by Ryan Schow
Now the freaking water’s out…
Naturally, I spend two days being depressed. After that I get up and go to my mom’s house. I have to talk to Tad, see if he knows anything. See if he’s done anything. When I get to their street, I see the block and my heart sinks. Half the houses have been bombed. More than a few of them have fallen to fire or from collapse. Some are better than others. Then there are those still standing untouched by anything other than heavy smoke and a soft, smoldering heat.
Tad’s and my mom’s home is standing in near ruin. I can’t help the tears and I can’t stop them. What’s left of Tad’s car is in the same place I left it. I only recognize it because of how the trunk looks smashed in. It’s a charred frame sitting on bare rims sitting in a quilt of its own toxic ash.
I get out of the Cutlass, make my way inside the home. Half the roof has caved in. I want to cry out my mother’s name, but it’s so deathly still inside I can’t bring myself to disturb the silence.
Looking around, wiping my eyes constantly, I see things I recognize, but it’s when I get into the kitchen that I see the most recognizable thing: Tad.
A large part of the ceiling has caved in on him. He’s an upper torso. A statistic. I turn away, stifling the cry. It smells like fire and soot in here, and even though the ashy smell sits heavy in my nose, there is a deeper, more distinct smell at work here. It’s something truly foul. Death. Backtracking to the stairs, I carefully make my way to the second floor in search of my mother. She’s no where to be found. Part of me is relieved. The other part of me feels nothing of the sort.
She’s already dead, I tell myself. She’s been dead since the beginning.
Sitting on the floor upstairs, the collapsed roof open to the sky, the sounds of things being bombed in the distance, I do what I’ve been doing and that’s open myself up to the flood.
I never really mourned for my parents. It kills me to know they may still be out there, but it stings even worse knowing chances are good they’re not really here anymore. They’re not really alive. A flash of my father dead in some building in L.A. tears through my mind, forcing me to close my eyes. I see my mother, dead in her car, blown up by one of those drones and my eyes squeeze out more tears.
It seems the more I surrender to the pain, the more I feel parts of me walling themselves off, shutting down. The warmth in me, the love I used to carry behind my breast, the little girl who wanted friends and a boyfriend and for God’s sake some kind of a future, it’s all slipping away. All becoming something that was and will never be.
Sitting in this house of death, in this city that’s systematically being destroyed, razed to the bone, I contemplate my own mortality, my own reasons for living. I don’t want to live. Not like this. Not with all this loss, all this fear, all this solitude.
The scream that boils up from inside me, the scream that feels explosive the way a nuclear bomb feels explosive, it starts with infinite sorrow and a mighty inhalation of breath, and when the flood of emotion roars forth I can’t stop it, and I can’t help it. I scream my throat ragged. I scream until I’m left breathless and hunched over with no fight left in me and barely a will to survive. Then I lie down in the ash. I just lay here with my eyes running and my heart this thunderous force in my chest. Then, as the tears dry and my pulse returns to normal, I feel that last bit of humanity inside me hardening to stone.
By the time I dredge up the will to pick my body up off this floor, I realize something’s changed. No. I realize everything’s changed. The light inside me is now gone. Behind my eyes there is nothing, no one, two lightless holes. The way Rider said I should make myself feel nothing, well that’s exactly what I feel.
Dead.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
My house is a tomb. I get home and know I should grab my bow and arrows and head outside, but I don’t want to. Instead, I grab an empty five gallon gas can I “procured” about a week back and a small plastic siphoning hose, then I head out looking for cars.
The thing about people abandoning their cars is there’s always plenty of gas around. If the power goes out like the city’s water pump went out, I’m going to need that gas to power a generator. I need to keep the fridge running. If I can’t find a generator right now, I’ll at least have the gas for when I do find one.
One half of the equation…solved.
Things are going to get worse, though. I can feel it. That being the case, I’m moving “finding a generator” to the top of my needs list. The only problem is the noise. Generators aren’t always quiet. Ugh. I’ll have to deal with the logistics of that later.
I open the garage door and back the Cutlass out into the alley. There is something about the sound of that feisty Detroit motor that has me feeling alive. This has become the kind of car you run over people with. The kind of car a real hard ass drives. This is a take-no-crap-from-anyone kind of car and I love every last inch of it.
Rumbling down the alley with my gun in my lap, I could care less who hears me right now. Come and get me…
Inside of two blocks I find half a dozen abandoned sedans. They all have gas. I fill the Cutlass first, then I top off the five gallon container one last time and put it in the front seat foot well.
The drive back home is short, and thank God because nothing is worse than the taste of gasoline in your mouth. Back home with a bottle of water, I brush my teeth, gargle some mouthwash to get the noxious taste out of my mouth, then head upstairs and lay down for a nap.
When I wake up, it’s to the sounds of screaming. Flying out of bed, feeling out of sorts, not sure what’s happening or even where I am, I rush to my bedroom window overlooking my backyard and Dirt Alley. Tearing the curtains aside, an orange sky greets me, one that’s quickly growing dark but isn’t so dark that I miss the nightmare scene unfolding below.
My senses are quick to return.
Across the alley, barging out of the back of the girl’s house—the girl I warned to be careful several days back—are the five deviants. One of these monstrous turds, he’s dragging the blonde out of her house by her hair. To her credit, the girl is kicking and screaming, clawing at her abductor’s hands and cursing violently.
All five of these creeps find this amusing, judging by the riot of laughter. Two of the guys crossing the backyard are even whooping and hollering like a bunch of drug-addled morons. They then count to three like a pair of drunk frat boys and charge the fence, driving into it shoulder-first. The entire thing topples and both guys go down laughing. They climb slowly to their feet and start jumping up and down on the wood, stomping the fallen fence until it’s all but flattened.
The guy with the blonde, he’s still dragging her by the hair. He’s still weathering her attacks. He’s still kicking at her when she gets in a good shot not because he’s mad but because sooner or later he’s going to be the fight out of her.
My pulse doubles, then triples. Something in me kicks into high gear and screams that I do something.
“You motherfu—”
At the fence, the guy with the girl drags her over splintered wood and exposed nails. She’s wailing now, screaming for help while I’m up here, squirming in the dark. In my head, I’m formulating a plan, but the truth is, I’m trying to figure out how to start this fight and not end up in the same position as she’s in right now.
I know what I said about calmer minds prevailing, and how there was no room for calm minds here, but I take that back.
Reeling myself in, I try to focus.
To think…
Now that they’ve got her in out in the middle of Dirt Alley, four of them are wrestling her limbs while the other is undoing his belt buckle.
Her screaming becomes pleading and her pleading becomes uncontrollable sobbing.
“No, no, no…”
I race downstairs, slip on my shoes, then grab my bow and arrows, blow through the back door and climb the ladder leading to my garage roof. Night is falling fast, as is the temperature, but my heart is kicking up a f
erocious storm, pumping adrenaline into my blood, keeping me warm, making me hot with rage.
Every one of those pukes has his eyes on the blonde. They have her pinned down by force, pinned to the ground with lust and sick intentions. One of the guys on her wrist, he’s tearing off her shirt. Another guy at her ankle has a knife and he’s cutting through the soft cotton shorts she’s wearing. When the shirt comes off, her breasts are bared. At the same time, the dirt bag who cut her shorts also cuts her underwear and all that gets pulled away, too, exposing a strip of dark pubic hair.
“Mother of God,” I hear myself mutter.
The lead in this pack of rapists gets down on hands and knees, planting his legs between her legs. He reaches back, drags down his pants and underwear, then nudges the insides of her thighs further apart with the outsides of his knees.
By then I’ve grabbed an arrow, seated it and have it pulled back to the anchor point. The second I loose the arrow, another is out of the quiver, seated and drawn back. The first arrow hits its mark, sinking deep into the flesh, much farther than I imagined. I was aiming for the rapist’s tailpipe. No kidding. It went in about halfway.
“Bullseye bitch,” I growl.
The next two arrows are flying by the time the rapist gathers enough breath to scream. He’s fallen face-first onto the blonde. Both arrows find their marks. We’re talking head shots. The two targets go down, dead. The fourth guy is looking around then finding me.
He’s got a gun and he’s pulling it out.
I loose an arrow that catches him just right. His head snaps back, then rocks forward; my arrow is protruding from his left eye. He topples over in slow motion.
The fifth guy is now running. No, he’s sprinting.
My fifth arrow finds his back, which slows him down and wobbles him a bit, but doesn’t stop him. By now he’s too far away.
I lob another arrow anyway. It falls short by a foot.
Leaping off the roof, I hurry to the girl. The man with his pants down and an arrow driven halfway into his ass is howling in pain on top of her. I kick him over, but his body stops the fall halfway, and he lets out another deafening screech. Apparently the protruding arrow is serving as a kickstand. The rapist’s eyes find me. Lock in on me. They’re pumped full of fear and righteous agony and pleading.
My eyes take in the ravaged blonde. She’s not in her head right now; she’s already disappeared by the vacant look in her eyes and the frenetic panting still going on.
I grab an arrow, seat in, draw back and shoot it right into the eye of her attacker, the man that’s still laying halfway on her. His head jerks back, then lolls forward and to the side. He suddenly goes very still, all the fight in him gone. All the life in him…gone.
“You okay?” I ask the girl.
She just looks at me, unable to form words. The look in her eyes tells me no one’s home, not that I blame her. First she gets assaulted, dragged out of her house, stripped naked before five men planning on defiling her, and then she sees four of those men die all around her, one on top of her. So yeah, I don’t really blame her for being traumatized.
Dragging the guy off her, I say, “I’ll be back to check on you. Get back inside.”
Without waiting for a response, I sprint after the one getting away, ripping my arrow out of the fourth man’s eyeball on the way. Hauling ass down Dirt Alley, I glance down and see the fourth man’s bloody eyeball skewered on the arrow. Sickened, I drop the arrow and pick up speed.
If the witness is going anywhere, it’s to his home base. If I find home base, I find their loot and killing him and his friends will be a formality at best.
At the end of Dirt Alley, on Judah, I look left and then right and then decide on right. I find him rounding the corner onto 22nd a block and a half away. With the dying embers of day working to my advantage, I hang back, but not as far back as I would have had there been an abundance of light.
I track him on 22nd, hiding behind cars and slipping into alcove driveways. I follow him the entire block up to 22nd and Irving where he disappears into the Walgreen’s.
So Walgreen’s is home base.
Inching up on it, I try but fail to see inside the windows. Where my eyes are rendered useless, my ears take center stage. There’s a commotion of voices coming from inside. Loud voices, authoritative voices. I hear enough to realize they’re gathering up a posse.
Oh, crap.
Moving like my life depends on it, because it does, I run down Irving, take the corner on to 23rd and book it home. The four dead men are where I left them and the blonde’s house is fully dark. Presumably, she’s gone in to clean herself up. Good girl.
Rushing inside my home, I grab the loaded rifle and start stuffing my pockets with shells. When I can’t get anymore in there, I scurry out back, heading toward the end of the alley furthest from where I expect trouble. There I set up a blind.
It’s dark outside now.
If they’re coming, hopefully they’re bringing light. Just as I’m thinking this, seven guys round the corner and start up Dirt Alley with flashlights, guns and the purposeful stride of men on a vengeance-fueled testosterone rush.
Sighting the pack of scumbags through the high-powered Bushnell scope is easy. They crowd the dead bodies, take a moment, and then they’re all eyes in search of me.
The guy I was tracking—the one who took an arrow in the back—he points to the garage by my house. It appears he’s talking to the one in charge, this heavily muscled beast of a man with slicked back hair. He has a gun in his hand and just one tattoo—an upside down cross over his Adam’s apple.
I put the first round right through the tattoo.
Then I open fire.
I’m conscious of my ten round magazine, and this being a .22, it’s got its advantages. Bullets like these from a rifle like this won’t blow through a person as much as it’ll make a mess of things inside the body first. I’m talking about head shots. The way a bullet enters the skull with enough steam to get in but not enough punch to get out means whatever’s inside is going to be brain soup in no time flat.
So…head shots.
My fourth shot is a charm, but the other three men run. I shoot at them with less confidence, hitting various parts of their bodies based on how two of them are now limping instead of running.
I use all ten of the rounds, then reload as I walk toward those who are down.
By now the blonde is coming out on the back patio. She’s scared, peeking around the corner, wondering what the hell is going on. When she sees me, she eases outside, still overly cautious, still scared.
“It’s okay,” I say. Thinking of what Rider said about me being soft on the thugs on Lincoln, I put a round in each of the downed men’s heads, just to be sure. It scares me that I’m not even moved by this sickening act.
“Are they gone?” the blonde asks.
“Yeah.”
She approaches me like some shy school girl and says, “Thank you,” but her voice is small and the words break off easily.
“I was scared for you,” I say.
“I was scared for me, too,” she replies. Now we’re both looking at eight corpses. “What do we do with them?”
For a long moment I ponder the question, then: “I have an idea.”
Heading back inside, I open the garage door, grab the gas can and one of the dozens of lighters I’ve collected, then walk over to the bodies. She doesn’t even need to be told what to do. She just starts moving the bodies together.
I jerk the arrows out of the heads of my victims, but leave the one in the rapist’s corn hole because…ew. I do give the shaft a thorough kick, one that’s hard enough to break the arrow in two. It’s easier to pull up his pants and not have to look at all his man bits this way.
When we’ve got them all face up and lined side-by-side, I pour gasoline across their faces and feet, then splash the rest on their chests, stomachs and thighs. I touch the flame to the closest body and step away as the whoosh! of fire throws light
into the darkness.
“I’m Charity, by the way,” the blonde says.
“Indigo,” I reply, not taking my eyes off the douchebag barbecue.
She looks at me and says, “I wish we had some marshmallows right now,” and for some reason I find this funny. It’s the first time I’ve laughed in days.
“How old are you, Charity?” I ask.
I’m seeing her in the firelight thinking about how beautiful she is. How a little bit of the life has come back into her eyes. Not that it matters. She’s always going to relive this moment, and it’s always going to haunt her. It’s not the burning of the creeps that will bother her, it’s what they almost did to her that will be forever haunting.
“I’m nineteen,” she says.
“Is that your house, or your parents?”
“Parents.”
“Do you know where they are?” I ask.
She doesn’t move a muscle. Not one. She just stares into the fire, watching it consume flesh and fabric, watching it turning eight faces into eight overcooked pot roasts. Eventually this will be nothing more than an assemblage of bones in mountains of ash.
“My parents are missing, too,” I finally say.
We don’t talk for awhile. Finally she says, “Is your water out?”
“Yeah.”
“Mine, too.”
“I have stores of it if you need some,” I offer, not that I want to use any of my spare water right now, not unless I absolutely have to.
“Thanks, but I’m gonna drain my water heater and toilet tanks. That should give me plenty for now.”
“You’re just going to drink it like that? Right from the tanks?”
“No, I’ll boil it.”
I think about this for a second, then ask, “Where did you learn that?”
“A friend of mine was a prepper. We all thought he was a nut job, sort of ousted him from our little group. He’s from Idaho, so it all fit the bill. Now I feel stupid for not listening to him more. It’s just…this kind of thing…it shouldn’t be possible.”