by Shows, Greg
“Ohhh,” the man said. “Get your clothes off.
Sadie nodded as she felt the small metal knot in his pocket, then unsnapped his jeans. She unzipped them and spread them open to reveal the stained white briefs beneath. Then she slid the man’s finger back into her mouth again and swirled her tongue in a spiral around the digit, making sure to coat it with plenty of saliva.
Instead of sucking on his finger this time, however, she slipped her right hand into her parka pocket, unscrewed the canister lid, and dug out a handful of white powder. After a lick across the tip of the man’s finger, Sadie pulled her head back, closed her eyes, and turned her face away. Then she slapped the powder over the man’s finger.
“What the—?” the man asked, but then the pain hit him and he snatched his hand away and clutched his middle finger with his other hand. This was a mistake, since the Calcium Oxide and saliva was transferred to his palm, where it began to burn into the flesh of both his hands at several hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
Sadie jerked the plastic canister free of her pocket and snatched the man’s underwear waistband so that she could dump the white powder inside. As she’d expected, the Calcium Oxide reacted quickly with the man’s sweat. His mouth opened and his eyes rolled back in the second before he screamed.
“Ahhhhhhhh!” he bellowed, forgetting the gun on his hip and jumping toward the canteen sitting on the card table. Sadie went for Callie’s pack, snatching up the Geiger counter and shoving it into her pocket just as the man got the canteen lid off and poured water over his finger, palm, and crotch.
The man’s shrieks were like nothing Sadie had ever heard, not even when she had sprayed sulfuric acid into the cop’s eyes. The man dropped to his knees and fell sideways, clutching at his crotch while rolling from side to side on the floor.
“You should’ve gone for vinegar,” Sadie said, and packed Callie’s belongings into the abandoned backpack. She broke open the shotgun, saw it was empty, and dug through Callie’s belongings, looking for shells. She found only two, and they weren’t paraffin loads. She slid the shells into the barrel anyway, and stuffed it into Callie’s pack. Then she picked up her rifle and stepped over to the man. She lifted the rifle butt and slammed it down against the man’s jaw as hard as she could. Then she slammed it into his belly. “But really, you should have just left my friend alone.”
“Uhhh!” he grunted as someone banged on the shed doors.
“Frank!” someone yelled. “Frank!”
Sadie ignored the yells and slammed the rifle down again, this time against the man’s forehead. He went silent and still, and the only remaining sound was the man banging on the shed doors.
Sadie dug into the man’s pocket and pulled out his keys. She also pulled his pistol free of its holster. For a second Sadie remembered how she felt when she’d shot the cop—the sorrow and regret and guilt that had nearly incapacitated her.
She didn’t feel that now. The possibility that Frank wouldn’t wake up didn’t bother Sadie one bit.
Funny how quickly habituation occurs.
Sadie quickly rummaged through the boxes of ammunition and took a box of .30-06s, a box of 9mms, and a box of 12 gauge shells. Then she stood up and shrugged her pack on, tucking the pistol into her empty pocket. As the man outside continued to bang on the door and call for Frank, Sadie pulled out the Geiger counter, dumped it out of its box, pulled the protective cover off, and used her multitool to pray at the back of the plastic case.
The case cracked and a four-inch long wedge snapped out of the back, right down the center. The plastic wedge fell to the floor and Sadie used her pliers to snap away the rest of the back. What was left was a thin, plastic rectangle the size of a credit card.
“Why does Titman want a credit card?” Sadie asked.
She pulled the card out of the Geiger counter and turned it over.
“Oh no…” she moaned as a chill zinged down her back to her buttocks then turned and raced back up to stand her hair on end.
Printed on the top of the card was the U.S. presidential seal. Beneath the seal was a column of numbers.
“No way,” she said, and noticed for the first time how hot and cramped the inside of the shed was. She looked down at the man she’d knocked out. It took her only seconds to calculate what to do next. She didn’t even have to ask her grandfather’s memory for help.
She tucked the card into her pants pocket, pulled out her multitool, and cut away the strap holding the ankle monitor to her leg. She tucked monitor into Frank’s pocket where her keys had been. Next, she jumped up and ran to the shed doors. With a quick flip of her wrist she pulled the screwdriver out of the eye bolts and stepped back to wait. Sure enough, whoever had been calling Frank’s name jerked the doors apart.
Sadie didn’t hesitate. As soon as the first wedge of light spilled in she lunged forward, her rifle aimed at gut-height. A second later the mustached, greasy-haired man who stood with his arms extended to open the doors had his belly smashed with a rib-crushing blow.
“Ohh!” he gasped, and took two steps back before doubling over. Instantly, Sadie reversed the rifle and pointed it at the crowd in front of the white line. They scattered and ran, yelling “help,” and “don’t shoot,” though the boy in the black hoodie who’d stared at her merely backed away with his hands up.
Sadie scooped up Callie’s backpack by a strap and ran to Callie. She dropped the backpack and rifle and fumbled with Frank’s keyring, hoping Blakely would help her out—and that one of the little Masterlock keys would open the lock holding her friend. If she couldn’t get it open with the key, she’d likely die here.
The first key in the lock. Neither did the second or third, and by that time the people in the stalls and the people shopping at the stalls had begun stare and point and yell at each other about the disturbance.
Frank, who she’d left knocked out on the floor of the shed, had revived enough to crawl to the door of his shed and moan, “Help me!”
The man selling armor saw him, and faster than Sadie thought possible, he leaped over his stall counter and came running.
Sadie considered trying to blast Sadie’s chain loose with Frank’s pistol, but wasn’t sure she could even hold her hands steady enough to aim. Instead she took a breath and tried the fourth key. When the Masterlock snapped open, she ripped it out of the chain and threw it at the armor seller. It bounced off his chest, drawing his attention to Sadie.
“Hey!” the man bellowed and charged at Sadie. He brought his pistol up and it boomed and a slug zoomed by Sadie’s shoulder.
Sadie pulled out Frank’s pistol and fired four shots. Two of them slammed into the armor seller’s chest. He went down, though no blood bloomed on his pale blue shirt.
“My ribs!” he wheezed, but Sadie ignored him and turned to Callie.
“We can’t leave them,” she said, and snatched a pair of shorts out of her backpack and put them on.
“I know,” Sadie said. She handed Callie the keys and pointed at the girl next to the shed. “Get her loose and ya’ll unlock the rest. We’re going to have to shoot it out.” She raised Frank’s pistol and fired off the rest of his clips into the air.
This was the signal Blakely had been waiting for. He’d watched Sadie step into the shed, shaking his head and marveling at both her stupidity and bravery. When she emerged shortly after that, he’d gotten into his attack position and waited to see what would happen next. When she shot the armor seller he said “Good girl.” Then he pulled the pin of his first smoke grenade and launched it into the middle of the market area. He tossed the second one toward the front of the lawn mower shed. Then he sprinted toward Sadie, drawing his pistol as he went.
Chapter 13
“Did you get it?” Blakely yelled as he reached Sadie and Callie. Gray smoke billowed around them. It smelled bitter and metallic, like frozen carbon dioxide sublimating quickly in a test tube over a Bunsen burner.
“On the floor in the shed!” she said, and felt instant gui
lt, despite the technical truth of her statement. A second later the first bullets came flying at them, fired by the same pair of armed men Sadie had asked about Callie. Both were sprinting through the vendor stalls between the slave market and the street beyond it. Both had their pistols out. Sadie watched the tiny flames jump from the barrels and felt the air move a foot from her head.
Blakely fired at the men, his rifle booming. The guards both dove for cover behind a vendor stall as smoke closed in and filled the market completely. When Sadie glanced at Blakely she saw him disappear into the shed.
Sadie spun and grabbed Callie’s arm.
“Come on,” she yelled as she ran, and her shoulder jarred hard enough to stop her forward progress. Callie didn’t immediately come with her. But when she looked at Sadie’s face, she sensed Sadie’s desperation and scooped up her backpack and ran.
They sprinted north toward a gap in the buildings—and the dead greenbelt and river beyond it. She looked back once, in time to see Blakely emerge from the smoke in front of the shed, his pistol at the ready as two more guards arrived. He locked eyes with Sadie for a second before smoke obscured him. His look made her stomach clench. The disappointment was bad enough. The understanding was worse.
“Don’t be stupid,” she told herself when the urge to return hit her. No way could she turn over the card from the Geiger counter. Not unless dying was the only alternative. Maybe not even then.
As they passed through the gap between buildings Sadie shifted directions and put the market zone out of her sight line—just in case she was tempted to look back again.
“Remember Lot’s wife,” she told herself as they stumbled across a gray, ashy field.
“Ouch!” Callie yelled suddenly, and stopped to hop up and down on one foot, her fingers rubbing the sole of the other foot. “Lost my damn shoes again.”
“Won’t matter if we don’t get out of here!” Sadie yelled.
A huge explosion went off behind them then, and automatic gunfire erupted. They ran again, Callie favoring her right foot as they traversed the gentle slope. To the north, beyond the dead trees, the wall of black clouds raced toward them. Veins of ice-white lightning bolts roiled the sky. The lightning kept kept flashing—bright, and beautiful, like phosphorescent sea creatures in a black, mile-deep ocean.
“Come on!” Sadie said. She ran harder when dust flew up from the ground and the “crack!” of a rifle shot came from their left. Sadie fired Frank’s pistol blindly in the direction of the shot, pulling the trigger every few steps without looking.
They reached the dead trees, rushing through a gap between the dusty trunks. There wasn’t much underbrush since the university had kept it cleared next to the campus grounds, and they quickly ran across a dusty concrete path—likely a jogging path that had been carved through the woods.
The downslope grew steeper almost immediately after they crossed the jogging trail and they quickly reached the line where the university’s groundskeepers had done nothing to clear the underbrush. The tree trunks grew closer together—thousands of the spindly gray stalks that had arisen in the heart of the greenbelt only to die when ash and dust had covered them and the sun had gone away. Now they formed an impenetrable barrier that stretched away in both directions as far as they could see.
“Now what?” Sadie asked.
“Now you follow me,” a man’s voice said at the same time they heard his footsteps.
Sadie and Callie spun around, Sadie bringing the pistol in her hands up to point at the arrival’s face.
“You!” Callie yelled at the young man in the black hoodie Sadie had seen standing next to her at the slave market.
“I’m sorry,” he panted as Callie stalked toward him. He put his hands out, palms forward. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know he’d do that to you.”
“Don’t tell me that,” Callie said. “I saw you standing there leering at me.”
“I wasn’t leering!” he said, and his face turned red. He looked down and dropped his hands to his sides. “I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t help you or they’d kill me. But when you got away...I can help you now.”
“Who the hell are you?” Sadie said, stepping between Callie and the young man and shoving her pistol against his throat. Back in the market more gunfire erupted, the shots echoing down the slope and making the young man flinch.
“His name is Dennis,” Callie said. “He’s the bastard who got me into this.”
“That’s not—,” Dennis said, but Sadie pushed the gun against his throat harder and he stopped talking. Then she listened to Callie describe being punched in the gut and robbed by a burly man with a motorcycle—a man Dennis had introduced her to after she asked him who would buy the bag of methamphetamine. Callie told the same story Frank had told—minus the part where Frank had forced Callie onto his mattress at gunpoint before chaining her to the earth anchor.
“I’m so sorry, Callie,” Dennis said. “I didn’t know he’d rip you off.”
“Save it,” Callie said, and Sadie thumbed back the pistol’s hammer.
“Please,” Dennis said. “I’ll help you. I’ll show you the trail.”
“What trail,” Sadie asked, and glanced toward the dead trees and shrubs and heavy undergrowth. She wished she’d stolen Frank’s machete, but didn’t have long to dwell on the oversight.
“Come on,” Dennis said, and turned away from Sadie’s pistol. “They’ll be coming.”
Dennis broke into a slow jog, and Sadie and Callie followed. They ran along the edge of the dead trees, following the curve of the dead forest and remaining next to the bushes and scrubby undergrowth. Soon they found what Dennis was looking for—a deadfall of old logs and spiky trees that had been piled up twenty feet high and left by someone years before. The logs and trees were covered in ash, but Sadie could see footprints where people had been climbing up and down the fall regularly.
Dennis turned and smiled.
“What?” Sadie asked.
“Come on,” he said, and went up the deadfall without any fear or hesitation. At the top he turned and looked down at them. “We used to play back here when I was a kid.”
“You’re still a kid,” Sadie said, and his smile went away, and for a brief moment his eyes went blank and Sadie could tell he was thinking about something sad.
“My dad and me cabled some of the logs together under there so it wouldn’t shift around or collapse on us when we played. He used to be a groundskeeper.”
“Where’s he now?” Callie asked, but Sadie already knew what the answer would be.
Dennis shook his head and looked away. He waited until Sadie and Callie had reached him before he turned and scrambled down the other side. Beyond the deadfall, a trail had been hacked through the dead trees and brush. Dennis took them down the trail so quickly they passed through the dead green belt in less than a minute. They stood in front of a dust-covered concrete retaining wall topped by a rusty, ash-coated chain link fence. Razor wire had been coiled along the top of the fence—which was only six feet tall on the forest side where they stood. For anyone trying to scale it from the outside, it would be twelve or thirteen feet.
Beyond the fence lay a flat dust-covered field. Only a few dusty cars remained where their owners had abandoned them. Sadie guessed the people of Steubenville had cleared them away and used them as part of their defenses. Removing the stranded automobiles would prevent any approaching enemy from using them as cover—a lesson the cannibals at Shanksborough Technical College had learned the hard way.
“That’s the freeway,” Dennis said, and Sadie recalled the map she’d been studying earlier. She was looking at the remains of I-22. Beyond it lay a set of railroad tracks and the bank of the Ohio River.
The river looked dead. A thick layer of gray ash floated it atop it, and Sadie wondered what kind of creatures would evolve to dominate it over the next few million years—now that the volcano had likely wiped out whatever life had survived the river’s decades of industrial pol
lution.
“No cars behind the fence line here.” Sadie said. She looked both directions down the fence line and saw nothing but dusty ground and dead, gray trees and undergrowth. “I was going to use a car to climb over. I knew I should have scouted the place.”
“This way,” Dennis said, and he turned west. They picked their way through the dead trees and brush for fifty yards until they reached a stretch of dead greenbelt where the sound barrier was shorter and the trees were more overgrown. “You can use this tree to get over. Some of us have been making plans…”
“Awesome,” Callie said. “Now you should get out of here before they see you.”
“I know,” Dennis said. “I just didn’t want you to think we’re all like this.”
He waved his arm back toward the campus they’d just fled, and looked at Callie.
“Here,” Sadie said, and tossed a shirt she’d pulled out of her pack to Callie.
Callie slipped off her pack and put the shirt on, then turned to Dennis.
“I know you didn’t mean it,” Callie said. “I know it’s not your fault. You didn’t do it personally. But you’re here, and it’s happening here, and you’re letting it.
Dennis nodded.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and turned and ran back through the trees the way they’d come.
Sadie watched silently as Callie turned back to the fence and emptied her backpack. Her possessions didn’t amount to much, but she shoved a pocket knife through the gaps in the wire, and then a mace canister and a couple of Snickers bars. Lastly, Callie shoved the sawed off shotgun and several MREs through a gap between the bottom of the fence and the concrete sound barrier
Before Sadie could say anything about Dennis, Callie moved to the trunk of a spindly Cottonwood tree. She reached up and grabbed a low branch and hopped up and put a foot into the crotch of the tree. As if reading Sadie’s mind, Callie said, “I was a tomboy once. Until I found out it was easier not to be.”