Lost and Found

by Trish Marie Dawson

  "Romero! Pick up the fucking radio, bro!" Another click...More gravelly silence. "Shit! Shit!"

  Something large and metallic made a bouncing sound before coming to a stop against a wall. A trashcan maybe? Another squeak of a tennis shoe echoed in the lobby, followed by mumbled cursing.

  "Are you dead in there, mother fucker?" the man screamed into the stairwell.

  I held my breath, waiting for him to walk into my line of sight again. I only needed one good shot. Just one. Shoes squeaked and the large metal object bounced along the lobby floor again.

  "I saw you assholes! I saw you run across the street, stupid shits!" he wailed.

  Damn. There wasn't anyone on the other rooftop, but that didn't mean there wasn't someone inside the building. I suddenly felt like an idiot. Drake was still squatted in his corner, the gun held less than an inch from his nose but his eyes closed momentarily while he pressed the barrel against his slick forehead. Obviously, he was feeling just as much the moron as I was at the moment.

  "You fucks dead in there, or what?" the man screamed again.

  I wanted to laugh. As if, we'd actually answer him either way.

  The clean white shoe came back, followed by another. A pair of loose jeans came into view then a shiny metal buckle followed by a yellow sweatshirt that poked out beneath a puffy coat the color of coal. My breath froze in my throat when I saw his elbow. A few more inches to the right and I'd have a clear shot of his chest. But he stopped and fired several more rounds at the stairs. One of the bullets ricocheted off the metal railing and whizzed by my head close enough to move my hair.

  One more fucking inch.

  Finally, he leaned toward the door to peer into the rectangular space where the window had been, and there it was - the front left pocket of his coat. My finger squeezed the trigger twice, the bullets lodging square into his chest. Like in an action movie, his arms and legs flew up into the air as he was catapulted backwards, as if a giant had punched him in the gut.

  Drake jumped up from his corner and kicked the door open, firing freely into the lobby. Something shattered, but the only person inside the open space was bleeding out on the shiny lobby floor, staining the expensive white marble a rich cabernet shade. Drake kicked the gun out of his hands and it spiraled across the tiled floor, coming to a stop with a loud clunk sound after hitting the base of the check-in counter.

  As I stepped out of the stairwell and into the much brighter room, the boy, barely out of his teen years, stuttered one blood-bubbly word before his head lolled to the side and the light went out of his chocolate brown eyes, "F-fuckers."

  ***

  Two men. I had killed two men in the span of ten minutes. Who…what had I become?

  "Did you hear me…Riley?!" Drake shouted in my ear, pulling hard on my right arm, "I said we gotta get the hell out of here!"

  With a yank, he pulled me away from the impressive blood pool already forming beneath the body, and pushed me out of the glass lobby door that Drake had managed to completely shatter with his wild shooting from the stairwell. Our feet were still crunching on the glass a good twenty feet from the entryway.

  "Huh?" I finally asked when we were half a block away, running down the deserted and cold street. I looked over my shoulder at the glass building and it stared back at me, sad and damaged from our brief shootout.

  "Jesus-FUCK!" Drake hissed, still pulling me by my arm. "Damn, that was close! We gotta move fast - they'll hear those shots for sure."

  Words finally found their way from my blank mind to my numb mouth, "Wh-where are we going?" I fought the urge to upchuck all over Drake's side at the juvenile and vulnerable tone of my voice.

  I will not cry, I will not cry, I WILL NOT CRY!

  "Damn, woman. You weren't kidding, were you?" He glanced over his shoulder, his hand still attached to me. I was surprised when I looked down to see that he was actually holding my hand.

  "What?"

  "That you know how to take care of yourself," he said with a manic grin. I didn't like it. I imagined his face held together from the inside by scotch-tape and that if he grinned like that hard enough, the tape would tear away and he would become nothing but cracks and bloody gashes. He was gripping my hand too hard for me to pull it free, even though I jerked my arm several times.

  "They're dead?" It came out a question, though I knew it was a fact. Two men, their bodies leaking out the blood they spent the last year trying to keep inside their bodies.

  Drake stopped in the middle of the sidewalk in front of a building that had boarded over windows and unreadable graffiti splayed across the entire façade. I blinked at it, curious what monsters lingered inside the darkness.

  "Are you okay?" he asked.

  I flinched when he reached a hand up to my face and attempted to fight back as he tilted my chin up. "I'm fine," I said through my clenched teeth.

  "No, you're not. Drink some water." He reached into his pack and tossed a bottle at me, then turned away, continuing up the sidewalk at a brisk pace.

  As I walked-jogged behind him, I drained the bottle of water and tossed it into the street, instantly appalled at my lack of concern for the environment as the plastic cylinder bounced twice before it rolled to a stop in the gutter. The environment - what a joke that had become. The millions of dead bodies polluting the ground and air outranked one empty plastic bottle.

  But I still felt a pang of guilt. Because that's who I was. My guilty conscious would never leave me be. It nagged at me - picking at my brain like a small child does at a splinter in their toe that they won't let their mother touch. Every thought was followed by guilt. Every smile, every laugh I had over the last year made me feel like shit because of it, but some of it was warranted, I knew that. I was a shit for smiling when my kids were dead. A shit for laughing after Fin was blown away in front of me. A shit for bringing Connor and Kris into the urban wilderness of California, when we had all been perfectly safe at home in the mountains. A shit for thinking I could storm a warehouse full of armed men and shoot them down without a care in the world.

  I was a complete and total shit.

  The first chance I got, after this mess in Orange County was over, I was going to walk to the coast and throw myself off the first cliff I found, letting the Pacific ocean claim me like it tried to do earlier that year.

  CHAPTER twenty

  Drake was right, the others did hear the shots and they scrambled down the street in our direction like two-legged cockroaches. I loathed roaches. They multiplied faster than rabbits and came out into the open only when it was dark. Except it wasn't dark when two fully armed men in black coats came running toward us. The tall one held a radio to the side of his head and as they neared, I could hear static growling from it angrily. Pointless, really - we had the walkie-talkies in our packs. Turned down low, of course. It's how we knew what street they would be taking.

  From across the residential lane, squished under a pickup truck, Drake sent me a thumb's up sign. This meant we were a go. I flattened myself beneath the massive bush I had crawled into and with a heavy exhale leveled my gun at the shorter man's head. He was closest to me. Drake had the sniper rifle he pinched off the first dead lookout pointing at the duo and when they were almost five feet from the bumper of the truck, Drake gave me a firm nod. Do it.

  My eyes involuntarily closed when my finger squeezed the trigger and my guy went down hard, landing on the ground a second before the radio guy. I didn't even hear the rifle shot. From under the bush, my knees began shaking so violently that they banged into the coarse dirt hard enough to leave bruises. Spittle flew from my mouth as I struggled to hold the cry in.

  Drake scrambled out of his hiding spot, only needing to crawl a few feet before he reached the first dead man's jean clad legs. I looked at his still boots as if the heels would magically click together and we would all wake up in a black and white world again - the color of blood no longer visible. Unlike Dorothy's ruby-red slippers, these boots were the kind that had a ste
el toe and laces that tied up the calf. Military boots. One of them twitched slightly when Drake nudged the man's side. After Drake shot him a second time in the face I turned my head to the side and did what my body so badly wanted to do for the last hour - I heaved up my meager food intake for the day into a wet, sloppy and grainy mess, missing my arm by a mere inch.

  ***

  There's something macabre about hunting the hunters. After I threw up in the bushes, I yacked all over the street while helping Drake pull the two dead men behind a house. A hole the size of a quarter replaced the taller man's right eye. The first shot had torn through his throat. As I stared down at what was left of the still warm body, I wondered if Drake was aiming for his freshly shaven neck on purpose. I wondered if Drake wanted the man to drown on his own blood, like he almost had that summer. There wasn't time to ask. The radio in the street screeched as another man's voice cut in and out. There were more of them - close by.

  "How many do you think are left?" I asked breathlessly, wiping the rotten drool from my chin. I would worry about my embarrassingly weak stomach later.

  "Let me think…maybe half a dozen or so. You know I haven't been out here for weeks, there could be more of them now," he said, briskly rubbing the top of his head with one blood-streaked hand.

  "Or less," I said softly.

  "What?"

  "You said there could be more of them…but there could be less."

  He stared at me like I was speaking a foreign language. "Don't count on that. I doubt we'll be that lucky," he said with a grunt. There was that word again - luck.

  As we walked north, following the curve of the road to the west, I said confidently more so for myself then for Drake, "Oh, I don't know about that. Seems like we've been pretty lucky so far."

  It was the hottest day of the week and we were in two layers of clothing, not counting our warm jackets. The thick canvas-like material had a green camouflage print that was meant to retain heat. And it worked well - I was hot. Sweat soaked the collar of my shirt, pooling in unpleasant places around my armpits and crotch. I walked with my legs slightly further apart than my normal gait because I wanted - no, I needed airflow between my legs. In California, the weather in the fall was always a gamble. It could be hot and dry or cold and wet. We didn't have dependable seasons in this part of the world.

  With my lower lip pinned between my teeth to keep from complaining out loud, we rounded a bend and found ourselves at a major intersection. The street sloped uphill over the freeway. The overpass fencing shimmered in the distance like a mirage.

  "That's the way," Drake began walking down the center of the street, the rifle slung over his shoulder like an urban gunslinger.

  "You sure you want to do this. Today?" I bit the inside of my cheek. I was the one that pushed him. I was the one that demanded this from him, yet I was willing to back out. To retreat to the safety of the solar paneled mini-mansion just a short walk away from anything and everything we could need.

  "Why not? We've already taken almost half of them out." He looked me up and down and then grimaced. "You're right. It's too much, isn't it? Doing all of this in one day?" With his hands outstretched before me, he looked like he was waiting for rain to come. It wouldn't.

  "It's afternoon. Let's find a place, wait for the others to come back. They have to regroup. We have to regroup." I nodded across the street at a school.

  "No way. That place gives me the creeps," he pointed behind me, into the neighborhood we just exited. "I think we should find a place around here, but keep it dark tonight."

  I nodded. "Lights out. Sounds good." And it did. I wanted a pillow to bury my head under. I wanted the darkness of sleep to take me over, consume me until there was no option but to allow my body to relax.

  The first house we approached smelled. We didn't bother to see if the doors were unlocked. The dead lived there. The next house had a unique design to the outside from the rest on the block. A more modern build, a sleeker yard with a waist-high wooden fence, that Drake grumbled was completely useless, and several bushes growing up around the front windows. We hopped over the painted fence and a piece of the rusty-red coloring flaked off against my palm. I felt like an animal, standing on the front stoop sniffing the air, hoping it didn't linger with the smell of rot.

  "It's locked," Drake said. He jiggled the handle in his hand before leaning over the porch railing to peek inside a window. "Looks clean. I'll go around back…you keep a lookout, yeah?"

  I nodded and watched him jump off the porch, his shoes making a scraping sound on the gravel that bordered the steps. A minute or so later, a crack of glass echoed through the house and I jumped back up the steps to look through the front window. The sheer curtains made it hard to see, but a shadowy figure moved slowly across the room, approaching the front door almost hesitantly.

  Already half-way to the fence with my pack thumping against my back and my heart crashing against my ribs like a feral cat stuck in a cage, Drake opened the front door and stuck his head out.

  "Hey, where you going?" he smiled, "Man, you've gotta see the master bedroom."

  ***

  Nightmarish. There wasn't a better word to describe what we saw. "I am not sleeping in here," I said finally, thumbing the room over my shoulder as I squirmed around Drake in the doorway.

  "Ha! And I am?" he scoffed, staying close behind me, no doubt just as wigged out by the master suite as I was.

  We set our packs on the kitchen table and took turns combing through the cabinets. Two cans of green beans, a pack of peach cups in heavy syrup, a can of cooked beets and a bag of peanuts later we displayed our loot on the table with mocked pleasure.

  "We'll be feasting tonight!" Drake cheered.

  "I'm allergic to peanuts," I lied. Drake dropped the few shells he had cracked open in his hand like they were radioactive and flung the bag off the table with a frantic swipe.

  It had to happen. That manic laugh one has when your psyche is just one warped event away from splitting into pieces, fracturing your mind beyond repair. The laugh was so violent that the convulsions brought me to my knees. I rocked back on my feet, not caring about the tears and snot flowing freely from my face as Drake stood next to the table, a look of shock plastered on his face.

  "You're losing it," he said.

  I nodded in agreement and his hazel eyes widened, which made me laugh harder of course. Even with a hand clamped over my mouth, I sounded like a rabid hyena. Ignoring the warning stitch in my side, I shrieked, giggled, guffawed and bellowed until my bladder threatened to empty itself - with or without a toilet nearby.

  Drake stood with his feet widened, his arms crossed at his chest and a curious look in his eyes as I fought to regain my composure and control of my cramping bladder. He furrowed his brow, the expression saying something like, 'What the actual fuck?' and that brought on another bout of giggles. With my knees pressed into each other, I struggled to right myself and swayed a bit before taking a deep breath.

  I was going to piss my pants if I didn't find the bathroom. Leaving Drake standing in the kitchen efficiently concerned with my mental well-being, I said over my shoulder on my way down the hallway, "I was just fucking with you, I'm not allergic."

  A peanut shell promptly flew into the back of my head, getting caught in my braid. "You little shit!" he laughed as I rounded a corner.

  Laughing. We killed four men and we were laughing.

  Yep, I was a shit alright.

  ***

  The sofa had a lump in it that pressed uncomfortably into my ribcage and sagged in a way that made my hip dip into the cushion awkwardly. Every half hour or so I turned like a piece of grilling meat on a rotisserie spit. My mind wandered through the past, present, and ignored the future completely. I didn't once think about the next day and what our plans were. I didn't think about the warehouse. What I thought about were walks on the beach. Hikes through the mountains. Holiday dinners and birthday cakes - all with the kids. Their smiling faces floated around my
mind like helium balloons, a constant reminder of the person I used to be.

  How foolish it was to think I could start over with a new love - a new family. As if it was really that easy. Somewhere in the tangled web of synapses, firing inside my skull was a memory. A reason why I got out of bed and decided to leave my house in the first place. But it was just out of reach, like searching for dropped keys on a moonless night. I knew it was there - the reason - but what it was escaped me.

  With a sigh, I rolled over again, this time facing the rest of the room, the other side of my hip sinking into the sofa. Drake was asleep on the recliner, his head turned away from me, one socked foot poking beneath the blanket he was loosely wrapped in. It occurred to me that we had lived together nearly a month and yet that was the first time I had seen the man sleeping. Memories of the angry kiss in the hallway came back to me and I groaned, rolling over again onto my back. It's not that Drake wasn’t an attractive man - we just weren't attracted to each other. He treated me like he would a rebellious little sister and I treated him like…well, I didn't treat him the way I should. He saved my life, offered me shelter, food, and the opportunity to seek revenge. The kiss was just weird. Though he didn't speak of his past, I wondered who he lost, who he had to leave behind.

  The rest of the night was like that - lost in thoughts, memories, and rotisserie squirming on the couch. When the temperature dropped, I knew dawn was soon approaching. I flung my blanket off, not trying to be quiet as I padded across the living room and down the hall to the bathroom.

  We closed the master suite door the night before on account of the hundreds of dolls that lined the walls, decorated the bed, and filled the floors two feet deep. They weren't cute, girly dolls. They were the kind with realistic glass eyes that followed you around the room and creepy grins that seemed to smirk at your back the moment you turned away. Old dolls with cracks in their ceramic skin and paper thin clothing. The lot would have been a collectors dream, but for two relatively normal people, it was like a scene from a slasher movie. The kind where evil dolls come to life and won't die no matter what you do to their little plastic bodies.