by Milt Mays
“Now. The codes.”
“You can easily get those from Ambrosia.”
There was a barely perceptible movement of her right index finger touching her abdomen.
“I don’t want the new codes. I want the codes you and Alex developed in 2002.”
Her gaze was steady on his. “They are the same codes Ambrosia has now.”
Her right index finger moved again. She was lying.
He leaned in quickly and jabbed his right index claw back into her left shoulder.
She screamed and bucked and every limb shivered and twisted. Then she passed out.
He slapped her face. She remained unconscious.
He slapped her again. Her eyes fluttered open and wallowed in their sockets, as if operated by a drunken puppeteer. There was a purple area on her left cheek and a bleeding crack on her supple lower lip.
This time he gently pushed the claw into her shoulder. She moaned. But her eyes stopped their slow dance and focused on him. Her legs and arms pulled into her body, as if that could protect her.
“You know, Rachel. You know which codes I want. Ambrosia told us you and Alex took the secrets of the bad codes with you. The GMO foods that kill 50% of those who eat them. Those codes. Not only will I hurt you and rape you again, but I will do the same to your daughter if you do not cooperate.”
Her eyes got wide.
“Yes, I know about her. And she is coming. I can feel her drawing near. So give me the codes—”
Movement and noise outside interrupted him. He twisted his head enough to see a huge pickup with oversized, alligator-tread tires, motor roaring, bouncing on a dirt road between fields of corn.
Rachel started to stand. He slapped her and she slumped to the floor, unconscious.
He focused on the truck. It was coming in fast. Dust roiled behind it; a flock of blackbirds flew off to the right. It stopped a few feet from the windshield of the van, its grill filling the windshield, so large and dark it looked like a vent to hell.
Two men, each he estimated at more than one-hundred-fifty kilos, all muscle with necks larger than their heads, climbed down from the front seats and walked to either side of the van. They carried shotguns and aimed them at the van.
Chapter 46
Inside the van, Jabril felt trapped, easy prey. The men walked on either side toward the rear of the van. One would soon open the side door. Jabril’s previously loose shirt now felt tight. His muscles bulged; his fangs grew; his claws were out. He ran and jumped at the windshield, shoulder down.
His shoulder burst the windshield outward. He struck the ground and rolled, his momentum carrying him to the driver’s side of the huge pickup. He looked at the men’s backs. The man on the left was the key. He would have to turn to his right to shoot at Jabril, probably move his shotgun down to avoid smacking the van: awkward and slow.
Jabril squatted as the man turned, and pumped hard with his legs in a vertical frog jump. The shotgun blast tore off what was left of the driver’s-side mirror of the truck, but Jabril was three feet above that at the apex of his jump. Before the man could correct his aim, Jabril landed on him, slicing fast and hard at his thick neck. The man fell, limp, his spine severed, but head still attached. Blood spurted from his neck and covered Jabril’s face. A deep growl emanated from Jabril’s throat. He licked the coppery-tasting liquid off his lips, wanting a glassful. One down.
Boom! The blast hit him on his left flank. The other man had apparently run around the back of the van. He cocked the shotgun again.
Jabril jumped again, over the top of the van, landed and ran toward the fields, jigging from side to side, holding his bleeding left side. One blast whistled by his left ear, a few pellets stinging the back of his head. He kept running, already fifty yards away. His left flank burned, though he could already feel the skin closing over the jagged tear. All he needed was ten or fifteen minutes and the wound would be healed. There was no cover here, the corn not nearly high enough.
He glanced back as he ran. The man was gone. He turned ninety degrees to his right, keeping the van and car in sight. After another fifty yards, there was a slight dip in the ground, and he dove into it. He thought of how he had hidden in similar clefts for hours from other soldiers in war games in the deserts of Afghanistan, how you could hide a whole platoon in a tiny wadi, complete with camels if they lay down.
#
The gunshots stirred Rachel, but something else woke her completely. Someone was stripping the duct tape off her wrists. Her ankles were already free. Jabril was going to rape her again. She lashed out with her feet, kicking and squirming and pulling her hands away from the hulk over her.
“Take it easy lady. I’m trying to help you.” Not Jabril.
A strong hand held her wrists. “I’ll have you out of this tape in a second. Who the hell was that guy?”
The man’s face came into view: Caucasian, blue eyes. Definitely not Jabril. The first sounds out of her mouth were garbled, whining attempts at speech. She cleared her throat and forcefully blew out a breath. “Did you kill him?”
He ripped most of the tape off, a painful sting, but a relief.
“Yeah, he’ll die pretty soon from that gut shot. Should have dropped him, but he jumped clean over this van and was in the fields before I could rip off another shot. He’s gone. If he doesn’t die soon, he’s lost enough blood to keep him out of our way.”
She pulled her shirt and jacket down. Then pulled them down again. She wanted to cry, to tell the guy Jabril had raped her, that he had to get out of the van and find Jabril and cut his head off while she washed herself in the sink, rid herself of any trace of that monster. But if Jabril was alive, there was no time. She tried to sit up and he helped her, grasping the sides of her upper arms and pulling. She winced. “Shit! Don’t do that.”
He let go of her like she was electrified. “Sorry, lady. Where are you hurt? I mean besides your face.” The squinted hurt in his eyes told her she must look awful. “Looks like he beat you up pretty bad.”
The left side of her face felt swollen, her lip puffed and painful to talk, left eyebrow burning. She wiped at a trickle on the left side of her chin with her right hand. Dark blood. She had to use her right hand, because she didn’t want to move her left shoulder. Not at all. Her left cheek felt like a mountain, a bruised aching mountain. She leaned her back against the couch holding her left shoulder with her right hand. “We have to leave right now. He’ll be back. I’m Rachel, by the way.” It was a blubbery sound, her lip not working right.
“Tony.” He nodded at her. “Did you get shot in the shoulder? Got some blood there. Want me to look at it?”
“No!” She yelled. “Get us out of here. Now! If he comes back . . .”
“I told you, he’s not coming back. Can you walk?”
She stood and immediately fell to one knee. Nausea took her in waves and everything spun.
He put out a hand to help her.
“No! I can do it.” She gritted her teeth and held back the tears. Not from any physical pain from the rape. Alex was probably more physical with her and he lasted longer than a mere five minutes. It was all her fault. If she wouldn’t have been so trusting, at least carried a gun out to thumb a ride. Stupid. Jabril had raped her and was surely going to rape her daughter. She bit her lip. Violated by the man she had once wanted to save. Yet he was right. That was her fault as well. She had ignored what she damn well knew the General had been doing to Jabril. It had been wrong. All her fault. She deserved this.
But Alexis doesn’t deserve any of this.
She held her breath and pushed it against taut abdominal muscles, clenched her jaw and stood, grabbing onto the handrail by the sink, the rail she’d been taped to when he’d raped her. Her legs got weak and she staggered, but then stood solid. The big guy eyed her, looked at the residual tape on her wrists and the bar. The pity in his eyes almost made her cry. He knew.
“Let’s go,” she said.
He unfolded his huge frame o
ut the side door of the van and she followed. From his size, he must have been a casualty of the old-style NFL, she thought, the one before they took away helmets and big pads. Bulk was important then. But it had come to the point where the repeated head trauma caused guys to lose their minds to Parkinson’s or dementia a few years after they retired from football. The game had changed. Now it was more like in the really old days, leather helmets, minimal pads, and no namby-pamby rules about hitting. There were more limb injuries but less skull-cracking hits and virtually no concussions. They’d stopped leading with their head. Too painful. And the men in the new NFL had gotten leaner and faster.
She scooted outside the van and stood. Another man of the same physique lay on the ground, his head at an odd angle, neck and chest covered in blood. She quickly jerked her head around, squinted into the bright sun then continued looking around the full perimeter, searching, inspecting every rise and dip. No sign of Jabril.
A breeze cooled her cheeks and ruffled her hair. A huge pickup was parked facing the van, driver-side mirror in pieces. The engine ticked, the smell of diesel strong. These two men must not have been here long.
“I’ll help you into the truck,” he said.
“I can get into a damn truck.” She walked to the big truck.
“Pretty high off the ground. You sure?”
The door hung open. She grabbed the handrail on the outside with her good right hand and was in the seat in a jump and a twist. She wanted to scream with the pain from her left shoulder, but instead smiled at Tony through the windshield and waved a finger dance like she was playing a piano. She felt like sticking her tongue out, but refrained. Instead, she murmured under her breath, “I’m a woman, not an invalid.”
He nodded, like he’d heard her, and yelled, “I gotta get my partner.”
She wanted to say, Leave him. But instead she yelled through the open door. “Just hurry, damn it!” She hoped he wasn’t one of those brain-dead, head trauma guys who couldn’t connect thoughts and action very quickly. They had to get out of here.
He went over to the man on the ground, lifted the mass of limp blood and muscle and started trudging back to the truck.
A car cleared the distant hill and raced toward them, the sides a mirror reflecting the environment around it in an exact camouflage. It was a car Rachel knew only too well, and the driver. Alexis.
She grabbed the door frame again and jumped down from the running board and stood and pushed her right hand in the air several times at the oncoming car.
“No. Go back! Leave! Turn around!” Rachel only wanted to save her daughter. The world would follow, but right now all she cared about was the girl she’d nursed and played hopscotch with and read bedtime stories to. Jabril was out there and Alexis was no match for him.
The car kept coming.
Chapter 47
They were on their way, though Jeff wished things had started differently. He was in the front passenger seat, his dad and Sam squeezed in the back. Alexis drove. No one spoke. Pretty boring scenery, too: miles of corn stalks and wheat, maybe a tree in the distant horizon. Jeff kept glancing back at his dad, wanting to speak, but afraid it would end like it had when they had picked up the two sopping, teeth-chattering men twenty minutes ago . . .
The reunion had started with Alexis stopping the car, jumping out without her coat and running to Sam, her voice loud and unpleasant. “How could you let him take her?”
Jeff grabbed the laptop Lorna had given them, opened his door, stood and watched his dad, the man he’d thought of almost every day for the last three-and-a-half years. Dan glanced once at Jeff then studied the ground. He clutched a white laptop to his chest and started rocking from side to side. Jeff was used to that, Dad being the way he was, but he’d hoped this would be different. After all, they hadn’t seen each other for over three-and-a-half years.
Dad already had a computer, so Jeff wondered why Lorna had given Jeff another. He tossed the laptop onto the back seat, got out of the car, and walked to his dad.
Sam had his hands up, like he was going to protect himself from Alexis. She stopped in front of him. He said, “I’m sorry. You must be Rachel’s daughter. I’m Sam Houston.” He held out one hand.
She ignored it. “I know who you are. How could you? You know Jabril. You know he’ll kill her. You know he’ll—”
“Look, I love your mom as much as you do.” Sam’s lips were purple and his head intermittently shivered. “We go back a long way. I was trying to help Dan. He was stuck upside down in the car, soaked in freezing water. She was trying to flag down help on the road. A van pulled up, guy got out, seemed friendly enough. They walked to the other side of the van, and the next second it drove off and she was gone. I ran after the van, got a couple of bullets into it, but it was too late.”
Sam looked at Jeff and Dan. Jeff was staring at the top of Dan’s head. Dan was staring at the ground.
“Dan!” Sam yelled. “What are you doing, man? That’s your son, Jeff, you know, alive and breathing.”
Dan glanced sideways at Sam and squeezed his eyes shut. His whole body quivered. Tears streamed down his cheeks. “He’s different.”
Jeff remembered Dad hated change, had to have his own computer fixed his own way, ate foods seasoned with exactly two shakes of salt and pepper, wore the same clothes for years, hung and folded in the same place, in the same order. Jeff, on the other hand, had always eschewed the orderly, preferring to have his mind sort out disorder, enjoyed the possibility that a flotsam of unknowns brought the challenge of possibilities and variety that stimulated. This difference might have been the beginnings of their split during the last year before Jeff joined up, before he’d left.
He recalled his last look in the mirror at the cabin yesterday: gaunt, hair shaved close, a haggard version of three-and-a-half years ago as a well-fed high school dropout looking to become a hero. But even so, he was his dad’s only son. Though he wanted to ignore the behavior, he could feel his gaze becoming incredulous, his mouth parting, his body tightening into anger. What the fuck? almost came out, but he gritted his teeth and pursed his lips shut.
Alexis ran to Jeff and wrapped her arms around him, squeezed gently, warming him, like he desperately wanted to do to his Dad.
“It’s okay, Jeff,” she said. “Give him a hug.”
He reached out, but Dan turned his side to him.
“Fuck you, too,” Jeff blurted, shrugging off Alexis’s arms and backing off.
Sam had walked over and nudged Dan with an elbow. “What are you doing, man? He’s all you’ve been thinking about for over four years. I know he’s a little different, but he’s Jeff. Alive. He’s not ashes floating away in that damn swamp.”
Dan glanced at Jeff, then hugged the laptop tighter and crimped his face into a lemon-eating grimace. Water dripped from the edges of his coat onto his wet pants. He stood as straight as a soldier at attention, as unmoving as a pillar of rock, a shivering pillar.
“Dan?” Sam said.
Nothing changed. Dan seemed to have left them for another place.
Sam’s teeth chattered and he shivered and hugged himself. He looked at Alexis. “I hope you brought a coat. Maybe we could get into the car, turn on the heat and get going. The longer we wait, the further away Rachel will be.”
Anger flashed in Alexis’s eyes, but then she smiled. “Of course.”
Sam got his equipment into the car. Alexis got in to drive, Jeff in the front passenger seat. Sam peeled the leather coat off Dan and wrapped him in a dry, tan Carhartt work coat, then opened the right back door. He moved Lorna’s laptop to the middle, and half carried and pushed Dan into the seat, still very rigid. There was no way he could get a seat belt around him. He ran to the left side and jumped in behind Alexis. The tires spun and squealed and they were going 90 MPH in three minutes.
After donning another dry Carhartt work coat, Sam relentlessly attempted to get Dan to talk with a running conversation about what had happened to them in the last tw
o days, pushing and pulling at Dan’s arms, then punching him in the upper arms. Nothing changed. Dan finally relaxed his posture enough to sit with his legs crossed, arms hugging the stupid laptop, eyes and mouth pinched tight. Jeff wondered if he’d lost it, like one time the neighbor next door back home had trimmed part of their pine tree to get it off his property. It had left the tree unsymmetrical, and Dan had spent a day exactly like he was now.
Since then, the car had been pretty quiet.
Alexis drove over a rise and slowed. “There’s Mom.” She paused and frowned. “But why is she waving for me to go away? She must know it’s me. She knows the car.”
Ahead Jeff saw an old model VW Vanagon, similar to one Jeff’s friends took to high school football games for tailgate parties. But the windshield was broken out. A huge guy was carrying another huge guy, bloody and limp, toward the back of a huge pickup parked in front of the van. The hulk seemed to hear them and twisted his tiny head around on a tree-stump neck. He dumped the body into the pickup bed, ran to the driver’s side and picked up a shotgun and pointed it at them. A woman stood at the other side of the truck waving a hand. Jeff read her lips. Turn around.
Alexis stopped the car and turned around in her seat, grasping Dan’s hands in hers.
“What are you doing?” Jeff said.
Chapter 48
Dan had wanted to hug Jeff, wanted it so bad he’d almost dropped his white laptop. But he couldn’t do that. Computers were important. They were valuable. They could save the world. And this one, this one was his and had important stuff. He would take it with him, try and salvage it from water damage. He had to.
When he’d first seen Jeff, his mind had started whirling, a tornado of pastel colors and prime numbers. Then he really looked at him. Jeff wasn’t Jeff anymore. He was skinny, had no hair, looked like a mangy dog, and that girl he was with loved him. He didn’t need Dan. He had her.
When Jeff put out his arms to hug him, it was only show. Why else had he said those things, the same things he had said the last night they had been together? Nothing had changed. “Fuck you, too.” Jeff had said. He could never look up to Dan. Even after Dan had saved most of the U.S. oil supply and was bringing up Jeff’s son, and had gotten over the fact that he’d probably killed Jeff, nothing had changed. Fuck you, too.