by D. J. Molles
To the left, the catwalk dropped over a single, flimsy rail and he could see the people milling about in panic below as five of the gunmen began to surround them, firing their rifles into the roof for effect and making Tomlin pray that he didn’t catch a ricochet from one of those idiots.
To his right, the catwalk butted straight into the wall where a slew of pipes, air ducts, and electrical conduits ran horizontally along the six foot space between the catwalk and the ceiling. Straight up ahead, Tomlin could see what appeared to be the ladder that led to the roof.
The clanging of metal rungs brought his attention straight ahead.
Someone was climbing down from the roof. He could see their legs working quickly down the ladder.
Attack or hide?
Hiding gave him a narrow chance, but the only chance he had. Bus’s plan was the only plan, and he suspected that even if he had more time to consider it, he wouldn’t have come up with a better one. The only hope for Camp Ryder and Captain Harden was for Tomlin to get to one of the other settlements, and sound the alarm that shit was going down.
He dove to the side, wedging himself between a row of three large pipes that sat abreast of each other, and an air duct. Panic shot through him like he’d stuck his finger in a light socket. He felt sure that he was not hidden well, that as soon as whoever was coming down from the roof passed by, they would see him sandwiched in there, and he was crammed in so tight that he wouldn’t be able to defend himself. He pictured it, his arms pinned down to his side, his rifle facing harmlessly in the wrong direction, as his enemies raised their weapons and pumped round after round into him, and he would be conscious as each bullet ripped into his guts and split him open.
The sound of boots struck the catwalk.
Someone shouted, “Let’s go, Jerry!”
More boots banging on the catwalk, then the sound of running, pounding and reverberating harder and harder as it drew closer to him.
Yes, keep running… If they sprinted past him, their chances of noticing him wedged into all these dark-colored pipes were pretty slim. If they would just keep running.
“Wait, slow up!” A new voice said, an older voice.
Shit shit shit!
“You see that?”
“Yeah.”
“Motherfucker’s holed himself into the office!”
Relief flooded him so hard, he thought he might piss himself.
The footsteps picked up the pace again, and two shadowy figures passed by, only inches from him. He could have reached out and touched them, and at any point in time he feared they would suddenly stop and turn to look at him, but the office held their attention.
Tomlin waited until their footsteps had retreated off the catwalk and then he scrambled to free himself from his hiding place. He twisted and turned and finally extricated himself and his rifle, although a sharp bit of welding took a nasty chunk out of his left forearm. With his feet under him, he moved as quickly and quietly as he could manage towards the ladder.
So close…so close…
“Hey!” Someone shouted.
Maybe they’re not yelling at me.
“Shoot him!”
The distinct barking sound of an M4 firing three rounds in quick succession came from below him. He wasn’t sure where two of the rounds went, but he watched a section of cement wall to his right suddenly explode into fragments, and knew that the rounds were meant for him.
All pretense of stealth immediately left him.
It was do-or-die time.
He bolted for the ladder, crossing the last dozen yards in an instant and leaping halfway up the rungs as more rifle reports came from behind him. This time he felt the rounds, impacting close to him. He could feel the shrapnel from the cement wall stinging his face, feel the ladder lurch under him as they struck the metal. He cringed, waiting for that ricochet to find him.
He kept pulling with his arms, thrusting with his feet.
Daylight above his head.
He grabbed the lip of the roof and pulled himself up like he weighed nothing at all, then vaulted himself over the edge. He hit the ground and rolled twice, then scrambled to his hands and knees, and finally to his feet.
He ran towards the edge of the roof, but then stopped himself short.
He looked around, gasping for air.
“How do I get down? How do I get down?”
The sound of shouting, echoing up to him from the ladder.
He scanned the entire perimeter of the roof, but didn’t see anything that looked remotely like a ladder. Not even a drain pipe that he might scramble down. How high up was he? Two stories? Three? If he busted his ankle on the way down, he’d be screwed…
A banging noise.
Metal on metal vibrations.
Someone was shimmying up the ladder.
He crouched down, making a small target of himself and brought the M4 up.
An identical rifle to his own suddenly protruded from the hole in the roof, and it began spitting out bright tongues of flame, the operator of the weapon blindly firing over the edge, hoping to strike something. But he’d chosen the wrong direction and was firing uselessly off to Tomlin’s left.
Tomlin snapped off one round and watched the rifle fly out of its owner’s grip as the bullet struck it right in the receiver. From the ladder came a yelp of surprise and pain.
Should hold them off for a second…
His options were dwindling quickly. It was either jump, or eventually get waxed by an enterprising individual that chose to pop up from the ladder at just the right time when Tomlin wasn’t looking. He wouldn’t last on the roof forever.
He ran to the edge of the roof and looked down.
It looked more like ten stories than the two or three it was.
He’d never been a fan of heights.
Lucky for him, he was facing the backside of the building, and there before him was the very same shipping container that he had escaped from, maybe five or ten feet off the side of the building. It would cut down on the distance he would have to fall, and lessen his risk of injury.
More shouting from behind him.
Now or never…
He backed up a few paces to get himself a running start, then flung himself over the edge.
He thought the drop was going to take much longer but the top of the shipping container rushed at him with surprising speed and he didn’t quite have enough time to set himself up for a good landing. He hit the top of it with an explosive noise and immediately pitched forward.
He was too close to the edge.
He tumbled off the shipping container and hit the ground on his side, the magazines in the shoulder sling jabbing mercilessly at his side and sending shooting pains through his ribs. He felt the air leave his lungs and refused to go back in, his shocked diaphragm locked in position.
Got the wind knocked out…it’ll come back…
He hobbled to his feet, feeling woozy and hoping his breath came back sooner rather than later. His vision swirled just slightly, and then found its correct spot and became solid reality again. He ran straight forward, toward the fence and all the while looked up at it with his mouth hanging open, getting small breaths into his lungs and gradually working them into larger breaths.
Barbed wire fences.
He wasn’t going to climb that shit.
He glanced behind him, saw that there were no immediate threats—yet—and then turned back to the fence he was running towards, trying to find a point where he might make it through. For the most part, the bottom of the fence touched the ground, and in some places the dirt had built up and swallowed the first few rows of links. But just to his right there was a section where erosion had carved miniature canyon into the dirt. The ground cleared the bottom of the fence by a few inches.
A few inches would have to be enough.
Tomlin knew instantly he wasn’t getting under that fence with the rifle and spare magazines, but there wasn’t a chance in hell he was leaving them behind. He shuck
ed off the shoulder bag and slung it as hard as he could over the top of the fence, and then did the same with the rifle. The two objects cleared the barbed wire and clattered down a few yards into the woods.
He dove to the ground, his hands splayed out in front of him, trying to sweep the bottom of the chain link fence away from his head. He was only partially successful, getting most of his head through before the bottom of the fence swung back into place and gouged him from the ears to the neck and then caught on his clothes.
Tomlin writhed under the pressure of the fence, only gaining inches with each movement, feeling panic welling up and not fighting that feeling. This was no fine motor skill that required a clear head, it was not a critical decision of what was a threat and what was not a threat. This was just an animal trying to get out of a trap, and if there was any time in the world to panic, it was then.
He cleared his upper body, then dug his fingers into the soft dirt and clawed himself all the way free of the fence. And when he was free, he didn’t stop to look back or to assess the damages. He lurched to his feet and pointed himself straight into those woods. As he ran, he scooped up the rifle and shoulder bag and flew as fast as his feet would carry him.
CHAPTER 31: JERRY
The pounding at the office door continued for nearly thirty seconds straight. Crouched behind the overturned desk, Bus and Angela stared at the door and wondered how long it would last once the men on the other side started kicking. The pounding now was only someone’s fist. It was a big, industrial door with a metal frame, and would not come down easily, but it would eventually.
And then what? Bus thought.
The hammering fist ceased, and a voice that was only vaguely familiar came through, slightly out of breath. “Bus! You need to come out of there, before we come in and get you! Don’t make this harder than it needs to be!”
Bus grit his teeth and shook his head, but didn’t respond.
Angela watched him quietly and adjusted the grip on her pistol.
“Bus…” The voice called again—Greg? Was that his name? “Are you armed?”
“Of course I’m fucking armed!” Bus yelled at the door. “Where’s Jerry? Let him speak for himself. He wants to take this place over, he can come look me in the eyes and we’ll talk it over.”
This time it was Jerry’s voice that came through the door. Lilting, proud, bitter, engorged with his own perception of victory: “I’m here, Bus, waiting for you to open the door, if you really want to face me like a man. But there will be no talking this over. We’re through with talking. You’ve pushed us into this position, so don’t bitch now that we’re taking control.”
Bus hung his head for a moment and there was silence between him and the people on the other side of the door. How many were out there? Five? Ten? All armed? And Jerry especially…wouldn’t Jerry enjoy it if they had to get in a shoot out? Because there was really only one outcome to that.
“Bus, we are trying to handle this with as little violence as possible,” Jerry intoned self-righteously, as though this whole situation was Bus’s fault. “But you’re making it very difficult. And the longer you hole up in there, the more likely it is that someone is going to get hurt.”
Bus closed his eyes, rubbed them. When he opened them, he looked at Angela with a strangely serene look on his face. “You know, Angela, when I first met you, I never would have imagined one day we’d be barricaded in this office, holding guns.”
Angela looked grim. “And yet, here we are.”
Bus actually laughed, as though the situation was some comedic story he was hearing about third-hand. “Yes…here we are.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Jerry shouted through the door. “I’ve given you plenty of chances to handle this like an adult and face the music! I’m giving you one minute to open this fucking door before we break it down! And then whatever happens will be on your head, not mine! You hear me, Bus? It’s your fault! It’s always been your fucking fault, and it’s gonna be your fault again! Open the fucking door!”
Bus almost winced at the sound of the man’s shouts, as though his voice were a particularly ear-piercing and high-pitched noise that you could feel in the fillings of your teeth and down the skin over your spine. When the room grew quiet again, he sighed quietly.
“You’ve got a lot of fight, Angela.” He looked at the pistol in his hands. “Probably a lot more than I ever gave you credit for.”
“Bus,” she said, licking her lips nervously. “Maybe we should…”
“Here.” Bus held out his hand. “Let me have your gun.”
She stared at him like he was nuts.
“Come on. Let me see it for a second.”
Slowly, she held the pistol out to him, and dropped the heavy metallic object in his outstretched hand. Bus looked at it like some alien artifact he didn’t quite comprehend, and then he stood up from behind the desk.
“What are you doing?” Angela asked, a note of apprehension coming into her voice.
Bus ejected the magazine of her gun, and jacked the round from the chamber. He looked at her with a sad smile, and then tossed her weapon on the floor so that it skittered away into the other corner of the room.
“Bus!” Angela stood up like she was going to make a leap for the gun.
The big man held out one giant paw to stay her, and when she was firmly rooted behind the desk again, he retracted his hand and tossed his own weapon to the ground alongside Angela’s. He shook his head. “We’ve survived this long. I’m certainly not going to be taken out now by this motherfucker.”
“Open the door, Bus…” Jerry taunted.
Angela and Bus regarded each other for a long moment, but both knew that it was the right decision. This did not have to end in bloodshed, and Bus would do the people of Camp Ryder a disservice by making a useless sacrifice of himself.
He reached forward and unlocked the door, and then stepped back.
It took the men on the other side a moment to comprehend what he’d done, but then the door flew open and two men burst through, shouting and pointing their rifles at Angela and Bus, yelling at them to raise their hands.
The man—it was Greg after all—that pointed his rifle at Bus, stepped to one side, and behind him Jerry stood in the door of the office, staring balefully at Bus from under scowling eyebrows, and pointing his sawed-off shotgun at him.
For a moment, Bus’s heart jumped, thinking that Jerry was just going to shoot him dead right then and there…but no. Jerry didn’t have the sack for such an overt act of violence. Jerry was a politician, and he knew that even though his supporters disliked Bus, they wouldn’t look at it very kindly if Jerry gunned him down for no reason.
Jerry stepped forward and raised his head up so that he was looking down his nose at Bus, and he sneered, the picture of haughty defiance. “Get on your knees, Bus.”
Bus shook his head. “Why are you doing this?”
Jerry leapt forward, but still left about a foot between the muzzle of his shotgun and Bus’s chest. “Because you fucked us over, Bus! You have us running around like lackeys for that GI Joe, giving everything we have to his ‘mission’! You just let twenty of our group—twenty innocent people—march out of Camp Ryder on a fucking suicide run to God-knows-where, to do God-knows-what, all because The Great Captain Harden said it was a good idea!” Jerry’s face was a contorted mask of rage. “You’re fucking pathetic! Pathetic!”
Bus laughed in his face. “And what are you going to do, hero? What’s your master plan for all of this? Run and hide? Wait for it to be over?” The smile on Bus’s face dissolved abruptly into a snarl. “Because I have news for you! It’s not going to be over! You’re not going to be able to wait it out!”
“Shut up!” Jerry shrieked.
“You think you can just wait for them to die, but you can’t! They’re just getting stronger!”
“Shut the fuck up!”
“And they’re breeding! They’re breeding, Jerry!” Bus took a step forward and
reached towards Jerry in a supplicating gesture.
The shotgun blast shook the room like an explosion had gone off underneath their feet. The twin barrels flashed bright, hot, violent smoke, and Bus toppled backwards like some invisible force had yanked him to the ground.
“Bus!” Angela screamed, and shoved past the man guarding her, who stood with his eyes as wide in shock as everyone else in the room, their panic-stricken gazes crossing rapidly between Bus’s figure on the ground and Jerry who stood over him, his eyes wild and glistening like a mad man.
It seemed to take Jerry a moment to realize what he had done. For a moment so fleeting that it seemed to have been only a trick of the light shifting through the cloud of gunsmoke that hung in the air before him, Jerry looked terrified.
“Did you see that?” Jerry began screaming. “He tried to grab my gun! You saw that, didn’t you? Greg! You saw him try to grab my gun! I had to shoot him! He was trying to grab my gun so he could shoot me! I had to do it!”
Greg stood, petrified in place. His mouth worked and he could find neither the courage to tell the truth—that there had been no aggressive movement on Bus’s part, that Jerry had shot him in cold blood—nor the intestinal fortitude to directly affirm Jerry’s lie.
Angela fell to her knees at Bus’s side. “Bus! Somebody get help! Help him!”
The big man lay on his back, his eyes wide in surprise, staring at the ceiling, as his chest hitched up and down, all the brawn of it mangled under the tattered and bloody remnants of his jacket. Strange noises came from him, from his mouth and from the air seeping through his lungs and directly out of his chest. No one in the room moved, or ran for help, partially because they were unsure how Jerry would react, but also because they all knew that no amount of medical help would save Bus from what was coming.
Angela put her hand on his brow and smoothed back the dark curls of his hair. Hot brine welled in her eyes and her breath was becoming ragged with sobs. “Bus, look at me! Look at me! You’re not gonna die! You’re gonna be okay! It’s gonna be okay…just fucking look at me!”