by D. Gideon
“You don’t have to do this, man,” Corey said softly.
I looked up then. Marco was still, staring at the water bottle in his hands. He wasn’t crying. His shoulders were tense through the thin t-shirt he’d put on in anticipation of the heat.
“My father went begging door to door for anything anyone could give us that we could possibly trade for my sister. He begged for help, but no one would stand up with him against these men. Every day a man would come and ask for the gold, and Father would offer to take them to the bank offices and give them files, deeds to properties that the bank owned, anything—and they would refuse him. On the third night, we heard something slam into the headboard we’d propped up as a door. It was my sister. They’d thrown her onto our steps and left.”
His voice dropped. “She was dead. Her body was still warm, but she was dead. There was blood everywhere. She was covered in bruises, cuts, burns. She was naked. They’d cut off all of her beautiful hair. They’d sliced into her breasts. She was…torn…”
His voice hitched then. He stopped for a moment, rolling the water bottle in his hands again. He took deep breaths.
“I’m so sorry, Marco,” I started, but he shook his head and held up a finger without looking at me.
With another deep breath, he continued.
“I didn’t know then how she could have been torn like that. It made no sense to me at the time. None of it made sense. It was horrific. Her mouth was torn. Her womanhood was torn. Her anus was torn. I know now that they had taken turns with her, and it didn’t matter to them if they hurt her. The point was to hurt her. For three days, they raped and sodomized and tortured my sister, and then threw her body away like so much trash when they finally broke her.”
He took another deep breath, then another. We waited.
“There was a message on her back, written in marker. It said your little boy will be fun.”
“Oh god,” Mel whispered. Her face was wet with tears. Corey slid down the wall until he was sitting with his knees bent in front of him. He put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.
Marco looked up, his eyes catching mine.
“We left that night. We buried her in the backyard. My father dug up our passports—he had buried them under the gardening shed in a jar when the siege started—and we fled the city. We had nothing but the clothes we were wearing. We came across soldiers a few times, and each time my mother would talk to them for a few minutes, go away with them for about an hour, and when she came back they’d let us pass.” He gave a little snort then. “For years, I thought my mother knew magic. I thought she could cast spells over men and make them do what she wanted. I was so angry that she hadn’t done it to keep my sister safe. I hated her for it. Until I became old enough and realized what she traded them for our passage. What she did to keep us safe.”
He looked back down at his hands. “And then I hated my father for letting her do it, even though he had begged and pleaded with her not to. Eventually, I grew old enough to know that there was no way he could have stopped her, because she would have done anything…anything…to keep me alive.”
He finally stuffed the fourth bottle into his backpack and began zipping it up.
“Eventually we made it to a town that had electricity and phones. My father was able to call his best friend; his supervisor at the bank at the headquarters in Germany. He thought my father had died because it had been so long. He wired us money. We left the country. Father went back to work for the bank, and we moved from country to country. A few years here, a few years there.”
He leaned back against the wall and sighed. “I had to fight in Israel. Everyone does. Two years in the military. I learned to hack in Ukraine until the tanks moved in, and eventually learned more in Russia. I’ve been in the middle of too many skirmishes and wars; things the American news never even reported.”
He looked at me then. “I’ve killed people, Ripley. So many that I’ve lost count. And it wasn’t just the fog of war. There was no romanticizing it, or removing myself from it. I’ve put bullets through the heads of men who were stoning a woman to death. I broke the neck of a man who was threatening to blow up a marketplace. I’ve slit the throats of soldiers that were dragging little girls away to sell them or rape them. I’ve shot and killed men who were shooting at me.”
I just held his gaze. It felt like any reaction from me at all would be taken as some sort of statement, a judgment. I held still, and waited.
He watched me for a few moments, then shifted, looking down at his hands and back up again.
“I’m not a super soldier. I don’t have any elite knowledge passed on by the best of the best. I’ve just been through a lot of war and stayed alive. I’ve seen the evil that people can do. I know that you can’t trust desperate people that aren’t your people. I’ve killed, Ripley, and I won’t hesitate to do it again if I have to. I won’t think twice about it, and I won’t lose sleep over it.”
He looked back up at me, but wouldn’t meet my eyes at first. His glance roamed from my shoulders, to my hands, and back up again. When I stayed quiet, he finally brought his eyes up to meet mine.
What I saw there was worry.
“This is what you were going to tell me?” I asked.
He nodded, short and quick.
I drew in a breath through my nose and shook my head. His eyes widened, and I held up a hand.
“I’m not saying no, you can’t come with us because you’ve killed before,” I said. “I don’t care about that. You did what you had to do. It’s just…a lot to take in. It’s horrible, what happened to you. I can’t imagine it, what it must have been like for you.”
He closed his eyes then and the tension flowed out of his shoulders. “I thought that when I came to study here, that I was leaving all of that behind. Nothing like that ever happens here. No civil wars, no regime changes, no arab springs.”
“And then this happens,” Corey said.
Marco nodded. “And then this happens. And I’ve got no rifle, no ammunition. I don’t know the layout of the countryside. I don’t even have a good pair of boots.” He waved his hands at his loafers. “I come here to finally live a nice quiet life in a country where I don’t need any of that, and now I need it all more than ever.”
He nodded at my pack, and then Corey’s. “Imagine my shock when the two of you, who have never lived through war, who have no reason to even think of war, were prepared for this.”
“We weren’t prepared for this,” I said. “We were prepared for a hurricane, a bad winter storm, maybe. Those things happen a lot on the East Coast.”
Marco shrugged. “Preparation for one is preparation for the other,” he said. “Hurricane, civil war, the sun falling down…in the end it all comes down to basic survival.”
Mel was wiping her face dry with one of the layers of her skirt. “What happened to your parents?” She asked.
Marco smiled a little. “They’re back in Portugal, near all of our family. Father bought a nice little estate and turned himself into a farmer. He has a herd of goats and some horses, and mother spends all day in the gardens with her chickens. They foster orphaned children sometimes. They’re happy.”
“Good,” Mel said softly. “Good.”
“Do you know if anything ever happened to the guys that took your sister?” Corey asked.
Marco looked at Corey and nodded.
“I went back and looked for them once I was old enough; once I thought I knew enough. It took a couple of weeks to track the three that were still alive. The war took a few of them, a couple more got sick and died, one overdosed,” he said.
“What happened to the rest?” I asked. He turned and looked me straight in the eye.
“I happened to them,” he said.
CHAPTER 27
M onday Sept. 3rd
College Park, Maryland
“This is unreal,” I said. “It looks like a war zone.”
“Doesn’t smell too far off, either,” Mar
co said. “It’s just missing the burned bodies.”
We looked at Marco with expressions ranging from dread to horror, and he grimaced.
“I’ll shut up now,” he said.
The intersection of Route 1 and 410 was a mess. We were standing in the entrance to an office building, surveying the wreckage. What was left of a telephone pole sporting three transformers lay across the road and over the roof of one crushed and burned-out husk of a small car. The transformers had busted open, but whether it was from explosions or the impact on the car, I couldn’t tell. An oily stain spread from underneath of them to the edge of the road, where it followed the sidewalk down to a large metal drain.
Corey pointed to the stain. “Once the mineral oil out of those transformers lit up, anything sitting in it was toast,” he said. “I bet some people got hurt really bad getting out of that.”
More cars sat abandoned on either side of the pole, many of them also burned-out; others partially burned, with doors left open, fiberglass bumpers warped and drooping. It looked like the fire had spread from either the pole, the electrical lines, the oil, or the cars—it could have been all four—to trees that bordered the west side of the road, and from there to the homes on the corner. The trees were black, skeletal fingers jutting up from the ground. All that was left of the homes were charred foundations and a few orphaned brick walls. Even now, days later, thin wisps of smoke still rose from the husks, drifting up to be ripped apart and scattered by the breeze.
“I tried to tell you,” Mel said. “There were fires or accidents at nearly every intersection. Getting back to campus was hell.”
Now that it was daylight and the curfew was lifted, there were some cars out on the road. They’d been driving past us as we walked, some slowing to look us over and others accelerating past quickly. Cars were moving through the main intersection now, weaving slowly around an abandoned truck in the center of the 4-way and driving over the electric and phone cables that lay across the roads.
King pushed past me and trotted to a car sitting on the office building’s lawn. It looked like the driver had swerved to avoid the falling pole, only to plant the grille of the little Honda Civic firmly around a small tree. The tree had probably been put there expressly to keep cars from cutting across the corner of the lawn when traffic got backed up; it had done its job well. The Civic’s driver’s door was also open, and King disappeared behind it.
“What’s he into?” Corey said, cocking his head. We followed the big dog, curious, and found him nosing through a McDonald’s bag, snuffling up stale fries.
Corey turned and pointed to the other side of the intersection where a McDonald’s sat empty, all of its windows busted out. “Dude goes through the drive-thru, gets onto the road, pulls out his burger, and wham.” He pointed to the remains of a Big Mac scattered across the top of the dash. King put a paw on the steering wheel and lifted himself up, trying to get at what was left of the burger.
“Smart dog,” Marco said. “Ripley, see if the keys are still in it, and give them to me if they are, please.”
Confused, I squeezed in next to King and found the keys still hanging from the ignition. King turned and licked the side of my face with a happy chuffing sound.
“Bleh,” I said, backing out and tossing the keys to Marco. Plucking a napkin from the seat, I tried to dry my face. “What do you want the keys for?”
“The keys won’t help you, Romeo. This car ain’t going anywhere,” Mel said. “Or did you miss the new hood ornament?”
“Organic,” I said. “It’s the latest craze.” She chuckled and bumped her shoulder into me.
Marco walked to the back of the car and popped the hatch open. “My dear Melanie, as much as I wish it could move, if only so you’d stop complaining, that’s not what I’m interested in,” he said.
“I have not yet begun to complain,” Mel shot back.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” came Marco’s voice. “And we’ve only gone about a mile.”
He leaned around the hatch and tossed me something black. I caught it without thinking and turned it over in my hands. It was a compact umbrella.
“Ok, it’s an umbrella,” I said, still confused. Marco gave me an I told you so expression and ducked behind the hatch again. Finished with his vacuum job, King backed out of the driver’s door and trotted around back to see if Marco had found more burgers.
“My turn,” Mel said. She sat down in the driver’s seat and flipped the visor down, then leaned over and opened the glove box.
“Corey,” Marco said, and his hand appeared around the hatch holding a tire iron. Corey stepped forward and took it.
“Uh, Corey, it wasn’t a dude driving this car, unless you guys normally ride around with tampons in the glove box,” Mel said. She got out of the car holding a tiny box of compact, bullet-sized tampons. “Scored these shades too,” she said, slipping on sunglasses.
I tossed the umbrella onto the driver’s seat.
“What are you guys doing?” I said. “This isn’t our car. This isn’t our stuff. This belongs to someone, and they’ll be back to get it.”
Marco stood up and closed the hatch. “It’s been three days, Ripley. If they were coming back to clean it out, they would have done it already.”
“You don’t know that,” I said. “Maybe they think it burned up with everything else.”
“In which case, they’re not coming back,” Marco said, crossing his arms.
A car pulled through the entrance to the office building and continued around the lot, driving through the building’s parking garage to exit onto 410. The two passengers were staring hard at us, talking to each other. With their windows rolled up, I had no idea what they were saying, but their expressions were those of disgust and fear. When the car exited the garage, its tires chirped as the driver tried to put distance between us.
I gestured at the fleeing car. “See? Those people think we’re criminals. And that’s what we’re acting like.”
“Ripley, I looked through your booklet like you told me to last night. I saw the scavenging maps and notes,” Marco said, his voice carefully neutral. “This is no different.”
“This is different,” I said. “What’s in a store isn’t someone’s personal stuff. It belongs to the business. Businesses have a full list of their inventory, and they can write off the losses.”
“But someone still owns the business,” Corey said.
“I don’t think Little Debbie is going to go bankrupt because we took some bear claws out of the vending machine,” I said.
“So you’re saying there’s a moral line,” Marco said.
“There is,” I said, nodding.
“So if you were close to freezing to death, and you saw a house that had obviously been abandoned, you wouldn’t go inside and take the blankets?” Marco asked, cocking his head.
“That’s different. That’s life and death,” I said. “We’re not in that situation.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Ripley,” Marco said. “We are in that situation.” He stepped towards me quickly, and from behind him, King growled. Marco froze.
“I would never hurt you,” he said. “Tell him that.”
“Come here, King,” I commanded, and the big dog trotted over to sit by my side.
Marco waited, but I just rubbed King’s head. He took a deep breath and let it out.
“Look around us, Ripley. Look at the destruction. This is life or death. It’s just that those people-“ he turned a thumb towards the intersection without raising his hand. “They don’t know it yet. We do.”
Corey nodded. “We’re just in the beginning of it.”
“I realize that it could become life or death,” I said. “But I disagree that it is right now. When and if we truly need any of this stuff-“
“I need these sunglasses,” Mel said. “I can’t find mine, and this sun is killing my eyes and giving me a splitting headache.” I had to give her that. Having the sun both beating down on us an
d reflecting up from the road was making my eyes and my head ache.
“I might need this to hit someone with,” Corey said, raising the tire iron. “Like those people that were chasing us last night?”
Marco leaned over, slowly, watching King, and picked up the umbrella.
“There was no poncho in your little bag from the shelter,” he said.
“Fine,” I said, throwing up my hands. “Fine. You guys go through cars, take people’s stuff. Take as much as you want.”
“If the cars are abandoned, that’s exactly what I plan to do,” Marco said, looking me straight in the eye. “They left it behind, Ripley. If we need it, I’m taking it. Please keep in mind that I’ve been here before.”
I knew he was right. I knew they all were. But it just didn’t seem right. This car still belonged to somebody. These things still belonged to somebody. Someone who might come back to get them. Someone who might need them.
Another car pulled through the intersection, slowing to navigate around the truck. A little light-skinned girl in the passenger seat stared at the wreckage, eyes wide and fearful. Her mother looked over and saw us, and I heard an audible click as she made sure the doors were locked.
“Hey, sweetie! It’s okay!” Mel called to her, waving and smiling. The girl gave a little wave back, and the car accelerated away, going west towards DC.
“Where the hell are these people going, anyway? Do they think maybe everything will be normal at the next intersection? Or the one after that?” Mel said.
“Maybe they’re heading for family, like us,” I said, stepping around Marco. I didn’t look at him. “Come on, let’s go.”
I walked around the corner of the building, heading east on 410. King padded along beside me, nails barely tapping on the sidewalk. After a moment, I heard the footsteps of the others following along.