by Shows, Greg
Sadie’s eyebrows went up. Then she realized the face she was making.
“Sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay,” Madelyn said quietly. “I disgust myself. I used to be a feminist. I guess I wasn’t a very good one.”
“Who am I to judge,” Sadie said, and felt a rush of gratitude that she’d been able to hide out in Boston for the first three months of the crisis. Thanks to her grandfather. Back before he’d died—several years before the Crisis—he’d signed her up for some long-term survival planning package he found on the internet. The company sent her thirty MREs a month, which she shoved into the back of her closet and kept hidden from her useless boyfriend.
Sadie remembered the look on her boyfriend’s face when he’d found them one day—the contempt and amusement. Then there was the crap he’d given her for a week.
“Special Ops Sadie,” he’d called her—until one afternoon she’d grabbed his testicles and told him to stop.
“Some people get lucky in life,” Sadie said. “Some don’t.”
Madelyn dropped her voice to a whisper. “I sure as hell didn’t get lucky. I’ve got a fifty-two year-old geezer’s baby in my belly, and no hospital or doctor in sight. Anything goes wrong, I’m dead. Hell, if everything goes right, the best I can hope for is he’ll knock me up again so we can replenish the fucking planet for Jesus.”
“You could run away with me.”
A sudden “BOOM!” on the bathroom door made Madelyn squeal.
“You got sixty seconds to get out of there,” Noah yelled.
“Come on,” Madelyn said, and snatced up a bucket from the floor. “Stand up.”
Sadie pushed herself up and Madelyn lifted the bucket of clean water and poured it down over Sadie’s head. Rivulets of warm water sluiced down her back and buttocks and over her legs and splashed into the tub.
Madelyn grabbed Sadie’s hand and pulled her out of the tub. She took a towel and from a rack and began to pat Sadie’s back and breasts and belly and arms.
“What’s that on your ankle?”
“Tracking monitor,” Sadie said.
“You got someone coming for you?” Madelyn asked.
“Any time now, probably,” Sadie said, and imagined what Titman and his two maniacs would order Blakely’s men to do to this place.
“Noah!” Madelyn screamed, and leapt for the door.
Sadie heard the man’s boots pounding the floor as Madelyn shoved the bathroom door open and stepped into the lantern-lit hallway.
Sadie wrapped the towel around herself as he arrived.
“She’s got an ankle tracker!” Madelyn yelled. “We’ve got to get her out of here!”
“She ain’t going nowhere,” Noah said, and for the first time Sadie saw him without a respirator and a pair of night vision goggles covering his face.
He looked every bit of fifty-two, with a decade tossed in for good measure. His forehead was a deep-lined field of wrinkled flesh and his nose was a bulbous gourd turned permanently rough and red from sunburn. He had stripped out of the black coveralls he’d worn when he’d captured her, and now he was in a pair of bluejeans and a white shirt.
“But someone’s coming for her, Noah,” Madelyn whined, and Sadie couldn’t tell if she meant what she was saying, or if she was just trying to sound loyal in case Noah’s family came out on top. “She can’t stay here.”
“Someone comes for her, God will deliver them to us,” Noah said. “Now get her into her dress. The boys’ll be back and I want her ready to go.”
“Yes sir,” Madelyn said, and the man leaned forward to give her a quick peck on the cheek. He turned and saw Sadie looking at him.
“Get yourself covered,” he said. “Don’t stand around like a hussy.”
“Give me my clothes and I will. Then I’ll be on my way.”
Noah reached for his belt at the same moment Sadie reached for the lantern. Sadie was quicker.
She hadn’t really planned on fighting yet, and had hoped for some food first, but she had the advantage since Noah didn’t appear to have a gun on him. If he did, wasn’t going for it.
Sadie slid the lantern off its hook and stepped forward, letting go of her towel at the same time. Noah’s eyes went wide and darted to her breasts, then lower.
Once again Grandad’s right. Every stinking one of them thinks with their pecker.
Sadie watched the belt buckle separate from the other end of the belt and the leather strip slid through Noah’s belt loops. She smiled when she realized she’d beaten him, then swung the lantern backwards and brought it whizzing forward as her shoulders came even with the door frame.
The lantern arced upward and smashed into Noah’s crotch.
“Oh!” Noah said, and dropped the belt at the same moment Sadie dropped the lantern. She watched Noah double forward as she stepped backward into the bathroom. Oil spread over the hardwoods and caught fire from the lantern wick.
“You whore!” Noah shouted.
The fire spread quickly, but not so fast that Madelyn couldn’t snatch up Sadie’s towel from where it lay on the floor in the doorway, and begin to beat at the flames.
Noah, whose right pants leg had caught fire at the ankle, alternated between slapping the flames and cradling his crotch.
Sadie slammed the bathroom door and turned the old brass lock until it clicked into place. Then she ran to the window and looked through its latticed panes.
The window was narrow and high on the wall—at least four feet at the sill. There was no ledge to step on outside, or any tree branch or trellis to grab onto. But Sadie had committed and she couldn’t change her mind now, so she shoved the old window open. She discovered right away that someone had removed its sash weights. The window slid back down and banged into its frame.
“Great,” Sadie said when Noah began pounding the door.
“You open this door right now, little girl!” he yelled.
“Kiss my ass, freak!” Sadie yelled. She snatched up the candle sitting on the small corner shelf and tossed it into the oil pooled beneath the bathroom door. It ignited again as Sadie lifted the window and pushed her right foot out into the night. That was when the flashing white light began to light up the sky and the ground below, as if nature had decided to throw a disco party for the people in the farmhouse.
“What the heck?” she said, then dipped her shoulder beneath the window and shoved upward with her back to get through. The bottom of the window scraped over her backbone, and she told herself to remember to put some disinfectant on the scratches when she got free.
If she got free.
She was pulling her remaining leg through the window when Noah hit the bathroom door with his shoulder and came crashing through. Sadie yelped and turned to slide off the edge of the sill. She let herself swing out into the night, twisting to grab the window sill at the last second. The sudden stop jerked her shoulders and the window slammed down onto the sill, barely missing her fingers.
Sadie looked down and saw the ground in the strobing light. She hung suspended for a second, afraid to let go until Noah’s arrival at the window spurred her onward.
“I’m going to whip your butt bloody,” he yelled, and lifted the window.
Sadie let go and fell back, trying to keep her feet beneath her. She bent her legs at the knees as she got ready to roll when she hit. The explosion came while she was still falling, a boom so powerful the air moved around her as her feet touched down and she fell away from the house.
Her back, which was sore from landing on her pack an hour earlier, reminded her of how much of a beating she’d taken in the last forty-eight hours. But the shaking house and shattering windows and the orange glow now lighting up the night grabbed her attention.
The explosion had to have come from a weapon, Sadie reasoned, and she wondered which of Titman’s freaks she would see first. But then there was another explosion, this one upstairs at the front of the house.
A scream sounded in the night, and glass spear
s and splintered wood flew in all directions, and Sadie ran as fast as she could for the back of the house, hoping her backpack and clothes were where she’d left them, and that there was no one there she’d have to fight to take them.
Chapter 8
“Ain’t this some shit!” Blakely mumbled in the second before he pulled the pin, popped up to his knees, and flung the stun grenade out into the darkness as hard as he could. He dropped flat in the ditch as bullets slammed into the dust around him. Squeezing his eyes closed, he waited.
When the “boom!” came seconds later Blakely leapt up and ran.
He carried three road flares in his right hand, and as he popped the cap off one and ripped the striker over the flare end. When it sparked he tossed it ahead of himself so that he had to run by it as he raced toward the old pickup.
He’d never tried this before, but the theory was sound. The fact that he hadn’t caught a slug yet meant the stun grenade had worked, so he popped another flare to life and hurled it forward. The question was whether or not the road flares would create enough light noise to spoil the night vision his attackers were using.
If any of them had thermal gear, he could expect to die at any second.
He didn’t die. Instead he reached the truck, unharmed, and saw that Sadie had already gone. He followed her tracks to the side of the road and saw it would take some real tracking to follow her.
Part of him was elated. But another part was worried. He sensed the attack didn’t have anything to do with him. They were trying too hard to kill him.
It meant they wanted Sadie.
And who would want Sadie? She wasn’t exactly an agreeable girl. But the sheriff in Shanksborough had seemed to want her to stay.
Blakely abandoned Sadie’s tracks and ran along the road.
He sparked the last road flare and tossed it in front of him, then snatched a flashbang out of his jacket pocket and pulled the pin. He went right and leapt over the ditch while simultaneously tossing the grenade in a high arc toward where he guessed an attacker was hiding.
As soon as his feet hit the ground he rolled and shoved his face into the crook of his elbow. Even through the shielding and his tightly shut eyes he saw the flash. He counted to three before pulling his arm away from his eyes and slipping his own night vision goggles down over his face.
He avoided the glare of the flares and searched the land away from the road. Immediately he caught sight of someone forty meters away. The enemy was dressed in all black, and was squatting down behind a bush of some kind, shaking his head and trying to recover from the flashbang blindness. He’d been flanked and was facing toward where Blakely had been thirty seconds ago.
Blakely didn’t hesitate. He snapped his rifle up, took aim, and popped off three shots, all of which hit the enemy in his shoulder and neck. The enemy went down, and Blakey jumped up and sprinted hard for the downed enemy, hoping the other people trying to kill him were still blind or confused or both. No shots rang out as he reached the man, so Blakely flipped him over and checked for a pulse.
There was nothing.
Blakely lifted the man’s night vision goggles off his head and found out he’d killed a boy.
“Shit,” Blakely said when he saw the kid couldn’t have been more than twenty—as young as his own soldiers. “Who the hell are you?”
The Shanksborough sheriff hadn’t seemed like the type to send out a boy on a rescue mission. She’d have come herself. So who the hell were these people?
Blakely noticed the boy’s walkie-talkie—a civilian model, of course—had fallen and lay on the ground next to his foot.
“Idiots out playing soldier,” Blakely muttered.
“Eli!” someone whispered. “You there?”
“Yeah,” Blakely whispered into the walkie-talkie after depressing the “talk” button.
“You still in position?”
“Yeah,” Blakely whispered again. He wondered what kind of moron would send kids out with suppressed automatic weapons and walkie-talkies to attack strangers in the middle of the night.
“You see him?” Samuel whispered.
“No,” Blakely whispered.
“You got him, Samuel?” a woman’s voice said. She didn’t whisper, so Blakely assumed wherever she was, she wasn’t an immediate threat.
“He ain’t trying to fight us,” Samuel whispered. “He’s just running.”
“You take him down, now,” an older man’s voice blurted suddenly. “Don’t disobey me.”
“Yes sir,” Samuel whispered.
Blakely scanned the night with his goggles, searching for any movement. Half a mile away he caught a flash of movement. He squinted and turned his head slightly and was able to catch a glimpse of two figures. They were heading north, disappearing into a stand of dusty, stunted trees.
“I see him,” Blakely whispered suddenly, putting urgency into his voice and gambling that the people listening wouldn’t know he was a fake. “He’s coming right at you Samuel. Three o’clock.”
“I don’t see him,” Samuel said, sounding as if he was on the verge of panic.
“He’s coming up through some bushes,” Blakely whispered. “Put some fire on him and I’ll flank him.”
Almost immediately the “clang-clang-clang” of Samuel’s suppressed automatic sounded. Blakely squinted again, staring hard toward the west. He was rewarded by the faint spark of a muzzle flash on the final shot, about two hundred meters from where he was kneeling.
“He went down” Blakely whispered. “a hundred and fifty feet from you. I couldn’t tell if he was hit. Stay put till I get closer, then we’ll hit him together.
“Okay,” Samuel said.
Blakely picked up the kid’s suppressed automatic—an AK-47 with a big bulky black tube screwed over the muzzle. He racked the bolt and stood up and ran across a field of dead weeds and shrubs, back toward the road where the sputtering flares were still throwing up red sparks.
Blakely crossed the road and descended into the ditch. He used the abandoned cars to shield himself from Samuel’s position, a point he had fixed onto the 3D map his mind. Once again, he was high above the battle looking down, watching himself run along the road while his enemy lay or squatted in the dark. Soon his breath was wheezing in and out. He kept running, and after counting to twenty he stopped and crossed the road and went down to his belly, using the dead shrubs as cover.
“Can you see me?” he whispered into the walkie-talkie.
“No,” Samuel whispered
Blakely nodded. He shrugged his backpack off and reached into it and pulled out another stun grenade. After yanking the pin and pausing for a two count, he sprang up and hurled the short steel tube high in the air, hoping he’d put enough heat on it to send it over his prey. Then he dropped to his belly and covered his face.
The “boom!” shook the ground, and the flash turned the night to day for the third time.
“Ahhh!” Samuel wailed in the darkness.
Blakely leapt up and ran straight for him, risking hidden branches or logs or chuckholes. He didn’t want to kill any more kids, and the best way to avoid it was taking this one by surprise.
Samuel was still shaking his head and rubbing his eyes and trying to clear his vision when Blakely said “Don’t move,” and gave him a swat across the back with his rifle stock.
Samuel went face-down to ground and rolled over, trying to bring his rifle up to aim at Blakely. Blakely stepped on the rifle, then kicked Samuel’s walkie-talkie out of his hands so hard it shattered into several pieces.
“Hey, man!” Samuel said and fell back flat, putting his hands out to his side and looking as if he was surprised his attack had brought such a vicious response.
He was just another kid, Blakely saw, probably twenty-two, and he was terrified.
“Where’s Eli?”
“Dead,” said Blakely. “Like you’re about to be.”
“Oh man,” the kid said. “Please, I didn’t want to do this…”
; “Save it,” Blakely said. “Roll over.”
“Yessir,” Samuel said, and flipped onto his belly.
Blakely slipped off his backpack and dug in it until he found several zip ties. He cinched the kid’s wrists behind him.
“Got a respirator?” Blakely asked, and the kid shook his head.
“Dust mask,” he said. “In my pocket.”
Blakely checked the kid’s pockets until he found the wadded white mask.
“This won’t do shit in this dust,” he said, but slipped it over the kid’s face anyway. It was better than nothing. The kid probably already had silicosis, Blakely mused, then pulled out the walkie-talkie.
“Next time someone asks if you got me,” Blakely said. “I’ll hold this up. You’ll tell them ‘yes.’ Got it?”
“Yessir,” Samuel said. “You’re not gonna kill ‘em are you?”
“Not if I don’t have to. But that girl means more to me than a million of you. I’ll kill every last one of you to get her back. Understand?”
Distant thunder rumbled to the west.
“Yessir.”
“Good,” Blakely said. “Now get up.”
Blakely hoisted the kid to his feet and put his night vision goggles on him. Then he slipped his own backpack onto his shoulders.
“Was that your who dad took the girl?”
“Yessir,” he said.
“What’s his name?”
“Noah. Noah Shoddy.”
“Okay, Samuel, take me where he’ll take her.”
“Yessir,” Samuel said, and stumbled ahead, bent forward and clumsy with his arms cinched behind his back. They didn’t have to wait long for the kid’s father to check in. “You going to trade me for her?”
“Something like that,” Blakely said.
“You boys get him?” Noah asked.
Blakely grabbed the kid’s arm and spun him around. He held the walkie-talkie to Samuel’s face. He also pulled out his pistol and put it against the kid’s neck. Then he pushed down the button.