Charges

by Stephen Knight

  He looked up toward the trailer park. The man who had stood up gestured to the west once again, then crouched, and shouldered his rifle. The situation was clear. The people guarding the trailer park were setting up an ambush, and Vincenzo had to boogie unless he wanted to join the party. What are you waiting for? Someone to take you by the hand and lead you away? Move your stupid ass!

  Vincenzo duck-walked to the front of the Acura. He peered over its hood at the trailer park. Someone at the end of the firing line up there waved him on sharply then dropped back behind a pickup truck. Vincenzo crossed in front of the Acura, keeping its sleek bulk between him and the men behind him. He holstered the Beretta and, keeping low, darted forward, running through cast-off plastic bags and discarded Dixie cups, sending garbage scattering in his wake. His footfalls sounded as loud as thunder in his ears, along with his ragged gasping.

  “Yo!” someone shouted behind him.

  Realizing they had seen him, Vincenzo straightened and broke into a sprint, driving toward another halted car. He stumbled over an abandoned suitcase, and at the same time, he heard a sharp crack. A neat hole appeared in the windshield of the car he was running toward.

  He cried out as he dove down and tumbled across the asphalt. The walking stick clattered to the ground as he lost his grip on it, and there was a flash of pain in his knee as it scraped across the hard roadway. He floundered onto his right side, struggling to pull the Beretta from its holster. Crack! Vincenzo was pelted by fragments of cement as the bullet buried itself in the barrier behind him.

  “Shit!” Vincenzo grunted, wrestling to draw the pistol while still lying on his side. It came free suddenly, and he pointed it downrange, where the bald man was lining up for another shot. He was well over three hundred feet away, but Vincenzo started firing anyway, the Beretta jerking in his hand. He’d never practiced shooting while lying on his side, and it showed. His rounds impacted well short of the bald guy, who grinned as he sighted on Vincenzo’s helpless figure. A bearded man hurried over to join the fray.

  The bald man’s head suddenly exploded as a fusillade of gunfire rang out from the hillside. The corpse twitched as it fell to the road. The bearded one looked around, obviously confused by the sudden attack. Vincenzo sighted on the guy and fired, aiming for the chest. The man went down with a cry, clutching his leg.

  Hey, that counts, he thought distantly.

  The gunfire continued, with larger caliber weapons raining down on the highway to the east. The bearded man jerked and shuddered as he attracted more precise gunfire from the hillside. Vincenzo struggled to his feet and hobbled toward the cover of a car, wondering just how badly his knee was injured. While painful, his mobility didn’t seem to be compromised. He put the car between him and the gunfight and crouched low, peering through the dirty windshield. The bald man was spread-eagled on his back, and the bearded one was curled up on his left side. Neither moved.

  Vincenzo could hear bullets ripping through cars on the highway. A few puffs of dust erupted on the hillside from seemingly random defensive shots thrown up by the gunmen on the road. He couldn’t see the shooters, but he thought they were still in the vicinity of the truck. The gunfire raged constantly for several minutes before it began to abate, eventually trickling off into nothing more than a smattering of single shots before dying completely. Vincenzo remained where he was, pistol at the ready. He heard dogs barking up the hill and crows cawing from the trees, but that was all.

  Finally, there was movement from the trailer park. Several men and women moved past the defensive perimeter of cars and began making their way down the hill, bringing two German shepherds and one rambunctious yellow Labrador with them. The dogs were leashed, but they strained forward, practically towing their handlers behind them.

  “Hey, guy,” someone called from the other side of the concrete barrier.

  Vincenzo froze then rose enough to peek over the car. A bearded man with short red hair and arms covered with tattoos regarded him. He held a black Mossberg shotgun, and it was pointed directly at Vincenzo.

  The man lowered the weapon’s barrel. “Take it easy. Just wanted to thank you for the assist. You made it easy for us to take those guys out.” He inclined his head toward the site of the gun battle that had just concluded. “You get hit?”

  “No. No, I’m good.”

  The man nodded. “You can stand up now. They’re all down. We’ve been waiting for a while to catch ’em out in the open.”

  Vincenzo stood, though he stayed behind the car. The rest of the people from the trailer park were already crossing over the divider, and the dogs barked excitedly.

  The man gestured at the Beretta in Vincenzo’s hand. “If you don’t mind, why don’t you put that thing away. Just to be on the safe side.”

  Vincenzo engaged the safety and slowly slid the pistol back into its holster. “Anyone still alive down there?”

  “Doubt it. They took a lot of heat. Stay cool, though. I’ll let you know when you’re free to go.”

  “You said you’ve been waiting for these guys?”

  The man nodded. “Yeah. They’ve been hanging out here for the past couple of days, but they left us alone. Then they start jacking hikers like you. We didn’t get involved until they started killing and raping two days ago, and last night was the final straw. They hacked a guy to death then raped his woman and cut off her head.”

  Vincenzo thought back to the three dead women he had seen farther down the highway. “I think they’ve been at it for a while,” he said.

  The man nodded again. “No doubt.”

  One of the other people whistled and shot the tattooed man a thumbs-up. The guy returned the gesture and turned back to Vincenzo. “Okay. You’re free to go. Pick up your walking stick and get to wherever you’re going.”

  “Fort Indiantown Gap,” Vincenzo said. “You heard anything about it?”

  “Yeah, I heard it’s a fucking cesspool now that FEMA’s moved in. Big relief camp there, but you’re living under the law of the Man, if you know what I mean.”

  “I... I don’t. Sorry.”

  “You like sucking on the government tit, then go for it. That’s where it is right now, at least until they run out of supplies. Heard that it’s nothing more than a big prison, really. You can get in, but they take everything you have, especially weapons. The government doesn’t want people being able to defend themselves, so they’re retroactively suspending the Second Amendment. Won’t be long until the first goes down for the count, too, and then we’re all in. Probably be flying the United Nations flag pretty soon, you know what I mean?”

  Vincenzo didn’t have a clue, but he nodded anyway. “So there’s no help down there? No transportation, things like that?”

  The man snorted. “Sure, you just have to give over everything you have in exchange for a little cot and three cold meals a day. You know the government. It just takes and takes and takes. Possessions are the new tax revenue, now that cash isn’t worth shit.”

  A woman with enormous breasts barely contained by a black Harley Davidson T-shirt approached, the yellow Lab beside her. Her face had a worn-out cast to it, and her eyes were hidden behind oversized sunglasses, despite the fact that the sun had just barely peeked above the eastern horizon. Her faded blue jeans looked painted on, and she wore biker boots. Her brown hair was streaked with bolts of bottle-blond. “What’re you carrying?” she asked Vincenzo.

  “Sorry?”

  “He’s got himself a Beretta,” Tattooed man said.

  “Hold out your hand,” the woman said.

  Vincenzo thrust out his hand, and the woman dropped a battered box of Winchester nine-millimeter rounds in it. It felt half full. She then passed him a large hunting knife in a blood-stained leather sheath.

  “We did most of the heavy lifting, so that’s all you get,” she said. “We’re keeping the rest of their gear.”

  “Okay,” Vincenzo said, surprised they had given him anything. “Thanks.”

  “You
can top off your mag before you go,” the man said.

  Vincenzo’s hands shook as he tried to feed the rounds into the pistol magazine, which made the operation take longer than it should have, but he eventually charged the magazine and slapped it back into the pistol.

  “Thanks for the help,” the man said as the woman and dog walked back to the rest of the group. “Don’t forget your walking stick. It’s a nice one.”

  “Thanks,” Vincenzo repeated.

  The man nodded and set off to join the others. Vincenzo limped over and picked up his walking stick. He then returned to the car and rolled up his pant leg to check out his knee. It was just a scrape, but he rubbed some sanitizer on it anyway, just in case.

  He looked over his shoulder and watched as the people from the trailer park removed everything from the dead gunmen: backpacks, weapons, even their clothes. They tossed the bullet-riddled bodies into the ditch on the other side of the interstate. One man with a huge beer belly and a flowing white beard carried a gas can, and he began pouring the contents over the corpses.

  Vincenzo adjusted the straps of his hiking pack and resumed his journey. When he had gone a few hundred feet, he stopped, leaned over the concrete divider, and puked his breakfast all over the shoulder on the other side.

  21

  Six days after Roth and the rest of the cons had broken out of the prison, their number had grown. Just having a running vehicle was enough to get things started. People were drawn to Roth and his crew, despite the guns and the murderous attitudes of some. Those who had something to offer were taken in; those who didn’t were either robbed and killed or just killed. Women were raped, and the ones who were fancied by several of the men were kept for longer-term entertainment. Children were released, even though some of the men would have liked to have had them around, but Roth forbade that. Like most convicts, he didn’t have much use for child molesters. He had to shoot one of the guys for disobeying that edict, and he had made sure everyone was around to see it. In the country he intended to build over the coming years, pedophiles wouldn’t have much of a chance. If there was a subhuman group he hated more than cops, it was kid-touchers. Deep down, Roth thought that was kind of funny, that a soulless killing machine like him had a hidden moral touchstone. He’d never been abused as a boy, nor had his toad of a brother. They had actually been brought up pretty well. But Roth had been born with a demon that dominated him, and killing cops was the only thing that kept it sated.

  But hurting kids was a lot different from killing cops. Roth liked the sport of the kill, the thrill of the hunt. Killing children was something that terrorists and degenerates did. Preying on the helpless was no fun, even though it was sometimes necessary. Taking down other predators, now that was entertainment.

  After he’d made his example of the pedophile in their ranks, the rest of the guys figured out that wasn’t going to play, especially since Roth took three hours to do his grisly work with a blade that was less than two inches long. But the new recruits were an unknown quantity, and while Roth had instructed them to leave any kids alone, he couldn’t be sure his orders would be followed. He would have to watch the men like a hawk to ensure no bad apples ruined the entire batch, because once that forbidden fruit was tasted, there would be no going back.

  By the time their number had grown to twenty-six, Roth decided they needed additional wheels. The bus was getting crowded, and he wanted some separation between himself and the rest of the troops. They invaded a farm house well south of the prison, killed its occupants, then helped themselves to the remarkably well-stocked larder. Afterward, Roth found a 1977 Ford F-250 in the barn. Some time and effort had been put into restoring the vehicle to showroom condition. It had premium seating, a rebuilt 460 cubic-inch V8 engine, and a nice lift kit. The high-tech radio and navigation system was garbage, courtesy of the pulse event, but that didn’t bother Roth one bit. He tossed the collection of Rihanna, Beyoncé, and Ludacris CDs into the garbage. One great thing about the event was that it had essentially nullified urban music, something that pleased Roth to no end.

  Roth and his crew continued west, pushing across the state of Pennsylvania. A plethora of small towns awaited them, and they cut through them like a scythe through wheat, plundering and pillaging. Whenever they found a law enforcement presence, Roth went to work with the Mini 14 from a distance, then with his pistol, and finally, his blade. He went through clothes at a phenomenal rate, soaking them through with blood as he resumed his war against anyone in a uniform. They collected more weapons and more vehicles: ATVs, dirt bikes, and diesel trucks.

  By the time they had slashed their way to within ten miles of Monroeville, a satellite suburb of Pittsburgh, Roth had almost two hundred troops and forty vehicles. Towns fell before them, most only offering token resistance that was never well coordinated and never strong enough to stand up to a veritable army of hardened convicts.

  It had been his initial plan to roll up to Pittsburgh and see what was going on. However, when they found a small unit of National Guard troops stationed in Monroeville, that gave Roth pause. While he would love to kill soldiers instead of just policemen, he knew that soldiers—even weekend warriors like the Pennsylvania Army National Guard—could inflict a remarkable amount of damage on his force.

  Stretched out in a grassy field atop some high terrain that overlooked the Pennsylvania Turnpike, he saw what appeared to be at least a company-sized force equipped with five-ton trucks and Humvees. Some of the vehicles had crew-served weapons on them, big machineguns with long barrels. While Roth would have dearly loved to obtain that kind of firepower, he hadn’t been fortunate enough to happen across any. And he knew that even half-assed Guardsmen could deny him access to Monroeville with such weapons. They were obviously guarding the turnpike entrance, and someone had spent a good amount of time clearing the roadway of disabled motor vehicles. Clearly, the Guard was expecting more company, and they’d been busy making sure they could accommodate them.

  A camp had been set up around what looked like a shopping mall. Roth examined it through the pair of binoculars he’d liberated from a cop several towns back. He saw armed troops on foot patrol and several large trailers with FEMA emblazoned on them. The state had set up a refugee center. Roth wondered how long it would last.

  “Looks like the feds are setting up,” Harley said as he peered through his own pair of binoculars.

  “Yes. We can’t take them,” Roth said. “We don’t have enough men or enough weapons. We’ll have to save this one for another day.”

  Harley grunted. “Thought you liked killing uniforms.”

  Roth clenched his teeth. “I do. But this would be suicide. Do you see those vehicles on the turnpike? The Humvees?”

  “The Hummers with the guns on them? Yeah, I see them.”

  “Those are fifty-caliber machine guns, and there are even some Mark Nineteen grenade launchers. One fifty-caliber could kill every man we have, and while we’re still hundreds of yards away. We might be able to take down some of them, but they’d have their way with us. Plus, they know how to fight while maneuvering. We don’t.”

  “Okay,” Harley said. “So no Pittsburgh, then?”

  “We’ll move on. We’ll head south and avoid Pittsburgh for the time being. Then, we’ll go west. There are plenty of other towns to take on, and if we stay away from the major highways, we should be able to avoid most military.”

  “We’ll have to face them one day,” Harley said. “They won’t just disappear.”

  “No, they won’t. But as time drags on and they start to lose control, they’ll start falling apart. Some of them will wind up joining with us, and that’s when we can think about hitting the larger cities.” Roth lowered the binoculars. “Maybe by the time we get to Ohio, we’ll have enough mass to be able to do what we want.”

  “Do we really need to get into a large city?” Harley asked. “Do we want that kind of a headache?”

  “Not right now. But eventually, we’ll need to. Tha
t’s where the people are, my friend, and if we’re going to reinvent the nation, then we’ll need them on our side. Or under our heels. Whichever way works for us.”

  “You’re the boss. You got my vote.”

  “It’s not a democracy, Harley. You’re either with me, or you’re dead.”

  “And I like breathin’. I’ve made my choice. I’m with you in this, Roth. Got nowhere else to go, anyway.”

  Roth kept his face expressionless, but inwardly, he was more than pleased. That was what he wanted, to be surrounded by the desperate, the unwanted, the wayward. He wanted those with skills who needed someone like him to channel their prowess toward more useful endeavors. Like so many of his fellow countrymen, Roth had grown to loathe what the United States had become, a shadow of its former great self, a greatness that had been forged by men like him in past eras, men who would stop at nothing to get what they wanted.

  Even if it meant thousands more had to die.

  That made Roth smile a little bit, though he hid it from Harley.

  22

  Outside the town of Fredericksburg, Vincenzo came across an unusual migration: several horse-drawn carriages carrying a load of Amish. The men all held shotguns or old hunting rifles, and their wagons were loaded with women, children, and household possessions. Vincenzo thought the procession looked like an Amish moving company.

  “Hi, there,” he said as the first wagon approached.

  “Hello,” said the old man holding the reins connected to the bridle of the single black horse hauling the wagon. The animal looked hot and uncomfortable.

  “Where you guys headed?” Vincenzo asked.

  “To my cousin’s home,” the older man said as the carriage drew abreast of Vincenzo.

  “Do you know anything about Indiantown Gap?”

  The old man glared, his blue eyes full of fury and scorn. His lips compressed into a tight line beneath his beard. “The Army, they took our land in the name of the government. They took everything, our crops, our orchards, our water. We’re lucky to have what you see here.” The old man kept the wagon moving past Vincenzo.