by Tom Abrahams
He was working with what was, at best, a motley group of inexperienced poseurs. They were angry and reflexively violent, but they lacked discipline and any real tactical skill. Palero was right to question this attack. Justin was as angry for that as he was for his insubordination.
They’d decided to only hit empty homes, but empowered by murder and greed, Justin had changed his mind. That, and the fear that once the military took hold, people rich with supplies would fortify their properties and become all the harder to penetrate. He’d convinced the others the element of surprise was like adding an army to their gang, but he stood at the gate, unconvinced himself. He wasn’t afraid of killing someone. He’d done that already and knew that pulling the trigger would come more easily this time. He was afraid of failing. He didn’t want to return home empty-handed to the chastisement or ridicule of his woman. That was the hesitation. That was the rub.
“You coming?” asked Palero, who’d squeezed past the opening.
Justin moved into the backyard, trying to regain the confidence he’d held until Palero questioned his plan. He pulled his shoulders back, adjusted his grip on the nine millimeter, and quickened his pace to move to the head of the pack. He gripped Palero’s shoulder as he passed him.
“As soon as we know they’re at the front door,” said Justin, “we kick in the back. All of us go inside at once. If they make a move, pull the trigger.”
Palero nodded, as did the others. They moved toward the back porch. It was a covered area that stretched ten feet from the rear of the home. Justin stepped onto the brick pavers first, his heartbeat accelerating, thumping against his chest, and he neared a window adjacent to the door. The sweat rebloomed at the nape of his neck.
There was a dim light flickering inside the large room beyond the window, a warm glow cast from a trio of large candles perched atop a fireplace mantel. There was an elderly woman sitting in an oversized chair. She was stroking a little dog with pointed ears curled into her lap. Her eyes were closed and her head was resting against the chair’s high wingback.
He scanned the room, searching the darker corners of the space. He didn’t see anyone else, but he couldn’t see the front of the house from his position. Maybe the woman was alone. Easy target.
Justin slithered back to the door and waited, ready to strike. His muscles tensed, his chest rising and falling with short, controlled breaths. He gripped the pistol more tightly. All he needed now was the signal.
***
Pop Vickers was in his kitchen when he heard the knock at the door. It was faint at first, and he wasn’t even sure there was somebody there. A second, more anxious rap was loud enough for Pop to slide from the barstool at the kitchen island.
He was tinkering with his HF HAM radio, trying to find a good frequency. The last couple of conversations had simply faded out and he was looking for more information on the powerless quagmire in which he found himself.
“Nancy?” he called, moving toward the narrow foyer. “You expecting anyone?”
Pop peeked his head into the family room and saw his wife dozing. Punchy, their Yorkshire terrier, pricked its ears at Pop’s voice, but kept its eyes shut.
Another rap at the door.
“Hold your horses,” he said, shifting his weight back toward the entry. As he did, he caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his right eye.
Pop stopped. His wife hadn’t moved and neither had the dog. His eyes narrowed and he scanned the room. The flickering candle glow danced off the rear windows, reflecting the light back into the room. He reached out and held onto the wood molding that framed the wide entry from the foyer into the family room. His eyes fixed on the window, gauging the pattern of the candle flames on the glass. His wife purred in her sleep. The dog whistled through its nose. He waited and watched.
Then he saw it, the faint flutter of movement outside. Pop retreated a step in the dark foyer, slipping back from the entry. There was someone outside.
Soft-shoeing backwards a couple of steps, Pop slipped back to the kitchen. Ignoring another round of impatient knocks at his front door, he pulled open a junk drawer next to the refrigerator. He rummaged through the deep drawer and pulled out the Governor, a trusty revolver he’d loaded with shell shot. He didn’t have time to make it to the bedroom for the shotgun.
Pop leaned against the refrigerator with one hand and held the revolver with the other. He’d never fired the weapon outside of a gun range, and that target practice was years ago. It had been even longer since he’d fired at a person. Decades, really. And a revolver didn’t pack the same punch as an M14. Pop rubbed the faded Globe, Anchor, and Eagle tattoo on his arm. He swallowed hard. This wouldn’t end well if he fought back. He was rusty.
His introspection was interrupted by the knock at the front door, which had become an incessant banging. Pop put two and two together. Whoever was at the front door was working with the person or people at the back.
“Nancy!” Pop yelled. “I need you here in the kitchen. Nancy?”
Pop held his finger aside the trigger and started back to the family room. He stayed in the shadows, clinging to the darkness as he neared the wide opening. Behind him, someone was pounding at the door. In front of him, his dozing wife, who somehow hadn’t awoken from the noise.
“Nancy,” he said, his voice sharp but close to a whisper. “Wake up!”
The dog’s ears pricked again and its eyes fluttered opened. It moved in Nancy’s lap and she jerked awake, snorting as she regained consciousness.
Pop waved to get her attention. “Nancy,” he said, “come here.”
Nancy’s eyes scanned the room until they locked onto Pop’s.
“What?”
He waved his free hand again. He had the other behind his back. “Nancy, I need you to come here. Now. Bring Punchy.”
Nancy’s face contorted with confusion and she yawned. She scooped the dog under her arm and rocked herself free of the chair. She moved toward her husband, her eyes never leaving his. When she neared him, he reached into the family room and grabbed her wrist, pulling her into the darkness.
“What is going—who’s banging at the—what—Pop?” She was still blinking the sleep from her eyes.
Pop raised a finger to his lips and led Nancy up the stairs to the master bedroom. Once there, he forced his wife into the room and shut the door. Nancy stood with the trembling dog in her hands while her husband locked the bedroom door and jammed an antique side chair diagonally underneath the doorknob. A battery-operated camping lantern next to the bed provided the only light in the room.
Nancy pulled the dog close to her chest and held his head against her neck. “What is going on?” she asked. “You’re scaring me. Who’s at the door?”
Pop took his wife’s elbow and led her toward the closet. “Somebody’s trying to break in,” he said. “There are at least two of them.”
Nancy shuffled her feet to keep up with her husband. “Break in? Why?”
Why?
Pop clenched his jaw tight and decided against answering his wife with the sarcasm she deserved. He moved her into the walk-in closet and handed her the revolver, shut the door behind himself, and reached onto the top shelf.
Nancy was trembling. “What is this? she asked. “I can’t shoot this.”
Pop pulled down the shotgun and then put a hand on the side of his wife’s face. The banging on the front had stopped or they couldn’t hear it from the closet. It didn’t matter. The silence was, for the moment, calming.
“Yes, you can,” he said, his voice soft and reassuring. “You can do anything. But let’s hope you don’t need to pull the trigger. I’m here with you. If we keep quiet, they’ll go away. We’ll be fine. Okay?”
Nancy’s eyes glistened, and her lips quivered. She swallowed hard and nodded. Punchy squirmed under her arm and chirped his version of a bark. Pop kissed her gently on her lips. He took the dog from her and held him under his arm, kneeling to put the animal on the carpeted floor. Punchy wal
ked in circles and found a comfortable spot on which to curl into a ball.
“What do we do now?” Nancy asked, her voice a strained whisper. “What do we do?”
Pop checked the shotgun and made certain the twin shells were loaded. He looked up at his wife, trying to hide his own fear, and exhaled. He forced a weak smile. “We wait.”
***
Justin was ready to explode. His muscles were sore from the prolonged tension. “What is taking so long?” he said through his teeth. “It’s been five minutes.”
The others shrugged. He peered through the window again, scanning the room until he got to the oversized chair. It was still empty.
“The woman hasn’t come back,” he said. “But she hasn’t answered the door, has she?”
Palero’s face squeezed with concern and he joined Justin at the window. “No. I haven’t heard the signal. What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Justin said. “I heard a man’s voice. She left and took the dog. I thought she was going to the front door.”
“What do you want to do?” asked Palero. “You want me to go around front?”
Justin shook his head. “No, I’ll do it.”
He backed away from the porch and bolted to the side of the house. The lookout was there, leering around the corner toward the front door. He jumped when Justin charged to his side.
He pulled the boy toward him. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. He’s still banging on the door. Nobody’s answered.”
“Somebody’s home,” said Justin. “I know somebody’s there.”
“Should we pick another house? I think we should pick another house.”
Justin squeezed the boy’s shoulder, digging in his fingers and holding him there despite the boy’s efforts to pull away. “That’s not happening.”
“Okay.” The boy nodded, his eyes wide enough for Justin to see the whites. “Okay. Sorry.” He shrugged himself free of Justin’s grip and adjusted his T-shirt.
Justin rubbed his head, the growing stubble rough against his palm. He peeked around the corner. The boy was still standing there, banging on the door. There was no sign the woman in the house was about to answer. Justin cursed and walked deliberately to the front of the house.
“Hey,” he called to the boy, who snapped to attention at Justin’s voice. “Enough. Get over here.”
The boy ran to the corner of the house, joining Justin and the lookout. The three of them stood in the dark between the target house and the one next to it while Justin considered the next move. He cursed again, spat into the grass, and stomped his foot. The boys gave him his space as he vented.
“All right,” he huffed, “we’re going in through the back. All of us.”
He led the boys to the porch and met the rest of the gang at the back of the house. He gave them each orders, and then with everything he could muster, he reared back and thrust his foot into the door beneath the knob.
The door cracked and loosened against the frame but wasn’t open yet. Justin sucked in a deep breath of the chilled air and exhaled with a grunt, hitting the same spot for a second time. He connected with his heel and the door popped free, the locking mechanism tearing away from the jamb. The door swung inward wildly, slapped against a stopper, and boomeranged back toward Justin.
He shoved it open with one hand, leveled the nine millimeter with the other, and stepped into the house. He was met with warmer air and the distinctly familiar odor of a hospital or nursing home. He’d been to both, visiting his maternal grandmother before she’d died.
It was an antiseptic yet sour scent that stung his nostrils and he tried breathing through his mouth as he moved into what looked like the family room. It was casually decorated with knit blankets covering each piece of worn furniture. The candlelight flickered, casting confusing shadows across the space, forcing Justin to double take more than once. He slid his finger onto the trigger and guided himself through the room, using the white-lined sights atop the weapon.
He directed the lookout and the door knocker to move through the wide opening at the front of the room and then move to the right. He told the others, including Palero, to move through the same opening but to veer left into the darkness.
Justin moved to the far end of the room and a pair of closed doors. They were narrow and tall. He braced himself at the first door, weapon aimed, and spun the knob to swing it open. Holding his breath, he jerked backward and braced the gun with both unsteady hands, ready to fire.
He exhaled at the sight of hanging coats and dry-cleaning plastic crammed onto a single eye-high bar. Beneath the coats and the smell of mothballs, jammed awkwardly into the closet, was a vacuum cleaner. Justin tested the coats, picking at them with the barrel of the weapon. He looked up at the shelf that hung above the clothing. There were shoe boxes and cardboard lightbulb packages haphazardly stacked atop one another.
Justin closed the one door and repeated the nervous process a second time. The second door revealed a bathroom with a toilet and a sink. It was dark enough that the candlelight only provided a vague glimpse of the space, but it was enough to convince Justin nobody was in the room.
He moved back to the closet and fished along the shelf until he found an open, half-empty yellow box of trash bags. They’d come in handy. He pulled a fistful of bags from the box and tossed the rest onto the floor.
He spun around to find Palero standing in the opening to the darkened hallway at the front of the house. He tossed him a couple of trash bags. “What did you find?”
Palero nodded to his right. “There’s a kitchen over there. Lots of good stuff. Not only food, but all kinds of batteries and weird radio. Looks like a couple of cases of bottled water. Some beer too.” A smile spread across Palero’s face.
“And the others?”
“I haven’t seen them,” said Palero, nodding to his left. “I’m thinking there are bedrooms over there. There’s also some stairs. We haven’t been up there yet.”
“Any sign of the old lady?”
Palero shook his head.
Justin shoved the rest of the bags at Palero. “She’s gotta be here somewhere. I’m thinking upstairs. You take care of the kitchen. Take everything that’ll fit into these bags. Everything. Then have the boys use the pillowcases from the bedrooms to take whatever you think is worth it. I’m heading upstairs.”
“By yourself?”
Justin looked Palero up and down, hard. “I took care of the woman at that other house, didn’t I? By myself.”
Palero nodded and stepped away from Justin, who shooed him back to the kitchen. Sulking, he walked away. Justin grabbed the wooden baluster and pulled himself up the carpeted stairway. He stepped lightly, pushing himself upward one step at a time, listening for any noise or tip as to where the woman had gone. There was nothing but the shuffle and clanging of his gang on the floor below.
“I’m coming for you, woman,” he said. “You try to stop me, it ain’t gonna be good for you.”
***
Nancy Vickers reached for her husband’s hand. “Did you hear that?” she squeaked.
They were backed into the corner of the closet, sightless in the black night of the space. Dresses and pants hung in front of them, protecting them from whoever might come for them. Only the shotgun barrel stuck through the drapery of clothing.
Pop didn’t like hiding. He’d as soon confront the cowards as stay holed up in a dark closet. He could only imagine what his commanding officer in Vietnam would think—a Marine running from the fight instead of instigating it.
“I heard it,” Pop admitted. “They’re in the kitchen. No doubt. And there’s more than one or two of them. They’re too loud. Too sloppy.”
“Maybe they’ll take what they want and leave,” whispered Nancy. Her voice was peppered with nerves and sounded like a warble.
She was a good woman. She’d tolerated a lot during their long marriage: the military, multiple tours overseas, moving to far-flung dirt farms the Marines
liked to call camps. She’d also indulged his long hours at the VFW and in the garage on his HAM radios.
They’d settled in Clear Lake after a NASA contractor hired the veteran for his electronic skills, a byproduct of an Uncle Sam-funded college education. He’d done his time and retired with a gold watch and a decent pension. They were in their golden years. And despite never having had children, they’d been happy. Adopting the families in their neighborhood while offering babysitting along with unsolicited parenting advice both were free to pursue their own interests.
In addition to occasional potluck block parties, Nancy had her bunko nights and book clubs. She cooked, she played golf, and she watched Dr. Phil. Their lives had been full. Now they faced the end of the world stuffed in the corner of their closet like scared children in a horror film, both of them armed with weapons they didn’t want to use.
“They want a confrontation, Nancy,” Pop whispered to his wife. “That’s why they knocked on the front door, to draw us out.”
Nancy whimpered. Her breathing had accelerated to a shallow staccato. Her body was trembling.
Pop lowered the shotgun and put one hand on his wife’s knee. He rubbed it with his thumb and scooted closer to her. “Maybe not,” he said. “I could be wrong. They could be taking essentials and then leaving. That’s probably what they’re doing.”
“I know you’re saying—”
Pop squeezed his wife’s knee. “Shhh. Be quiet. I hear something. Get the revolver.”
Nancy inched into his body while picking up the weapon. She held it with both hands, pointing it blindly through the clothing. Pop let go of her knee to retarget the shotgun and listened for a repeat of the noise he thought he’d heard. There was silence for a beat. Then he heard it.
Creak.
It was a loose subfloor in the hallway leading from the stairs and into their bedroom. There were typically four spots that groaned under the weight of a footstep, the last of which was right outside the closet. He’d heard at least two of them now.