Dead Weight

by Casamassina, Matt

  The cries for help continued but he didn’t respond to any of them. Instead, he sneaked around the bus and spied into the window of the rear exit. He could see the silhouetted outlines of multiple figures, all of them clinging to the interior sides of the overturned vehicle, no doubt crouching for cover and waiting for the opportune moment to attack. He ran back to the Humvee, crawled into the front seat and pressed the cigarette lighter. With that done, he took aim at the underbelly of the bus, sighted in on what he thought was the fuel tank, and pulled the trigger. He heard shouts and screams, but no gas trickled from the plastic wound. He took aim at another bulbous black canister, pulled the trigger and this time gas did flow from the opening and splattered on the gnarled street below.

  “Help! Please!” cried one of the assaulters. “We’re hurt in here. We’re trapped! Let’s talk about this!”

  “Yeah, probably a little late for that!” Zephyr called back. “Maybe we should’ve had that conversation — oh, I don’t know — before you murdered a couple of my friends? I would’ve been all for that. I really would’ve have. I gotta say, though, I’m not feeling very chatty anymore.”

  “We’re—agghh—” The words that followed were unintelligible, just a medley of pain and aggravation. Then the speaker was back. “We’re chained up in here! They said if we didn’t shoot anybody who tried to pass, that if anybody got through, they were going to cut off our feet and watch us bleed out. Our feet! They’d do it, too. For Christ’s sake, you have to believe me!”

  “Who are they?” Zephyr asked.

  A long pause with more agonized commotion. He heard chains rattling as someone pounded against the interior of the bus.

  “Listen, I know you guys must be cold in there. It’s freakin’ freezing out here, that’s for sure. Don’t worry, though, because I got this,” Zephyr shouted.

  “No, wait! Some guys. We don’t know who. They’ve got weapons and they’re… “a new voice called back, and in a lower tone added, “They’re deranged. They think the city is theirs and that the leftovers are their slaves. It’s been like this for a week.” Leftovers? Is that what they’re calling the survivors?

  Chains again as something slammed inside. “They took my damned sister. I had no choice.”

  So far, it was just the two voices, but Zephyr knew there were others in there. So what were they doing? He asked the latest speaker to identify everybody in the bus but the voice gave no response. And what about the other buses? Was there anybody in any of them? If so, why weren’t they mounting any kind of counterattack? He was contemplating all of this when a hand closed on his shoulder and he squeezed the trigger of the rifle, sending a bullet into the air.

  “It’s me, dude,” Ben said without inflection, plucked the lighter from Zephyr’s hand and casually tossed it into the growing puddle of gas beneath the bus. The blaze was immediate.

  A half dozen voices shouted to be released, screamed for mercy, and cursed them simultaneously. Seconds later, the tank exploded with a deafening crash and flames flared up before they engulfed the bus. It was fast. So damned fast.

  Zephyr glowered at Ben, who either didn’t notice or didn’t care. The twin screamed at the bus instead. “Yeah, does it hurt? Good! Get used to it, you fucks!”

  “Ben, they’re chained up in there,” Zephyr said. He wasn’t sure if this statement was meant to discourage the twin or simply to inform him. Probably, something in the middle.

  “I don’t care. Those chains didn’t stop them from trying to murder us. They killed Brad and Merrick. They killed my brother.” He looked as though the realization had just struck him. “They killed my brother.”

  Zephyr nodded. He understood. He even agreed. And yet, he just couldn’t go through with it. He couldn’t let these people, however vile, die this way.

  All he said was, “I’m sorry, Ben, but I can’t.” And then he ran for the back of the bus.

  It was futile. Even if the doors hadn’t been locked and chained shut, the temperature itself was impenetrable. Zephyr grabbed for the handle and burned his hand. He tugged off his shirt, wrapped it around his hand, and tried again. Even through the cloth, he could feel the heat, and this grip offered him no advantage against the lock and chains. He considered shooting the doors and as he did he remembered that they all had guns inside, too. Slowly, and with hot tears blurring his vision, he backed away.

  The locks that barred him from a rescue were easily sidestepped by the inferno, which seemed to dance in rhythm to the tormented squeals of the shuttle’s roasting occupants. Zephyr held Jordan hard and tried to shield her from the brutality. All of those voices in agonized harmony. They seemed to sing forever — a terrible, nightmarish song that he knew would never leave him.

  Eventually, after a slow-motion infinity, the torture drained away into an uncomfortable quiet interrupted only by the crackle of flames and moan of the wind. The air itself smelled of barbecue for all the wrong reasons.

  When enough time had passed, Zephyr ventured back to the overturned giant and shot out the rear window. Light bled in and he could see the charred remains of the assailants. There were four of them and yes, their left wrists and ankles were handcuffed to bars that had been welded to the interior of the bus. Poor bastards. Poor, pitiful bastards, he thought. He saw rifles strewn about the floor—what was actually the opposite side of the vehicle; and yes there were broken windows there, not just more metal— and realized why there hadn’t been any more shooting. The crash must’ve scattered the weapons about and the cuffed assailants simply couldn’t reach them.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “Not for them,” Ben answered behind him.

  Not, Zephyr thought, for any of us.

  28

  They spent minutes, not hours, arguing about what to do with the bodies and whether or not to turn back or go forward. They couldn’t bury them. They lacked both time and tools. Zephyr was surprised when Ben didn’t argue against the practicality of leaving his brother in the Humvee. He just nodded, walked back to the car and then climbed inside to say his good-byes. The boy couldn’t watch it. He cursed Merrick, but wasn’t angry with the older man. He felt like crying and held strong. Not in front of Jordan.

  The other buses were empty. All of them. But Zephyr did discover that his presumption about the coaches on the opposite lane was correct. The windows had, in fact, been replaced by sheet metal on the reverse side. So the intention was to keep people in as well as out. But why weren’t there any shooters in any of these other buses? Perhaps they weren’t cuffed like the others and simply ran away at the first sign of danger. More likely, though, the group the attackers spoke of hadn’t yet dedicated the manpower to the vehicles yet. If that really was the truth of it, he counted himself lucky. Had the shuttles been similarly armed, they would all be dead now.

  Merrick had certainly paid the price. He stared at the departed man on the highway and puzzled over what to do with his body. Leaving him to the elements wasn’t an option. He was cocksure if not downright patronizing at times, but Zephyr liked him all the same and wouldn’t leave him to rot in the streets. While he meditated on it, Ben drew up beside him with three new rifles.

  “I salvaged these from the bus. I thought they’d melted. Nope, though, just a little warm,” he said. “They look like Uzis, but I don’t know.”

  “What are you planning?”

  Ben surveyed the clouds, his cheeks still streaked with dried tears. “A bit of a hunting trip.” His words came in a monotone daze.

  “So you’re going in then?”

  “Yep,” the twin said.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea, Ben.”

  “Yeah, I could’ve guessed. You don’t have to go.”

  “We don’t even know if we’ll ever find these guys. Las Cruces is a pretty big place. A hundred-thousand people. Maybe more.”

  “Not anymore, dude,” he replied. “Maybe it used to be big, but I think the crowds are gone. I’m pretty sure all I have to do is lay low,
keep quiet, and these guys will cross my path.”

  “And assuming they do, then what?”

  “They all die. Or I do.” He shrugged. “Either way.”

  “Won’t bring your brother or Merrick back.”

  “I realize that.”

  Zephyr sighed. “OK. If we’re gonna do this, let’s be smart. And fast. For all we know, the crazy assholes are already en route to us.”

  Each gripping an armpit, they dragged Merrick back to the Hummer and lifted him to the driver’s seat with a combination of clumsiness and care. The corpse threatened to slump over but they balanced him so that he stayed. When Zephyr saw that his eyes were still open, he tried to close them but they wouldn’t remain shut. The man appeared to be feigning sleep and secretly spying through the lower slits of his vision. Of course, any such fiction disintegrated above his forehead.

  Jordan followed Zephyr around like a lost puppy and cycled between confusion, fear and hysteria relative to their distance from the bodies, so he asked her to hold back as he stripped the Hummer of their gear and any sign that they had been passengers to the crash. After several minutes, the scene was finished to the best of his ability. To any investigators, it would look like Merrick and Brad had taken fatal gunshots but not before crashing into the bus, toppling it and igniting an accidental blaze. Or so he hoped, anyway.

  The trek into Las Cruces proper paralleled Zephyr’s escape from his hometown with the distinction that instead of eluding the nightmare one step at a time, they walked toward it. The journey was slow— the city stretched out several miles ahead of them and they were mindful of every sleeping car or conspicuous home, which sedated progress. But as the clouds grew ever darker and the chill in the air turned icy, they found themselves beyond the freeway and into the beginnings of an outlying neighborhood.

  The streets were empty except for some residual cars and trash that blew around in the gusty air. No sign of the alleged slavers, as he had already taken to calling them. No sign of anybody. By the time they opened the squeaky door into a quaint yellow house amidst an old track development, the world was fading from gray to black and they welcomed the shelter from the dropping temperature.

  The three of them utilized what remained of the natural light to feel out the unremarkable residence, small, with running water and gas, but no electricity. Zephyr needed to bathe, badly, as much for a psychological cleansing as a hygienic one. A quick search of the kitchen cabinetry yielded two functioning high-power flashlights. He set one of them atop the bathroom sink, its beam blasting the paint-peeled ceilings, and luxuriated in a steamy shower for as long as he could. Isolated from everybody else for the first time in too long, he felt no shame as the water washed away his tears.

  After, he studied himself in the dim reflection of the bathroom mirror. His thick brown hair had grown some, he was inarguably thinner than ever and he looked older, which was unsurprising given everything he’d raced through in recent days… or was it weeks? He still hadn’t decided. There was something else, though: he thought his eyes seemed a little wilder and his features a little harder. And why not? His soft life had been shot dead alongside some of his new friends.

  Someone knocked on the bathroom door. “Hey, it’s me,” a muffled voice announced. “We got movement.”

  The community wasn’t poised to make any future Best Of lists, but the house was serviceable and it did afford the trio one valuable convenience, which was a direct line-of-sight with the bridged freeway off-ramp before it sloped down to ground level again. While Zephyr and Jordan showered and bathed respectively, Ben rotated the flowery living room couch so that it faced the window, sat down and watched. Sooner than later, a pair of headlights disrupted the darkness as a vehicle traded freeway for city streets.

  “Just the one?” Zephyr asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Could you tell what kind of car it was?”

  “Nope.”

  No way to know if it was the slavers or just another random survivor. The car had come from the direction of the buses, though, so if it was the former and they examined the wreckage at all, they might already know that someone had walked away from the crash alive and a few guns heavier. That alone could be enough to put them on guard. Then again, if their attackers had spoken true, and it was possible that they hadn’t, their warped abductors believed themselves exceptional, everyone else disposable minions kept singularly for their pleasure. Buckets of arrogance typically accompanied this brand of fanaticism and Zephyr thought maybe such people might also ignore any threats that were not rubbing up against their collective noses because, after all, bad things couldn’t happen to them, only others.

  “Where’s Jordan?”

  “Getting dressed, I think. She has the flashlight,” Ben said.

  The boy was glad for it. He wanted to shield her as much as he could from anything he deemed dangerous, and more human encounters of any kind qualified. So far, roughly half of everybody they’d chanced upon had proven murderous. He wondered not for the first time if this was a mathematical statistic he should be focused on, if it meant something in the biblical sense or if was somehow by design, and promised himself to ponder it again when there were not other concerns.

  His shotgun held only a single shell. One freakin’ shot. Practically useless, he thought. The Uzis were better. One clip housed a full thirty-two bullets, another twenty-one and the last seventeen. He didn’t know how far these rounds would go, though, and he was terrified that he might pull the trigger during a firefight and run bone dry of ammunition before he could even steady his aim.

  “Our best chance is to figure out whatever the equivalent of Main Street is here, find a good place to hide and wait. I’m sure we’ll get a hit in no time. Then, if it’s our guys, we take them out,” Ben said.

  “What happens if they blow by us on the street? We’ll never be able to follow them. And the other thing is, I don’t know how far our guns are gonna go. I thin—”

  “It’ll work.”

  “Ben,” he said, “I just think…” But he stopped, aware that his boyish friend was struggling to keep his composure, and as Zephyr noticed, he finally let go.

  “Go—d… damn th—em,” he barely choked out in spastic, breathless whimpers that circled the periphery of hyperventilation. “This whole fucking wor—ld is bull… bullshit!” He pounded his fists against the couch and cried in a great, silent trembling.

  Sucker-punched by the display, Zephyr didn’t know what to do or say. All he could think was, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry this happened, and the combination of guilt and shame was palpable. Finally, after several uncomfortable seconds that imitated minutes, he said, “I wish I could bring your brother back, Ben. It’s not fair—none of this is fair. None of it.” He felt his own eyes watering, his voice wavering. “I can’t. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, man.” He lay his hands on his friend’s shoulders and added, “I can stand by you on this, though.”

  29

  There is no romance at the end of the world. Nothing to love in leaving a bawling little girl to fend for herself in an abandoned house on the outskirts of nowhere, the prospect of battle and a premature death looming. It stank of ill-conceived priorities. It spat in the face of honor. Zephyr recognized the dirty brutality of the situation, and yet there was no way he could renege on his promise to Ben and no way Jordan could join them. She had to stay behind because he couldn’t bear the thought of putting her directly in harm’s way. Not again. Not when it wasn’t imperative. So he scoured several homes in the neighborhood and stockpiled food and drinks, returned with a myriad of new clothes and blankets, and made more promises about their inevitable return. He told her to be brave, that she could do it, that she had already done it, that all she had to do was wait for them. And he said it all with the dark understanding that if they died in the streets of Las Cruces, she was doomed to a fate far lonelier than he wanted to imagine.

  As he pillaged homes for gear, Zephyr stole a pair of keys that belong
ed to a plush Ford Flex with a half tank of gas in the neighbor’s driveway and he and Ben drove it into the city. Along the way, the two of them worked through what they hoped was a much better plan. He bore no deep appreciation of the tactic— it was presumptuous, unpredictable and therefore riddled with danger, and yet he also saw its potential if everything fell into place. Of course, it was a big if.

  The city’s main street was, in fact, Main Street, and it was a black hole without the lifeblood of electricity. As he hugged himself in the darkness, he fought to keep his teeth from chattering out a novel in Morse code and thought of the last thing Jordan had said to him. Don’t leave me, too. She had held her composure, but it was a facade. Promise you’ll come back and get me? And, of course, he did. He could see that she was petrified — that she tried to conceal her terror only amplified his guilt. All of his practiced pledges seemed to crumble under the pressure of her heavy words. Don’t leave me, too. Too. Just like everybody else. A little girl – the only person he knew for certain didn’t deserve any of this, and he left her all alone. What is wrong with you? Seriously, just what the hell do you think you’re doing? Get her now and go, he thought. Now. Before it’s too late.

  It was literally too late. Still no watch and therefore it was just a guess, but he thought it must be at least midnight. The public bench he chose as his waiting spot was hard and cold and there was no sign of anybody save for his trusty friend the wind, which had not abated its frigid attack. He drifted in and out of sleep and caught his head nodding forward several times before he jolted awake again and scanned the streets as though they held the answer to life and it would vanish in a flash if he didn’t suddenly behold it.