Michael swallowed. “Yes, boss.”
–––––––
At least two thousand gathered at the intersection. A quarter of them were in vehicles. The vehicles were primarily of civilian class, but those among her people who could operate acquiesced military craft were provided with them. Everyone was armed to the teeth. The crowd could have been even larger, but fragments remained behind in their respective territories to maintain order and security there.
Lilith had driven to the crowd before it reached full size, and remained until the time had come. She tasked the leaders of each gang and family to keep everyone vigilant and prepared for battle. She felt lucky to have reached such a high turnout before issues like warmth, food, and restroom breaks arose. Finally, she was ready.
As she stepped from her car, then climbed on top of it, the crowd recognized her, and cheered. She was only a moment from delivering a speech to get their blood pumping, but something else needed to be addressed. South of their position, down 148th, she and the crowd witnessed an equally-sized mob approaching. Quickly, she jumped down and remained behind the car for cover. “No one shoot unless I say!” she commanded, and her captains echoed to the rest.
Lo and behold, Kershaw herself led them. She stopped a short distance away. “Let’s discuss this, Krohn,” she called directly to Lilith.
“All right. I’m fine right here.” When all of Kershaw’s crowd halted, she added, “Nice to see you again. It’s been so long.”
“I have families behind me. Fathers, mothers… There could be more…”
“Oh, likewise, my friend.”
“I didn’t want to disturb them, ask them to leave their homes and shelters to rally for a fight. I don’t want to make any orphans. What’s this all about, Lilith? Why are you amassing an army and bringing them to my doorstep?”
“Order.” She swung her arms up and dropped them down. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted. I think everyone here could agree.” She turned to her crowd. “YEAH?” They cheered loudly. “And let me tell you, Rosie… Your resistance is actually starting to piss me off now. You just couldn’t stick with the plan…”
Kershaw trembled. “What’s it going to take? I don’t want any more bloodshed.”
“It’s either me, or we all die. You’re loved, I’ll give you that…” Saying that made her cringe a little. Loved… her mind repeated. She wanted love. She wanted devotion. Did that crowd behind her follow out of love, or fear, or cause?
Kershaw looked to her guards, and then at her army, for a rather long while. “You won’t back down, will you?”
Lilith sighed deeply. “Portland needs someone who won’t,” she answered.
With that, Rosalind Kershaw dropped her weapon. She gestured, and her guards dropped theirs as well. Then, a few at a time, everyone behind her followed. “Don’t lead them to slaughter,” she said. “That’s all I ask.”
“I’ll accept your surrender under one condition,” said Lilith. “Come here.” Kershaw obeyed. The men protecting her remained idle, as she commanded. “Turn around,” said Lilith when Kershaw was directly before her. Then, she addressed Kershaw’s crowd. “If I wanted this woman dead, trust me, I would have buried her a long time ago, alive. That is not what I want, though…”
She knew what more she was going to say, but it pained her to speak the words. It felt as more failure, and her heart broke again. But, against the strain, she said it anyway:
“This woman is loved by many. I’m sure there are thousands more who would be here with her tonight if they could be. I… I am not… I’m not like Kershaw. I know I am not loved. That is not my purpose. That is not my skill. That is not what I was born to be… I wish it were. But it seems I am a commander; a soldier, in my own way; a force to be reckoned with. This woman here… She is a leader. A beloved mother to you all. For that reason, I will not kill her, for the same reason I chose not to this whole time. When the war is over, I will surrender my power back to this woman, and she will inherit a stable city, not a battlefield. Until then, I will keep her with me.”
That was all. Lilith did not wait for reactions or objections. She pulled Kershaw back onto her feet, and led the woman to her car. Her captains came up to her. “Let everybody go home,” she instructed them, and they obeyed.
After loading Kershaw into her own car, Lilith took the driver’s seat, then proceeded homeward.
“Thank you for sparing them,” said Kershaw.
Scowling, and refusing to look at her through the rear-view mirror, Lilith asked, “What the hell did you expect?”
“A savage execution, followed by a massacre… Because we tried to leave.” Solid silence for a minute followed her words. The woman looked to Michael, then back to Lilith. “You … didn’t mean what you told them, did you? You’re really going to kill me?”
Lilith said nothing, expressed nothing. Only for a moment, though. Once they pulled up to the gate, she smiled and said, “A persuasive lie, wasn’t it? Fortunately for you, it was no lie.”
She and her men parked at the house or their own houses. All the others exited their vehicles first. Lilith felt drained; deprived of fulfillment; almost dead. Her own words echoed through her mind. “I know I am not loved. That is not my purpose…” What was the point of caring? Such devotion and determination… She felt no happier that the war was truly on the verge of concluding. Was peace truly her desire? She could only wonder.
The others waited around her car, patiently, until she finally stepped out. They walked together up to the house. Just before Michael could unlock the front door, a pop, followed by whizzing and then a splatter made Lilith flinch. Next she saw, Shane dropped dead, and half his brains covered her clothes.
“In! In!” she screamed. Everyone panicked as Michael opened the door and they rushed inside. Another bullet burst through the door just as Arty shut it. Horrified and frozen in shock, looking at the innards she was drenched in, Lilith screamed, “Kill that fuck!”
The men scattered, seizing weapons from multiple hidden caches all over the house. Some remained in the living room while others took to the second floor, and she even heard some go to the attic. In short time, gunfire erupted from the house, all in the direction they assumed the sniper was located.
Lilith retreated to the basement, where she could lock the door behind her. Down there, she had her own collection of weapons as well, concealed under a trap door in the concrete. She seized the first one she touched, a 12-gauge, cocked it, and hurried to the bottom of the stairs, pointing upward.
She expected bombs to drop from above, like what had been done to certain areas of the city during the Uprising. An entire battalion, sent to swarm the property and completely overwhelm her defenses? Anything was possible at that point. She made her capabilities, and ruthlessness, universally known, so perhaps it was only a matter of time before the troops used all their resources, what little they had remaining, to eliminate her. She trembled like she never had before, swaying her weapon like chasing a bird.
After some time of waiting, never changing her post or her aim, she realized that the culprit was likely working alone. Ethan… she thought, horrified. Please don’t be you. At this point in time, she wouldn’t put an assassination attempt past him.
Before too long, her men caught the suspect. The man was in the house opposite the white house – the one right beside the gate, where Michael lived. As expected, he was military. Lilith dropped the gun and rushed upstairs as soon as they announced it. The man was brought to the second floor, forced onto his knees before the boss.
“How many of you are there?” she asked calmly, still trembling. When he didn’t answer, one of her men punched him in the temple. Lilith stormed to the bathroom, broke the towel rack, and brought it out. “Strip him.” They tore off all the man’s clothes, and he began to whimper. Lilith gestured for the others to clear as she turned the man on his stomach, then proceeded to drive the towel rack up his anus. “HOW MANY?”
“Me!” he screamed in agony
. “Just me! Just me!”
She kept it in, and her hand on it. “I just moved back into this house. How did you know to find me? How did you get into any house on this street? The people in that house belong to me! This required some planning, yeah? Some pre-attained intel?” She drove the rod in further, and the man cried louder. “Yeah? Am I right? How did you know where I’d be? Fucking answer me!” The man only cried, so she removed the rod and rolled the man onto his back. “Knife!” she demanded from whoever had one. When placed a knife in her hand, she put the serration against the man’s penis. “This comes off if you don’t start TALKING!”
“Ah-Aleh…Alexander knew. H-He knew. He knew all of them.”
“Them? All of what?”
“Bases… All your bases. Every house and bunker you were hiding in.”
She froze… “All of them?”
“Y-yes!”
Only a small handful of people possessed that knowledge, and all of them were in that room. All, except one.
Lilith dropped the knife, and stumbled backward. She had never been in immense shock. Dizziness, headache, labored breathing all became her… She started to shake spastically. Rage filled her until she exploded, “NOOOOOOOOO! FUCK! FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!” She picked up the knife again and drove it hard into her hostage’s chest. He struggled and begged as Lilith carved downward and sideways and twisted the blade in random motions. She was drooling, growling and continuing to scream. She stabbed the man again, then a third time, a fourth, a fifth… She wasn’t finished until she dug her hands into him and pulled out his still-beating heart. She crushed it then threw it and screamed again.
Stumbling to her feet, tears filling her eyes, she looked at Michael. “Ethan,” she growled. “He’s with the Corwins. Queen’s Quarter. He’s hiding there. Send everyone. EVERYONE! I want him dead. I want them all dead.”
“Lily, please, this isn’t you!” advised Michael. “Calm down. We can’t just send thousands of people to…”
She grabbed Michael by the hair then plunged her blade into his neck. “WATCH ME!” Throwing him down, she looked to her other army heads. “Anyone else object?” They denied it. “Then GO! Get the fuck out! Take it down! Every street, every house. Take it all!”
–––––––
Hours later…
Her bedroom door creaked open slowly. She swiftly pointed her gun at the entrant, but it was only Cameron. “What?” she hissed.
“Need anything, boss? We cleaned up… You’re still covered in shit, though. That’d be enough to make a man puke.”
“Why are you in here?” She pointed her gun at him again. It was common knowledge that no one was permitted in her bedroom, even if they knock.
“It’s over. We swept through Fallon Corwin’s turf. People are wondering why you weren’t there.”
Lilith smiled. “You know… I’ve killed … a lot of people… Never enjoyed it, though. Not till tonight. When I realized my brother – my own brother – betrayed me and set me up, you know what I thought? I thought: nothing could make me happier than seeing his dead body among a pile of other dead bodies.” She laughed. She started tapping her bed absentmindedly, shaking her head, and swaying some. “But just a few minutes after I gave the order… I regretted it. I didn’t want him to die. I didn’t want anyone to die. Still, I didn’t stop it. Traitors need to be eliminated. Family, gang, nation… Every other group in the world abides by that rule. So, I stayed home and allowed my brother to die. His daughter too. He never told me where he left her, or who he left her with, but I know she was there. I stayed here because I realized I still love him, very much. I couldn’t watch him die. Now, I’ve accepted that he’s dead, and I’ll leave it at that. Maybe I’ll curl into a ball, sit in a corner, and wait until starvation kills me.”
“Boss…” began Cameron. “We didn’t find him. Neither of ‘em. They must have escaped.”
Lilith squinted. For the off-chance that Ethan truly survived, she realized that she had a second chance; a second chance to change her decision, or continue to see it through to the end. Ultimately, she whispered, “Well… That’s a problem. Get your Brothers and let’s see for ourselves.”
Cameron transported her to the site. She exited the car shortly after the border. Plenty of destruction, but a surprising lack of corpses. She returned to the vehicle, and Cameron drove her to where their intel said Fallon operated from – the former school H.B. Lee Junior High. Bodies sporadically covered the parking lot, but none matched Ethan’s physique. She checked inside… More nothing. Some of her people were cleaning away the bodies, and some were interrogating survivors who never escaped.
Lilith approached one such survivor. The man, who had been yelling at her for information, stepped aside. She knelt down and asked the young woman, “Did you see where everybody went?” She wiped away some blood from the woman’s lip and chin from where the man had struck her. “You can tell me. I won’t hit you.”
“It was planned,” said the woman. “We were going to evacuate.”
“Evacuate? Where to?”
“The coast. Cannon Beach, I think. That’s what my parents said before we got separated.”
Lilith stood. A sloppy exodus. Glad I could ruin it for them… she pondered. Not everyone made it out, not everyone headed in the right direction. Ethan would… He’d be right on track.
She tapped Cameron’s arm. “We’re leaving. Bring the Brothers, and only them.”
–––––––
Lilith drove this time. Before departure, she had secured her 12-gauge and machete. Cameron and Arty accompanied her in the car, while the others followed closely behind on the road. Everyone communicated via radio, reporting everything they saw out their windows. Nothing they witnessed seemed plausible for a regrouping stop; not for miles. In part, Lilith hoped Ethan took the entire trip to Cannon Beach, where it would be easier to corner him without interference from others. Finally, shortly after reaching Interstate 26, she found the type of roadside gathering she expected. As she pulled in, another car was parking, which helped provide cover.
Stepping out, she spotted a campfire in the near distance amidst the trees. She led everyone away from the fire light, feeling it wiser to approach from an alternate direction.
“I’ll find my targets,” she informed them. “Your job is to keep everyone off my back. Scare them away, kill anyone who shoots at you.”
Taking slow steps so that even twigs and leaves couldn’t expose them, they successfully came close enough to the gathering without a single eye looking in their direction.
There he was, beyond any doubt. Initially, she didn’t see Theia, until she spotted the girl on the opposite side, cuddling under a blanket with a woman of no familiarity.
Now, Ethan was located, but Lilith was outnumbered. She looked to her gang. She gestured, Wait! with her lips, and they waited. They remained, in total silence, for several minutes. The crucial time to strike arrived when Ethan stepped away with a few others.
She prepared…
Theia dies first, little brother. I hope you see it.
In position with their rifles aimed and their eyes on their boss, Lilith nodded to them. Then, all at once, they opened fire. Lilith didn’t hear the bangs, nor the screams; she only saw her target and the woman protecting it. Those two scattered like the rest of them, running further west. That was Lilith’s opportunity…
Circumventing the onslaught, she was able to quickly catch up. Theia was only surrounded by three adults, two of them several feet behind. Those were her first victims, who had looked back and seen her, but didn’t move to defend themselves, not until Lilith raised her gun and shot them both in the chest. A man and a woman, likely a couple since the woman cried the name of the man when he was shot first.
The woman protecting Theia was immediately alerted, and forced Theia to hide behind a tree. Just as the woman pulled a pistol from its sheath, Lilith shot her in the stomach. Theia screamed at the top of her lungs, “MERCY!” Lilith
felt no pity for the little girl; in fact, she enjoyed having inflicted emotional devastation before ending her life.
Theia kept behind the tree as Lilith fired another round into the woman, spraying some of her innards across the dirt. Two shots left, she counted. Figuring there was no use in wasting ammunition on a defenseless little girl, she dropped the weapon and unsheathed her machete. “You have your father to thank for this!” she yelled. As she stepped closer, she could hear Theia’s breathing, which was so heavy and rapid, it could have been mistaken for a panic attack. But Theia did not move.
Heavy, yet swift steps approached suddenly. Determining it came from behind, Lilith waited until the person was close enough, then swiped her weapon at the assailant as quickly as she could. She missed, as the assailant had crouched then body slammed her. Landing flat on her back, losing nearly all her breath, Lilith took her weapon and dug it into the man’s shoulder. He screamed, then threw himself off. The adrenaline rush allowed Lilith to rise to her feet at once.
“…Damn. I was hoping to leave her for you to find.”
Ethan said nothing. He shook the blood from his hands, then charged at Lilith again. She thrust her blade straight toward his gut, and he blocked it with his hands. Though it tore up his fingers, he had control of her weapon now, so she relinquished, then straight punched his throat. As Ethan stumbled backward, choking, this bought her a couple of seconds to strike his windpipe. Ethan, despite all his rage, was now fallen to the ground, temporarily unable to move, and hardly able to breathe.
Lilith obtained her blade again. With a loud scream she raised her arms, preparing to strike down into Ethan’s chest, but a deafening bang sounded, and Lilith felt a chunk of her left shin eject outward in a spray. Falling down, in shock and in agony, she saw Theia standing above her, aiming her own shotgun at her.
“Dad…” said the little girl, terror in her eyes as she kept her focus on Lilith. “Please say something, Dad.”
Regaining breath laboriously, Ethan gasped as he slowly stood up. Lilith held her shot leg, but did not cry. She saw Ethan stumble toward Theia, who nearly refused give up the rifle when he took it. Ethan held the weapon in his right hand and rested the end of the barrel at Lilith’s forehead. In his eyes, Lilith knew he wanted to do it, but also, that he wouldn’t. Tears streamed down Lilith’s cheeks. Part of her wished he would pull the trigger; to end it once and for all.
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