We’d talked about trying to get inside it before, but never really followed through. Easy and his skinny little ass were small enough to get inside a tiny little window on the second story that we figured we could get to, by going up onto the roof of the house next-door, and use some boards to get over on the roof of our target house. Then, on our ‘target’ house, we used a stick to bust out the little window, cleared the glass from the frame, and then I could lower Easy down till he could creep through this window. It was risky, but hey, that's life, bub... No risk, no reward!
After Easy got inside, I waited a while, but then I started to worry. Easy wasn't a very tough or smart kid; someone smart enough and rich enough to build this little fortress was probably also smart enough to set up booby traps around their stuff in case someone broke in – just like we were doing. I relaxed when he finally came back and started telling me about bodies inside, and that he was scared.
"Dude, go see if you can find a way to unlock the front door.. like a knob you can turn or keys to unlock it if there's no knob or whatever!" He went to look.
"James, there's keys."
"Fine, okay, do they work in the door?"
"uhh.. I di’n't try 'em." Like I said, he wasn't that smart.
"Okay, man, go try the keys. If they work, lock the door again and come back and tell me and I'll come down and you can let me in the front door."
Several minutes later, I heard Easy's whiny little voice again. "James, the keys don't work!"
"Why, Easy?"
"There's no hole to put em! I twisted the knob but there was no key hole."
Oh for fuck's sake.
"Easy, it's one of those deadbolt things, it doesn't need keys inside. Go downstairs and wait by the front door, I'll be there as soon as I get down off the roof!"
I nearly broke my damn neck by falling off the board-bridge, rushing back the roof, then down through that house, and then running back over to the front door of our target house. I called out softly, "Easy, can you hear me?"
"Yeah James I hear you!"
"K man.. " I tried the door handle - it was one of the simple round ones. Trying to turn it didn't go anywhere.. "try the main handle first, does it turn?"
I couldn't see it turn, but heard his voice.. "Yeah it turns James, but I can't open the door! What's wrong?!"
"Easy, is there a knob above the door handle?"
"Yeah James.."
"Okay, turn that, then try opening the door again." Boy, this kid wasn't gonna win any contests anytime soon.
I could hear the deadbolt slide back, then Easy again.. "James, I turned and pulled, it still won't open!"
"No Easy. Leave that one alone, try the big door handle again."
Still no go. It took us, god, it must have taken us half an hour back and forth until I FINALLY got him to flip not just the obvious deadbolt, but also two more that were only visible inside - one near the floor, and another so high up he had to go get a chair to stand on.
When that was all done? Man, It was EASY to get inside (ha! see what I did there?). We started digging around, and it turned out out the place was some hold-out for people back during the troubles.
We found skeletons - well, we found bodies really, with most of the flesh rotted off - just two of them, the ones that weirded Easy out in the first place. It was kind of creepy, though... one was in a bathtub, one arm hanging over the edge and a knife on the floor. The other was in a bed, covers over it, hands folded, with some weird rolling chair next to it. Okay, it was really creepy. First time I'd ever seen an actual bed, too... I thought it was some sort of strange thing that people used to do for dead people instead of tossing the bodies over to the tennies for that biological recycling thing they did.
The floors had this weird shit on them that was softer than concrete, but not quite like a pillow... it was weird. I'd never seen that before. Some of the floors had what looked like wood on them... It was really weird, but damn comfortable to walk on - and, as I found out later - to sleep on, compared to concrete. I later figured out this was called, “carpet.” Fun stuff, but trust me, the bed was even better than the carpet.
More than that, though... the place was a goddamn gold mine of stuff. We found all kinds of wild shit... rifles (like what I had in the military, but that story comes later), pistols, ammo for both, knives, swords, all kinds of other stuff... At the time, the guns were a 'boogeyman' thing - no-one in our gang had any firearms, but we'd heard about muskets. There was enough stuff in this house to arm probably three or four dozen people. I had no idea at the time, but there was a lot more than just firearms and bladed weapons. You don't get to hear that story until later.
The gear we found… It was like a dream at first because the stuff was lined up in racks, neatly stacked in boxes on shelves, all of it organized and easy to get to. It was a bit dusty and I figured it hadn’t been touched in years, but the rifles and pistols themselves had actually been packed in some sort of funky bag – I grabbed a box that had a drawing of a knife on it, thinking to get something to open up one of the bags that had a rifle in it.
The knife inside the box was a bit rusty along the edge, but the rest of it had a deadly looking black coating, over the whole thing. It was absolutely beautiful. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I was in love. It looked like a physical representation of all the rage and anger I had inside, compressed and condensed down into a single object. I loved that knife, I cleaned it up, and it became something of a signature weapon that other people knew was mine, mine alone, and not for the grubby hands of anyone other than “the leader.”
"Rage", as I called it, stayed with me every day after that first visit to the inside of what would later become our place.
I’d kept the box it was originally in, because it was so fascinating to me – a small box, neatly put together, it showed that people used to do things way cleaner than we do now. That –and a few other odds and ends that I came to like, and decided to keep around for my own personal use – stayed in my room in the house, a room all to myself. Years later, after I learned to read, I found out that the box’s outside said "Blackwater Ursa 6.” When I found out what Blackwater had been, and what “ursa” meant, my unit commanders thought I’d lost it from laughing so loud and so long.
The blade was pretty sharp despite being rusty along the cutting edge (but strangely, nowhere else on the blade), but it served to slice open the bag of a rifle I wanted to look at closer. As soon as I cut it, the bag stopped sticking to the rifle – I learned a long time later, the rifles had been vacuum packed to minimize damage and deterioration during long-term storage. Smart move – and, fortunately for me, that was the only rifle I opened that day. I later used the same M34 rifle in the military, but on that day, I didn’t do anything other than just gawk. I looked at a pistol, too – it was an ancient thing, part metal and part plastic, but all black and all lethal. I realized later it was an M17 – a Sig Sauer p320 modular gun. The equipment was probably a hundred years old, but looked like it was brand-new, thanks to the vacuum packing done in inert gas chambers.
The knives… there were only two others like Rage, but it was the only one with the really wild sheath that was in the box with it – all the others had some sort of cheap-feeling canvas sheaths. There were many other kinds of knives, too. Some were fixed-blade ones like our fighters had, simple and cheap, but sharp and effective. Some were folding knives that we hadn’t seen much of, and I took one to sell to a tenement soldier. Easy wanted to take one as well, but I told him no. That was a bad idea – well, both were bad ideas. Both him taking one, and, me telling him no.
There were backpacks – I’d seen ones like them before, but never in the sealed packaging. There were utility belts, made of some sort of material that was thin but strong. There were boots –all one size, and too big for either Easy or I, but we still looked at it all. Some of it – like a weird looking jacket – was decayed and falling apart, probably because of the age, but most of the gear was solid.
Speaking of the jacket… I remember pulling at it, and it crumbling in my hands, but as it did, it showed a bunch of plastic crates behind it. We pulled one out, and it turned out to have a bunch of different sizes of shirts and pants. The clothes were what we wanted most, because they were so well put together and comfortable compared to the rags we had. They had weird splotches all over them - I know now that it was a camouflage pattern, but at the time, it was just some weird gang colors to me, and it was better than what I already had on me. We kept rifling through the boxes and found other uniforms as well, just simple tan or khaki-colored ones. We actually took some of those, that very first day - I needed pants to cover up the welts and bruises you could see on my legs, and Easy took a shirt kind of thing that had a zipper in front, same pattern as the pants.
Those fucking boots that Pip had? Yeah, we had BETTER ones here. God, whoever stocked this place must have had a ton of cash, because there was stuff in this place for literally hundreds of people!
The biggest and best thing was, there was food. Oh my god, there was food. We'd heard stories before about people who ate too much exploding from it (which we’d always thought was just a lie to keep us from wanting to eat more), so we were a bit terrified and we only ate a little. The strange thing was, the food was in bags, inside paper bag/box things, inside other boxes... We only found it because I thought there'd have been some other good shit inside these boxes - there were boxes full of boxes in the basement of this place... Turns out there were different kinds of food in each but damned if there wasn't enough there to feed a lot of people for a month or two - or a few people for a lot longer than that.
Since we had keys now, we were able to walk out the front door like fucking kings or generals or some shit, leaving for some sort of adventure. I hid the key in a place where no-one would ever think to look, so that coming back would be a lot easier - and we did come back, a lot.
To this day, I don't think anyone ever managed to get into that place uninvited, except Easy and I. It was far enough away from most of the tenements it would take four or five hours to walk there. Not only that, it required someone small enough, smart enough, and trustworthy enough to figure out how to get into that window and then unlock the door afterward - and trust like that just doesn't happen with ignorant, dipshit dumbfuck gang leaders like... well, pretty much every street gang member I ever met. Yeah, I'm an arrogant little fucker, but then again, I'm also smarter than the rest of you, too.
You’ve heard from me a couple of times now about how smart I am, but I think you probably just don’t understand what I’m getting at.
Pip was hand-to-mouth, and his only thoughts were about filling his belly, getting his rocks off, and the rest of us obeying whatever he told us to do or not do. I was already planning not just for tomorrow or next week; with the discovery of the safe house, I’d started planning for next month, next year, and the year after that.
No, I think you probably still don’t get it. I don’t mean just moving into it, although we eventually did do that – and, according to a plan that I’d made, despite having to execute that a little earlier than I’d intended… I mean we started fixing the place up to be more than it already was. It took us months, but we had time.
A lot of these places didn’t have running water – and our safe house didn’t, either, when we moved in. We did, however, fix the gutters, find rain barrels and route piping from the gutters to the rain barrels inside the house, to multiple rooms – and then MORE piping (that would have been worth a fortune, to the tennies!) to take away old water, so it was always fresh since the last rain.
That was just the basics. We also figured out that the sewers were still working, so we put rain barrels into the bathrooms (and this place had three) so we had toilets that actually flushed! Shit, that was such a rush the first time I took a shit without having to dump a shit can out the window.
The insides of the house needed some fixing, too… Those two bodies? Yeah, we ditched those… not into the arkie’s thing, but rather, to a house a few doors down. I wanted them out of the way because it was just weird, and, I wanted the space for myself - and my plans.
Yeah, like I said, plans. We started bringing stuff to the safe house, instead of to the tennies, or back to Pip. That caused problems, but in the long run, was better for us – and for me. Remember, this place had some weird sort of metal walls inside the walls. We took advantage of that and started changing the inside of the house as well, so that we could actually use the front door as a first gate, and you could come in but couldn’t get to anyone else until we opened the SECOND door that we built, inside. It wasn’t metal, but it was a solid double-layer wooden door, and was mounted so that it would be really difficult for someone to just knock down. The term, I learned later, was “Mantrap” – and we had ample opportunities to use it later on. Where’d the material come from to do this extra building? We started taking down the houses next to ours, because we wanted to see more of what might be coming at us. Those extra doors, wood, metal, you name it – it all got used to boost the strength of our place.
We made other (and BIGGER) changes to the house and the yard, later, but that’s another story, for another time.
The whole idea was to make this place a total fortress – not as pretty or as automated as an arkscraper, but our own version, out in the middle of no-where compared to the rest of the city. I found out later that this place was called “Riverdale” and was in “The Bronx.” Old names for an even older city – but names that would again become known far and wide if I had anything to do about it.
Not bad for a kid who didn’t even have any hair on my balls yet. I TOLD you I was smart. Maybe next time you’ll believe me when I tell you something.
Chapter 3: Growing Up
Easy and me, we didn’t say shit to Pip or anyone else about our new threads; we just made sure they looked dirty and old by rolling around in the dirt, and scuffing them up. It must have worked, because no-one said shit other than ask what corpse we took ‘em off of.
Things settled into a routine again – I stayed out of Pip’s way (and Mary’s, that stupid bitch) and made sure I was never around where Pip could say much about me taking his shit. Unfortunately, things weren’t ALL routine – I think I said, I didn’t know how old I was? Well, usually you hit a certain timeframe in your life when you start to grow up instead of out, and your body starts changing, and… well, you get my drift.
As I started getting bigger, and looking meaner and meaner, Pip couldn’t help but notice.. And he made me start working with Pug, another guy in the gang, who was one of the better fighters. The whole idea was, making me into a soldier meant one more way that Pip could get back at me - by putting me where OTHER people could beat me up or hurt me or… worse.
Pug was pretty good. He already was pretty scarred up; he’d been hit with blades, clubs, and he’d even been shot a couple of times. All of that made him start to pay attention to what was going on around him, and made him learn - the hard way - how to be that much harder to hurt or kill. He must have liked me, because he taught me the same things, without me having to get smacked, sliced, or popped – by other soldiers, in our gang or from other gangs.
Yeah, our guys fought each other sometimes, too. Sometimes it was as simple as wanting someone’s club, blade, or occasionally, their guns (although no-one else in the gang had anywhere the quality or quantity of guns that me and Easy had, at the Safe House).
I got pretty good at it. No, I got REALLY good at it. I went from five feet tall, to 5’2, to 5’4, to 5’8 in the space of a couple or four months. Better? Because of all of the scrounging I’d grown up doing, I already had some knotted muscles under my skin, despite being a young kid, and those muscles stuck with me. I went from fat to scrawny, and I was mean, and I was fast. Put all that together with Pug’s lessons, and I was downright dangerous.
He wasn’t like those karate kids or real soldiers, but Pug had learned about moving as you fight.
He’d also learned how to use your whole body to attack or defend, instead of just using fists and feet to attack, and arms and legs to defend – I learned from him, and I learned well.
Of course, there’s also a difference between learning, and doing, and I found that out the hard way. Remember I said we sometimes would send our fighters out to rip off other gangs? Yeah, well, Pip had us take on another gang that was a bit smaller and a bit older than us, and it was a big wake-up call for me. We didn’t use anything at all like strategy or tactics, like I learned later in the military – we just pretty much walked into another gang’s place, told them to get the fuck out, and if they didn’t, then we went at them with fists, clubs, and knives.
I had Rage with me, tucked away under the leg of my pants, but I wasn’t about to pull out my pig-sticker to give myself a competitive advantage; I knew that if I did that, it would get a lot of attention, and Pip or others would hit me as a group and take it. Instead, I had a short length of pipe I’d yanked out from under a bathroom sink in a house we’d scrounged in – it had a weird curve in it, but with the round side being more of a club, and the other open-end of the pipe being sharper, I could be hard, or I could be hard and lethal, depending on my mood.
Rage & Fury Page 2