by A. American
I steeled myself for what I knew was coming next. The sounds from the break room had stopped, and I could see a beam of light shining under our surgical room door as the punk stepped in front of our hiding place. I let go of Janice, and braced myself. I would lunge at the son of a bitch, and stick him before he could get us. My legs were taut, as I envisioned myself in the starting blocks one of the hundreds of swim meets I had participated in. I was coiled and ready when the door exploded inward, a heavy kick from the scumbag sending it off its hinges and flying into the room.
That, I wasn’t prepared for. The violence of his entrance, and the door crashing back at me held me momentarily stunned. By the time I recovered, the brute was shining his flashlight directly at Janice and me, freezing us in place. The vision of a deer in the headlights suddenly became reality as my muscles refused to budge. There we were, squatting behind a mobile crash cart, me holding a pitiful knife, and no doubt, the druggie holding a gun. We were screwed.
“Hey Darrell,” the punk screamed over his shoulder. “Lookie what I found here!”
I couldn’t see at all, the flashlight blinding me, keeping me from even attempting to fight back. I had no idea where he was other than somewhere behind the intense white beam. As I started to stand up, the druggie hissed back.
“Drop that knife, or I’ll shoot you and yer friend dead! Drop it now!”
I held on, trying to find a way to strike back. We were trapped, and there was no way out. I lost all hope, and dropped the knife to the tile floor where it bounced with a crisp ring against the ceramic tile.
“Awww,” he said. “Now that’s a good girl. I ain’t gonna kill ya. Just look at you two, pretty as all get out. Naw, we ain’t gonna kill something as pretty as you! We just came to get us some party pills, and here we found us some party girls!”
The thug yelled back for his companions. “Hey Darrell! In here! I done found some…”
Suddenly the flashlight toppled out of his hand and onto the floor at his feet. I heard a sudden gasp. The brute stumbled into the room and went down hard on the tile floor, the flashlight illuminating his upper body. A second person crashed on top of him and Janice and I leapt back to the wall. When the flashlight had finally settled down, I saw Dr. Kramer straddling the man’s back, an I.V. pole in the back of the thug’s head and sticking out of his mouth on the other side.
“Are you girls alright?” He asked.
I was too stunned for words. I just saw Dr. Kramer jam a stainless steel rod through a man’s head. He had just saved our lives.
“Where is his gun?” He quickly asked.
“I… I don’t know” I stuttered.
Dr. Kramer grabbed the flashlight out of the rapidly pooling blood on the floor and began to search the surgical room’s floor for the man’s gun.
“I don’t see it!” he cried. “It has got to be here somewhere!”
It only took a few seconds to search the small room. There was no gun!
Just then, another flashlight shone at us from the doorway. A second hood had arrived and the sound of a gun’s hammer cocking back left no doubt about who had a firearm.
“Damn you!” he shouted, looking at his fallen friend. “You son of a bitches! Ya killed him. Now, Git against the wall… NOW!”
The three of us raised our hands and backed up until we could move no more. Once again, the flashlight blinded us as the thug moved forward to his fallen companion.
“Look what you’ve done! I’m gonna shoot all three of you, you bastards! I should make you suffer!”
I waited for the first bullet to come. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see it coming. For all my bravado earlier, I felt so hopeless and alone, I just wanted it to end. I wasn’t ready to die, but I knew deep in my heart that it was my time. All I could do was think about my mom and dad and pray that I wasn’t going to suffer.
A loud thud broke the silence of the room, and the second man’s flashlight fell to the floor. A second thump woke me from my death trance and I could see the flashlight shining on the man where he was now laying on the floor next to his friend, blood dripping down the side of his face onto the floor. His body twitched once and became still. Quickly, someone grabbed the fallen man’s light and I heard a voice like an angel.
“Hey guys,” the mystery man said. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah!” I said shakily.
Then I quickly followed up. “Who are you!?”
“Oh! Sorry,”
With that, our savior shone the light back on himself. He carried a tire jack and wore a Publix uniform.
“It’s me, Garrett!” He said. “Janice invited me to join the party. I hope that’s OK!”
“Garrett! Thank God!” Dr. Kramer shouted. “There’s at least one more out there!”
Dr. Kramer shone the flashlight on the floor and found the second man’s revolver lying next to his body. He scooped it and hustled out into the hallway, pointing the gun down toward the lobby and front door.
“It’s O.K.” Garrett said, stopping Dr. Kramer. “There was one more. He’s by the car. But he’s dead, too.”
“I had two tire irons” he continued. “The other one’s out there. I crushed the guy’s skull while he was smoking. Just couldn’t bring myself to pull the crowbar back out of his head.”
Garrett began to shake, his flashlight beam bouncing around the room as his body dumped the adrenalin that comes from a fight or flight situation. Dr. Kramer put his arm around the young man and gently took his flashlight.
“Come on, son.” The doctor whispered. “You saved our lives. Let’s find a chair while I go outside and clean up the mess.”
The four of us returned to the waiting room where we sat Garrett down. Janice retrieved a Coke from the tumbled refrigerator and sat next to him, brushing his hair and holding his hand. Thank goodness she bonded with this guy. It saved us all. I had no doubt that the patients and the doctor would have been killed, and Janice and I would be in whatever hell-hole those creeps inhabited. Rape would have been the best we could have hoped for. It was unimaginable.
A few minutes later, the doctor had gathered the patients and we all sat in the reception area. Dr. Kramer found the first man’s pistol in the hallway by the room Janice and I had hidden in. There was a third gun in the car. Dr. Kramer turned the old vehicle off and returned to the office. We let Garrett calm down a bit then heard about the horrors down at Publix.
It seems that the dump truck had blasted its way through the front entrance, taking out the other two employees. Carla and Ed were crushed where they were preparing to open the doors and feed the crowd outside. Mr. Wayneright and Garrett were in the back gathering more food when the wall exploded in and the truck crushed his poor co-workers. They quickly took refuge in the manager’s office and locked the metal door, unable to prevent the looting. There was nothing they could do. The mob was too large and too desperate. Their need too great.
After hours of watching the carnage through the upstairs glass window, the crowd began to settle down. Most had loaded up what they could and retreated back to where they came from. Mr. Wayneright decided it was time to abandon ship and he and Garrett proceeded down to the main level. They needed to get out of there, go to their stash in the dumpster behind the building, and make their way out of the area. For Garrett, that meant finding Janice. For his manager, it meant a long walk to his home in Kissimmee.
When they reached the main floor, the gunfire began. Looters were caught in the middle. Some ran out into the melee, while others fled to the back of the store, seeking cover from the fusillade of bullets. The two retreated once again and watched as almost a dozen thugs entered the store and looted what was left. A number of people were trapped as the back entrance had been locked shut. Mr. Wayneright still held the key.
Trapped between the back of
the store and the open front door, they begged and pleaded to be let go. The thugs began to shoot them one at a time. Mr. Wayneright couldn’t take it anymore. He left Garrett in the upstairs manager’s office, leaving his keychain with the young man but removing the pharmacy cage key, and hurried down to try and bargain with the druggies. They were rattling the metal cage that had been locked down to the floor, trying to get to the narcotics in the back.
Garrett watched as Mr. Wayneright flagged down the criminals. The gunfire abated while they talked. They made their way to the pharmacy and the cage was unlocked, giving the hooligans everything they wanted. Mr. Wayneright turned to face the remaining trapped people and pointed them to the front opening. It seemed that he had negotiated their safe passage by opening the pharmacy gates. That is, until one of them pointed his pistol at the back of the kind manager’s head and pulled the trigger. Before his body hit the floor, the remaining six people were shot as well as almost a dozen guns opened fire on the unarmed group. It was over in seconds.
“I couldn’t believe it!” Garrett said. “He did everything he could to protect those people, but it didn’t matter. He gave them everything they wanted but they shot him like a dog.”
“Lesson learned.” Dr. Kramer finally said. “There is no room for trust outside of this group. Trust needs to be hard won and certain before it is given. I want all of you to remember this!”
“Well,” Garrett concluded. “After they looted everything and left the building, I went out toward the front of the store and heard them talking outside about your office. They wanted more drugs. So I got a couple of crowbars from the docking area and got here as fast as I could. There were only three of them and by the time I got up here, two were in the building and one stood by the car smoking a cigarette. He never heard me come up behind him. After seeing Mr. Wayneright killed by those sickos, it was terribly easy to smash the punk’s head. I just wanted to make them pay for what they did. And I couldn’t let anything happen to you guys.”
We sat in silence, considering what had just happened. Dr. Kramer, as usual, was the first to act. He stood up and faced us.
“Well,” he started. “Out of tragedy comes opportunity. We now have a functional car and supplies in the dumpster.”
“It will be light in an hour or two.” He continued. “Charlie, you and I will go down to the dumpster after I inventory the stolen items in the car and retrieve the supplies. Then, we can get the hell out of here.”
Nothing ever had sounded so good to my ears.
Chapter 16
Day 6
John Drosky
South Orlando
Officer Drosky sat on the front porch of the one story house. After finding the two bodies in the back bedroom, he spent the next few days helping those in the neighborhood cope with the new realities they faced. It was frustrating to watch civilization rapidly disappear. The two local gas and go shops were a total loss, having been broken into and vandalized the third night he slept.
After the second night in the house, the smell from the back bedroom forced him to duct tape the door’s seams. His food supplies, at least the ones that he wasn’t using in his emergency kit, were rapidly drawing to an end and John felt he had done all he could with the limited resources he had at his disposal. He was throwing buckets of water on a forest fire. It was futile to do much more. It was time to make his way back to headquarters and check in with his superiors.
The morning air was crisp and cold when John went back inside and gathered his backpack and supplies. He wore his civilian clothes, his police uniform stuffed in the backpack with the other items he was to carry. His “Batman” duty belt was on his waist with his Sig 226 holstered and a couple of spare magazines. He manufactured a sling for his shotgun and it hung from his right shoulder. His patrol car still sat in front of the house as he closed the front door to the dead couple’s home he had occupied the past five days. He had completed a final, quick check for anything of value in both the house and his vehicle earlier so he began the walk downtown. It shouldn’t take too long, he thought to himself. It’s less than three miles.
He strode north to Colonial drive and gazed right down the six lane road. Smoke still rose from the Executive airport where a jumbo jet had tried to land. The pilot attempted to use the short runway to glide his beast to the ground, but in the end, there was too little real estate and too much mass to stop. It slammed into one of the numerous hangers that lined the runway and burst into flames. With no firetrucks or power, the wreckage created a series of smaller fuel fires that spread from hanger to hanger, and plane to plane. By the third day, most of the buildings had been reduced to ashes. The only thing John could see as he started down the road was the Southwest emblem on the tail of the doomed jetliner. It was the only part of the jet to survive the inferno.
The walk to the station was remarkably serene. John always liked early starts, and with the sunrise at his back as he made his way west towards downtown, it gave the city a lightness that belied the reality of the situation. As he approached the downtown area and its blocks of high rise office buildings and condominiums, vandalism was starting to show itself. Every store that could have held something of value had been broken into and ransacked. Another gas station at the corner of Orange and Colonial was gutted and burned. A pharmacy and local sandwich shop also suffered similar fates.
Checking down one small side street, John saw a body on the grass of a renovated home. The early 1900’s brick mansion had been converted into an attorney’s office. The lawn was littered with trash and as John hustled down the street to check the victim, he quickly realized she was beyond help. Her clothing ripped from her body, a knife buried in her chest, the poor woman had been sexually brutalized and killed where she laid. John made his way up to her body. He moved her lifeless form to the flower bed next to the broken out front door of the mansion. John retrieved his sidearm and entered the house. Once he was inside and confirmed a lack of occupants, he brought the body into the old house and laid her on a couch in a reception room to the right of the front entrance. He covered her form with a blanket from a closet in the hallway. After finding no identification, he said a quick prayer and went back on his way.
A few minutes later, John crossed under Interstate 4 and turned left onto Hughey Street and gazed down the road to the OPD headquarters.
“My God!” He said to himself. He stared at dozens of vehicles a quarter mile away, many moving about. Mostly large yellow school busses and HUMVEEs. Even a few modern MRAPS. They were clustered in front of the old headquarter building, parked end to end under the I-4 overpass parking spaces that sat across from headquarters. Several busses idled on the street, their accordion doors open and engines spewing diesel smoke into the air. All at once, civilization seemed not so far away. It was with a lighter step that John rapidly walked to the front of the building to present his credentials to a guard that stood watch.
Before he could reach the stairs to the front door, two DHS agents in full military gear appeared from behind one of the idling busses and brought their M4 rifles to bare on the policeman.
“HALT!” One man cried. “DROP YOUR WEAPONS NOW!”
John forgot he was in civilian clothing and quickly dropped to his knees. He unslung the shotgun from his shoulder and laid it on the ground. He raised both hands high in the air and replied.
“John Drosky, OPD, reporting for duty!” he shouted.
The DHS agents were in black military gear. A “POLICE” Morale patch was stuck to his Velcro Identifier on the front of their plate carriers. They were in full kit, with Kevlar helmet, a battle belt with full load out of 556 ammunition. A side arm with two spare magazines rounded out the firepower. On their shoulders were the DHS patch he had learned to recognize over the years of federal and local interaction. John didn’t move a muscle.
Both agents approached Drosky and cove
red him. They eventually took his shotgun and pistol from his holster. They finally frisked him and zip tied his hands behind his back.
“We’ll have to check this out,” one of them said. “Stay seated while we verify your identification.”
One of them, the older of the two, went into the building with John’s identification while the other stood guard. The younger one, younger than John by his looks, bounced back and forth on his heels as he stood guard over his prisoner.
“Don’t worry,” the young agent said. “We just need to make sure you are who you say you are.”
“No big deal,” John replied. “I get it. I could have capped John Drosky and taken his weapons and I.D. No problem.”
The agent seemed to relax a bit, his rocking motion steadied. But John noted that he wasn’t well trained. For starters, the young man failed to keep an eye on his surroundings while his partner was in the building. In an amateurish sort of way, it felt like the kid was playing soldier and not well versed at his job. He glanced at a few woman that passed by, trying to strike up a conversation with one attractive girl. As the minutes passed, he even stopped watching John and fumbled in his pocket for some dip. Retrieving a can of Skoal, he actually put his rifle butt down on the ground, leaning it against his legs so he could use both hands to place the cut tobacco between his cheek and gums. He actually had the barrel of his firearm pointing up at his body, effectively putting his head in the line of fire. Instructors called that “lasing” as if you were pointing a laser at someone or something not meant to be pointed at with your rifle. It was inexcusable, but given the state of things, John chalked it up to desperation and situation. You take what is available and use it to the best of your abilities. DHS was using the assets they could.