by Lukens, Mark
*
Two hours later the sun began to set, the schoolroom getting darker as night approached.
Mike and Emma had fallen asleep thirty minutes ago and Ray let them sleep. They had to grab sleep when they could. Mike was curled up into a ball on his side and Emma was lying down against the wall. Ray had given Mike an extra shirt so he could wad it up under his head for a pillow.
Ray was getting worried about Josh and Luke now. They’d been gone for a while. Different scenarios ran through his mind, and he assigned percentages of probability to each scenario. Maybe they’d gotten killed by rippers. Or killed by Dark Angels. Maybe they had been captured by the Dark Angels. But then again that probably wasn’t likely with Luke’s shooting skills. But the Dark Angels had taken over a fortress, according to Luke. Maybe they were more formidable than Ray and everyone else was giving them credit for. Another possible scenario was that Luke and Josh had gotten lost. But the most likely scenario, the one that scored the highest percentage with Ray, was that the two of them had found a vehicle and had decided to take off and survive on their own. Ray didn’t want to suggest that possibility with Mike and Emma just yet, he didn’t want to tear down his son’s new heroes, two characters right out of the video games that he played, but when the reality came, when he was sure they had ditched them, then they were going to have to figure out what to do.
Ray’s butt and back were getting sore from sitting on the floor for the last few hours. He got up, telling himself that he was just stretching his legs, but he knew what he was doing—something he’d wanted to do for the last few hours, but he had wrestled with the ethics of it.
Hell with ethics. This was a new world. There were no ethics anymore.
He walked over to Josh’s backpack and opened it, searching through it, pulling clothes and supplies out, rummaging through the pockets on the side. A few minutes later he stared down at the items all over the floor in the fading light. He hadn’t found the proof he’d been looking for—the bottle of pills or baggie of drugs. Maybe Josh had taken all the drugs already. He definitely looked high enough.
Ray stuffed the clothes and supplies back into Josh’s backpack and closed it up. He glanced over at Mike and Emma, both of them already lost in the shadows. He didn’t think he had woken them up.
He walked down an aisle through the rows of desks. He thought about sitting down in one of the desks, but they looked too small for him to squeeze into. He went all the way to the teacher’s desk and sat down in her chair. It was comfortable, but it squeaked just a bit when he leaned back.
Emma got up and felt her way along through the desks, traveling the same route that Ray had just walked, like she was tracking an invisible trail that only she could detect. Ray got to his feet as she approached the teacher’s desk, a surge of panic twitching in his heart. “What’s wrong? Did you hear something out there?”
“No,” she whispered as she felt the desk in the front row and sat down in it. “It’s nothing.”
Ray relaxed a little. “Did I wake you up?” he asked, walking over to her.
“No. I wasn’t sleeping.”
Ray sighed, feeling guilty. “So I guess you heard me searching through Josh’s backpack.” He sat down in the desk next to hers, managing to squeeze himself into it.
“You find what you were looking for?”
“No. But it doesn’t mean anything.”
Emma didn’t respond.
Ray tried to keep his voice low, but he didn’t really even care if Mike woke up and heard him talking right now. He wouldn’t mind if he knocked Mike’s new heroes down a peg or two. “Josh is a drug addict,” he whispered. “And there’s something shady about Luke. I know he’s some kind of criminal. Where the hell did he find a gun with a silencer on it? Silencers are illegal.”
Emma was still quiet.
“Remember when I told you that I saw Josh put something in his pocket back in that town when we were going through those Dark Angels’ truck? I think it was a bottle of pills. And now his eyes are all glassy. I can tell he’s high on something. I’ve seen people high before.” He thought of his younger brother.
Ray glanced back at Mike. It seemed like he was still asleep; he hadn’t moved a muscle. He looked back at Emma. “They both said they saw you in their dreams. They said that you spoke to them and told them to come south and find us.”
“You saw both of them in your dreams, too,” Emma reminded him. “And Mike dreamed about Josh and Luke.”
“Yeah, but I don’t understand any of this. Why do we need to be with those two? A drug addict and a criminal.”
“I don’t know. I’m not doing this or controlling this. All I know is that we’re stronger together than we are alone. And we’ll be even stronger when there are more of us.”
Ray thought of the woman and the little girl he’d been seeing in his dreams lately, the little girl Josh had thought he’d seen sitting in the middle of the road earlier. “Why are we being drawn together?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who is drawing us together?”
Emma just shrugged.
They were quiet for a few minutes. Ray tried to shift his weight in the desk, trying his best to get comfortable. The desk creaked with his movements.
“I’m sorry I’m slowing you down,” Emma said.
Ray stared at her. “What? No, you’re not slowing us down.”
Emma smiled at him. “I know I am. I learned to get around pretty well over the years, and I gained some level of independence for a while. But this . . .” She let her words die in the darkening room. “This is different. It’s all different now. Now I’m a hindrance.”
“Emma, I don’t care what happens. I won’t leave you behind. Under no circumstances. You hear me? I’m not Josh or Luke.”
“Ray—” Emma began, seemingly ready to defend Josh and Luke, but then she froze, her body stiffening, her face turning towards the door as if she’d just heard something out in the hallway.
And then Ray heard it—footsteps out in the hall, slow and deliberate footsteps. The person wasn’t trying to be stealthy.
Someone was coming their way.
CHAPTER 30
Josh
Josh kept up with Luke as they went from house to house. They had found a few possible vehicles, but Luke didn’t think one was big enough, and the other one didn’t have keys inside.
Now they were getting farther and farther away from the school.
Josh had Luke’s spare gun in his hand as he followed Luke through a back yard. Somewhere a dog barked, but they hadn’t heard any gunfire for at least an hour now. He hoped the lack of gunfire meant either that the rippers had all been killed or the Dark Angels had taken off for the woods. Or both. Let’s hope big if we’re going to hope.
His arm was still bleeding a little. An hour ago he’d found an old T-shirt in the cab of a pickup truck and tore it into strips, wrapping the new “bandages” around his forearm. Probably not the most sanitary bandages, but it would have to do for now. He still hadn’t pushed up the sleeve of his hoodie yet to look at his wound. Even with the pain pills coursing through his veins, he was still too much of a chicken to look at it.
“I don’t think Ray likes me very much,” Josh said as they got to the corner of the next house.
Luke paused at the corner for a moment, peeking around it. He watched the side yard between the house and the edge of the woods. The back yard looked like a junkyard, and the side yard was even worse with piles of junk lined up at the edge of the woods: old sheds, appliances, a bathtub, boxes and crates, old construction debris, even a rusty old car buried under some of the junk. The car looked to Josh like something from the early sixties, long and flattened down, not the regal hotrods from the late fifties, and not the muscle cars of the late sixties and early seventies.
“He knows you’re high,” Luke said conversationally as he rounded the corner and continued cautiously down the side of the house, his eyes on the piles of junk.
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Josh was too shocked for a few seconds to respond, but then he resorted to his usual habit—lying: “I’m not high.”
“Anyone can see it,” Luke said over his shoulder.
Josh was already on his second line of defense, thinking of excuses, just like he used to do, listing the ways in which things weren’t his fault. He had only taken a few of those pills from the bottle he’d found in the Dark Angels’ box truck, and it was for the pain in his arm. He’d been stabbed, in case everyone forgot. What was he supposed to do? Gut it out?
How many pills had he taken now? Maybe two or three? Four or five? He remembered popping one when he and Mike had been in the manager’s office in the restaurant looking for a toolbox. He’d told Mike they were aspirins.
Luke turned around when they were halfway down the side of the house. He lowered his gun to his side and stared at Josh. “That’s why you didn’t want to leave your backpack behind, wasn’t it? Your pills are in there.”
Josh thought about telling Luke that his bottle of pills were stuffed down into his sock, but he decided not to, afraid that Luke might demand he hand them over. Instead, he argued back: “Is that why you told me to leave my backpack behind?” Josh asked, suddenly disgusted. “So you could prove a point?”
“No. We will travel faster without our packs. I meant that.”
Josh just snorted out a breath of air.
“Look, I really don’t care what pills you pop,” Luke said. “You want to stumble around high all day, fine. You’ll only get yourself killed, not me.”
Josh was about to begin his rebuttal, but a flash of movement shot out from the piles of junk. Luke was tackled and knocked to the ground, his gun flying out of his hand. Josh aimed his gun down at the ripper and Luke, but they were intertwined with each other, wrestling on the ground.
The ripper on top of Luke was bigger than him. He had red curly hair cut short, and his face was smeared with dirt and mud, his clothes torn. He had no shoes on and his feet were black with caked mud.
Josh kept his gun aimed at the two of them, but he didn’t want to take a chance on shooting and hitting Luke. His hand began to tremble too badly as he pointed the gun at them.
A second later Luke was somehow behind the ripper’s back on the ground, clutching him in a chokehold. He had his legs wrapped around the ripper’s body, controlling him and turning him over and keeping him from squirming out of the headlock. As the next few seconds ticked by the ripper’s movements slowed down, his bright blue eyes stared up at Josh, but they didn’t seem to be focusing on anything anymore. The ripper’s eyes closed and then he was out. Luke kept the pressure around the ripper’s neck, still squeezing tight for the next few minutes, squeezing until the ripper was dead.
Luke got up from the ground, letting the dead body fall off of him.
Josh picked up Luke’s gun from the ground, ready to hand it to him.
“See?” Luke said. “A distraction. That’s what you are. You’re stumbling around here like a drunk, and you’re going to get somebody killed.”
As Luke took a step forward, about to take the gun from Luke, another ripper burst out from the stacked-up junk. Luke turned towards the ripper, bracing himself for the attack.
Josh swung Luke’s gun around and squeezed the trigger twice. It made a spitting noise and kicked just a little in his hand, but he kept it steady. He shot the ripper in the side of the head and right in his throat, knocking him back into the pile of junk before he could get to Luke.
Luke stared for a moment at the dying ripper. Then he looked at Josh.
Josh handed Luke’s gun back to him without a word.
“Let’s go,” Luke said and walked away.
Josh followed Luke around to the front yard. There was as much clutter in the front yard as there had been in the side and back yards. But at least there were vehicles parked there that looked like they might run. Luke walked up to a large Dodge van parked on a dirt driveway. The van looked like it was from the late nineties, and it looked like it had been parked there for a while.
“This will do,” Luke said as he checked the van’s tires out. “Let’s go inside, see if we can find the keys.”
Josh glanced around at the front yard and the woods across the street, waiting for more rippers to pop out of the late-afternoon shadows. But none came. He caught up with Luke at the front door.
“Locked,” Luke said.
Josh spotted a screwdriver on a table near the front door. He picked it up and jimmied the door open in less than twenty seconds.
“You’re pretty good at breaking and entering,” Luke said when they were inside the house.
“I don’t really think you’re a Boy Scout, either,” Josh said.
Luke didn’t reply.
The house was so full of junk there were aisles to walk through. Boxes, crates, bags, and other containers were stacked up in the living room, kitchen, and a hall that led back to some bedrooms. Luke entered the kitchen.
“This might take a while,” Josh said. “Maybe we should go somewhere else. Find a different vehicle.”
“We’re running out of daylight,” Luke answered without looking at Josh. He pushed some boxes off of the counter and down onto the floor, sifting through the layers of junk on the countertop.
Josh still hadn’t started searching for the keys yet. He watched Luke for a few seconds. “Hey, where’d you learn to fight like that?”
“I was an MMA fighter.”
“Pro?”
“No. Didn’t make it that far.”
“Why not?”
“I got in some trouble.”
“You did time?”
Luke nodded.
“Yeah, me too.”
“What a shocker,” Luke grumbled as he looked through one of the drawers in the kitchen.
“What about your shooting?” Josh asked as he moved some stuff around in the living room, making a half-assed attempt at looking for keys he knew were probably not going to be anywhere in the room. He wished he had a pair of gloves on, not really sure if touching some of this stuff in the house was safe. “How’d you learn to shoot like that? Were you in the military?”
“No.”
Josh could tell that Luke was beginning to get annoyed with the interview, but he didn’t care. “Where’d you get a gun with a silencer on it?”
“Found it laying around.”
“What did you used to do for a living?”
“Odd jobs.”
Josh chuckled. “Yeah, I bet they were odd, all right.”
Luke stopped his search and stared at Josh. “What about you? What did you used to do for a living?”
“I thought you had me all figured out. I’m a pill-popping junkie who can’t be counted on.”
Luke shook his head in disgust. “We’re wasting time.” He continued his search for the keys to the van. “We can bond later. Right now we need to find the keys.”
“Maybe we should check the van,” Josh said, already giving up searching through the living room—the idea of looking through all of this junk was overwhelming.
Luke didn’t respond.
He stared at Luke. “You’re welcome, by the way.”
Still no response from Luke.
“You’re welcome for, you know, saving your life back there.”
“And you’re welcome for me saving your lives at the restaurant,” Luke said.
“Well, you’re welcome for me coming up with the idea to cut a hole in the wall and blow up the restaurant.”
“You done patting yourself on the back yet?”
“Hell with you,” Josh grumbled. “I’m going to check the van. I bet the keys are in there somewhere.” But he didn’t head for the door; he didn’t really feel like being out there by himself right now.
Luke opened another drawer, pulling it out all the way, dumping the contents onto the kitchen floor.
Josh walked over to a bookshelf crammed with books. There were some paperback westerns, a whole shelf of a
n action-adventure series, some older sci-fi and horror novels, a few Stephen King books. Josh pulled one of the Stephen King books out, one he hadn’t read before: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams; it was a book of short stories. He slipped it back into the row of books. For some reason he doubted that the owner of this place had read a lot; these books were probably just more items to be collected, more items that he couldn’t throw away, items that had value just because he couldn’t throw them out. In a corner beside the bookcase there were electronics stacked up on top of each other with cords bundled up all around them: old DVD players, stereo systems and speakers, two VCRs, and a video game system. The video game system made him think of Kyle and he had to look away from it.
It was getting late, shadows already overtaking the living room, the fading light a golden yellow and red shining in through the curtains.
Jose turned back to Luke. “I used to have a drug and alcohol problem. I had a problem for a long time. But then I moved up to Pittsburgh with my sister and her son Kyle, and I got clean. I promised to stay clean for them. And I did. That first day everything turned to shit, some cops picked me up and took me to a FEMA camp. I escaped and went back to my sister’s apartment. But when I got there . . .” Josh had to stop talking for a moment, his throat closing up for a moment. He could see it in his mind again, himself standing in the open doorway to his sister’s bathroom. “When I realized that my sister and my nephew were dead, when I saw all the blood, I . . . I just lost it. I had a bottle of pills with me. I took a bunch of them.”
Luke stopped looking in the kitchen drawers again and sighed. “Look, I don’t care. The thing is that you’ll eventually run out of pills. You might find a bottle here and there, but eventually you’ll run out because nobody’s making them anymore. Eventually you’ll have to go through the withdrawals and learn to live without them.”
“I know,” Josh said. Eventually, he thought. Everything’s eventual. It was another of the titles he’d seen on the bookshelf in the living room.