by Justin Bell
Walking toward the canned goods aisle, he was pleasantly surprised to see large stacks of baked beans, soup, and other non-perishables and he snagged a shopping cart himself, starting to toss the items on the shelf into it. In the darkened caverns of the quiet store, he could hear the squeaking wheels of the other two carts as the two boys raced them down the aisles. Every once in a while the squeaking stopped and he could hear the clatter of boxed and canned items being thrown against the metal insides of the carts. It sounded like they were having just as much luck as him.
“Wrap it up, boys!” Angel shouted through the quiet, empty store. “We need to keep moving! Don’t linger in one place too long!”
He heard a few more clatters, then the squeaking wheels of the shopping carts, and moments later both Brad and Max emerged from the darkness, carts half full with various boxed and canned items.
“Nice haul, boys,” Angel said, nodding emphatically. He walked to the window and kicked with his booted foot, knocking out a few chunks of glass, so the carts could more easily fit through. Ducking his head, he walked his cart outside, with Max and Brad close behind, then popped the trunk and started tossing items inside. It took less than two minutes to fill the trunk and cast their carts aside, all three of them clamoring back into the car to move on to the next place.
“Where next?” Angel asked.
“Let’s try that way,” Max said, pointing toward the city.
“We don’t want to get too close,” Angel resisted.
“Just a few blocks. Seems like we’re on a good stretch of road here.”
Angel nodded and gunned the engine, turning over the sedan and sending it forward down the road toward more darkened stores. Buildings grew tighter and taller as they moved forward, encroaching on the road, dropping it down to two lanes, and shoving more tightly together. Soon the road was less a road and more like a pair of alleys navigating through taller, more thickly grouped structures.
“I think we need to turn around,” Angel said as he made one more right-hand turn, venturing down a one-way street. “This isn’t where we want to be.”
Easing off the accelerator, he searched for a side street to take, a way to escape this single lane road, carrying them further and deeper toward the city of Chicago. Looking around, he tried to see if they could stop and turn around in the middle of the road, but the car was huge and the road was tight, it seemed almost too snug to maneuver.
Lights strobed in the darkened alley followed by a chattering bark, a rattling flash flash flash of yellow/white illumination and echoing snaps of sound.
“Was that gunfire?” Angel asked, both hands clamping tight around the wheel.
Max lowered himself down in his seat. “Sounded like it,” he said, reaching back to pull the cherished revolver from his belt. He still wouldn’t go anywhere without it.
“Turn around,” Brad whispered. “There’s a parking lot up there, can you pull in and swing around?”
“Give me a minute,” Angel whispered just as another swift, staccato barrage of popping weapons fire echoed in the narrow street, seeming to come from all around them. “Hold on!” Angel shouted as he swung the car left, popping the curb and jumping up onto the paved parking lot. As the front end came down, the car jerked right, the steering wheel flying out of his grasp and the vehicle’s blunt front end slammed into a dumpster with a metal-on-metal bang, jerking and throwing all three of them forward in their seats.
“What happened?” Brad asked in a frantic whisper.
“I don’t know!” Angel replied. He rammed the car into reverse and punched the accelerator, and the engine gunned, roared, then silenced. “No no no no!” Angel shouted. He turned the key toward him, then cranked it over again, and the engine sputtered, almost caught, but wheezed into quiet again.
“Is it dead?” Brad asked.
“What’s going on?” Max echoed.
“It won’t start!”
“Make it start!” Max twisted around, looking out the rear window. Another rattle of gunfire burst through the night, sending yellow, streaking light arcing across the walls of the buildings. In that swift flash of illumination, Max thought he saw something.
“Someone’s over there!” he shouted.
“Where?” Brad asked.
“In the alley behind us. I saw them moving.”
“Not our problem,” Angel whispered, then tried to start the car again.
“It might be our problem soon,” Max said. As the car ticked into silence, Max could hear muffled shouts from across the alley, followed by thumping footsteps, the sounds of a group running and shouting.
There was another shadow of movement and Max flew open his door, jumping down into the parking lot to get a closer look.
The boy ran into him at full tilt, chest to chest, knocking Max from his feet and spilling to the pavement himself, both boys shouting in pain and surprise.
Max looked up at the boy whose head was snapping back, then around to face him again.
“They’re coming after me,” he whispered frantically. “And now, they’ll be coming after you!”
***
The alley running parallel to the parking lot rocketed with flashing light in tune to the successive pop pop pop of semi-automatic gunfire, sending spastic sparks dancing along the metal edge of the sedan roof. A swift burst of breaking glass shattered the driver’s side window, sending Angel scrambling downwards toward the floor of the vehicle.
“Angel!” Max shouted as the boy he’d just run into extended his hand to help him up. Max wrapped his fingers around the boy’s forearm and allowed himself to get yanked roughly to his feet as more gunfire rattled from somewhere in the night. The driver’s side door slammed open and Angel spilled out, crouching low to the ground.
“I’m okay!” he shouted and glanced over to see Brad scrambling from around the front of the car himself. “They’re coming! We need to split up!”
“If we lose track of each other, meet back at the grocery store!” Angel shouted. “Go go go!”
As if in emphasis of this fact, a staggered row of sparks punched into the door in a lazy upward motion, sending both groups lurching backwards.
“Come!” the new boy said, tugging Max’s arm. “This way!”
Max looked back at Angel and Brad who were lunging toward the mouth of an alley near the front of the car, swinging around the hood and navigating around a green dumpster.
“My friends!” he shouted, but he was yanked further along, swallowed by the darkness.
“They’ll have to fend for themselves!” the boy shouted. Max knew they could, and ducked forward, dashing through the alley, staying on the heels of the boy ahead of him. They rounded a corner, then dipped left down a narrow passage, the popping of gunfire easing to an occasional and faint din in the distance.
“Who are you?” Max asked in between hushed gasps of breath.
The boy leaned against the brick wall behind him. A long, black rifle clattered against the brick, sandwiched between his back and the wall. “Tamar… my name’s Tamar.”
“What are you doing out here alone?”
“Stirring up a hornet’s nest, apparently.”
“Yeah, I’d say so. Those guys were firing rifles! Rifles like yours.”
“Standard issue for the Ironclad dorks. Actually, I think we stole this one from them.” He patted the weapon strapped to his back.
“Ironclad?” Max asked.
Tamar nodded. “Local security firm. They’ve been at our throats for a couple of months now. Real nasty dudes.”
Max stood up, finally catching his breath. “You said ‘at our throats.’ There are more of you?”
“Oh, yeah,” Tamar replied. “Bunch of us. We call ourselves The Orphans. You and your friend, you guys would fit right in there.”
“I’m confused,” Max replied, shaking his head. “You guys live out here? On the streets? Where are your parents?”
“Did the name ‘The Orphans’ not register, bud? Most
of us don’t have any parents. Either never did, or they were killed in… well, you know.”
“Killed in the what? There was no detonation up here, was there?” Max’s heart picked up. In their desperation to escape a radiation zone, had they inadvertently driven themselves into another one?
“Nah, man, no bombs here,” Tamar replied. “Just hearin’ about it was enough for Chi-town to self-destruct, though. Martial law, panic in the streets, lotta young dudes with guns thinking this was their shot. Stuff went sideways real quick with or without a dang nuke.”
Max shook his head. It was unbelievable to him how quickly the entire country had deteriorated, even in places where no actual damage had been done.
“So, yeah,” Tamar continued. “One of the good guys, an ex-Marine named Lonzo saved my bacon one day. My neighborhood went up in flames, most folks I knew did, too. I would have been with ‘em if Lonzo hadn’t showed up.”
“Sorry about your family, Tamar.”
Tamar shrugged. “You know, I lived in a bad section of a scary city. Every morning I woke up I’d beaten the odds, so no reason to stop now.”
Max glanced behind him as they continued navigating the darkened alley. Gunfire had long since stopped, at least nearby gunfire. Max thought he could hear the sporadic, but recognizable chatter of small arms fire, likely from deeper in the city. Every once in a while, the drifting breeze carried with it a distinctive stink of burning. Every time the smell blew by, Max thought of St. Louis, memories he didn’t care to keep rattling around inside his brain.
“So what’s this Ironclad got to do with it?” Max asked. Tamar had drifted ahead of him and was running his fingers over a chain link fence that stood between them and the exit of the alley, running out into a cross street.
Tamar shrugged. "They showed up around the same time things started falling apart. We crossed paths with them on a few supply runs, and one of them got messy. Couple of us got killed, one of us disappeared. We got a few of them, too, though, and ever since they’ve been all up in our business.” He looked back at Max. “Can you climb this, country boy?”
Max drew back. “Country boy? Get outta here.”
He nodded at Max’s dirty blue jeans and loose-fitting flannel shirt. “Calls ‘em like I see’s ‘em.”
Max chuckled and charged forward, clamoring up the chain link fence, then swung his leg over and dropped down on the other side, in a swift series of graceful moves. His right hip barked a little as he landed, a souvenir of that time in St. Louis he preferred to forget. He made no sign of the pain though, hopping up and down on the ball of his feet, smiling at Tamar.
“Easy. Show me how it’s done, gangstah.”
Tamar laughed out loud. “Boy’s got some ball.” He leaped up the fence, snatching his fingers between the links halfway up, then swung his legs up and over, vaulting the rest of the way, landing in a smooth crouch on the other side. The M4 Carbine bounced on his back as he landed and Max admired not just the way he moved, but the way he moved with the large weapon buckled around his torso.
“That’s how it’s done,” Tamar laughed, standing and slapping Max in the chest. Max shook his head, holding up his hands in mock surrender.
“You win, Tamar, you win. Nice moves, slick!”
Tamar nodded. “Yeah, tell me something I don’t know.” He walked past Max and out toward the crossing street, keeping low to the ground. “Be careful out here,” he whispered. “Ironclad likes patrolling these main roads.”
“Where are you taking me?” Max asked. “I gotta get back to my friends.”
“Chill yourself, man. I’m getting you there. We just need to work around those bozos.”
Max followed him, walking low to match and pressing himself tight to a building, staying in the shadows. They moved forward, quickly and quietly. As much as Max wanted to trust this new friend he’d made, he’d only known him for minutes, and he kept on glancing back where they’d been, wondering how they were going to angle around back to the car. Up ahead, another road intersected with the street they were on, a basketball court on the other side of the road, bracketed by more chain link fencing.
“Hold it slow,” Tamar said. “We’re hanging a right here, but getting back into Ironclad territory.”
A thought came to Max’s head then as they crouch-walked forward. “You said Ironclad showed up like two months ago?”
“Something like that.”
“They all wear, like military gear? Bunch of white dudes with shaved heads?”
Tamar looked back, stopping his movements. “Sounds like you may have met these jerks before.”
Max nodded. “Yeah, we met them. They’re nasty, all right. We drove them out of a shopping mall down near Peoria about two months ago, but they did some serious damage before they left.”
“That’s their MO,” Tamar said. “They go for the throat, every time. Don’t matter how old you are, boy or girl. I mean, shoot, that girl who disappeared, pretty sure they snatched her up. Hate to even think what happened to her.”
“Scary freaking world, man,” Max said.
Tamar nodded.
Angling right down the street, Max looked over at the basketball court and smiled wistfully, wondering how long it had been since he’d played a game of hoops. He and Brad used to do it all the time during breaks at school, taking shots, barely keeping score, thinking every time they shot a game, they’d be back there the next day to shoot another one.
Until they weren’t. He wiggled his fingers, almost feeling the smooth, dimpled flesh of the basketball there, almost hearing the dull whack of it hitting the court and the rattling clang of chain nets, the squeak of shoes on court. He could feel his heart racing, the sweat on his skin, and for that moment he wanted to shoot basketball more than almost anything else in the entire world. Was there a court near the mall? He decided he’d have to check on that when he got back. If he got back.
“Wake yourself, country!” Tamar shouted.
Max snapped his head up, his eyes springing open. “What’s going on?” He didn’t have to ask. Up ahead, down the road they were walking on, a quartet of headlights flashed to life, splitting the darkness and hurtling down toward them, reflecting light washing over the building to their right, their crouching forms exposed in globes of pale yellow.
“They’re on us!” Tamar shouted. “Run!” He darted right, snaking down a narrow road and Max charged after him as two cars screeched to a halt in the road, swerving into diagonal road blocks, doors already flying open even before the cars stopped moving.
“In the alley, I saw him go in the alley!”
“There’s another one!”
Two men charged from passenger side doors, and Max could see their smooth scalps reflecting in the amber glow of the headlights and he could tell they had weapons in their hands. Three swift pops exploded, showering him with chunks of brick debris from the building next to him and he dropped, spinning around, drawing the revolver from his belt, slapping it up into a two-handed grip, tracing down one of the gunmen. He fired twice and the window of the opened door exploded, chased by a bright bang of sparks from a bullet hitting the door. Max adjusted left, aimed again and fired twice again, and this time hit his mark, the bald man with the rifle grunting and stumbling backwards.
More shots burst from the cars, flashing sparks merging with the wash of headlights, and more brick exploded above his head and behind him. A stray round smashed the M4 strapped to Tamar’s back, and the weapon blasted apart into jagged edges and broken plastic.
“You okay?” Max asked.
“Just get in the alley, kid, I’ll be fine!” Tamar yelled.
“They’ll just chase us!”
“They won’t catch us!”
Max adjusted again and fired two more times, shattering a headlight and punching a small hole in a windshield, but he didn’t hit anyone. He had two more rounds, plus another few speed-loaders in his pockets, so he adjusted one more time as another barrage of return fire sent
divots of sidewalk spraying up into the air. Max fired twice more and thought he saw another bald head snap back, but he couldn’t be sure, and he couldn’t sit out in the open while he reloaded, so he fell back, popping the cylinder open and slapping in another speed loader with quick precision, turning and lurching down the darkened alley. Tamar dodged trash, weaving left and right, then leaping over a stack of boxes, running the alley like an Olympian navigating some third world obstacle course. Max nodded appreciatively as he followed in his wake, impressed by the nimble movements of the boy ahead of him, trying hard to keep up. The mouth of the alley was a couple blocks ahead and they ran toward it, reaching close to the breach.
Two bald men with machine guns appeared out of nowhere, filling the void of the exit into the next street, lifting weapons.
Tamar dodged left, then moved forward and swung his leg in a tight curved arc, his foot clipping the barrel of one of the weapons, shoving it aside as it went off, shattering the brick building next to them. He landed gracefully, then spun on his heel, kicking a leg out and striking the second man in the knee, sending the leg bending the wrong way on the joint and the bald man shouted stumbling sideways, catching himself on the wall next to him. Max lifted his pistol and fired, sending the first shot into the torso of the first gunman and throwing him out into the street, then swiveled and fired three more times at the man with the dislocated knee, who sprawled backwards, following his friend.
“Good teamwork, country!” Tamar shouted, barreling out into the street, Max following close behind. Both of them emerged into the wide, two-lane street which intersected the alley, looking both ways.
“Where do we go?” Max asked, lost at this point.
“That way!” Tamar shouted, pointing to his right, but just as Max followed his outstretched finger, a car charged out of the side road and swung to a stop, doors opening and four men in tactical gear exiting, weapons in hand.
“Dang, man,” Tamar muttered, taking a cautious step back. He looked at Max, then back at the car. “How many bullets you got in that thing?”