by Ryan Schow
“I know.”
After that the fire begins to settle down and the smell of cooked meat becomes a touch nauseating. She finally turns and gives me a hug, then says, “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you earlier. Thank you again for saving me.”
“Come to my house anytime you need anything, or just to hang out, if you want.”
She smiles then nods, her eyes misting over. It’s the first time I actually felt halfway decent since this whole thing began. I watch her return to her house, clomping over the downed fence, then locking the door even though it looks kicked in.
I make a mental note to help her fix that, or see if she wants to move into my fortress/armory in the morning. I don’t want to be too forward since right now she’s the only chance I have at making friends, but I don’t want her to think I don’t care either.
Ugh.
Chapter Thirty
My nights are chock full of nightmares. Even more so now. With the world descending into madness, I’m redefining the meaning of my existence, my life. I am an adult. A loner. Mine is an unstable world overrun by hostile forces and there are no guarantees in this life. There are no cops, no military presence, not even FEMA to balance out this precarious equation.
Then again, what could they really do against the machines? Against this society that’s gone rogue and seems to celebrate lawlessness?
Cities are being attacked all over. It could be two cities; it could be all cities. The unknown presents its own set of problems, of terrors. The fact that San Francisco continues to suffer such long destructive days without any outside aid is proof that as a city, we are also on our own.
With each sunset my resolve to survive grows stronger, more powerful; my emotions, however, continue to harden, to winnow away into something cold and callous. There is a drive I feel forming in me, this cruel offshoot of myself that’s needing to become more self-sustaining, more lethal, something vastly more…primal.
Crawling out of bed, I walk to the window, look down upon the row of ash and bones and know that I have changed. That I’m firmly on this dark path. That my life won’t end with retirement as much as it might end with brutality and a bullet.
I eat the bare minimum, drink enough water to chase away any concerns of dehydration, then grab my gun and head next door to check on Charity. If there’s any hope that some shred of humanity is still left inside me, it’s evident in my concern for my neighbor.
I stalk through the smoke tinged air and the noise of the war raging between man and machine. This destruction is steadily encroaching upon the entire city, looming ever closer to our little corner of the bay area landscape. Right now, on these outskirts of town, the threat is primarily human. Later, when the threat of machine supersedes the current terror posed by man, I will adapt and overcome. As of this very moment, however, all I care about is my new friend. My only friend.
I knock on the front door and wait. Inside, I hear something.
A smile curls my lips as I think about me and Charity combining forces. I really want her to move in because in the climate of survival, two heads are better than one. Plus I could use the company.
Footsteps approach the front door; locks are disengaged. It’s only when the front door opens that the most minuscule of noises sparks a current of fear in me.
It’s a noise coming from behind me.
Standing in the doorway, however, is an ugly man with a long scar pulled across his face. It starts at his hairline, drags down over his eyebrow then cuts a swath across his cheek, lips and chin in an unsightly, jagged line. To make matters worse, this disgusting creature with a toothy, sadistic grin had the scar tattooed over. The ink turned what would have been a white line into a giant Frankenstein stitch, almost like these fake stitches are the only things keeping his real head from opening like a split watermelon.
The second I go for my Glock, something from behind cracks my skull so hard, it’s lights out.
I wake up in a chair, ropes digging into my body. Where am I? The world can’t seem to strike a balance, and there’s some disconnect between the waking world and me, a disconnect that feels like an open chasm. A small moan escapes me. It’s the throbbing in my head and the sound of screaming and crying that finally brings me around.
Charity is on the ground in front of me. She’s sprawled out on her back, a long red line trailing from a punched eye, a rose shaped smear of red sitting on a punched lip.
Her clothes are torn, but they’re still on, which makes this groggy, still not quite together version of me sigh with a small measure of relief.
We’re in a living room (hers I presume), and Charity is on the floor, pinned to the ground face-up by two other guys. She bucks every so often, but I can see she’s weary. The creep with the scar on his face, he’s standing over her with a gun in his hand. Looking at me, he says, “There she is.”
“Here I am,” I mumble, almost back to myself.
Looking down, I realize I’ve been stripped of my clothes, of my dignity. A sick pummeling of emotions rips through me. I am embarrassed, angry, scared, vulnerable, enraged.
Things are becoming more clear now that my senses have returned. There are three men in this room and they have me and Charity in the worst of positions.
“Who are you?” I ask, all but gnashing my molars. “Are you related to the fire-pit brothers out back? Because if you are, I just want to say they died screaming. Like little girls.”
“You are a little girl,” Scarface says. “Will you die screaming, too?”
“Perhaps.”
There is a pungent stuffiness in the air. The stink of old walls, tired carpet, a growing patch of mold somewhere nearby. There is also something lingering beneath these layers and that’s the smell of body odor and bad breath.
I hate these men already.
Charity is crying now, her soul lost in dark worlds behind her eyes. At any moment, she’s going to slip away inside her mind. Things will never be the same for her again. Trauma victims like this, they never truly recover, not all the way, and sometimes not at all.
“See I came here for both of you,” Scarface says in a heavily accented voice, interrupting my troubled thoughts, “and though I admire the fight in you, it’s more tantrum than I care to deal with right now. Bigger things are happening and I can’t have you little putas taking out my soldiers. So this is what I am proposing, and the more I think about it, the more I’m falling in love with the idea.”
At this point, I’ve already accepted my death. I didn’t expect it to come so soon, and certainly not like this, but what else is there for a girl like me in a crumbling society without rules or consequences? First my body will be abused, violated, irreparably damaged. After that I will be killed. I’m mortified by the idea of this, but the more I tell myself this is my reality, the easier it will become to endure it. My thoughts turn to Rider. He told me to swallow my emotions, to let my eyes show nothing but death and determination.
I feel my emotions dying.
Going dead.
“Who are you clowns anyway?” I hear myself ask, all the tenderness in my voice gone.
“Formally, or in a more existential way?” he says, slicking back his hair with a heavily tattooed hand. “What are you referring to?”
“Your gang affiliation, moron,” I say.
He looks at me, unblinking, then he starts to laugh, like he isn’t sure how to take me. After a moment’s consideration, he pulls up his shirt and shows me an entire gallery of artwork on his body. He points to a large black snake coiled in hard S’s.
“The Ophidian Horde. That’s our gang affiliation, isn’t it boys?”
The two other men lift their shirts, showing off their onyx black snakes. They are proud, but the ink is new. It’s new on all of them.
“Why don’t you let us go?” Charity asks. “Or just do what you want then leave?”
“Because you killed my boys,” he snarls.
“I killed your boys because their idea of romance was dragging a girl i
nto the street and gang raping her,” I say, making him look at me. “She didn’t do anything. I did.”
“This was all you?” he asks, looking both pissed off and impressed.
“It was all me.”
“Well I would apologize for their behavior, but to make your mark in a city this size and under these circumstances, you can’t be nice and you can’t think small. So we’re not nice, and we’re not thinking small.”
“A gang that thinks big and isn’t nice. That’s original.”
Waving off the comment, he says, “The Ophidian Horde will be the largest gang in San Francisco. Bigger and more ruthless than the MS-13, the Sureños, the Norteños, the CDP’s. They’ll all fold to us, into our organization, and when those drones get done leveling this place, this wasteland will need order and we’ll be the ones to provide it.”
“What makes you think you’ll survive the drones?”
“Instinct,” he says, patting his chest.
“Why are you telling me this, then? Am I supposed to be impressed? Because I’m not going to be your soldier, or your whore. And if you decide to rape me, or kill me, it’s because a piece of crap like you would never catch the eye of a real woman, so you take what no respectable woman will ever give you, and to me that’s sadder than anything else I can think of.”
“You’re a mouth one,” he says, most of his intrigue in me now gone. “I’ll give you that.”
I spit with all my might across the room and the loogie catches him on the chin. Time seems to slow. He wipes his face, then charges toward me with a throaty roar, grabbing my face and giving it a mighty jerk.
“I’m going to do to her what should have been done to you,” he’s growling. “Then I’m going to do to you what was intended for her last night.”
Charity—who’s back inside her body for a second—is realizing again that I’m here and that our situation is about to become much, much worse.
Looking over at me, she says, “Indigo?”
And at the same time, Scarface rips a pistol from the small of his back, then turns to Charity and pulls the trigger twice. Both bullets smash into her face, killing her instantly.
He lets go of my face as the howls of rage and anguish explode from me in wild, lashing fits. I’m beating against my restraints, flexing and wailing and screaming like a lunatic who’s lost all control.
That’s when the gunshots go off behind me in ten successive shots. All three men fall. A young girl with big wet eyes and short blonde hair emerges from upstairs, cautiously walks over to the three groaning men. She pops the empty magazine, drops it, then inserts another with small, shaky hands.
I can’t see her face, but she’s making damn sure these guys can. She puts two rounds in Scarface, both shots hitting him in the exact same place they hit Charity. The remaining men are shot multiple times and begging for lenience. She gives them no reprieve. She simply shoots one, waits long enough for the other to piss himself, and then she shoots him, too.
For a second, the girl looks at me. I see it in her. I see entire worlds colliding. When she finally looks down at Charity, the unsteady mask of determination falls away and she slowly breaks down, first crying, then sobbing. Sitting down, pulling Charity’s dead body toward her, she holds her. Charity’s head is drooped over, her arms flopped out wide, her body limp.
I can’t stop crying. I can’t stop hurting.
It’s like whatever emotions I told myself I’d erased, or buried, they all rose up at once. Collectively, they become one giant, crushing wave, undoing everything I’ve tried to do to harden myself, to prepare for these despicable times. Now that it’s all come apart, I feel and what I feel is death. I hurt and it makes me ache for retribution. I need and that need is pure, unadulterated vengeance.
After a long while, after both me and the young blonde are exhausted, she gets up and comes over to me. She works the knots holding my body to this chair loose, and I ask her name.
“Atlanta,” she all but whispers. I recognize the similarities in her and Charity. They must be sisters which breaks my heart even more.
When she’s done, Atlanta simply goes and sits back down, holding Charity’s head in her lap, despite the abundance of blood. I find my clothes, my shoes, my gun. After that, I drag the three dead bodies out back, over the fence and to the ash heap to be with their murdered brothers. Outside, by myself, I douse them in gasoline, then I light them on fire and watch them burn.
Atlanta finally joins me, but she won’t look at me.
“What are you going to do?” she asks.
Looking at her, even though she won’t look at me, feeling a new part of me emerge—a darker more determined part—I say, “I’m going to find them. I’m going to find them and then I’m going to kill every last one of them.”
Chapter Thirty-One
I cannot sleep. I cannot sit still or think rational thoughts, or even focus on anything but these violent creatures who have invaded our neighborhood and brought with them such misery.
With my gun ready, with my quiver on and my bow wrapped over my shoulder, I set out on foot, head straight to the Walgreen’s to stop The Ophidian Horde once and for all. The second the store comes in sight, I see a pack of five men leaving, talking loudly amongst themselves and heading east armed to the teeth.
I follow them closely, but not too close. At times, I get close enough to hear what they’re saying. It sounds like they’re talking about the Presidio. About a new faction within the gang. I fall back a bit. Wonder how big this gang is.
Part of me wants to end them, stop walking this tedious walk, but another part of me wants to know who this new faction is, where they’re located, and how to stop them.
The things I was told sitting in Charity’s living room were unnerving enough. This gang, The Ophidian Horde, if they really did plan on overtaking the city, and they were not only in just one neighborhood but spread across the city, then perhaps this is my mission from God: stop them before they start.
Can I do that?
Can I just go after people and kill them with the belief that they deserve to die not for what they’ve done, but for what I expect them to do? This I have to think about.
After Charity, I’d say probably.
And that’s when I see the mammoth SUV come roaring in. A small burst of energy erupts and the SUV rolls to a dead stop in front of a field. Behind them, a pair of drones crash hard and slide to a stop next to the SUV.
Five people pour out of the vehicle. The driver, two other men, a woman and a blonde girl. They race into the field, each at a different pace, the men moving slower than the women, and this attracts the attention of the men she’s been tracking. Seconds later, she hears the low thwump thwump thwumping sound of helicopter blades whirring to a start.
Now the group of men I’ve been following run toward the SUV. I hang back a bit, not sure what’s happening, but a few moments later the helicopter I’ve been hearing goes airborne. I watch it rise into the sky, then dip forward and accelerate, but suddenly there’s a pillowy burst of power in the sky and the helicopter quickly loses altitude. It goes down fast and explodes, and for a second I startle thinking about the people aboard it.
I return my attention to the idiots I’ve been following. Guns out, the five of them descend into the field. I crouch down, wait for a minute, but then as I’m about to take chase, I realize how foolish it would be to fall in behind them in an open field.
Moving around the field’s perimeter, closer to a grove of trees, I try to catch a glimpse of them, at least enough to bring them back in sight, and that’s when I see them dragging a sixth guy out of the field.
They have the man at gunpoint.
I remember seeing this guy emerge from the SUV. Did he not make it to the helicopter? He was walking a bit slow, so one of them hammered him in the back of his head with the butt of a rifle, sending him crashing to his knees. They all laughed as he went down. Two sets of hands reached down, grabbed him and hauled him to his fee
t.
“On your feet sunshine,” one said with sadistic laughter in his voice.
They were walking him through the trees when two girls and a man encountered them. They didn’t make it to the helicopter either? So who left? The driver? Maybe he was on the chopper, or maybe I just have no idea what is happening here.
From a little ways away, I watch the situation unfold. It’s not pretty and I have that sick, sinking feeling that if I don’t intervene, these people are going to die.
I can’t let that happen. Not after I let the guy on the sidewalk get kicked to death. I don’t think I can live with the guilt of an entire group of people.
I take out my weapon, aim it at the most threatening of the five thugs, then pull the trigger. The gun clicks.
“What the hell?”
I aim and fire again, getting the same response. Do I really have an empty magazine in the gun? Or is there something wrong with the firing pin? I’ll have to figure this out later, because the situation in the grove of trees is quickly becoming untenable.
Sliding the bow off my back, I steady my breathing, start working out the logistics of this attack. When it becomes a certainty that these men are going to hurt the group of people, I force myself to accept that I won’t be tracking them to their next faction.
I have to intervene now.
Drawing an arrow, I seat it on the bowstring, pull back to the anchor point, adjust my aim for distance and a slight breeze, then let the first arrow go. Before it even finds its mark, the second one is already airborne, along with the third.
END OF BOOK 1.5
Chapter Thirty-Two
When my brother Rex announced that the flash in the sky could very well be the result of a nuclear EMP counter-strike, Macy wanted to know if the toilets would still flush. I’m worried about the end of the world; she’s worried about where all the poop will go.
Naturally, Rex said no. He said the toilets wouldn’t flush.