by Ryan Schow
We get to our feet then finish searching the cars. Now more than ever, I’m feeling how sticky my lips have become, how my throat is so dry not even the summoning of saliva is enough.
“We need water,” I say.
Seconds later a pair of drones zoom by not fifteen feet over our heads. Macy and I duck into the backseat of a nearby Ford F-150; Stanton jumps into the front passenger seat next to a dead guy who’s face down on the steering wheel, the spider-webbed windshield painted red.
When they’re gone, Stanton says, “Check the glovebox.”
Inside is a map of the city, a two-pack of Bic lighters and a locking lug nut for his custom wheels. I grab the lighters and the map.
“Get the lug nut,” he says.
“Why?”
He rolls his eyes and I get it.
“Macy, open the driver’s side door for me, please.”
She gets out and does just that. Stanton gets on his butt, braces himself, then uses both feet and his leverage to shove the man over. The dead guy spills out of the car without an ounce of grace. He lands on his head, his body not quite making it out.
With his head wrenched sideways, half his face is smashed into the pavement, but his body is propped up on the truck with his legs half in the air. It’s like a handstand of death, but with no hands. Macy looks away. Maybe it’s his position, but maybe it’s that one of his eyes was shot out.
Stanton gets out of the truck walks around and perfectly deadpan, he says, “Hot dang, that couldn’t have gone better.”
He grabs a leg and begins unlacing the man’s right shoe. He pulls it off, tosses it over his shoulder then peels a long beige sock off his foot.
Did I tell you I hate seeing other people’s feet? I do. Most of them…they’re just plain nasty. Especially this guy’s. I don’t even want to tell you what’s up with his toenails.
“Lug nut?” he says, hand out, palm up.
I hand him the heavy silver nut and he drops it into the sock, tying the top of it into a knot.
“Stand back,” he says.
We oblige him.
He swings the thing in the air and now I see it. He’s made us another weapon. In case bullets don’t work, we can beat people to death with this here sock.
Macy’s smiling now, which makes me smile.
Turning his attention to the F-150, he stands back, swings it as hard as he can and hits the back window, shattering it.
“Bingo-bango, baby!” he says, surprising us both with a look of satisfaction.
“Nice, Dad,” Macy adds, and even I’m nodding my head in approval. He hands the sock to our daughter, almost like he’s handing over the keys to the kingdom.
“Anyone gets out of line, swing this down on their forehead as hard as you can.”
“Stanton,” I say.
“What?”
“Won’t this kill a person?” Macy asks, swinging it around.
“You could always go underhand and catch them in the baby maker,” he says.
“Hold this?” Macy asks me.
She bequeaths me the gigantic blanket and I take it. She then walks up to the truck and starts swinging the loaded sock backwards, really getting it going. When she’s got the timing down, she steps forward and shoots it at the truck where it smacks the back door with a ferocious bang!
“Holy crap!” she says, looking at the huge dent the nut left behind.
“Impressive,” Stanton says.
And me? I’m having a hard time with my husband teaching my baby how to hurt people. Maybe I’m being too overprotective of her. Maybe Stanton’s right.
A few cars up, we hit what Stanton believes is an even bigger jackpot. Macy pulls something big and green and tightly packaged out of the center console.
“What about this?” she says, holding up a brick of weed.
“I almost want to say yes,” I tell her, “but given that the bottom’s fallen out of this city and we need to be on our toes, I’d say leave it.”
“Are you kidding?” Stanton says. “We’re taking it with us.”
“Since when do you do drugs?” I ask.
“Never. But we’re in gang territory, so maybe this is our get-out-of-death card.”
Macy’s sniffing it, then turning away and making a face.
“As much as I appreciate your logic, I’m not toting around a big bag of weed so you’d better make sure you know how to use your gun.”
“I do.”
“But would you?” I ask.
He knows what I’m asking. I want to know if he’ll pull the trigger to protect his family.
“These are different times. Maybe they won’t always be this way, but right now they are. So yes. If it comes to it, then yes.”
“Are you guys talking in code?”
“Yes,” we say together.
Our eyes meet and there’s a resolve I trust. Slowly I’m nodding my head (I believe you), and he’s giving me a reassuring smile (I’ll never let anything bad happen to you).
The thing about Stanton is he works (worked) in the Transamerica pyramid inside the financial district about twenty-seven hours a day and I work (worked) in the ER just as much. We live (lived) an affluent lifestyle, but it’s taken a toll on us both emotionally and physically over the years. Our home is (might be past tense, as in was, but the jury’s still out on that one) gorgeous, worth every penny of the three million we paid for it, but now all that might be gone. All things considered—and I know it won’t be easy—I’m starting to think we’ve got thick enough skin for this.
A second thought crawls over the first, but it sounds a lot like a warning: whatever you’re expecting this to be, it’s going to be far worse than even you can imagine.
“No on the weed,” I say and Macy tosses it back in the truck. “C’mon Macy. We’re going home.”
“To our home?” she asks.
“Whatever home we sleep in, shower in, eat in, that’s our home,” I say. “Got it?”
Stanton suddenly goes very rigid.
“Shhh,” he hisses.
He’s listening with an ear to the sky and that’s when three blocks up Masonic a huge pair of drones carpet bomb the six or seven story Public Storage building, a nearby big box retailer and rows upon rows of nearby homes. Public Storage collapses onto Masonic street in a heap of smoke and powder, spilling its bricks and damaged contents out over dozens of abandoned cars.
“Let’s go!” Stanton says, breaking into a run.
We follow as fast as we can, cutting down Turk Street, but the earth is shaking beneath us and the bombing raids have anyone caught outside running in doors. Someone’s left a one gallon jug of water on the roof of their car in a panic; I sprint across the street to grab it and keep running.
“Cincinnati!” Stanton yells over the noise.
“Water!” I scream.
By the time I catch up, I’m out of breath and that’s when a fleet of drones appears up the street. Stanton turns us into a narrow stairway leading up a hillside, a stairway that’s fairly well hidden. It’s made of concrete and flanked by two homes and tons of trees and foliage. For whatever reason, I think of the stairway in The Exorcist and this gives me a second’s pause. Did I tell you I hate horror movies? Yeah. I’m a big chicken when it comes to demonic possession, serial killers, inbreeding hill people.
Sin, the drones…
I keep moving. As the three of us hustle up the stairs, my legs feel more destroyed than ever and I swear to God, my lungs are on fire. Stopping means dying though, and this has me pushing hard. The rapid concussion sounds of dozens of bombs being dropped isn’t lost on me.
The drones zip by and we all heave a collective sigh, but at the top of the stairs are two guys who are looking down past Stanton to get a good look at me and Macy. Macy is in front of me. All I can see are those ugly pants. They aren’t going to save us.
What I’m thinking at this exact moment is that we aren’t unattractive women, not by any measure. I’ve been considering this for the last few hours. W
ill our slovenly condition mask our good looks, or will guys like these see through them?
I think I can handle myself, but Macy? I can’t even begin to tell you how much I worry about her innocence.
Now I’m thinking of my baby girl not from my own perspective, but from a man’s viewpoint. A boy’s viewpoint.
She’s very cute in the face and at the age where she’s no longer too young for the consideration of older boys and younger twenty-somethings. That’s to say she’s got her boobs and her hips are coming in, taking her from boyish straight toward the more curvy look of a woman. Honestly, she’s growing up too fast. She’s becoming a woman.
Considering the lawlessness we’ve seen so far, I’d bet my last breath this terrifies Stanton about as much as it terrifies me. Maybe more. Neither of us have spoken about this, but I can feel it in his soul as much as I’m sure he can feel it in mine.
“There are two of them,” one of the guys says to the other, his tone betraying his intentions, “and two of us. We just need him out of the way and I think we’ll have a love connection.”
These guys are about five steps ahead of Stanton with the high ground; the one talking has a shotgun at his side. The other is looking over his shoulder, perhaps at the neighborhood that was almost bombed into the Stone Age.
“I think you guys can be each others’ love connection,” Stanton jokes, even though I can tell he’s agitated, not amused.
“I’m into girls,” the one toting the shotgun says. “Young girls. Blondes especially.”
“Right now survival is the flavor of the day, fellas,” Stanton says. “In case you hadn’t heard, all that smoke in the air isn’t from guys like you lighting up blunts and listening to Snoop Dogg in your grandmother’s basement or whatever. There’s actual death happening out there.”
“Yeah?” one says to Stanton in a sick, mocking tone. Then to his buddy, he says, “About to be one more on the dead guy list, don’t you think?”
Stanton draws the pistol, pulls the trigger and the guy drops. He shoots the other one before he can run, then scampers up the last few stairs in case there are more of them on the other side. Fortunately for all our sakes, there aren’t. Right about now I can’t breathe.
Is this really happening?
My eyes watch as my husband drags the second kid off the sidewalk, both of them moaning in pain. He grabs the shotgun, tosses it to me (which I catch on my way up the stairs) and tells Macy to look away. He waits for more bombs to drop, and when they do, he puts a single round into each of their heads.
Chapter Ten
Leaning over the boys’ bodies, Stanton goes through their jeans (pocket knife, lighter, three shotgun shells—he crushes and discards half a pack of smokes). Every so often, glancing up at the ground level neighborhood we popped up into, my brave, reckless husband looks perfectly poised.
This scares the absolute crap out of me.
He barely even hesitated. Who is this man that I married? He looks at me and I’m scared at what he’s seeing in my eyes. He returns to the bodies.
“You didn’t even give them a chance,” I all but whisper.
Without looking up, he says, “You heard what they said, right? Didn’t you see what I saw? How they were looking at you and Macy? And that one idiot saying he likes young girls…that was reason enough.”
I find myself pacing in a tight line. He just killed them.
Stopping, looking down at them, I can’t believe they were breathing a moment ago, and now they’re not. How is Stanton not freaking out?
How am I not freaking out?
Macy comes up behind me, takes the water jug out of my hand and drinks. “Not too fast,” I say. “Pace yourself.”
She finishes, burps then says, “Man I needed that.”
I drink a bit myself, then hand it to Stanton who waves it off because he’s busy. I take another sip, hand it to Macy and tell her to ration it.
She knows exactly what I mean.
Looking everywhere else, not even flinching as things explode a few blocks away, I see a neighborhood that looks relatively untouched by the chaos.
“This is nice,” I hear myself say. “The houses here.”
I turn around and see Macy looking down at the two boys. Stanton is standing up. He’s got another shotgun shell that he’s stuffing into his pocket. I hand him the water. He drinks, slowly. It’s just several sips while he’s looking around. His eyes are roving—going to windows, cars, potential hiding places.
After he decides we’re not in imminent danger, he relaxes his eyes, his demeanor. “It is nice,” he says. He adjusts the contraband in his pockets, then: “Let’s see if we can find ourselves a house.”
“What if there are more of them?” Macy asks.
“I don’t think there are,” Stanton says. “Otherwise you’d see a lookout, some other evidence of gang activity.”
“You think they’re gang members?” I ask.
Stanton fires me a look. As far as we’re both concerned, if they carry guns and talk about having sex with young girls in front of said girl’s parents…they’re gang bangers. It’s a stereotype, sure, but it’s my stereotype.
Frowning, I pull Macy aside.
It’s not the bullet holes or the blood that tells the story of these two knuckleheads. It’s the tattoos. They’re all skulls and names and numbers. They’re full sleeves. The ink spanning from wrist to earlobe…on both arms. One of them has three tear drops tattooed under his right eye.
“It’s good you shot them,” Macy says, and this saddens me. Actually this crushes me inside. I thought I raised my child to have more respect for life than this.
Is she thinking of Waylon, the Iraq war vet, and what he said about the neighborhood gangs? Is Stanton? Perhaps these were the types of kids he was warning us about. Or perhaps we’ll never know.
“You shouldn’t feel like that,” I tell her.
“Yes, she should,” Stanton says, looking up and down the block. “You can’t be this soft, Sin. Not now.”
“This isn’t the wild west.”
He turns and snaps at me. “Look around, Cincinnati. It sure as hell is!”
We step into the neighborhood, round a corner and see a trio of bodies. This is residential, so we expect to see something like this, but nothing prepares you for seeing the body of a small child.
My eyes focus on the girl.
She’s wearing a pink dress and one of her white shoes had come off her foot. It has a small silver buckle. The minute I see her white tights—her little foot turned sideways—I turn away, stifle a cry. Something in my soul cracks, breaks. The image is in me now, burned into my brain. She can’t be more than three years old.
“These…animals,” I say, half angry, half struggling not to have a total breakdown.
“These things are neither human nor animal, Sin,” Stanton says in a wet, choked up voice. “They’re machines and they have no sense of morality. No hesitation, no respect for life, no remorse.”
Looking at the homes, the sounds of bombing stall out only to be replaced by a cold, steady silence. Lately we’ve come to distrust these subtle platitudes. We pass the little girl and a woman a few feet ahead of her. Was this her child? They’re both sprawled face-down on the sidewalk. The woman has a meaty red mess in the crown of her head while the child has two red blooms in her back.
Ahead, propped against someone’s garage door, is a handsome young man. He’s got a dried red carnation over his heart. Not the flower. Blood. Judging by the rust colored smears on the sidewalk, he dragged himself over to the garage, perhaps in search of cover. Not that it provided any cover at all. His head is lolled forward, his chin sitting on his chest. On his ring finger is a shiny gold band. I look over at the two bodies. Was that woman his wife? Was that his child?
On second thought, she looks too old for him—what I can see of her. Maybe the woman was his mother and the little girl was his. Maybe they were neither. Just strangers in the wrong place at the right time
.
“Do you hear that?” Stanton asks. Collectively we perk up. “I can’t be sure, but…I think that might be them.”
Stanton’s on the move, looking for open doors because there’s no decent place to hide from these things but inside a home.
The first two doors are locked.
Now we all hear are the approaching sounds of more than one UAV. Stanton kicks in the third door. It splinters, the frame cracking completely. He kicks it again and it swings in hard, bouncing back. The three of us hustle inside, slamming the door behind us as best as we can.
“Conversion,” Stanton says looking around, breathing hard.
Instead of this being a single home with three stories, there’s a tight staircase heading up to the second floor, then presumably another heading up to the third floor. The first door says UNIT A.
The construction isn’t pretty, but it serves its purpose.
Each floor, it appears, has been renovated into its own separate home. The reason for this? Money, of course. The owner was working to milk the property for as much rent as he or she could collect.
Typical capitalists.
I grab the knob of UNIT A’s door and twist. It’s locked. Macy shoves by me, grabs the handle and gives it her own valiant effort. It doesn’t open so she starts to shake it with all her might, her nerves finally spinning out of control.
Wow.
Ever since her school was shot up and Trevor died, she’s been halfway herself. The stores of emotion are bleeding out now. They were bound to erupt somewhere.
When Macy finally gives up, Stanton says, “You had your chance.”
We move out of the way.
He’s rearing back to kick this door down when we hear a voice on the other side of it saying, “We’re armed in here! Leave us alone or we’ll…we’ll shoot!”
Stanton ponders the warning, looking at us. I shrug my shoulders. He looks up the stairs, pauses. Outside, something else starts shooting.
“Get down!” he barks.
We drop to our knees and cover our heads just as a handful of bullets blast through the main door. They bury themselves into the wall where we were all just standing, which has me feeling part queasy, part relieved.