bottomless chasm of despair.
“He kicked his balls up into this throat. Dick, too. It’s not an easy thing to see, but it’s an even harder thing to forget. Trust me on this one.”
For a moment, Clay felt relief. If Boone saw Bronx as the traitor that played a part in his loss, he could maybe release a few of the demons holding him hostage day and night.
“So Bronx was in bed with a kid, and then Boone kicked him in the balls so bad he changed sexes.”
“Yeah. He was naked. That made it so much worse. Boone just kept kicking the thing like it was a wet squid. Even if the traitor had lived, there was no way he would ever use that thing again but to piss blood. The dick hole itself was bleeding.”
“Well, you know how I feel about pedophiles,” Clay said with the wave of a hand. In that moment, he decided to let the murder go. Even if Bronx wasn’t a traitor, in his mind, the best kind of pedophile was a dead pedophile.
“I do,” Logan said. “That’s why I thought you’d appreciate the news.”
“How’s your leg?” he ask
ed, seeing Logan favoring it.
“Still hurts on the outside of the knee, worse when it’s cold.”
“And your foot?”
“Heel’s still a bit numb,” Logan answered. “Feeling’s coming back, though. Slowly but surely.”
Clay knew Logan wasn’t one to lament his pain, so if he acted like the pain was at a level three, it was probably at a level eight in real life.
“You should stay off it as much as possible,” Clay said.
“Don’t start…”
He raised his hand and said, “Alright, alright. You should really try this coffee.”
“That steamy toilet water you gave me last time is still eating holes in my intestines. I’m gonna go. Just thought you’d want to know about Bronx, and Boone.”
“How was he?” Clay asked, not really wanting Logan to go. “Boone, I mean. Did he look better? Like the release helped?”
Clay hated being alone in that house. Being alone in general was flat out awful for him. Then again, the way he tossed and turned all night—thrashing about, sweating profusely, reliving elements of the war both in Five Falls and abroad in an endless string of nightmares—there was no way it was safe for anyone else to be there with him.
“At first, when he started beating on Bronx, I kind of felt like it was going to be alright, you know? Like that thing trapped inside him now had an outlet. But then when it came to the rough stuff, he sort of got cold feet.”
“Boone doesn’t have the stomach for this kind of thing,” Clay said. Which made him start to wonder where a former computer geek like Logan acquired such a taste for violence. “How was it?”
“How was what?” Logan asked, starting to look a bit fidgety.
“Killing Bronx? I mean, after the betrayal, and that business with the kid, how was it killing him?”
For the first time since he arrived, Clay found the emotion Logan had been concealing from him. It was like his eyes had been in some sort of sleep mode while they were open, and then they woke up. There was no soul before, but now he couldn’t stop seeing the vibrancy in the man’s eyes.
“It felt amazing,” he said.