by Aric Davis
How long would Alison wait to remarry? Hopefully not long. She deserved to be happy. Would his death be anonymous, or would they let his body be found? Will assumed the former was far more likely; why give the police anything to work with? There was nothing holding back his tears and his fear beyond a dignity he was only now discovering in himself, a determination to die with dignity, or at least as much dignity as he was capable of if the MS-13 leader decided that he needed to die a bad death.
The wind was really howling now that they’d left the city, moving their van back and forth. Will could no longer see the taillights of the other van traveling in front of them. Their driver was doing a pretty good job, considering. They passed by Alpine, its normally bright retail lights nearly smothered by the weather, the parking lots that Will could see empty and the almost always clogged traffic nonexistent.
The weather was some of the worst Will had ever seen, but as they passed the first exit ramp past Alpine, it somehow got worse. The younger, nervous man sitting next to Will said, “Shit,” in a thick Latin accent. Just then, through the window, Will could barely make out what looked like a giant tearing off the top of a warehouse, just as a regular man would tear the top from a tin of sardines. The sound it made was horrible, an otherworldly screech. The van swerved, Will assumed to avoid something, and then Jason was smashing the bandanna-covered face of the man next to him with an elbow and shooting the man’s carry piece into the front of the van. The noise from the gun was louder than anything Will had ever heard, and the men around him were covering their ears and shouting rather than attacking Jason. At that moment, as Jason was finding a way to free them, or at least himself, the world went upside down. The same hand of God that had been tearing the top from the building seemed to lift them as well, and then the van was airborne and spinning.
Will awoke confused, and then the fear came back to him. We crashed. He began trying to move as his eyes adjusted to the darkness and to the pile of unconscious and possibly dead men around him.
As worried as he was about his brother, his priority was to make sure he was going to be in a safe enough position to try to help Isaac and help himself. Will’s body felt made of aches. He heard a voice begin swearing in Spanish, and then that voice was extinguished as another voice said, “Choke on that, motherfucker.”
Jason, thought Will, trying to pull enough air into his lungs to call for what he was starting to think of as his old friend.
Will’s eyes continued orienting themselves to the darkness, as well as to the odd shapes that the ruined van and even more ruined bodies were taking on. The gang members were everywhere. The scared kid who’d been sitting next to him had his brains leaking out of his ears and his nose. Already having a rather deplorable day, Will had no problem with rooting around for the kid’s pistol, finding it tucked into the waist of his pants and taking it for himself. He slowly racked it to check the chamber. The gun was a Glock and had not been taken care of properly. It would have to work.
Will began to slide, pistol first, to the back of the van, which, he now finally realized, lay upside down. This helped him make some sense of the scene. The seat he had been in was fine above him, but the roof over it—now the floor under Will’s knees—had been crumpled like an accordion, making the trip to attempt to find Isaac into a series of valleys and hills. One of the MS-13 members groaned when Will placed his hands on him, and Will responded by hitting the man in the throat with the butt of the pistol until he stopped complaining. The wind was blowing snow into the distressed van, and Will could hear Jason dealing with another one of the bangers in his own way, but he didn’t care; he could see Isaac’s shirt, and the shirt was covered in blood.
Next to Isaac, or at least what Will could see of him, one of the bangers was starting to stir. Will, sore or not, increased his pace, the pistol in front of him. Behind him, Will could hear a struggle. That, and hearing Jason say “son of a bitch” awoke something in him. Will turned, the pistol coming up naturally, somehow, and shot the banger holding Jason in the head, dropping him. Will had only fired a Glock a couple of times, and the weird part was how quiet the gun was, almost no noise in the van. My ears, Will thought, as he raced—well, crawled—back to Isaac and his bloody shirt.
Isaac was underneath one banger, plus half of another. Will could feel, if not hear, another gun go off near what had been the cab of the van, but chose to ignore it. He shoved the sawn-in-half MS-13 member off of his brother’s prone body and was happy to see that Isaac was still intact, at least from the waist down. Someone behind Will, in the front of the van, began to scream, then stopped as a sputter of hail attacked the ruined vehicle. When the hail passed, the scream had become a gurgling noise. Will dragged the other man covering his brother from off of Isaac, then began scrabbling at his brother’s wrist to try to feel for a pulse.
Isaac was alive. Twin bubbles of snot and spit were inflating and then deflating under his nostrils, and Will was sure he could hear him moaning.
The sound of thumping came from the front of the van, and craning his neck, Will could see Jason beating another one of the gangbangers to death with the butt of a pistol.
“Get your fucking brother, Will!” Jason was screaming at him, and Will, terrified that he was going to somehow damage Isaac further, began to crawl over the dying and dead while dragging Isaac by his feet. His brother wasn’t stirring, which Will took as a bad sign, but tried to just ignore it. Something grabbed at his leg, and Will jumped, almost screamed.
“It’s just me,” said Jason. “Hold on tight.”
The tugging on his leg grew stronger, and then first Will and then Isaac were out of the van and onto the highway. The wind was insane, but relief flooded Will. They were alive. He looked for the other van, but other than some tracks leading off the highway, it was gone. He gave Isaac a glance, knowing that a day of hauling his older brother around was just beginning, and then turned to Jason.
Jason was bleeding from a cut over his right eye but met Will’s glance with a grin. He was holding an AK-47 that he must have taken from one of the dead bangers and tossed a short-barreled AR-15 to Will, a semiauto with some sort of sight on top. Will fiddled with the sight for a moment. Then, after pushing a button on the back of it, a small red dot surrounded by a red circle was visibly projected onto a clear, square piece of glass. Will took the safety off and lowered it.
Jason was moving Isaac to a sitting position, then picked him up over his shoulder. “We need to find your brother some shelter.”
“Don’t you think we should just get out of here?”
“Look over there,” said Jason, pointing to the shoulder of the road. If there had been footprints, they were erased by the wind, but a distinct blood trail, likely only minutes old, was headed north. “Chris isn’t in the van,” said Jason, “and neither was his backpack. From what I remember, and counted, there’s at least one of these fuckers missing as well, maybe two of them. I smell gas. Let’s go.”
Jason began moving down the highway, Isaac slung over his shoulder, the small AK in his free hand. Will was the rear guard, wondering to himself if anything could kill or even scare Jason.
The blood trail went up the next exit ramp, and they followed it through the wind, ice, rain, and snow, the storm becoming as much an adversary as the room full of armed and angry gangbangers had been. If Jason was having trouble with Isaac, he wasn’t showing it, or at least wasn’t mentioning it.
The blood trail was visible off the ramp and headed down on a street called Fruitridge. Just off the exit ramp, Will could see a gas station, its sign and pumps destroyed by the storm, as it became visible through the maelstrom.
Jason led them to the gas station, a battered Sunoco that had not only lost its pumps and sign, but also its windows and electricity. Setting Isaac down next to the door, Jason fiddled with the lock through the shattered glass and then opened it. Will grabbed his brother’s shoulders, attempted to pick him up, and settled on dragging him into the gas station. H
e had no idea how Jason had carried him down the highway and up the ramp.
Stopping once they were inside the station, he found Jason across the room, looking around. “Over there,” he said, pointing to a wooden door that looked like it still had some integrity left.
Jason opened the door to the windowless manager’s office, and Will dragged Isaac inside, leaning him against a desk. Jason took a coat hanging off the back of the door and wrapped it around Isaac.
“Do you think he’ll be OK in here?” Will asked. “He’s totally out of it.”
“Well,” said Jason, “if the pumps were going to blow, they’d already be tits up. Looks like somebody had the good sense to hit the cutoff on the gas before they got the hell out of here. Hey, small miracles.”
“I mean, just leaving him, though. Will he be all right?”
“I don’t know, and neither do you. I do know that neither of us have a cell phone and that, even if we did, there would be no fucking reception out here in this storm.” Jason picked up a wired phone receiver from the desk, held it to his ear for a second, and replaced it. “Landlines are down too, so either we sit here and hold your brother’s hand while we wait for morning or we go after this asshole. To be entirely honest, I’m going either way. Those fucks were going to kill me, and that’s not something that sits easy.”
“All right, I’m in too. I’m going to get some water and food to put by him, in case he wakes up. Will you find something in here to write on and leave him a note?”
“You want me to put on some lipstick and kiss the note too?”
“No, I think the note and supplies will be enough.” Will grinned despite himself. “I’ll be right back, and I’m serious about the note.”
Will walked into the store part of the gas station, grabbed two bottles of water from a cooler with blown-out glass doors, then also grabbed a can of Pringles and a couple packs of beef jerky.
When he came back into the office, he found Isaac lying on the floor with a note on his chest that said, Back soon, stay here. Will set the food and water next to his brother, then stood watching as Jason half-racked the bolt on the AR.
“They’re both loaded,” Jason said, “but we don’t have any spare magazines, so if you have to shoot at someone, make sure it’s worth doing. You see these?” He pointed fore and aft on the small carbine. “If that cute little dot sight gets fucked up, hit the buttons on the sides of those, and you’ll be back in the game, assuming you’re worth a shit with iron sights.”
“I’m not.”
“Well,” said Jason, “better than nothing. Are you ready?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Then let’s hope that fucking asshole is still bleeding.”
Will gave his brother one last look as they left the office. The expression on his face stayed with him as they left the relative comfort of the gas station and returned to the storm. Isaac looked as though he were having a lovely dream.
The savagery of the weather was on them before they were even out of the gas station and grew worse the farther they drew away from it. Jason ran, and Will kept up as best he was able, the blood trail coming and going in the same spurts in which it had left its injured former owner. Will found himself following Jason and ignoring the rapidly disappearing trail, stealing glances to the side of the road to see if perhaps whoever had left it had ventured from the streets to find refuge, whether at their intended destination or just one of convenience.
Some of the buildings, Will was able to see from their position in the road, had been shattered by the storm and others left alone. Giant warehouses were torn asunder, while nearby farmhouses remained undisturbed. This was an angry storm, a wind that was attacking at random, and it showed no signs of letting up.
The clothing Will wore was both soaked and frozen, he was cold to the bone, but the only thoughts in his head were of his dead son, the trail of blood, and one foot passing before the other, over and over again. The gloves Jason had handed him just a few impossible hours before were the only thing allowing him to hold onto the carbine, which, for all he knew, wouldn’t function in this sort of weather at all.
Will thought of mountain climbers desperate to reach the summit. When asked why, they’d simply say, “Because it’s there.” He’d always thought that answer was a cheat. Sure the mountain was there, but so was the way around it. Now it occurred to him that walking in the storm to find the man who had killed his son—and maybe also the reason for the death in the first place—was the same as saying, “Because it’s there.” If asked, Will would have said that he was walking on because he loved Alex, had even loved the stupid things that he had always found himself doing. He loved his son for giving him a reason to live, even as an angry and resentful teen convinced that he was scraping the shit from another man’s child.
Alex had become so much more than that, though, just as Will’s mother had said that the boy would. The family celebrated Alex’s triumphs, and his miscues, as unfortunate as they were, had mostly come after Will’s parents had passed. Alex had been a gift given by a woman who had no idea of the wonder of the life she was giving away, a life no less a wonder because its owner had proven, over and over, unable to escape the curse of his bloodline, no matter which tainted father might have been his.
Jason spoke, and the words shook Will from his fugue.
“We need to move more slowly, stay off the road,” Jason said, pointing down a path that could have been a six-lane freeway for all Will knew. But still the blood trail was visible in the glow of the few surviving streetlights and occasional bursts of lightning. “They went this way. Let’s go see where.” Jason launched himself into the snow beside the road, and Will followed him, images of Alex smiling and a smug Chris spitting at Jason alternately rotating in his head.
They were walking along a driveway now, keeping to the tall pines littering both sides of it. The pines provided dual protection: from prying eyes and from some of the wind and snow. Even in his Thinsulate-lined boots, Will’s feet had gone from cold to fire to now just two wooden blocks that were attached somewhere below his knees.
Even Jason was slowing. Will hoped it was the weather wearing him down, and not some additional injury that had been hidden in his clothing. If it was an injury, he knew Jason was a lot more likely to just keel over dead than complain about it. He also knew that he was in no shape to do what remained on his own.
Every few hundred feet of walking in the pines, Jason would loop out so that he could see the road, making sure that they hadn’t passed the owner of the blood trail and that they hadn’t been doubled back on. After doing this for the fourth time, Jason returned, walking toward Will instead of just continuing forward.
“Looks like they went into a building,” he said. “And unless I’m going blind, there’s nobody posted by the door.” Jason managed a grin, his mouth ringed in ice-crusted facial hair, the cut over his eye caked with snow and fused shut. “The place has taken a beating, but not like some of the shit we’ve seen. The blood trail ends before it gets to it, or at least it looks that way. We’ll see when we get closer.”
“Are you ready to do this?” Will asked, not sure if he was ready himself. The snow and the storm had saved them, but it could still be the death of them about as easily as a warehouse full of gangbangers with tattooed faces could be.
“I’m ready,” said Jason. “It’s only a little further, and then it ends either way. I sure would prefer the winning side, though.”
“Hey, at least we should be able to make it inside. Do you think they have heat? Maybe we can dry our boots off before we try and kill each other.”
“I think we’re lucky just to still be kicking. They got sloppy, should have killed us off at the house, and me being able to take a gun off one of those scary-ass motherfuckers just goes to show that a little more time spent shooting rather than getting their faces all done up might not have been a bad plan.”
“Hey, just in case we don’t make it out, thanks for you
r help.”
Jason shrugged. “Shit, this is the first worthwhile thing I’ve done in a long time, even if we have had to torture and kill some people. I feel alive, and my head is clear for once. I’m not going to waste your time with some dumb speech, but this almost makes up for everything else.”
“Did you do it?” Once he’d said it, Will wondered where the fuck it had come from. Now he was bringing up the girl in the B and E twenty years ago?
But Jason just nodded thoughtfully at him, and when he answered, it was like they were just finishing an interrupted conversation. Like it’d never left his mind. Which it probably hadn’t, Will thought.
“I don’t know,” Jason said. “Isn’t that just the most fucked-up thing? If you would have asked me the day after the break-in, I’d have said no. But then, when I got to prison, everybody thought I’d pulled a fast one. My reputation was in place, waiting on me to get there. I never denied it, but it didn’t happen the way everybody thinks it did. That’s why I was never charged with it, I guess. Bottom line, I didn’t put a gun to her head, but I probably had scared the shit out of her, and she felt like she had to do it. Not like it matters, though. No one would ever believe me, and it’s fucked up my life enough that, even if they did, there’s no fixing what’s already happened.”
Will wasn’t sure what to say to Jason about any of that, and Jason grunted and began moving again before he could come up with anything. Will kept his pace, following his mysterious and damaged friend farther into the trees.
They walked next to each other through the pines, the wind whistling and whipping the branches, distorting sounds so that every cracking branch sounded like a gunshot and everything else eerie and unnatural. The two men were moving at a faster pace than they’d managed since they had left Isaac at the gas station, even through deeper, crusted snow. When they made the edge of the driveway, the warehouse visible to both of them, a few scattered cars in its lot, Will felt almost elated.