“Marty, I’m going to throw up.”
“Roll down the window or use the backseat, honey. If I stop now, they’ll kill us!”
She powered down the window and leaned her head over the passing pavement, holding her hair and retching twice into the wind at sixty mph. She pulled her head back in and grabbed a bottle of water from the backseat, rinsing her mouth and spitting it out the window.
Marty followed the car ahead of him up the on-ramp to the highway and merged with the speeding traffic. “Well that was definitely surreal,” he said, relieved to be in traffic for the first time in his life.
“You scared the piss out of me!” she said, hitting him.
“But I got us through.”
“You also called me honey. Don’t think I didn’t notice.”
He caught her thin smile from the corner of his eye and felt warmth spread through his loins. “It was a figure of speech.”
“Mm-hm,” she said, watching the cityscape passing by. “We’ve got a long way to go. We’ll need to stop for gas again before we get there.”
“We’ll find a place.”
Five miles up the highway they got a flat tire.
“Son of a bitch,” he said, crossing the lanes to the berm. “Can we catch a break?”
“There’s a spare,” she said, watching fearfully out the back window to see if anyone was going to stop and hassle them.
He got out and opened the back hatch, lifting the cover to the spare tire compartment to find a doughnut-sized space saver tire. “Just what I thought.”
“We must have hit something in the road,” she said, joining him at the back of the car, her red hair blowing in the wind.
He looked at her askance, wondering if she’d already forgotten the bodies.
Halfway through changing the right rear tire, a car pulled off the road with two large men inside.
“Oh, crap,” Marty said.
“Need some help?” the passenger asked as he climbed from the car.
“No, we’re fine,” Marty said. “Thanks anyway, man.”
Both men were covered with jailhouse tattoos, and they were watching Susan too closely for comfort.
“Why don’t you let us give you a hand?” the passenger said, coming close. “You gotta make sure you get those lug nuts good and tight.”
“Good and tight,” the driver echoed.
Marty took the pistol from his pocket and pointed at them. “I said no thanks.”
They stopped short but didn’t appear afraid. The passenger looked at his buddy. “I don’t think he’s got the cojones.”
There was a sharp crack and the man grabbed his thigh, stumbling backward. “You motherfucker!” he screamed, his face twisted in anguish, blood quickly gushing through his fingers.
“Chill the fuck out, man!” the driver shouted, pointing at Marty. “All we wanted to do was help, you son of a bitch!”
“Get lost!” Marty shouted, taking a step forward.
“Marty, let them go.”
“Move it!”
The driver helped his bleeding friend back into the car and got behind the wheel, speeding off with the wounded man giving them a bloody finger.
“I don’t think he’ll live long,” Marty said, going quickly back to his work. “Did you see how bad he was bleeding? I must have hit the femoral artery.”
“Do you think they were really . . .”
“Gonna take you?”
She nodded.
“I’m positive.”
Two hours later, just across the border into Arizona, they began to run low on fuel and started looking for an acceptable gas station. Every station they passed for thirty miles was swarming with motorists, and many of the stations appeared to be more or less under siege. One they passed was fully engulfed in flames.
They finally spotted a Shell station with only a few cars at the pumps. People were running in and out, picking the place clean, but Marty decided to give it a try.
They pulled up to one of the pumps and he got out and swiped his card. To his immense relief, the card was authorized and he grabbed the nozzle from its slot and stuck it into the fuel port.
“Hey, buddy?” a man said, poking his head around the pump. “Do you suppose we could use your card? There’s nobody working in there and all we got is cash.”
Marty glanced into the man’s car to see that he was traveling with a wife and two children.
“I’ll pay you double,” the man said.
“You can owe me,” Marty said, lending him the card. “Pump as much as you need.”
“Thanks a lot.” The man ducked back around.
When Marty was putting the nozzle back into the slot, the man stepped back from around the pump, and even as Marty was reaching for his card, the man jammed a .357 Magnum into his face.
“Sorry, buddy,” the guy said, “but we got a dead battery. Tell your old lady to get out of the car.”
“Hey, whoa!” Marty said, stepping back. “We’re more than willing to give you a jump, man.”
“Get her the fuck outta the car!” the man ordered.
“Bill!” the man’s wife shouted. “Let them give us a jump!”
“We don’t have any fucking cables!”
Marty pointed at the station. “They’ll have some inside!”
The man pointed the weapon at Susan. “If I have to tell you one more time, I’ll shoot her. I swear to Christ!”
Susan got quickly out of the car. “Let them have it, Marty.”
The man trained the gun on Marty as his family loaded into their car. The woman offered to let Susan get their bags of food from the back.
“Don’t let them take a fucking thing!” her husband ordered, never taking his eyes off Marty.
That’s when Marty first noticed the gold star on the man’s belt.
“Protect and serve, huh?”
“Fuck you,” the man said, getting into their car, keeping the gun trained on him. “I got a family to take care of. Get over there where I can see you and keep your hands up. I see the gun in your pocket.”
Marty stepped back and kept his hands up as the man drove away with their car and all of their supplies.
Susan jumped into the cop’s car and turned the key. There was a clicking noise under the hood but that was it. In the backseat there were a few meager rations and two bottles of Gatorade. “At least they left us something,” she said. “Maybe we can get somebody to give us a jump.”
During the confrontation, the looters had cut the pump island a wide berth, not wanting to risk getting shot, but now that the maniac with the gun was gone, a large group of teenage Latino males were taking notice of Susan, loitering about and smoking cigarettes they had stolen, talking furtively among themselves. A few of them were marked with gang tats and had moco rags tied on their heads.
“We’d better just get moving,” he said.
“Okay, yeah,” Susan replied, taking his meaning.
They took the supplies from the back of the car and started off on foot toward the highway. Marty had no idea what they were going to do now, but they needed to get away from the gang because there were more of them than there were bullets in the gun.
“Shit,” he said with a glance over his shoulder. “They’re following us.”
“I’m scared,” she said, grabbing his hand.
Marty could feel her trembling, and his bladder filled with ice.
“Don’t run before they make their move,” he said, spotting half a dozen or so civilized-looking men standing across the street in front of a doughnut shop. “Maybe we can get some help from those guys over there.”
The gang started trotting after them.
“They’re coming!” she said in panic.
“Don’t run!” he hissed, gripping her hand tighter.
The group caught up and encircled them. “Hey, mamasita!” the apparent leader said with a heavy Chilango accent, flicking his cigarette away and grabbing at Susan’s T-shirt. “Let’s see what you got under the hood, esa.”
The others laughed, making exaggerated gestures as they flicked the ashes from their cigarettes or swaggered along combing their hair.
Susan fended off the advance and kept walking, squeezing Marty’s hand.
“What’s the matter, mama, you don’t like young dick or what, eh? We’ll show you a good time.”
They kept walking, but as they drew closer to the doughnut shop, the men on the sidewalk filed inside, and that’s when Marty knew they were in deep shit. The gang knew it too, of course, also watching to see what the doughnut men were going to do. Now confident, one of them grabbed Susan by the hair from behind and another tore at her T-shirt, exposing her bra.
Marty shot the leader in the face at nearly point-blank range, blowing his teeth out the opposite side of his face. Someone stabbed him a glancing blow to the shoulder from behind and he spun around, shooting the youth in the belly as the rest of them dragged Susan off at the run. She screamed for help as they lifted off her the ground and Marty ran after them, shooting two of them in the back before the gun jammed.
Three of the teens turned on him immediately and began to assault him in a flurry of fists and feet, beating him quickly to the ground and stomping him. Marty blacked out, and they left him where he lay on the pavement.
Susan was shrieking now, clawing at her young assailants as they hauled her off toward an alley, kicking furiously in a futile attempt to get her feet back on the ground.
A rescue-green Jeep Rubicon suddenly came streaking into the lot and mowed four of the teens over in one blow. The driver hit the brake and cut the wheel hard, gunning for the rest of them. The gang panicked, dropping Susan to the ground and running for their lives from the Jeep.
The driver stopped and jumped out, firing a single shot after them to keep them running.
“Are you okay?” he asked, offering Susan a bloody hand to help her to her feet.
She was sobbing and trying to remake her shirt and bra in order to cover her exposed breast.
“Come on,” the man said, walking her toward the Jeep. “We need to go.”
“Marty!” she said. “Where’s Marty?”
“That him over there?”
She saw Marty getting to his feet, staggering and bleeding from a gash in his head, and she ran to him, grabbing him and bawling.
“I’m okay,” he said hazily, seeing their dark-haired rescuer walking up in black jeans and a blue denim jacket, his cowboy boots spattered with droplets of wet blood.
“You gave a good account of yourself, partner.”
“Thanks,” Marty said, holding his head.
The cowboy cut the men in the doughnut shop a hard look and they turned away from the windows. “Don’t mention it,” he said. “You two had better mount up. We can’t get caught flat-footed in the open.”
The Jeep had a hard-top cover, and there were four red five-gallon fuel cans strapped to the roof.
Susan climbed into the backseat on the driver’s side and Marty rode shotgun. The cowboy belted himself in and wheeled the Jeep around toward the highway, where the traffic now headed into the desert wasn’t a great deal busier than it would normally have been at that time of year.
“Where ya headed?”
“Mesa.”
“Well you’re in luck,” the cowboy said. “There’s enough gas for the run. My name’s Joe.”
“Where are you going?” Marty asked.
“Down the road a ways,” Joe said, shaking a smoke from a pack of Marlboros and lighting it with the lighter from the ashtray.
Marty glanced into the backseat at Susan. She shrugged her shoulders. There was an M-1 carbine on the seat next to her along with a green bandolier of extra magazines.
“What’s down the road a ways?” Marty asked.
“More desert,” the cowboy said, exhaling a large cloud of smoke, which was blown quickly away by the wind.
“More desert?”
The cowboy stuck the cigarette between his teeth. “Here,” he said, taking his .45 automatic from the small of his back and giving it to Marty. “Better acquaint yourself with that. You’ll likely need it.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, glancing again at Susan.
“The magazine holds seven shots,” Joe went on. “You pull back on the slide to load a round into battery. There’s a slide lock on the side there. It’s like a safety. It kicks some but you and your girl can handle it. The carbine in the back is easy too. I’ll show you how to use that in a bit. Right now we just need to put some real estate behind us. I’ve got some pretty bad hombres after me, and if they ask around back there, somebody’s bound to tell ’em which way we went.”
“Why are they after you?” Susan asked.
Joe dragged deeply from the Marlboro. “Well, let’s just say I gave ’em a good dose of the same medicine I gave those spics back there.”
“Were they trying to rape somebody?” She couldn’t help asking.
“No, they’d done raped her already,” Joe answered quietly. “I killed all seven of ’em, but I didn’t know the bar was full of their friends. It was a Mongol bar.”
Susan gasped. “My God, they were Chinese?”
“The Mongols are a biker gang, Sue.”
“Outlaw biker gang,” Joe added. “And they’re already rapin’ and pillagin’ their asses off.”
“They raped a woman outside a bar?” Susan said, quietly aghast.
“In the back of a pickup.”
“About how many bikers are after you?” Marty asked, looking into the side rearview mirror, half expecting the horizon to be filled with motorcycles.
“A lot,” Joe said. “But don’t worry about it. Where this Jeep can go, their Harleys can’t follow.”
Marty could see Susan sitting forward now with her head in her hands, and he wanted badly to climb into the backseat and hold her, but he didn’t want to do it in front of Joe.
“Where’s the woman now? Did you have to leave her behind?”
“She’s dead. She needed a hospital bad and there just wasn’t one to be found.”
“You mean you had to . . .”
Joe nodded. “That’s what I mean.”
Ten miles farther on, Joe pulled off the highway, drove right through a fence onto a dirt road and then down into a dry arroyo where they couldn’t be seen from the road.
“End of the line,” he said, climbing out.
Marty looked at Susan and then noticed that Joe’s seat was soaked with blood.
“Oh, no,” he muttered, and got out to find Joe sitting in the dirt behind the Jeep, against a rock.
“Get me that carbine outta there, partner. I need to show you how to work it.”
“How bad are you?” Susan asked, getting out of the Jeep with the carbine.
“Bad enough, darlin’. Lemme see that.”
He made sure they knew how to operate both weapons and had them each take a few practice shots.
“Okay,” he said, lighting up another cigarette, this time with a disposable lighter from his jacket. “Off you go now.”
“No,” Susan said, “we’ll stay with you.”
“Get on,” Joe said. “I need time to talk with my wife before I die.”
“The phones aren’t working,” Marty said. “There’s too many people making calls.”
“I don’t need a phone to talk to the dead. Get on now. And ride parallel to the highway whenever you can. Most road warriors won’t be able to follow you off road. Those that can, you just shoot ’em with the carbine.”
Susan knelt beside him in the dirt and gave him a hug. “We’ll never forget you.”
“I don’t envy either of you what lies ahead, honey.”
Marty offered Joe his hand and then he and Susan reluctantly got into the Jeep.
“Hey, partner! Come back here a second.”
Marty got back out. “What do you need?”
“Don’t you let that girl be taken alive again, hear?”
“It was your wife back there, wasn’t it?” Marty said, his eyes filling with tears, his voice thick. “They shot you and took her, didn’t they?”
“Biggest mistake they ever made was not killin’ me,” Joe said. “Love her long as you can, partner, but don’t you be afraid to do what needs done. Hear?”
“I won’t,” Marty said, wiping his eyes with the tail of his tattered shirt and turning to get back into the Jeep.
“Why are you crying?” Susan asked. She looked out the back window to see Joe resting his head against the rock, eyes closed. “What did he say?”
“Nothing,” Marty said, starting the motor. “He died.”
He drove up out of the wash, back through the hole in the fence, and sped off down the highway, both of them listening to the tires humming against the asphalt. Susan tried the radio. There was no music, just a lot of news. Bad news about civil unrest and the state government’s inability to do much of anything about it. People were being urged to stay in their homes and off the highways.
Nineteen
They hadn’t driven very far before Marty spotted the first of the motorcycles coming over the horizon in the rearview mirror. They were still a few miles back but gaining.
“This isn’t our day, Sue.”
“What?” she said, whipping her head around. “Mongols?”
“Gotta be,” he said, hitting the brakes and pulling quickly off the highway.
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