by David Smith
Suddenly, his eyes got big and he took a quick step back as the we heard a loud boom and crack behind us. We ran to him and past him, taking cover behind him as he stopped with his gun pointed at the doors. I turned around and the entire herd was pushing at the door, so many that they filled the parking lot almost all the way to the road. The doors shook against the deadbolt lock and the glass had a long diagonal crack in it from the initial impact.
"You must've locked it." He said.
"Yeah." Mom said, her voice shaking as she tried to catch her breath.
"It's not going to hold long. There's a door in the back, let's go." He said then took off ahead of us down the hallway.
He stopped at the back door just long enough to peak out through the crack then busted out, running. We ran into the woods behind a store and he helped us slide under a barbed wire fence and into a field. The grass was so tall that we couldn't see the rows that had been cultivated into the field years ago and we both, Mom and I, tripped and fell in the high grass as we took off running.
"This is no time to take a nap." He says as he stood just inside the fence, putting his gun into its holster.
We both got up to run again and took off, running parallel to the rows this time but still stumbling. He ran along side us easily, outside of the last row, on flat ground, then cut us off at the end of the row with his arms outstretched.
"Whoa!" He said as if halting a runaway horse and we stopped, Mom looking over her shoulder. "There's nothing after you, take a break. We can take it slow from here, we've got a lot of walking ahead of us."
"What about the..." Mom started and he interrupted her.
"Don't worry about them. They'll all follow each other into the store and it'll take them a while to figure out where we went. By that time we'll be long gone. Let's walk."
The field became the back yard of a two story house with an large in-ground swimming pool, long since leaked out but still streaked with green and black marks from algae and mold. We passed around the side and across the front yard then turned up a street lined with live oaks that created a sort of tunnel over the road.
"There were a lot of dead here earlier this morning." He said as we neared the end of the road. "I'm guessing you came through here?"
"Yeah." Mom answered.
"That's good. You brought them all with you so the coast should be clear for a ways. You've got take it slow when nothing's chasing you. Otherwise you just tire yourself out and end up running into a herd because you're not paying attention, then you're too tired to run."
When we reached the end of the road and turned left, we could see the freight car yard again. "You let them out, huh?" He said as we took a left and followed the highway back toward the tracks.
"Friends of yours?" She asked.
"They chased me to here from the interstate when I crossed earlier this morning. I jumped in there then climbed out through a hatch on top and when they were all in I jumped down and shut them in so I could come back to the store for supplies. It's too dangerous there now, going to have to go all the way into town."
We followed a curve to the left before crossing the tracks and headed north toward Picayune. It was about two miles and had finally gotten just warm enough that my fingers weren't freezing, the sky completely clear and the sun bright.
"Who are you?" Mom asked. "Where do you live?"
"Sorry, I got caught up in the moment back there. I'm Chuck Sampson. And where I live… that's a secret."
"Okay, then how do you live, being out here all by yourself?"
"It's a lot easier actually. Big groups make too much noise and are a lot harder to feed. By myself I can move a lot faster and I don't have to argue with anyone over what's the safest plan of action."
"What about safety in numbers?"
"Well, that's only good for the ones in the middle, if they don't mind watching others die."
Ten minutes later we were still following the highway when it passed between a soccer field and the railroad tracks when we heard an engine running in the distance. Chuck ducked off the road and dove into the ditch as soon as he heard it, pulling us with him. Across an intersecting road from the other end of the soccer field was a red brick building with a large parking lot and what little was left of an American flag, flying halfway up the pole. There was a fence in back of the building surrounding a gravel and red clay lot full of big, green machines and a slightly taller metal building.
"What is it?" Mom asked.
"It's the National Guard armory. Stay here."
He said then began crawling away in the bottom of the ditch, toward the armory.
"It's the Army, Kara." She whispered and started crawling behind him at a distance.
"What's that?" I asked but she just kept crawling away so I followed. "He said to stay put..." I argued in a whisper, not sure why, I guess because we were crawling in a ditch. "Momma!"
All of a sudden, there was a sound like lightning when it strikes really close by and you can hear the crack as well as the boom and we all froze. Then it started up like a machine gun only slower, deeper, louder. I could feel it in my chest. Chuck looked back at us and realized we had moved and angrily motioned for us to stay put. I looked around and could see tree limbs falling across the street from the armory.
When the shooting stopped, the truck started to pull out and two more trucks came from the other side of the building and followed it. As they pulled out into the road, Chuck looked back at us with a sudden look of desperation. They turned right onto the highway though, heading away from us but when they did Mom stood up and took off running down the road waving her arms and screaming. I just lay still, not knowing what to do.
She ran past Chuck and he yelled at her to stop but she ignored him. The brake lights lit up on the last truck and as she kept running they reversed back into the drive and turned around, the others stopping ahead. She stopped running as they pulled back out onto the highway and motioned for me to follow her. Chuck shook his head as I started to stand and motioned for me to stay down. To this day, I wish I would've listened.
The men took us back with them to Magnolia Ridge. It was practically a paradise compared to what we were used to and Mom did what she had to do for them to let us stay. I'm sure you know Captain Jennings. He was like a father to me the few weeks we were there then one night, Mom got up out of his bed, got me out of mine across the room and took me outside. Your friend with the red beard hid us in the back of one of the trucks under a pile of rucksacks and sleeping bags and about an hour later we were heading back home.
We slipped out of the back of the truck when all the other soldiers were out scavenging for supplies and your friend led us back to the railroad tracks and pointed us in the right direction. We made our way back to the compound slowly. I didn't know why we had left Magnolia Ridge and I could tell Mom didn't really want to, but we had no other place to go. I asked her several times why we had left but she never would answer, wouldn't even say a word or look at me. She just kept walking like one of the dead. I felt like she was mad at me, like it was somehow my fault so I stopped asking before I made her mad enough to hit me.
The men at the front gate must've seen us coming from down the road because as soon as we walked through the gate Dad was walking out to meet us. She stopped in front of him as they closed the gate behind us, like she was waiting, before she spoke, to see if he would welcome her with open arms or chastise her. He looked at her for a moment and then at me, standing behind her. Then, with his eyes locked to mine, he threw a big right hook across her face.
It spun her completely around, her knees buckling around each other like two twigs being twisted together then one shoe slung off her foot as they unspun and she fell to her face, her palms slapping the concrete. Blood came from her nose making a drippy trail as she tried to crawl away. Just as she reached up to one of the guards for help, he stomped down on her calf, breaking her leg. The guard just took a step back, looking down at her with no expression.
I stepped over her, putting myself between them but Dad just picked me up and threw me to the guard. He then lifted his foot high as he could and stomped down, hard and fast with all of his weight, on the middle of her back. She was crying, screaming and growling like a cat stuck in a fan shroud.
He straddled her, one foot at a time then knelt down with his knee in the middle of her back. He grabbed her left wrist and pulled it back behind her and grabbed her hair with his other hand then whispered in her ear, "Nobody leaves Big Choppa."
He then began slamming her face into the concrete. She screamed till she was unconscious and he kept slamming it. I could hear the bones breaking in her face and he kept slamming it down. When I could tell she was dead, he kept slamming it down. When her forehead all the way down to her brow was crushed in, broken bone protruding through in places, her eyes smashed and hanging from the nerves, he finally stopped. Then he stood and pushed the hair on the sides of his head back behind his ears then reached out to me with a bloody hand.
"Come on my sweet girl. I won't let nobody take you from your Daddy again."
You still think we'd be better off here than at Magnolia Ridge?
Chapter 20: Emancipation
"Well, I have a feeling after today that won't be a choice you'll have to make." I replied.
She shook her head and smiled as her boyfriend poked his head out the door.
"Kara!" He barked at her. "Time to go!"
She just sat, staring at me across the picnic table and smiling. This made me feel particularly cocky. I stood slowly as he tried to give me an intimidating stare and put my hand out to her. "You ready to go?"
She smiled even bigger and took it, both of us acting like he wasn't there. We held hands all the way to the door and as she passed by him he grabbed her arm and put his hand on my chest, pulling us apart, pushing her into the break room and pinning me against the door frame. I felt the broken ends of my ribs grinding against one another but I just kept smiling.
"When this is over," he stuck one finger in the middle of my chest. "I'm gonna wipe that smile off your face!" He said, his breath smelling like rotten teeth.
"Spider," I replied. "if you do that, who's going to teach you how to read?
I fully expected that to lead to a fight which I was sure I would lose. He was half a foot taller than me and even without broken ribs, I was sure I couldn't beat him but I felt the beating I was about to receive was worth it. Instead, he looked as if I genuinely hurt his feelings and after he stared at me just long enough for me to see the hurt in his eyes, he turned, grabbed Kara by the arm again and drug her off through the building.
I didn't get the chance to tell her that the man they had met a few years ago was my father. I wasn't sure if I wanted to because the way she described him made him sound a little crazy, even to me. I did feel like it was fate or something like it though. If she wouldn't be saved by the father, maybe she would be saved by the son, or something like that.
Out in the front lot, the truck sat waiting with the newcomers, standing around beside it and the thirty or so survivors of that mornings attack standing beside, or sitting on, their motorcycles. They stood apart from the bikers, didn't have the tattoos or leather or the hard looks on their faces that said 'I'm trying too hard to be intimidating to compensate for my inadequate intelligence'. I counted eighteen in all; two young love birds, two middle-aged couples, one black, one white, five others between the ages of twenty and seven who appeared to be their children, and six other men and one woman of various ages and demeanors.
As I followed Spider and Kara, Choppa and one of the seventeen walked from the truck to meet us.
"This is Dave." Choppa introduced him as Spider and Kara climbed into the truck.
"Good to meet you." He said as he smiled and stuck out his hand for me to shake it. I had never seen this gesture and didn't even know what to make of it. I stuck out my hand and he shook it up and down. "Come on, let me introduce you to G.W."
He was just a little taller than me with thick, low eyebrows nearly covering his caribbean blue eyes, nearly fifty but moved like a man half that age. I could barely keep up with him as he walked toward the truck. The hair that hung halfway down his back, pulled back into a loose, low ponytail, was starting to turn from sandy blonde to gray as was his short but thick beard. A big hatchet hung at his side in a blood-stained leather sheath with the blade covered and the handle bounced against his leg as he walked. There was a spring in his step, something else I had never seen, and he gave a complimentary nod, a smile and a pistol-fingered wave to the bikers as he passed. As we came near the truck he introduced the members of his group. He spoke more loudly than was necessary and in a rhythm like the speaking part of a country song.
"This is Ethan and Julie, they're in love so they don't say much." He chuckled and continued past them. They were in their early twenties and looked like a couple of kids at Woodstock without the LSD induced, open mouthed grins. The boy had blonde curls hanging in his eyes and the girl, a long, golden blonde braid down to her waist.
"This is Eli," a tall, thin, tough-looking cowboy type in his late thirties, "his wife, Maria," a petite, but just as tough-looking, Hispanic woman, "their kids, Joseph and Rosemary, different Dad's as you can see but don't bring it up, they're a family just like any other and a little sensitive about it." He said and slapped Eli on the shoulder as he gave him a smile and a nod. Their oldest was Black-Hispanic and about twenty while the little girl, about seven or eight, looked just like her mother, except with curly, light brown hair and light green eyes.
"And this is Terrence and Malika and their bunch; Demetrius, Donte and little Daviana. She's named after me." He said and tousled her puff-ball pigtails. Terrence was 6'6", a barrel-chested man of about three and a half hundred pounds and smiled from ear to ear as he took him arm from around his wife to shake my hand. She was no small woman herself, thick in the arms and legs and hips but nowhere near soft. His oldest boy was tall and built like him, the second, a tall but thinner version and the little girl was tall for her age and built like the mother.
"These gentleman over here," he said as we walked up to the group of men. "This is Ross, Will and Michael, and that's Vladimir and his daughter Lucia." Ross and Will were about forty and thirty, respectively. They joked with one another, competing for the attention of the blonde.
She was stunning in an Eastern Germanic kind of way. Her honey blonde hair was cut to jaw length and pulled up into a pony tail with the front strands that wouldn't reach, hanging down at her chin. They moved when she talked because they touched her lips. All of her facial features were softly defined, beautifully feminine but about a five pound loss of body fat from being slightly masculine. The rest of her body was thin and lean, slightly muscular except for the places where it should be soft. She looked like Davinci's depiction of the offspring of Aries and Aphrodite if such an offspring had existed and been born in Russia.
Her father, the shorter-than-her, soviet farmer with a jaw that could hold his body weight from a rope and forearms and hands that could choke a polar bear, looked at the two men and his daughter with a raised eyebrow and eyes like steel as they flirted back and forth.
The third man, Michael, stood in their circle but looking across it, oblivious to their conversation, toward the bikers. He wasn't staring in a defensive sort of way but more inquisitively. His eyes searched through the twenty some odd men and ten or so 'ol' ladies', unbeknownst to anyone in either group, moving across and stopping to go down and back up every now and then. He held a slight grin as he stood with his arms crossed and tallied their numbers up, tapping each finger on his forearm , in slow succession, to keep count.
"Alright." Choppa said. "Enough of this. He's getting further away by the minute."
"Who's G.W.?" I asked Dave. "Is that the older guy that was with you?"
"G.W.?" He replied. "No, that's DeMarkus. G.W. Is this fine gal here." He said slapping his hand against the fender of the truck. "Georgina Walke
r Bush. Twin turbo, nine hundred horsepower...”
"Georgina?" I interrupted. I knew he was referring to the president.
"Huh? Well, yeah! You can't have truck with guy's name. That'd just be gay."
"I said, let's go!" Choppa interrupted.
"Alright, alright!" Dave said and stepped up onto the side, then climbed up onto the hood. "Hey, everybody listen up." He said, holding his hand up. All the bikers started to gather around. "I've never led a bunch of motorcycles down the highway but here's what I figure." He looked up and over their heads, imagining making a path as he gestured it with his hands. I had never seen anyone so animated, it almost made me laugh. "We'll keep it fast and loose till we run into trouble then, if y'all get up behind G.W. close as you can in a tight inverted wedge formation, maybe five wide at the front," he made his hands into the shape of a triangle and looked through it, the tip pointing at the ground. "I'll bring her down to about 40 miles an hour and that should still be fast enough to part the red sea without y'all getting all squirrelly." He then turned his head sideways and look down, putting his hands up with his index finger up on each hand. "but you got to keep it tight. Stay as close to G.W. and as close to each other as you can, because the crowd'll close in fast. Alright? And here they are now!" He said and jumped down from the hood. He was already in the truck when the rest of us noticed that there were more than a hundred of them approaching the gate. The bikers scrambled to get to their bikes as the newcomers ran toward the back of the trailer.
They herd filled the entire width of the road and the ditches. The front of it was already coming through the gate and the rest continued all the way around the curve and out of sight behind the trees. As they caught sight of us, they started moving faster and spreading out as they came.
DeMarkus, Spider and Kara were already in the truck and when I climbed in, Choppa followed and sat in the passenger seat. Inside the truck were two seats, as you would expect, then an opening between the seats that lead back into a larger cabin. There was room to stand behind each seat with cabinets and shelves on the side, pictures of women in bikinis taped on the cabinet doors from top to bottom. They had installed a ladder on either side, just behind the cabinets, leading up to hatches that were welded primitively into the roof. There was a small sink and a refrigerator on one side and a cushioned bench on the other, then the bed. It was big enough for two people and had another, a single person bunk that folded up to the wall, up above it. I sat on the bed on the opposite side of Kara from Spider as the truck shook and shuddered on startup then smoothed out with a low roar and a faint whistle from the turbos, already spinning. DeMarkus' legs hung down behind my head from the top bunk. I looked up and there were more cabinets above the windshield with a crucifix and a small medallion hanging from a hook in between them. On the dashboard were three small, die-cast, toy cars, glued in place.