by Joshua Gayou
“What the hell is this?” I yelled, tryin’ to be heard over the gunfire.
“Army leftovers,” Mike yelled back. “They have a base of some sort setup at the Portland International Airport. I don’t think they have much of a command structure left, though; they seem to be pretty disorganized. They’ve been trying to take our section of the city back for weeks.”
“You assholes are at war with the Army?” shouted a disbelieving Robert.
“Eh, I don’t know if I’d call it a war. We just sort of disagree on a few key points, you know?”
A bullet whined and snapped as it flew by a few inches overhead and we all ducked in reflex. I said, “Look, Mike, this is all beyond us. Just let us go. You guys got your hands full. We don’t want a damned thing to do with any of this!”
Mike was already shaking his head before I’d finished speakin’. “No can do, my man. The rules are absolute; you gotta see Raul. Just chill here a bit; we’ll get this all figured out soon enough.”
“Hell with this!” growled Robert. He reached out, wrapped both his hands around the stock of Mike’s rifle and yanked hard enough to pull the man off the wall and across the whole damned alley. They rolled all around with the weapon locked between them, lookin’ like a couple of ‘coons fighting over a hotdog.
“Jee-zus…the fuck’re you doin’!” snarled Mike while arching his back and writhin’ all around in the trash of the alley. Robert didn’t bother to answer, instead lettin’ go of the rifle with one of his hands to start hammerin’ Mike repeatedly in the face. He got in ‘bout five or six solid shots, splittin’ Mike’s lips, breakin’ his nose, and causin’ all kinds of mayhem in general.
It was a mistake, though. With only one of Robert’s hands holdin’ the rifle, Mike had the leverage to angle it back into the boy’s chest and fire.
The shot surprised me; sounded somehow louder than all of the other gunfire goin’ on around the corner, which was beginnin’ to taper off a bit, even though the shot had been muffled due to the muzzle bein’ jammed into Robert’s body. Robert didn’t seem to react at all, outside of shiftin’ his body slightly, adjustin’ the grip of his left hand closer to the muzzle so he could push it away, and continuin’ to hammer punches down on Mike’s head. I stood there, horrified; watchin’ a patch of red bloom over the boy’s left shoulder.
Mike eventually lost all sense and his grip loosened to the point that Robert could yank the rifle from his hand. Robert stood up, levelled the weapon, and fired three rounds into Mike’s chest, point blank. He turned to look at me and panted, “We gotta get the fuck outta here.” You ever hear someone say, “Such and such a thing turned my bowels to water”? I never really understood the phrase until that moment when Robert spoke to me. I’d been scared and excited in my life before that, but the physical experience of it was always more like a flush of heat runnin’ through me or my heart a-jackhammerin’ in my chest. This time, the sound of Robert’s voice honest to God made my insides churn like they was all liquid an’ gettin’ stirred up by a paddle.
The boy’s voice was all wrong; had gone all croupy and wheezy. There was this clickin’ deep in his throat when he breathed, almost like what you’d hear when you put a playin’ card in some bicycle spokes, only slow, like. And he was breathin’ hard, breathin’ like he was trying to suck down e’ry last bit of oxygen in the area and still couldn’t get enough.
I looked down at his body and saw the matchin’ red bloom in his shirt over his right chest. I said, “You hit, son,” and was shocked at how hard my voice shook.
It only seemed to make him angry. He said, “Damn it, Otis, did you hear me? Come on!” He grabbed me by the collar and pulled me along after him. I did my best to keep up with the one gimp leg but had to hobble pretty fast, takin’ a couple of steps for each one of his.
He poked his head out to see what was happening up the street only to yank it back out of sight when a bullet exploded a brick on the wall close by. He fanned dust out of his hair and I heard Pete’s voice call out from across the street, “Mike, what the hell’s going on over there? Get your ass out here and fight! Frank’s dead! Albert’s dead! We gotta get the fuck out of here!”
“He doesn’t know what happened. He still thinks he has a buddy back here,” Robert wheezed just before launchin’ into a coughing fit. He coughed a long time, body doubling over, while the gunfire kept rolling up the street and Pete kept yellin’ for his friend Mike to help stir the pot. When he got control of himself, he said, “I’m going to step out and give you some cover. You get your ass over to the SUV. Get it started up and ready to roll.”
“You’re gonna get hit,” I said. “There’s another way. We can circle back around this building, come out ‘round the other side and work our way up from behind-“
He was shakin’ his head impatiently. “I can’t walk that far.” He was leanin’ hard into the wall like he was tryin’ to keep the building from fallin’ over.
“There’s not a lot of time,” he wheezed. His face got really serious before he said, “Don’t you fucking waste this, Otis!”
He swung out around the corner and commenced to light up the entire street. I didn’t see what all he was firin’ at; I was already hobble-skipping at full speed over to the driver’s side of the SUV. I just saw Pete go down out of the corner of my eye as I slammed the door behind me. Samantha and Ben was both screaming from their huddled position in the back seat but I either didn’t understand or don’t remember what they was shouting.
I had the engine runnin’ and the transmission thrown into reverse. I almost stomped on the gas but looked up to Robert instead. He was on his knees by that point. He was still shootin’ but the red patch over his shoulder was a lot bigger and there were new patches of red all over the rest of him as well. He fanned out behind himself with his left hand, shooin’ me away like I was some kind of annoyance he was just too tired to deal with. He keeled over onto his side, lifted the rifle up, and kept firing.
I hit the gas.
Gibs
Otis had gone quiet, not bothering to indicate that he was done speaking. He just stared into the flames licking up out of the barrel, lost in his own head, playing back what had happened and no doubt seeing all the things he could have done differently to save his friend. Children laughed from across the way and I realized Jeff was still over there doing his thing; keeping them all entertained and out of our conversation. I saw that the girl Samantha sat silently, looking troubled, and I wondered if she had heard anything, or how much she’d heard.
I waited about a minute to give someone else the chance to say something. When no one took it, I asked, “How certain are you that those men on the rooftops were Soldiers?”
Otis looked at me, surprised, and shrugged. “I ain’t, I guess. Sure dressed the part, from what I could see. They had the helmets, anyway.”
“Why do you ask, Gibs?” Jake asked.
“Well, it sounds like they had an ambush set up, only it was poorly executed. When you lay an ambush like that, you typically want an element to close in from the rear and block off any kind of escape, only you folks drove right out of there. I’m just a little surprised.”
“I don’t think they was interested in prisoners,” Otis said slowly. “They never called out at us to surrender or anything. They just up and started firin’.”
“Well, as to that,” I said, “that all depends on their past history with your group of red-armed bandits. If they’d mixed it up enough with that group, they certainly wouldn’t greet them with a handshake.”
“Maybe they didn’t expect the third vehicle?” Amanda suggested. “Maybe the train was too long and they couldn’t close in from behind?”
“That shouldn’t have mattered,” I said. “There’s typically enough flexibility built into the kill zone that you can correct for things like that.”
“Maybe they were just undermanned,” said Jake as he rose from his chair. “There could be any number of explanations. Fruitless to
speculate, though, with the information we have.”
“Where’re you going, Jake?” asked Amanda. He was moving across the circle of people towards the cabin.
“I’m going to go grab something. Why don’t you take Otis over to Billy’s Tree? I’ll meet you there.”
A few minutes later, Amanda and Otis stood in front of a massive fir tree, though I couldn’t tell you the exact kind of tree it was, with Barbara, Wang, George, myself, and the rest of the grownups all standing back from them by a few feet to give them some space. I couldn’t see much in the black of night as we were pretty removed from the fire; there were just two people-shaped voids standing out in front of me, about ten feet away. I heard soft footsteps approaching on the right and Jake’s apparition appeared next to them.
“That’s Billy, then?” Otis asked.
“It is,” said Jake.
There was the sound of a sniffle, followed by Otis again. “You folks saved us all, back then. Didn’t have to.” His voice shook.
“We’re glad you came to find us,” said Amanda. I thought I saw an arm go around a set of shoulders but it was so damned dark I couldn’t be sure.
There was the sound of liquid swirling in a bottle, followed by a gasp. Jake said, “Here”, and then that same swirling sound and another gasp, this time with a cough.
“Hah!” Otis growled. “This the same stuff we had last time?”
“The same bottle,” Jake confirmed. Another round of swirling; this time Amanda gasping.
They were quiet a while. Finally, Otis said, “Always wondered, Jake. What did you say to Robert that day? That boy grew into a different person after we parted ways. He grew into a man. What’d you tell him?”
Jake didn’t answer for a good, long time and I thought no answer would be forthcoming, which we’d all grown used to. He surprised us all, though, and said, “Just told him a bit about me. Where I’d been. Where he was heading if he didn’t watch it.” Another swirl and a cough.
“Yeah,” agreed Otis.
I must have been bouncing on the balls of my feet. I’d never heard Jake give up that much before and was holding my breath just waiting for him to say something else. Within my head, my inside voice – that part of me that does the yelling when I become aggravated – was screaming, “What? Fuck, man, don’t stop there! More, goddamn it!”
Instead, I said in a calm and controlled tone: “Where is it you’ve been, Jake?”
I could feel the people standing around me tense up. We were all waiting to hear what he’d say. In the dark, a hand reached out and squeezed mine, though I have no clue who it was. The flesh was soft and loose; I suspected Barbara.
In the darkness, Jake’s voice floated back to us, hollow and remote. “Here and there.”
A sound of swirling liquid, splattering in the dirt, and Jake was gone.
23 – Powder Keg
Gibs
Though Oscar had busted his ass both day and night to produce housing adequate to meet the demand of our group, it remained that there were still pockets of people packed in tighter than could reasonably be considered comfortable. With three additional people moving into the neighborhood, Oscar, Greg, and Alan redoubled their efforts with urgency to find ways to get everyone housed. This was especially critical, as the housing distribution had not ended up being equitable in some situations; mostly due to the composition of our little sub groups. For example, people with familial relationships naturally wanted to be housed together, and yet these relationships all consisted of no more than two people; Greg and Alan, Monica and Rose, Oscar and Maria, and Amanda and Lizzy. We simply had to fit more than two people to a residence in order to make the best use of our space, which essentially meant that we were asking families to take on adoptees.
The challenge is that family members paired with acquaintances creates an us-and-them dynamic, which boiled down to the very real problem that most individuals didn’t feel comfortable being paired up to live with a family, whether that family was fine with having that person in the home or not. There were cases were it worked out, of course. Rebecca ended up living with Monica and Rose in a container home, as they all did a pretty good job getting along. Alish, who was at the time still struggling to fit in and find her place in the community, ended up staying with the Page brothers, again in another container home; an arrangement I suppose came about naturally just because all three of them had spent the most time together and were all at ease in each other’s company.
On the other hand, you had Oscar and his little girl Maria, who had a whole container home to themselves, due in large part to the fact that most people had no desire to encroach on that father-daughter relationship, especially with her at such a young age. It was naturally agreed without the need for discussion that those two just required their own place to be their own way.
A lot of these little live-in relationships came about naturally, like I said, but the problem was that the leftovers created some rough dynamics that needed some pretty rapid resolution before shit came to a head. You had Fred Moses, for one, who nobody in their right mind wanted to room with; not because he was a slob or anything – he just snores like a motherfucker. Sleeping anywhere within twenty feet of the man is basically pronouncing a death sentence on quality sleep (unless you’re a veteran; guys like me can sleep through anything). Not only that, he had a quirky personality, as I’ve taken the trouble to illustrate in past entries. I’m still trying to find a good way to describe Fred’s temperament and, so far, I’ve failed to find anything that fits without running my mouth for fifteen minutes to describe him into the ground. Most of the time, the guy is totally personable, right? Quick to laugh, quick to joke, always the first guy to pitch in to help when help is needed, and he’ll absolutely break his damned back in the process of helping you out. And yet every so often, you find patches of his hide that are paper thin. It’s bizarre. With most people, you just know; you can either talk shit with them or you can’t. With Fred, you can talk shit with him most of the time, until you find whatever random hot button that manages to piss him off for that day. Then it’s all hurt feelings and dick measuring contests until he gets over it. It’s tough for me to put my finger on - I hesitate to label the guy a bully; I’ve seen how they operate and Fred doesn’t fit the profile. But there is definitely a kind of you-got-me-so-now-I’m-gonna-get-you-harder thing going on with him.
So, yeah, people are cool with Fred, for the most part, but nobody wants to live with his Baby Huey ass.
Same deal with Wang and Edgar, for obvious reasons, I should think. Wang has a sharp fucking tongue; a point I’ve discussed with him on more than one occasion. He’s been good about taking the criticism and I’ve noted him making an effort to dial it back but all it takes is a little stress to bring out the personality that I’ve begun to think of as Belligerent Wang. That guy can do some outright damage with his mouth; and he knows just how to hit those little exposed nerves that you work so hard to keep covered. He just…lifts the flap off ‘em and braises ‘em with a torch.
So, a little stress and Wang starts throwing darts. As bad luck would have it, we were all feeling stress in those days because the food situation was a constant concern that just wasn’t getting any better and Old Man Winter (the inconsiderate prick) just kept getting closer.
Then there was Edgar. I’m starting to think he doesn’t realize how he comes off; the reality is that he’s an effortless douche canoe. He doesn’t even have to try. It’s like he’s a virtuoso of condescension and backhanded compliments. He’s just always convinced that he knows better than everyone around him, which is only made more insufferable by the fact that the guy is actually pretty smart and does have good ideas.
So, taking all that into consideration, we knew right off that bunking Wang up with Fred was just weapons grade levels of stupid, so we stuck Edgar and Wang together instead. Yeah, maybe it was kind of a dick move, given that Wang wasn’t Edgar’s biggest fan either, but Jake and I figured that Fred would ha
ve murdered either one of them eventually, so it was what it had to be.
If you’re keeping score, this left me, Barbara, George, Davidson, Jeff, and Fred dividing up the available space in the camper and RV we’d found so far. Now, we added Otis, his son Ben, and Samantha into the mix. We had just been treading water in the sleeping situation up to this point and now we were back to scrambling in order to find a life preserver. As a stopgap measure, we had them assigned to bunks in Lizzy’s room in those earliest days when they came to stay with us.
Even with the on again, off again help of Greg and Alan, Oscar found himself hard pressed to meet demand, so I took time off from slinging a rifle to fill in as unskilled labor. The container homes had been a good idea and had worked out pretty well but they had just taken too damned long to get into a livable state and we had folks that needed a roof right now, so we put the scavenging crews back on the hunt for more camping trailers of any shape or size. When time was a factor, you simply could not argue with the ability to tow a ready-made and furnished home back to the valley. All you had to do was get lucky and find one; then it was just a day’s worth of effort before folks were moving in.
The morning after Otis’s group arrived, I was out on the site of Amanda’s future cabin, having been assigned to mixing duty at a wheelbarrow. And by mixing, what I really mean is hour after backbreaking hour of hauling water buckets, upending bags of sand and masonry cement, and mixing up said components into mortar. With a goddamned shovel. I don’t know if you realize just how heavy mortar is but in its mixed, liquid form, it’s worse. Mixing and slinging that shit for an hour will drain all of the life out of you, never mind doing it all damned day.
We needed the mortar because you can’t just build a wood structure right onto the dirt, apparently, because it’ll pick up moisture and rot. To counteract this, Oscar’s plan was to lay a foundation using cinder blocks, which would be all glued together by the mortar I was mixing up. Thankfully, the stuff we needed to make this happen had all been gathered up from local home improvement stores on earlier excursions; Oscar did the layout on Amanda’s cabin, realized what it was actually going to take to get the job done (no, you can’t just chop down trees and stack them like Lincoln logs), and had to put the whole thing on hold while a team went out and stocked up on masonry materials.