by Connor Mccoy
Bingo. Now was his chance. He quickly kicked and kicked at The Coach, not unlike wrestlers he had watched on TV. He thrashed quickly. He couldn’t let The Coach gather his wits.
Come on, go down, go down!
But The Coach could not be caged. He burst out of Criver’s assault and pushed him back hard with both palms. The force was so powerful it launched Criver backward, sending him stumbling toward the opposite set of ropes. He stopped himself, but just barely kept standing.
The Coach then reached into the side of his left boot and ripped out a small knife. He held it close to his face, so close he nearly kissed the metal. “I will win,” he said as he stepped on one of the blood stains on the mat. “I always win. I always win!”
So much for ripping my limbs from my body, Criver thought. For the first time, The Coach actually sounded a little unsure of himself. Perhaps the possibility of losing finally had entered his mind, but that actually could be a problem. Cornered animals were often the most vicious.
So, Criver would have to outthink The Coach, and fast.
The tall, scarred brute let out a loud yell, and then charged Criver like a mad bull. Criver quickly stood directly in front of the ropes nearest a ring post.
Now!
Criver ducked low. The Coach’s blade kissed empty air instead of Criver’s neck. Instead, Criver grabbed two ropes and snagged The Coach’s blade arm between them. Then he yanked backward on them, pulling them taut. The Coach’s arm now was locked in the ropes. Criver snaked his leg around the ring post for added support.
“Let…me…go!” The Coach’s words were accompanied by gobs of spit.
Criver responded with a sharp kick to The Coach’s face. Not as sharp as he would like, but he was using much of his strength to hold The Coach firm. Blood tricked out The Coach’s nose.
“You’re still a child!” Criver yelled with every hit to The Coach’s face. “You…never…grew…up! You never left the past behind!”
The Coach roared his loudest yet. Then he yanked strenuously, jostling the ring post loose with his strength. But as it turned out, The Coach was a little too strong for the makeshift ring he had erected. Criver seized the chance by releasing the ropes and then slamming the hardest kick he could muster against the back of The Coach’s head.
With a bellow, The Coach tumbled out of his ring and onto the hard floor below, dragging down the ropes and the adjoining post with it. The rest of the ring followed.
Still on the mat, Criver stumbled backward and fell over. The punishment he had taken from The Coach had caught up with him. Pain shot through his body, particularly his legs. He wondered if that last kick had torn something in his leg.
At that moment, the rear doors of the cafeteria burst open. Cheryl came rushing out—with about thirteen children behind her. But it was the boy at Cheryl’s side that caught Criver’s immediate attention.
“Amir.” Criver would have shouted for joy if so much life hadn’t been knocked out of him. She had found him!
“Mister Criver!” Amir called back. He broke from Cheryl’s side, but the sergeant caught him.
“Wait! Wait, baby.” She held Amir tight. “Don’t go near The Coach. Stay here. I’ll go help him.”
But Cheryl never got the chance. Criver caught a brief glimpse of the eyes of the children. They all fastened onto The Coach, who just had risen to full height. His hands were free, with his knife knocked a good few feet away. Criver expected the kids to scurry away from The Coach like frightened prey. After all, he had been their captor.
Instead, they all rushed at him.
“Wait!” Cheryl cried out, but it was no use. Even Amir broke away and dashed toward The Coach.
The Coach, the captor of children, turned to see the mass of kids rampaging at him. The look in his eyes betrayed confusion. The man who had wielded such power could not comprehend that things were going so wrong.
Then they all piled right onto him. The Coach was forced down onto the floor.
It was a scene right out of a old horror movie that Criver had watched as a child, The Island of Lost Souls. It was based on a slightly differently named H.G. Wells novel about a scientist who took animals and tried turning them into human-like creatures. But at the end of the movie, the human-animals turned on the scientist who made them after his evil was exposed. They attacked and stabbed him to death with his own scientific tools.
That spectacle was repeating itself. For all of his fierceness and brutality, The Coach was just one man, and after taking a beating from Criver, he was no match for thirteen angry children. The little ones forced him down on the ground. They used any instruments they could find, from stones to chains to their own fists and even their fingernails. The Coach screamed and wailed, but he had no hope of escape. Criver could make out nothing of him but his twitching legs under the mob.
“My God!” Cheryl approached Criver. The Coach’s wails turned to sickening gurgles.
Criver wasn’t sure what to do. The bastard was getting what he deserved, but he didn’t want these kids around this monster, even if they were pummeling him like a punching bag. No, he had to try calming them down. “Alright,” he exerted. “Alright! That’s enough!”
“Stop!” Cheryl rushed over to the thrashing mass of kids. “Please, stop! You’ve got him!” She waved at them. “You’ve got him. You’ve got him.” One child, then a second, then a third, stopped their assault and stepped back. Cheryl kept repeating, “He’s not going to hurt you anymore. He’s not. He’s not.”
Chapter Twenty
Amir ran up to Criver. “Hey buddy!” The two hugged each other tight. It was hard for Criver to hold back his tears.
“Papa,” Amir said in Criver’s embrace.
Criver smiled. “Papa, huh?”
Amir pulled back. “Sorry. I got excited.”
“No, that’s okay.” Criver rubbed the top of Amir’s head. “Papa. That, that’s okay.”
Amir smiled. The two silently agreed with each other. “Papa” it was.
Labored wheezing caught Criver’s attention. He parted from Amir and stood up. The other children were keeping their distance from The Coach, who now was lying flat on his back with breathing that sounded pained and forced. “Stay here,” Criver ordered Amir. He’d be the one to finish this, however it happened.
He approached The Coach. Criver was taken aback at the children’s savagery. The Coach was battered and bruised, and slashed in several places. Blood trailed down his arms and head in small streams. His left eye was swollen shut. Broken off teeth lay on his chin and near his arm.
Cheryl joined Criver, clenching her jaw. She wasn’t going to betray any hint of compassion for this beast. Criver mentally agreed. In a world where the normal law enforcement had been obliterated, there was no one to arrest and try The Coach, except for these kids. In the end, he had been judged and executed by these children.
It still sickened Criver that The Coach had so brutalized these kids that they had to respond so ruthlessly.
But with the sight of the dying man, the horrid dreams of the past few days seemed to perish with him. No longer would he view The Coach as an unstoppable demon who would destroy him and his new family. No, he was mortal and soon would be gone from this life—from their lives—forever.
“Guess it’s fitting,” Criver said, partially to himself. “You were taken out by just little kids. Each one of them is so much smaller than you, but all together…” He bowed his head. “Damn.”
A gust of pained air rose through The Coach’s throat. He was trying to speak. “I…”
Criver and Cheryl tensed up. But The Coach wasn’t moving. He was fighting just to say something. These could be his last words.
“I am not…only one. There are others. We capture, trade. I got many, but there are more…a chain of us.”
Criver’s skin ran cold. “You’re telling me there’s more kids out there in the hands of more assholes like you?”
The Coach’s lower lip formed an awk
ward smile, not helped by the absence of several lower teeth. “With many parents dead, the children are left…and we take them for our own wishes…”
Cheryl suddenly whipped out her baton. “That does it! Get ready to meet Hell, you son of a bitch!”
“Wait!” Criver grabbed her arm and talked to his defeated adversary. “Where are they?”
“To the east, past the Apalachicola River.” The Coach’s mutilated smile sickened Criver even more. He had half a mind to let Cheryl finish him, but he couldn’t, not if The Coach could provide information. Criver grilled him for more. The Coach did provide some—a few names, some transit points--but not much.
“I am not trying to help you,” The Coach said. “You are going to your deaths. And they…” He coughed. A spittle of blood gushed out of his lips. “…will take…yours…”
Cheryl’s hand trembled. She wanted to finish him. “No,” Criver said, reading her intent. “Let their handiwork stand.” He nodded to the children.
She looked at them, and their faces. She dropped her baton. “Tom…” A tear fell down her cheek.
“Hey.” He clasped her cheeks with his hands, raising her face to his. “Let’s put on a brave face for these kids. We’re their heroes. Let’s show them what heroes look like.”
She stole a glance at the children. They all fixed on her and Criver. So many young eyes still comprehending that they were free, and wondering who these two people were who had freed them. They needed to see strength and resolve after having been so helpless for so long. So, she and Criver would provide it.
“Right.” She wiped her right eye. “Right.”
A strange silence filled the air. They turned aside. The Coach was completely still, his fingers frozen open in a vise-like grip. The monster at last had perished.
Criver pulled off the last branch, unveiling the car he and Cheryl had used to get here. Their camouflage had gone completely undisturbed, to Criver’s great relief.
“The car works?” Amir asked. “But all the other cars got shut down.”
“It’s just made of sturdier stuff.” Criver playfully knocked on the car’s metal skin. “It doesn’t have any computer chips to get fried, and the wires were covered enough so the pulse didn’t get them.”
“We get to ride in a car?” asked one of the boys.
“Sure do, but we must plan our trip carefully because there are no working gas stations. When we run out, this thing isn’t going to run anymore.” Plus, there was engine oil and the car battery, but no need to fill these kids’ heads with anything more to worry about.
Criver looked over the mass of children they had taken with them from The Coach’s hideout. Counting Amir, it was thirteen in all, some a little older and younger than him, nine boys and four girls. None of their clothes were in pristine condition, ranging from dirty and slightly worn to full of holes and hanging off their bodies. It disturbed Criver to his core. They were alive, but God only knew how much they had suffered at the hands of The Coach, and his insane and brutal followers. They were a mass of stories yet to be told.
The only consolation was he and Cheryl never found any dead children inside the hospital. He hoped and prayed that no children actually had perished in there before he and Cheryl had broken in, but judging from the blood stains in The Coach’s ring, some people undoubtedly had died in there.
Cheryl strolled up to him, her bucket of freshly picked nettles and dandelions in hand. “Wasn’t much, but I did find a patch back there.”
“We’re going to need it.” Criver lowered his voice. “All those kids. We’re probably going to strip the forest just to feed them all.” He was ecstatic that they had freed so many from The Coach’s grasp, but now he was faced with the terrifying prospect of caring for them all. That would be nerve-wracking enough in a world where everything worked.
“But we’re all they got.” He squeezed her shoulder. “Well, I did say you’d be a fantastic mommy. I think the universe just decided to put you to the test.”
“And you, too, Mister Thomas Criver.” She narrowed her eyes mischievously. “Daddy.”
“Papa,” Criver corrected. “At least that’s what Amir’s going to call me.”
She leaned in close. “Fine, ‘Papa.” Criver took the hint and planted a kiss directly on her lips.
“Gross.”
Criver looked over Cheryl’s shoulder at the boy who had said it. “Gross?” He marched over to him, a tall kid in battered blue clothes and a mess of blond hair. “So, what’s your name?”
“Terry.”
“Terry, huh?” Criver narrowed his eyes. “Well, let me give you some pointers. You’re young now, right?”
“Nine,” he replied.
“Nine. Well, someday you’re going to start going through some changes. And when you do, girls are going to start looking a little different to you.” He approached Cheryl. “They’re suddenly going to be appealing in some ways, but you just won’t be able to put your hand on it.”
As he got to the word “hand,” he glided his hand across Cheryl’s posterior, giving it a good feel. She jerked back in surprise and cried out a “Whoa!”
Criver kept talking as if Cheryl had not reacted. “See, in a few years, you’re going to start feeling that things like kissing aren’t gross at all. That’s when you need to be a man, to guide you through—”
He didn’t get to finish the sentence as Cheryl sprung around and sweep kicked him right in the legs, dropping him into a bed of leaves. The sergeant then planted her left boot on top of his chest.
“Ow!” Criver chuckled. “Hey, I thought I was done getting my ass thrown onto the ground.”
Cheryl glanced at the children. “And girls, this is how you deal with boys if they get a little too frisky for their own good,” she said. Some of the girls giggled.
“Oh, I don’t care. It was worth it,” Criver said.
Cheryl then backed up her boot and held it over his crotch. Some of the boys said, “Whoa!” and “Yikes!” while the girls laughed and even cheered a little. Cheryl then raised an eyebrow.
“Touché,” Criver replied.
“I’ll spare you this time, but that means you have to drive,” she said.
Criver sat up. “And just where are we going?”
“East,” she replied. “We busted up one bad guy. Feel like adding more notches to your belt?” She withdrew her boot, then reached down and held out her hand.
He took it. “You bet.”
Once on his feet, Criver wrapped an arm around Cheryl’s waist. “Looks like we have a family station wagon,” she said.
“Family?” He eyed the kids. “So, I guess they’re all ours, huh?”
She nodded. “Looks like it.” She had talked a little to some of the kids, and almost all of them so far confessed that their parents or guardians had died in the aftermath of the pulse.
Criver let out a long breath. “Wow. Please tell me you saved most of that toilet paper.” He knew they had bartered some of it earlier with Stone’s group at the pharmacy.
“I think we have some.”
Criver stared at the car. “I just had a terrifying thought.”
“What?”
“We’re not going to have a lot of privacy with our new family.” He lowered his voice. “I hope last night was enough for a while?”
Cheryl playfully slapped him in the stomach. “Oh, shut up.” She giggled, then pulled free.
“Come on.” She opened the back passenger-side door. “Alright, kids. Now we must figure out how to pile you all in here. We probably should call this The Sardine Express. Oh, and let’s finally introduce ourselves. I think I got six names.”
Criver eyed the crowd of kids. “Also, before we go…make sure you all go to the bathroom because we are not stopping for bathroom breaks.”
Find out what happens in part two! Coming Soon!
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