by Ryan Schow
Meanwhile, Jagger and Bright were going house to house scavenging for the future and for the remainder of Jagger’s trip back home. Two days ago, they used a crowbar to pry open the back door of a vacant home. Bright went in first.
He walked straight into a shotgun blast to the chest.
Jagger tore his pistol loose, dropped and rolled sideways as a second blast went off. He fired on the attacker, hitting him twice before realizing the shooter was a pre-teen boy.
The boy took both shots hard, dropped the rifle, then fell sideways into the wall where he collapsed in sobbing, dying heap. Jagger drew a sharp breath. The boy expired moments later, his last breath a blood bubble that expanded, then contracted into a small run of saliva.
Standing there, it all hit him at once. Bright was dead, killed by a child, a child he just killed. He cleared the house, returned to the boy.
Running his hands through his hair, groaning at the mess, he paced around the room like a caged animal, and then he stopped and looked down at his friend. At Bright. Inside, something unlocked and the pain flooded in. He stood there, staring at Bright, then at the kid. He was a little blonde haired boy who looked as hungry as everyone else in this damned apocalypse. He was an innocent. Then again, so was Bright.
Jagger felt the outburst coming seconds before he began throwing things around and kicking holes in the walls. The cursing, growling, violent grunting became so bad he snatched up the kid’s shotgun and starting shooting up the place. He pumped load after load into everything he saw. When the chamber fired empty, he hurled the shotgun through the kitchen window and screamed at the top of his lungs. He screamed until his throat was hoarse. It wasn’t because he’d just killed a child, or that he saw his friend die, or even that he missed Camila like crazy and longed to see his family—it was everything!
Now he had this girl. This little mute thing that nearly died. She had no friends or family, but did he either? What if Lenna and the boys were dead? Exhausted, his chest heaving up and down, he eyes glistening from the total meltdown, Jagger sunk to the floor, panting and sad, desperate and feeling all alone in this world, and he wondered how the hell life had come to this.
The next day, he told the girl it was time to go. She said nothing. She just got up, got dressed, and stood beside him, ready.
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Indigo grabbed her bow and arrows, but she was still sluggish from being asleep. Far from fully alert. Rex wanted to tell her to grab a gun, but he didn’t have the time.
Margot just stood there, frazzled, terrified.
Rex grabbed the shotgun, went to the kitchen window, shot it out. He pumped another round outside just as Indigo was backing him up. The man with the flaming Molotov Cocktail, he fell down dead, his body suddenly in flames.
“Rex?” Margot asked.
“Get down!” he screamed. “Or hide someplace!”
The bitter sounds of gunfire cannoned through the house. Indigo ran to the front, but a glass window exploded, which had her diving down. She scrambled back to the stairway, took cover there.
“Get in the closet, Mom!” she screamed as gunfire ripped apart the front door.
The gunfire stopped, but half the front of the house was burning. Then a booming kick shook the front door. She seated an arrow, positioned herself just right.
“Front door, Indigo!” Rex screamed.
“You cover your end, I got mine!” she shouted back. The second kick flung the door open, revealing the bright light of fire and the shooter. She loosed the arrow, caught the shooter in the neck. He staggered backwards, toppled down the concrete stairs in a heap. The thug’s replacement appeared seconds later, but she was ready for him. She let the arrow go. It found its mark and he went down, same as the last guy.
“Too many of them!” Rex shouted.
“Out front or out back?” Indigo called back. By now, the fire was sneaking into the house through the open front door and all the shot out windows.
“Front!” he said. “Get back here!”
Indigo turned and sprinted for the back kitchen, ripping open the closet door on the way. Her mother yelped.
“Let’s go!” she said.
Her mother made for the back of the house as gunfire blasted apart the front of the house. Suddenly the gunfire stopped. Were they done?
Peeking into the front hallway where dawn was breaking, Indigo saw movement on the other side of the fire. Seating an arrow, lining up the shot, she tracked the movement of a shadow, waited for it to stop, then sunk an arrow in her target.
“Ooof.”
She aimed lower, sent another arrow past the nearly disintegrated front door. The second arrow found its mark as well.
More shouting and gunfire erupted. Inside, the house sprung to life, everything jumping and dancing as it was shot to absolute ruin.
Indigo hit Rex with a look, but he had one eye out the back window and was measuring the storm.
“What the hell are you waiting for?” Indigo growled.
“Something just hit the side of the house and two guys are now coming in hot,” he replied, lining up the shot. Just then, a gas can with the spout wrapped in burning cloth slid through the front door and into the front room.
“Bomb!” Rex cried out. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, he ran for the back door, seeing the orange flames even as he pulled it open.
Shotgun at the ready, Rex sprinted through the fiery back door, firing on the other two guys now in the backyard. Three big shots took the two men down, but at that point, Rex was on fire, along with Indigo’s mother.
“Roll!” Indigo screamed by the time she realized she was on fire, too.
While Rex and her mother were dropping on the ground and rolling out their fire, Indigo was shrugging off the bow and arrows and doing the same. Rex jumped on top of her, began patting her down rapidly, roughly, thoroughly.
“Follow me!” he said when Indigo’s fire was sufficiently stamped out. She headed for the garage, opened the door to the Olds, then cranked the motor.
“You want me to drive?” Rex said, realizing his mistake the minute he made it. She could drive just fine and they were wasting time.
“No, get in!” Indigo shouted. Rex dropped into the front seat while Margot situated herself in the backseat. “Buckle up.”
Indigo kicked the motor over. It sprung to life in a roar. She slapped it into reverse, stepped on the gas while standing on the brakes, then she popped the brakes and rocketed through the wooden garage door, cranking the wheel hard and to the right.
The muscle car blew through the door and slid around, bucking and fighting her all the way. They came to a skittering stop in a cloud of dust. When the debris cleared, Rex and Indigo saw five startled men with guns and a sixth with a plastic red gas can.
“Do it,” he said, knowing what she was thinking.
Indigo slapped the tranny into first and stomped on the gas just as Rex slid out the window with his Sig and opened fire. While he was dropping as many as he could, Indigo was aiming for the center of the pack. Bullets peppered the windshield, cracking and spider-webbing it; Indigo ducked low to the left, maintained the trajectory.
At the last minute, she realized the last shooter was going to dive to his right hoping to clear the Olds, so she swerved in that direction, clipping him in the hip as he tried to clear them. The brutal thump on the front of the car told her she probably shattered his pelvis.
Rex pulled himself back inside, spun and said, “Margot?”
“I’m okay,” she said, sitting up.
They roared up the road, Indigo so violently incensed, one look in her eyes told him all she saw was red.
When they burst out of Dirt Alley, Indigo swung the wheel hard to the right and they fishtailed out into the street.
“Get ready,” Indigo warned. Rex was already reloading. “Mom, stay down.”
They swung another hard right, giving her a full view of the conflagration that was her home. She also saw a dozen more
men in the street turning their guns on her.
Rex ducked out the window and started shooting, but pulled himself back inside after hitting only three because they were taking heavy fire. Indigo was looking not at the men now scurrying for cover, but at a crappy green Datsun and that son of a bitch scrambling inside. It was the same guy who knocked on her front door. The same clown who threatened her.
Emilio Gustavo Francisco De La Fuente.
The remaining men fired on them as they blazed by, hot on the trail of the green Datsun. Indigo hit the next street where the Datsun turned and took chase, really getting after it.
“Indigo?” her mother said.
By then Rex was gripping the door and bracing for impact. They hammered the Datsun with such savagery, the Olds went airborne and turned sideways with Indigo on the high side and Rex on the low side. The Datsun spun, caught an edge and began to barrel roll behind them.
The Olds hit on Rex’s side and slid hard into a sidewalk planter where it came to a stop under a decorative tree that had seen better days.
Hanging in her seat belt, Indigo said, “Mom?”
Nothing.
She looked at Rex, who had a pretty decent cut on his head, but was otherwise okay. He was on the door in a heap having never buckled his seatbelt. He kicked the windshield until it dropped out then climbed free; Indigo was concerned about the Datsun. More specifically, about De La Fuente and what he might do.
Behind her, her mother was buckled in her belt and hanging against it. She was on the high side of the car and unconscious.
Indigo took a deep breath, let it out, then unbuckled the seatbelt and dropped to the ground in all the broken glass. Her breath was suddenly gone, the wind knocked out of her. It took a moment for her chest to loosen enough for her to breathe, but when she did, she crawled through the glass, out the hole where the windshield used to be and then managed to drag herself to her feet.
She was bruised, but not broken; cut but not defeated. Bleeding, glass stuck in her right arm and shoulder, she zeroed in on the Datsun.
The small sedan was turned upside down and spun one hundred eighty degrees. The underside of the car, now facing skyward, was smoking. All the glass was exploded out of the car and De La Fuente was in his seatbelt, hanging upside down. His face was bloody, his eyes syrupy but cognizant. A smile formed, but upside down, it was just a frown in a river of red.
Rex already had his gun out. She looked at him; he looked at her.
“You okay?” he asked. She nodded, eyes back on the scumbag in the Datsun. In the undercarriage, a small flame burst into existence.
She started toward him, picking up speed the closer she got. By the time she reached him, she wound up and soccer-ball kicked him in the head.
“That’s for destroying my house you bastard!”
He fired off a slew of curses she didn’t understand. It didn’t matter. Kneeling down so they were nearly eye-to-eye, she said nothing, she just grinned a maniacal grin at him and refused to blink, or even to look away.
“Funny how I’m here,” she snarled, “and you’re there. You’re The Ophidian Horde, aren’t you?”
“I am not one, there are many.”
“You’re the head of the snake,” she said.
“Think of this city as Medusa, and me as just the head of one snake in a sea of a dozen snakes. You kill me, there will be seven more to take my place.”
“Seven of you didn’t burn down my house, or have my friend killed. Just you. So I don’t care about the seven of you, or even the seven hundred of you. Just you.”
Rex stepped forward, made his gun available to her. She took it, never removing her eyes from him.
He looked at it and said, “You got the balls to put one through my head, puta, you go right ahead.”
With a sweet grin, an almost playful grin—sort of like the Cheshire cat—she said, “Oh, I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to sit and watch you burn.”
And she would.
His eyes now showed concern. He was thinking of a bullet as the easy way out, but she refused him such a simple solution. Instead, she simply watched the flames as they spread over the undercarriage. She an Rex moved back, their eyes dancing from de La Fuente to the flames and back again.
“You’re one twisted bitch,” he snarled.
“Indeed I am.”
When Rex turned around, he saw Margot crawling out of the Olds. Indigo saw her, too. Made that face. For a second there, she felt ashamed for having been so consumed with rage she’d neglected her own mother. Margot was rolling some pain out of her neck and shoulder, but she seemed to be alright, all things considered.
The three of them stood at a safe distance, watching De La Fuente squirm to get free of the seatbelt that was broken enough to be stuck in place. He was trapped and frantic. Defeated, grinding his teeth and losing his mind, he jerked and fought the seatbelt, tugging mightily on it, pounding a fist on the buckle but to no avail. Finally he gave up. Just sat there, stewing, accepting his fate.
The flames now rolled over the car, causing De La Fuente to make one last desperate attempt. Indigo raised his weapon, shot him in the shoulder. De La Fuente broke into a screeching wail. Spit and crass language spewed from his lips as the flames snuck inside the car and went for him specifically.
“Just shut up and burn, pendejo,” she said.
Rex turned and looked at Indigo with a raised eyebrow; she shrugged her shoulders in response, which made him smile inside. She shot the man to ensure he met his appropriate fate. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
As the flames enveloped De La Fuente, as they swallowed him, he bucked and screamed and thrashed until the skin began to bubble and melt, and the fire ate the last of the life right out of him.
The three of them stood a ways away even as the small engine exploded. The hood punched up off the asphalt a foot or so before slamming back down. They all turned and shielded their eyes, but the explosion was fairly self-contained.
“Well this is a fitting end,” Indigo said.
“Yes it is.”
Margot stood there in abject horror, silent, trying not to look, but looking anyway because she couldn’t seem to look anywhere else.
When De La Fuente was dead and gone, when the flames consumed the seatbelt and the roasted maggot dropped in a pile onto the overturned roof of the car, they returned to the Olds where Rex said to Indigo, “Give me a hand.”
The muscle car was on its side, nothing leaking too badly, and nothing on fire. Together they pushed the muscle car over. It bounced violently on its springs and all four inflated tires. Indigo appraised the damage. Despite nearly every square inch of the beast having taken an absolute beating, she thought it might still run. That’s how cars were supposed to be built. Back in the day they were all balls and grit with noisy engines and hard charging mufflers.
“Give it a try,” Rex said.
For the next few minutes, Indigo worked the ignition and the gas, flooding it half a dozen times. The engine coughed and sputtered, but eventually it showed signs of life. When it finally caught and kicked over, they were all exhausted smiles.
“Get in,” Indigo said to them both.
Margot and Rex piled back in; Indigo threw the beast in gear and headed back home. They found a few Horde stragglers, which Rex popped out the window and shot dead, but by and large, they’d all dispersed. Indigo’s home, however, was still burning, as were the homes next to it. By mid afternoon, half the block, if not all of it, would be one long coal bed.
They drove to Dirt Alley. Stopped right in the middle. When they got out of the car, there was no wind but the fires were spreading out on either side of her home. They couldn’t jump the alley, which made it safe. Indigo turned and looked at the house Cincinnati and her family had stayed in. It was untouched by violence. But more important, it was familiar.
“A quick nap and we’ll go?” Rex said, standing beside her all the sudden, looking at the same thing she was looking
at.
“We should go,” Indigo replied, even though he could see she was aching for sleep right about now. “Then again, a cat nap might be great.”
They all headed inside the house, each finding a bed they could crash in.
Indigo woke up disoriented. Her body felt punched to all hell, and her arm stung in a dozen places. She was still picking glass out of her otherwise flawless skin.
Her mind began to clear.
Wrong house, wrong bed, pitch black outside, she thought. She got up, shuffled to the nearest window, looked across the way at the orange glow that was five and a half fire-gutted homes, hers included.
Her soul withered inside her. There was something truly awful looking at your childhood home like this. There was so much history. Her whole life was wrapped up in that house. Now it was gone. Reduced to nothing more than a glowing, orange ruin.
Her father would come home and see this and he would wonder if she died in the fire. She couldn’t let that happen.
She wouldn’t.
Downstairs, by candle light, she left her father an address, said to find her there. While Rex and her mother were still asleep, she slipped on her shoes and a coat, then walked out back and around the front of her house. The smell of charred wood hung heavy in the air, the lingering smoke burning her eyes and nostrils by the time she got to her porch stoop.
The only thing standing was the concrete staircase and the heavy ceramic pot on the porch, the one her mother used to plant seasonal flowers in before she ran off with Tad and left them all behind.
Can’t think like that anymore, she told herself.
She tucked the note under the ceramic planter, leaving out a small corner for her father to see. Hopefully he’d see. When she returned to the house, Rex was on the back porch waiting for her. Margot stepped out a second later.