by Mark Tufo
“Ain’t nobody gittin’ in here,” Darlene spat. “Don’t matter if Randy shoots everybody or nobody.” She kicked the back door to demonstrate its strength.
“Yeah,” said Jim. He looked at me as he brushed by. “You can stay here with them or come with me. Hell, you can run off on your own. I don’t care. I’m sorry about your uncle or friend, or…” His eyes looked down at the straps on my wrist again. “Was he kidnapping you?”
I nodded.
“Then Randy did you a favor,” said Darlene, as she put a hand on my shoulder. “He’s a short-tempered putz most of the time, but he’s a good man in a fight.”
Jim disappeared deeper into the house.
Darlene sat herself in a kitchen chair that had been pushed against an interior wall. She pointed a cigarette-stained finger at my pistol. “That’s a big gun. You know how to use it?”
I’d never had a pistol of any kind in my hand before but knew enough to see that the safety was off and the trigger ready to pull. “Yes, ma’am.” I folded the knife closed and put it in my pocket.
Men started arguing in the front room. I recognized Jim’s voice.
“Don’t mind them,” said Darlene. “That’s just how they talk. You want me to cut them straps off your wrists?”
I nodded and held my left arm toward her, keeping my right hand by my side with the gun gripped tightly. I didn’t like the situation. Outside was hazardous in an obvious way. Inside, danger seemed to be all around me but hidden behind veils of yellow-toothed smiles and words that were almost kind.
Darlene pulled a big knife from a sheath hanging from her waist. She fumbled getting the tip between the plastic and my skin. In her clumsiness with the big blade, she gouged a shallow trough through the skin on my wrist. I flinched.
“Sorry, honey. You be still.”
I stayed quiet.
The blade cut the plastic, and the strap fell to the floor. I switched the gun to my left hand and let Darlene do her sloppy work with my right wrist.
Jim stepped into the kitchen, herding a dark-haired girl about my age. She had to be Jim’s daughter. Like everyone I’d seen in the house, she was armed. She had a pistol in a holster on her hip, and her hand rested on the butt. Through the doorway, Jim shouted, “What are you going to do, Randy, shoot every degenerate in Houston?”
“I got forty-thousand rounds,” Randy laughed as he called from the other room.
“It’s legal now,” someone else in the front room added. “Mayor said so himself.”
“That’s right,” Randy loudly told us as he came into the kitchen. “He said anybody that had to defend themselves is in their rights to shoot any degenerate on their property.”
“And you own the street?” Jim asked, as he guided his daughter toward the back door. “Is that it?”
“Don’t matter,” argued Randy. “They’re coming this way.”
“They’re all coming this way because you’re shooting them,” Jim argued. “They’re not as stupid as you think. They know you’re trying to kill them and the ones that are still smart enough to want to get revenge are going to come get it.”
“You can’t believe everything you see on the Internet,” Randy scoffed as he looked around for support from the other men in the kitchen.
Jim turned to Darlene. “Open the door, please.”
She looked at me. “What about him?”
Jim looked at me, too. “Like I said. Do what you like. Up to you.”
The only thing I knew about any of these people was that they’d gone trigger-happy on the car I was riding in, and Jim had taken a risk to come out and save me. I looked at Darlene and pointed at Jim. “I’m going with him.”
“Open the door, Darlene.” Jim’s tone made it clear he was ready to escalate if she didn’t comply.
His tone didn’t make sense given what little I knew about the situation inside the house, but I inferred a great deal from it. The fortified house was a dysfunctional mess, and whatever was the source of the tension, it had been building toward a breaking point that looked like it might come at any moment.
I stepped away from Darlene and put my back to the stove so everyone in the kitchen was in front of me. Whatever was going on, I didn’t plan to take any punches, and I wasn’t going to get shot for a load of crap that didn’t involve me. I put both hands on the pistol and held it the same way I’d seen cops hold guns in the movies.
The gun in my hand had a fat bore in the barrel, which meant it fired a big round. Aside from our family’s shotgun, stories from relatives who hunted, and loads of videos on the Internet, I didn’t have any experience with firearms. Guns were one topic of my Internet research in the early days of the H5N1 outbreak. Back then, driven by fear of the coming apocalypse, I’d tried to learn a great deal about things that I thought would help me navigate my future.
Long story short, I knew the gun would kick, maybe a lot. I needed to hold it with both hands if I wanted any control. I hoped the information I’d gleaned off the Internet was enough.
“Let him go,” announced Randy, as though he was pardoning a horse thief out on the range. To Jim, he said, “Don’t come crying back here when you find out you can’t defend your shitty little house.”
Looking at Randy, Darlene said, “Don’t be an asshole. You need to remember who this house belongs to—me. You don’t make the rules here.”
“We all fortified this place,” Randy shouted, redirecting his foul temper at her.
A man put a hand on Randy’s shoulder and said something softly to try and calm him down.
Darlene took a brace off the door, only one of several she’d put in place after Jim and I had entered. Looking at Jim, she said in a soft voice, “You come back if you want.”
Jim nodded slightly and looked down at his daughter. “You stay close, you hear?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
Darlene opened the door.
Jim looked out. “The backyards are still clear.” He looked over at me. “C’mon.”
Jim jogged through the door. The girl followed, and I was right on her heels.
Degenerates were screaming everywhere. They were pissed.
The door slammed shut behind us, and Darlene banged the braces into place.
Jim continued jogging along a path through the gardens.
The rate of gunfire from Darlene’s house increased.
The reinforced fences between the houses swayed in places—rioters were pushing from the other side. Not one was yet through, but even I could tell the fence was going to come down. It was only a matter of minutes.
Chapter 175
Jim unlocked the back door of his house. He urged the girl and me to hurry inside before locking the door behind us. The girl pulled out a flashlight and turned it on, once we were inside. Like Darlene, Jim had to place two-by-fours in brackets mounted to the wall to bolster the door.
While he was doing that, I looked around and listened for the sound of other people in the house.
The girl noticed what I was doing and said, “It’s just us.”
In the flashlight’s dim glow, I saw that we were in another kitchen that was laid out much like the one at Darlene’s house. None of the windows was boarded over, though, and the house didn’t smell like cigarettes. The kitchen was clean and organized, but well-used. The top layers of vinyl on the floor had worn through to expose a black underlayment. The wallpaper, patterned with large yellow flowers amidst languid green foliage, was peeling at the seams. The Formica countertops were worn through in big browns spots beside the sink and stove.
Volleys of gunfire exploded from the direction of Darlene’s house.
“Fools,” grumbled Jim, as he turned on another flashlight.
“You’ve had riots here before?” I asked, guessing the reason all these people had put so much effort into preparation.
“Three or four.” Jim glanced at the girl as if for confirmation. She nodded.
“Are they always like this?” I asked.
That sounded like bullshit to me. “I’m not an adult, but I don’t need to be soothed. We left Darlene’s house because you think they’re endangering themselves. Why?”
“That’s right.” Jim walked to the kitchen doorway to get a look into other parts of the house. “Each time the riots come, they get worse. Last time, some people were killed a few blocks down. Over behind the Kroger supermarket, about a mile that way,” Jim pointed, “a couple of blocks got burned out. Nearly every house. Nobody knows how many people were killed there. After the last one, some of us neighbors who shared the gardens out back decided to set up Darlene’s house as a fortress to protect ourselves.”
“Why isn’t Darlene’s house safe for you and…” I looked at the girl.
“Addy,” she told me.
“I’m Christian,” I told her.
“Don’t know why we chose Darlene’s house,” said Jim. “Maybe because she was willing. We agreed before we started we’d only shoot the degenerates who tried to break in.”
“Randy agreed,” said Addy, “but you knew he was just saying it. You said so yourself.”
Jim nodded and frowned.
“Shooting them makes them more dangerous?” I asked.
Answering for her dad, Addy said, “People on the Internet say that when the degenerates get like this, they just want to break things and start fires. Shooting at them makes them mad, makes them want to get you.”
“Makes sense, right?” Jim asked me but didn’t wait for an answer. “They’re all degenerates out there, but not all of them are completely stupid. They’re still people. Most of them have the good sense to know when somebody’s trying to kill them, and they get real mean and vindictive when they think that.”
“But most of them aren’t smart enough anymore to be afraid of guns,” said Addy. “They say it on the news, too. At least on some of the channels.”
“That one fellow on Channel 13, though—” said Jim, “the one who’s always preaching about this and that, always complaining about how the law needs to change so we can just shoot ‘em all down in the street—Randy and some of them others in Darlene’s house like to listen to him. They think he’s right. And now with a riot going on, they know nobody’s gonna prosecute them for shooting degenerates. I suspect this is what they wanted all along, to set Darlene’s place up like a fortress so they could slaughter as many degenerates as they could. I think maybe all the riots pissed them off too much. I suspect they’re tired of seeing things go out of control.”
I listened for a moment to the sounds from outside. The guns were firing steadily now down at Darlene’s house. More and more wild voices were hollering angry nonsense. “Does it sound to you guys like the riot is growing?”
Jim’s lips tightened into a crease across his face as he cocked his head and listened. “Sure as Dickens, all that shooting is bringing them in. Dammit! Most times they move on through, just breaking stuff nobody cares about, sometimes getting into houses to look for food. People don’t understand it’s best to just stay out of their way.”
Addy asked, “What are we going to do, Daddy?”
Banging on the front door silenced all three of us.
Heavy pounding against the door stopped our hearts.
Feet kicked the front walls and fists beat the windows.
“Addy!” Jim pointed out the kitchen door. “Bug out!”
Addy ran through the door with Jim right behind her. I followed. Addy stood aside in the living room and let Jim lead down a narrow, dark hall.
Once halfway into the hall, Jim reached up and tugged hard on a braided piece of rope. An attic access panel swung down and a ladder unfolded. He turned to Addy. “Up.”
Addy squeezed by Jim and all but ran up the ladder. Jim waved me to follow behind.
The attic space was cramped and hot despite the cool autumn weather. Addy coughed on fiberglass dust kicked up from the insulation piled between the joists. The crap got into my throat and lungs, and scratched until I couldn’t help but cough, too.
Jim pulled the ladder up behind us as Addy scooted across the attic toward a wall covered in sheets of new pink fiberglass insulation.
I followed, thinking the wall had been built as a hiding place that would keep us from being seen by anyone taking a casual peek into the attic from the ladder we’d just climbed.
Once I rounded the thin plywood wall, I saw Addy pushing open a small roughly-made door through the roof.
I silently complimented Jim on the choice to build an escape hatch.
Addy climbed through the door on a homemade ladder. I followed her through and squatted on the roof near the door, just as she did.
Outside the house, the sound of the riot was deafening. Thousands of voices were raging. All around, I heard the sound of breaking fence boards and shattering glass. Degenerates were jumping up and down on cars parked along the road. Rifle fire was pouring out of Darlene’s house.
A large section of fence gave way down at the far end of the garden plot and a solid mob of degenerates poured into the space behind the houses. Weapons fired through the rifle slits in the fortified windows on the back of Darlene’s house. Rioters fell and were trampled.
“Daddy,” Addy urgently told her father, “the fence.”
Jim shook his head as he climbed out through the doorway in the roof. “No way that fence was gonna hold with those fools shooting like that.”
The gunfire coming from the back of Darlene’s house had no hope of stemming the tide of the mob. There were too many degenerates. And just like that, they were at the house, enraged, beating on the wood siding with their fists.
Something banged so loudly below us I felt it through my feet as I squatted on the roof shingles.
“They’re in,” Jim told us, closing the doorway behind us.
Addy stood up and looked around.
“Don’t,” Jim grabbed her shoulder and gently pulled her back down. “We’re behind the roof peak here. They can’t see you from the road.”
“Are we staying here?” she asked.
I was looking across the combined yards at the degenerates coming through the broken fence. “The ones in the backyard garden will see us up here, right?”
Jim nodded. “They might think we’re with them and leave us alone, but mad as they are right now, they’ll probably believe we’re with that bunch in Darlene’s house.”
The sound in the house below us changed.
“I think they’re in the attic.” I looked at the roof hatch to see if there was a way to lock it closed from the top side.
Jim crouched and walked into the midst of a tall tree’s branches that were overhanging one end of his roof. Addy went right after him, also in a crouch. I followed.
It was even darker being surrounded by the tree’s branches, but I saw where we were going. A ladder spanned the gap between Jim’s roof and the roof next door. Long two-by-fours were lashed along the ladder’s length to give it strength. The end of the ladder on Jim’s roof was loosely secured with brackets. I assumed it was secured on the far end as well.
“Go,” Jim told Addy, pointing at the ladder and looking through the tree’s branches and remaining brown leaves. He was worried the degenerates would be coming onto the roof at any moment.
Addy raced across the ladder, perfectly balanced on the rungs, as though the fifteen-foot fall off either side was nothing at all.
Once she had her feet on the roof of the house next door, Jim waved me to follow.
I crossed the ladder on all fours, going as fast as I could move, given that the ladder shifted in the loose brackets that held it in place on each end.
I guess I had a shamed looked on my face when I reached the other side and looked at Addy. As an explanation for her nimble crossing, she simply said, “Gymnastics.”
I turned to see Jim crossing the ladder, going slowly
on all fours as if he expected the ladder to collapse beneath him.
When Jim had only a few paces to go, the doorway to his attic flung open, and a degenerate’s head popped through. The degenerate screamed and pointed at us.
“Hurry, Daddy,” said Addy.
Jim stood and bounded over the last few steps.
I dropped to a knee, lifted my pistol, and pointed it down the length of the ladder.
Jim squatted and went to work on the bracket securing the ladder to the roof. “Don’t shoot,” Jim told me, “unless he starts to cross.”
The degenerate was out of the doorway, and another was coming up behind.
“Why are they chasing us?” I asked.
“Like I said,” Jim cocked his head toward Darlene’s place without taking his attention off the metal bracket in his hands clinking against the ladder, “once you start shooting them, some of them go on a rampage.”
The degenerate reached the far end of the ladder, gave it one apprehensive glance, and stepped out to plant a foot on a rung. I lined the sight on the pistol with the degenerate’s chest, held the gun tightly, stiffened my arms, and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked and a red haze blew out behind the degenerate as the bullet knocked him backward. He bounced off the shingles on Jim’s roof and fell into the gap between the houses.
“Nice shooting,” said Addy.
“Yup,” Jim agreed, though he didn’t look up from what he was doing.
Another degenerate was working his way through the branches as a third was climbing out of the door through Jim’s roof.
Addy aimed her pistol.
The ladder clanged as the brackets came loose. Jim lifted it from our end, pushed it toward his house to collapse its length by a few feet, and let it go. It fell into the gap between the houses. He smiled grimly as he glanced at Addy and me. “Let’s go.”
Chapter 176
We ran across the roof of the house next to Jim’s and then crossed another ladder bridge to another roof. That’s when the familiar smell of a backyard barbecue blew past us on the breeze. It wasn’t mesquite wood slowly roasting beef, but was the smell of lighter fluid burning off as it started a fire.