He told Shy how everyone at his college and on the cruise ship thought of him as this tough, gangster type because he was from Compton. And because of how he dressed. “That shit cracks me up sometimes,” he said. “ ’Cause if you actually talk to the brothers I grew up with…they’d laugh in your face. Back home folks see me as a straight-up nerd, man.”
“Serious?” Shy knew Marcus was good at school, but he couldn’t see him as a nerd.
“Swear to God.” Marcus chuckled a little. “I mean, I had the grades, right? But it’s more than just that. I always had my face buried in a book. Especially comics. And I barely ever went to parties. Fools used to call me ‘the Milk Drinker’ when I did. I’d walk in the door and some girl would shout that shit out. ‘Hey, everyone! The Milk Drinker’s here!’ ”
“No way,” Shy said. “I saw you drink on the ship.”
“I’m talking about back in high school, though.” Marcus shook his head. “Anyways, I’m not trying to tell my life story or anything. But it does sort of fit with what I wanted to tell you.”
Shy watched Marcus rub his eyes, like he was suddenly exhausted.
“I got some bad news, I guess.” Marcus turned to face Shy. “I’m going home, man. First thing tomorrow morning.”
“Home?” Shy repeated. This caught him totally off guard. “Wait, why’d you come all this way, then?”
“Like I said, I been thinking about shit.” Marcus shoved his hands in his jacket pockets and leaned back against the gutter wall. “I ain’t no hero, bro.”
“What, you think I am?”
“I saw the look on your face in the hospital, Shy. When you said you were going to Arizona. You meant that shit. I went along with it ’cause…I don’t know. I guess I thought I was supposed to.” Marcus pulled his hands out of his pockets and rubbed his eyes again. “And that’s not a good enough reason to do something, I decided.”
Shy searched his head for something deep he could tell Marcus, something that would make the guy see their Arizona trip in a totally different way. None of them were heroes. It was like Shoeshine said, they’d just found themselves on this journey. And they had to complete it. Or maybe Shy could bring up what his dad had told him back at the Sony lots. That his mom was gone. His sister and nephew. Maybe the only reason he was going to Arizona was because he had nowhere else to go.
But it didn’t seem right for Shy to use his family that way, as a tactic to try and change someone’s mind. So he just sat there, shaking his head and fingering the diamond ring in his pocket.
“Anyways, I wanted to tell you first.” Marcus kicked Shy’s foot to make sure he was paying attention. “I know I give you a hard time and shit, but, for real…you been a good friend to me, Shy.”
“Same with you,” Shy said. He had a strange feeling in his stomach. This might be the last one-on-one conversation he and Marcus ever had. They’d already lost so many people from their group on the cruise ship. But this was different.
“Anyways,” Marcus said.
Shy wanted to say something else, just to keep them talking a little longer, but everything that came into his head seemed sentimental. Marcus would probably laugh at him. So he just sat there instead, staring at the dirty gutter floor.
“I feel like a punk, you know? I’m not gonna lie.” Marcus shook his head. “But at the same time, I don’t even care.”
“You’re not a punk,” Shy told him.
Marcus coughed into his fist and peered down the gutter at Shoeshine and Carmen. “Anyways, next time I see you, kid, I expect you and Carm to be all arm in arm and shit.” He turned back to Shy. “That girl’s annoying as hell sometimes, but, hey…at least things would never get boring, right?”
They both smiled.
Secretly, though, Shy was trying to picture the rest of the trip without Marcus. For some reason he couldn’t really do it. They’d been through so much together.
Day 48
34
Circle of Poison
When Shy awoke the next morning he was surprised to find himself alone. He rubbed his eyes with balled fists and looked up and down the gutter, but there was nobody. Their stuff was gone, too. He hooked his arms into his backpack straps and climbed to his feet, and that’s when he saw it.
In the middle of the eastbound lanes, maybe twenty yards from where he stood, a large circle of motionless bodies surrounded a commercial van. “What the hell?” Shy mumbled.
He climbed out of the gutter and started toward the freeway, his heart already pounding. The sun was just coming up over the far-off hills to the east, spilling light over the strange scene. Shy focused on the bodies again, all of them on their backs, arms by their sides. There were at least two dozen. Perfectly arranged. The van between them was facing the shoulder.
Shy was relieved to see that Marcus hadn’t left yet. He was wedged between the van and an overturned Volvo, peering into the van’s cracked windshield. Carmen and Shoeshine stood on the outside of the circle of bodies, staring at a small box.
“What happened?” Shy called out, as he crossed over the freeway median to join them.
Carmen was first to look up. “They did it to themselves. Can you believe that shit?”
There were boxes scattered all around the bodies. Shy reached down and picked one up.
“It’s rat poison,” Carmen told him.
“Rat poison?” Shy scanned the label, spotting the skull and crossbones in the upper right-hand corner. He turned back to the van just as Marcus slid open the side door and stuck his head inside. The big logo on the side was for a pest control company. The group must have raided the thing.
But why?
And how come the bodies were so neatly arranged?
Shy looked around the freeway again. There was a large, orange-painted storage facility beyond the shoulder. Past that, a strip mall. And one of those big McDonald’s that has an outside play area for kids.
“Couldn’t have happened more than a few days ago,” Shoeshine said.
Shy watched the man kneel over one of the bodies. A middle-aged woman in a gray tracksuit.
Carmen nudged the body closest to her with the toe of her shoe. “How could you even do that to yourself?”
“Were they sick?” Shy asked.
Shoeshine peeled open the woman’s eyelids with his fingers. “Doesn’t look like it.” He used his stick to help himself stand.
“Yo, check this out!” Marcus shouted from the driver’s seat of the van. He was holding a set of keys out the rolled-down window.
“Shut up!” Carmen shouted, tossing aside the box she’d been holding.
“There’s even a little gas.” Marcus hopped out of the van and bounded toward them. He stopped just inside the circle of bodies and tossed Carmen the keys. “Hang on to these while I check the back.”
Carmen turned to Shy and Shoeshine. “Let’s drag some of these bodies out of the way so we can take the van.”
Shoeshine cupped a hand to his ear and aimed it at the sky. He had an odd expression on his face.
“Yo, you’re seeing this, right, bro?” Marcus was pointing at Shy. “One last contribution. Don’t say I never did nothing for you all.” Just as he started back toward the van, a loud blast echoed in the distance.
Marcus stumbled, grabbing the lower right side of his back. He turned toward Shy, his eyes impossibly wide, and crumpled to the ground.
Carmen screamed.
Shy held his breath and crouched instinctively, looking all around.
Two armed men in gas masks had appeared in front of the McDonald’s. They were advancing toward the freeway. Two more shots were fired, the bullets ricocheting off the concrete near Marcus. The men ducked behind a trash bin.
Shoeshine dove on top of Marcus. “Get in the van!” he shouted over his shoulder.
Shy grabbed Carmen and pulled her past the bodies, toward the pest vehicle. Three more shots rang out, sparking the concrete near their feet. Then Shy heard another familiar sound.
<
br /> He looked back, saw a government helicopter lifting into the sky from behind the storage facility.
35
Still Hands
Shy and Carmen sprinted behind the overturned Volvo.
He took the keys from her and opened the passenger-side door of the van, then dove over the bucket seat, to the driver’s side, and fumbled to get the right key into the ignition.
More gunfire.
One of the bullets tore through the back wall of the van. Another shattered the small back window. Carmen crouched in the seat beside him, her hands covering her ears.
Shy’s heart was in his throat as he pulled himself all the way into the driver’s seat. He kept his head as low as possible as he turned the key and pumped the gas. The engine turned over and stalled.
“Come on!” Carmen shouted, pounding the dash.
Shy glanced outside. The gunmen were fifty yards away now and closing fast. They’d figured out that Shy and his group were unarmed, that they were sitting ducks.
Shy pumped the gas and turned the key again. This time the van started up. He revved the engine and cranked the gearshift into reverse.
“Hurry!” Carmen shouted as Shy slammed his foot down on the gas, peeling out backward across the freeway. When the van made it between the gunmen and Shoeshine and Marcus, Shy hit the brakes and threw it into park and shouted at Carmen: “Let’s get ’em in the van!”
Carmen leaped out of the passenger-side door.
Shy climbed out after her and slid open the side door and he and Carmen lifted Marcus into the van while Shoeshine brushed away loose tubes and hoses and boxes so they could lay him on his back.
Shy looked up.
The helicopter was almost directly above them now, its blades whipping the air all around. The side door was wide-open now, too, and a man with a gun leaned out and started firing.
Shy dove inside the van just as a bullet shattered the windshield. Shoeshine leaned over Shy, pulling the door closed and shouting at Carmen: “Drive!”
Carmen scrambled into the driver’s seat, flipped the gearshift into drive and stepped on the gas. The van lurched forward, thumping over a few of the bodies. She steered them into the fast lane and gunned it, slowing only to slalom around a stalled car or a buckle in the concrete.
The sound of gunshots continued.
Shy crouched near the back of the van, pulling in deep breaths and covering his head with his hands. He kept expecting bullets to pierce the sides of the van, or the roof, but they didn’t. After a few seconds he raised his head slightly and looked out the shattered back window.
“Get down!” Shoeshine shouted.
The gunmen on foot were no longer firing at the van. Their attention was on an SUV that had shown up out of nowhere. It looked exactly like the SUV that had crashed into the Sony lots. The man driving aimed a gun out his window, but he didn’t fire at the pest control van—he shot at the gunmen on foot.
One was hit in the shoulder.
Shy watched him fall to the pavement.
The SUV screeched to a stop and the driver leaned out his window and fired at the other gunman, who dove behind the overturned Volvo. After that, the van was too far away for Shy to see. He looked to the sky again. The helicopter had pulled off their van, too. It was circling back toward the shoot-out.
“I said get down!” Shoeshine repeated.
“They let us go,” Shy told him.
“Do what I said!”
Shy ducked away from the window, his heart pounding in his throat as he tried to makes sense of things. Why was the guy in the SUV shooting at the two men on foot? Weren’t they together? And what about the helicopter?
He turned to look at Marcus. The left side of his friend’s shirt was soaked in blood, and he was blinking hard, like he was trying to wake himself up.
“Is it bad?” Shy asked. As soon as the words left his mouth he knew it was a stupid question.
Shoeshine didn’t answer. He was too busy pressing one of his spare shirts against Marcus’s wound.
“Who were they?” Carmen shouted from the front of the van.
“LasoTech!” Shy shouted. “Right?”
Marcus began to moan.
Carmen glanced over her shoulder at Shy, then looked back at the road. “What about that guy in the SUV, though?”
Shy shook his head and looked out the rear window again. The helicopter appeared to be landing several miles to the west of them. “Maybe he was with the Suzuki Gang. I don’t even know.”
“The men on foot were LasoTech,” Shoeshine said. “So was the helicopter. They’re the ones with the resources.”
“What about the SUV then?” Shy said.
Marcus’s moaning grew louder.
Shoeshine held Marcus in his arms and began rocking him. “Everything’s gonna be okay,” he said into Marcus’s ear. He repeated this over and over. “Everything’s gonna be okay. You hear me? Everything’s gonna be okay.”
Shy watched them for a few seconds, cringing at the amount of blood. Nothing made sense. Not the circle of bodies or the shooting or the SUV or Shoeshine’s strange embrace of Marcus. Shy wiped his hands down his face and turned his attention to the shelves built into the walls of the van. All the chemicals and strange contraptions. He wanted to believe Shoeshine. That everything would be okay. Even for Marcus. But he couldn’t shake the sight of all that blood. Or how wide Marcus’s eyes got after he was shot. Or the moaning that now filled the van.
How could this happen?
Marcus was supposed to be on his way home by now.
Shy sifted through dusters and sprayers and fogging equipment, wondering if any of it would be useful. Strange-looking vacuums with dozens of attachments. He turned on a UV flashlight and aimed the powerful beam of light into the drawers near the bottom of the shelves as he opened them one by one. He studied the jars and bottles for a few minutes before realizing what he was looking for. This was where the people they’d found circled around the van had found their poison.
He pushed aside a dual-headed plastic container of insecticide concentrate, and found the rat poison. There were only a few boxes left. A part of Shy understood why the people did it, even if they weren’t sick. At this point, everything was so bleak in California. And it was only getting worse. They wanted to take control of how and when their lives came to an end.
But at the same time it pissed Shy off. How could they willingly take their own lives when so many of those who’d died would give anything for another breath? He pictured all the people he’d seen die since the ship was pummeled by that first tsunami wave. Passengers in his muster station and Supervisor Franco and Toni and Rodney and the oilman and countless others, including everyone who’d lined up on the beach back on Jones Island, thinking they’d been rescued.
And that didn’t even count his mom.
He grabbed a box of the poison and let it fall to the floor of the van, and then he stepped on it. He didn’t even know why.
“Shit!” Carmen shouted.
Shy scrambled to the front of the van. “What now?”
“The gas light came on.”
Shy sat in the passenger seat and stared at the gauge.
The fuel light was blinking bright red. He looked out the side window. Still nobody following. “Shoe!” he called toward the back of the van. “The gas light just came on. We should just go as far as it’ll take us, right?”
When Shoeshine didn’t answer, Shy turned all the way around. He saw Shoeshine caressing Marcus’s hair and kissing his forehead as he continued rocking him. It weirded Shy out a little, but at least Marcus had stopped moaning. Maybe Shoeshine knew what he was doing.
Shy turned back around and glanced at the gauge again, then looked through the spidered windshield at the road ahead. “We can probably make it another fifteen, twenty miles,” he told Carmen.
She let out a deep exhale. “I can’t stop shaking.”
Shy looked down at his hands. He was surprised to find them pe
rfectly still. His heart had calmed, too. It didn’t make sense considering all they’d just been through.
“I swear to God,” Carmen said, “if Marcus doesn’t make it…”
Shy looked into the back of the van. Marcus seemed more alert now. Shoeshine even had him talking a little. That had to be a good sign. But then Shy focused on the blood. He turned around and sat there, watching the road, sometimes glancing down at his steady hands.
36
The Plan
The farther east they got, the clearer the freeway became. Carmen was able to keep them at a steady forty-five mph. Shy went back and forth between checking the gas gauge and watching the stunted towns on either side of the freeway. They passed Pomona and Montclair and Ontario. They passed a few more tent communities. They passed a large group pushing shopping carts full of their belongings near the shoulder of the freeway—all of them stopping to stare at the shot-up pest control van careening down the freeway.
They’d just passed a sign announcing WELCOME TO RANCHO CUCAMONGA! when Shy spotted something in his side mirror. He stuck his head out the window and watched the small dot slowly evolve into a helicopter.
It was far away, and he had no way of knowing if it was the one from before.
Still.
His heart sank.
“You see what’s behind us?” he asked Carmen.
She kept her eyes on the road. “Chinga! What is it?”
He adjusted his side mirror so she could see.
Carmen slammed the wheel. “What now? We’re running on fumes already.”
“Take the 15 East up ahead,” Shoeshine called to her.
“Where’s that gonna take us?” Shy asked, spinning around. He was surprised to see Shoeshine sitting against the side of the van with his journal in his lap. Marcus was sitting up, too, pressing the shirt against his side and staring blankly at a bullet hole in the roof of the van.
Shy spun back to his mirror. He watched as the helicopter got closer and closer, until it was directly behind them.
Just then the van’s engine started to sputter and cough. “What am I supposed to do?” Carmen shouted, pumping the gas pedal.
The Hunted Page 13