by Ian Daniels
More jeers and yells rose up again seemingly from all around us.
“Hey over here! Look what they’ve got!” I keyed in on one burly voice and saw a big guy in a puffy coat pointing at us from all of fifteen feet away. I couldn't even think about getting to my AK or Clint’s AR and Danielle was on the wrong side of the truck; bad luck for him. Adrenaline maxed out, my sausage fingers fumbled and finally drew my pistol. Unable to count the diminutive rounds from the little .22 caliber conversion, I emptied the gun into the puffy coat in a flurry of trigger pulls and flying down stuffing. To his credit, the guy actually managed to swear and run off.
I’d have to practice my stress point shooting a little more if I lived through the night; I made the snide mental note.
Unsure if my muscles would respond or not, I pushed and stood somewhat upright, or at least enough to let me try walking. Finally reaching the truck, I lowered Clint down to lean against a tire. The jolt finally bringing him back to, like a loud noise shocking someone out of a deep sleep, and he targeted the first thing he saw with his immediate fight or flight response, me.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I yelled pinning his arms down, trying the exact wrong tactic to calm someone down. “You’re all right. Calm down, get your bearings for a minute.”
“Where are we?” he managed to get out at last, rubbing his head to clear the cobwebs.
“Other end of the tunnel trying to hide and outrun a murderous mob.”
“We all here?” he asked, obviously recalling the scene from the last few seconds before he got knocked out.
“Dani’s right over there,” I pointed. “Can you cover me from here? I’ve got to get back into the tunnel.” I gave him all the answer I could manage right now.
“Do it,” he forced his eyes wide open then let them level off.
“Does she know?” Clint asked while he checked his gun that I handed back to him.
“No.”
The shock and pain on his face was obviously redoubled now but Clint knew the score and knew that our immediate problem was the one to focus on.
“Dani, you still on the net?” I pushed the little transmit button for my radio and asked quietly.
“I’m here,” she confirmed after a second of silence.
“Clint’s back in it so here’s what we’re doing. He’s covering the cross street, I’m going to make my last run.”
“Got it, go!” she responded quickly.
I was exhausted but felt light as a feather now that I was unburdened on my last run back to the pump house. Ducking inside, I stopped to catch my breath again and a flashlight beam swung across the doorway.
“Bet there’s some cool shit in there!” I heard a young voice exclaim, followed by three rapid “clunks” of heavy 308 bullets tearing up the ground in front of the brick structure.
“What the hell was that?” the voice asked, soon followed by a separate one saying, “Screw this, hey let’s go see what those guys’re doing!”
I breathed a heavy sigh of relief and loosened the grip on my AK. The last bottle of propane sat idly by, innocently daring me to pick it up.
“I’m not so heavy; it’s just a little further.”
“Crowd is forming; lots of 'em headed your way. You’re going to be cut off in about ten seconds.” Clint’s voice came over the radio and into my already throbbing head. “Gotta leave the gas.”
A piece of the nearby building that was on fire crashed heavily down and the renewed roar of the fire sounded like a jet engine. I could feel its heat from in here. A barrage of gunshots broke out and I stuck my head through the doorway to find their source. It wasn’t a crowd; it was a sea of people. They were armed and pissed.
“We don’t have enough yet!” I implored through the radio. “Can you drive them back? Or hell, drive the truck over here and I’ll throw the last one in.”
“Truck’s a bullet magnet, you know that. Leave it. We’ll have to make do.” Clint reasoned with me and calmly shot a metal street sign to get the crowd’s attention away from me. No one seemed to notice as they swarmed closer.
Well this just sucks.
A quick smattering of shotgun pellets bouncing off the brick followed by the unmistakable sound of glass breaking drove me back into the little one room structure. I looked around the bare room desperately. Nothing had changed but a foreboding feeling had crept in from somewhere. The lone propane container still just sat there, but now it was staring menacingly at me.
“Smoke?” I yelled to Dani through the radio, desperate for a distraction to cover my retreat.
“We’re out!” she radioed back.
“Fuck... light something on fire then!”
“Like what?” she yelled back.
She was right. The snow was really coming down now and there was nothing that would light easily in this concrete jungle anyway.
“I don’t care what you …” Aw shit. I finally realized what the foreboding feeling was. It was a really bad idea forming. “Do you have any flares left?” I asked hesitantly.
“Yes!” she responded.
I paused and stared back at the silver colored asshole that was sharing the room with me.
“Alright, load one up... and range into the pump house,” I radioed back calmly to her.
“What?” her predictable response came immediately back.
“I’ll drive them back with a few shots, open up the last tank, fog the place, then get clear for you to launch a flare into it,” I explained unhappily.
“If the building goes, you won't be able to get back out,” Clint’s voice broke into the conversation.
“Just do it. I’m going back down there anyway... just means we come back overland,” I said guiltily knowing that I was playing a cheating card to get them to light the propane and that there would be no “we.”
“Once it’s done, get in the truck and get out of here. I’ll make for the clinic but worst case is that we meet back at your place. If the Doc doesn’t think its enough, make him think otherwise,” I released the button and finally dug out a box of .22 shells to reload my pistol with.
“We’ll wait for you guys at the truck,” Danielle’s disconnected voice said into my ear.
“No. These guys will overrun all of us and go for the truck, propane and everything else... including you. You’ve got to go now before someone gets their shit together and closes the roads. I’ll start the countdown and you finish it,” I cut off the non-negotiation and took aim at the doorway with both hands on my gun, then let out a big sigh.
Lashing out with my foot, I swatted the tank and it tipped lazily to the side, then finally lost its balance and rolled noisily down the stairs. Going slowly backwards down the stairs to keep my gun on the doorway, I reached the bottom and placed my hand on the round handle and started slowly counting down into the radio.
“Ten...nine... eight...” This is a really bad idea...
Chapter 20
I woke up in a splintered darkness. Cracks of daylight shown down into my little cell. As terrible as I felt, I didn't wake up disoriented. I remembered all too well the last few hours from the previous night.
The explosion and cave in that just narrowly missed burying me alive. Pushing my body to the brink through the dark tunnels as I went back to look for Blake. The frenzied crowds, the cold, the smoke... I didn’t have any problem re-living seeing him shot, going back through every detail to figure out why we had been so stupid.
It was daylight now and I was holed up in yet another end of the damned tunnel network we had been using. After seeing our “entrance” end blocked by my makeshift propane bomb, I had tried to make it back to the parking garage side and to Blake, only to be driven back by a deadly hail of gunfire, this time from inside the tunnels themselves.
Some of the adventurous rioters must have finally figured out what we had been guarding and came in to check it out. I used my stolen map to get away through other access doors and managed to lose them, slinking away and out of their reach
before passing out in an old basement room that connected to the tunnels through a different entrance.
I had to break through a piece of plywood that had been used to cover up the doorway. In this part of the tunnel labyrinth it was nothing more than a dirt floored access point with maybe four foot high ceilings for a good hundred yards. As bad off as my mind and body were at that point, I almost thought I was tunneling straight into hell.
Throwing myself through the plywood I found I was in the storage basement of an art building. I spotted a couple dark windows and scrounged a canvas drop cloth to cover up with before allowing myself to finally shut down. A large part of me hoped I wouldn't wake up.
“Cant we just hide? You know, stay low and ride it out?”
Those words brought me back to the land of the living. Or in my case the land of the semi-conscious and almost coherent. Kathy had asked me that not all that long ago when we were at their house the night after we had picked up Blake and Danielle from the train station. I had agreed at the time and that had been the plan. I guess things don’t always go according to plan.
Shutting my eyes tightly against a wave of heartache, I pried them back open again and experimentally moved all my limbs. I was sore, battered, bruised, cut and exhausted, but I was alive, and laying around in this basement wasn’t going to get me where I needed to go.
And where was that? My place out of town? No, I wasn’t going to go slump away and hide. Clint and Kathy’s house? They shouldn’t be there yet depending on how long I’d been asleep. They should still be at the clinic. Right, the clinic with the blackmailing doctor who didn’t want to treat Kathy with simple medication. Now he had Clint to patch up too, if he even could. Hopefully Danielle had taken my advice and not given him an option.
I pulled myself upright with the help of a leaning pile of boxes and looked around for a door or stairway. The last thing I wanted to do was go back into the tunnels. An unlit emergency sign hanging from the water stained ceiling in the far corner pointed me towards the stairway. Thankfully the door was unlocked and not blocked by anything like an imploded building from all the fires last night.
Using the handrail, I pulled myself along to the top and slowly opened the door. Fresh, cold air streamed in through a broken glass window in the hallway I had emerged into. I let the breeze wash over me and I inhaled deeply, immediately forgetting the stuffiness from the basement.
Raising my eyes up as if for the first time, I saw how the snow had blanketed everything. It covered the ground in a good six inch layer. I looked at the buildings around me, then at the hills in the distance. A winter whitened landscape had erased all the signs of evil done not twelve hours before. Fresh white layers over top a crimson stained ground and frosted trees hid charred bark.
The outer layer of my clothes were dry for the most part as I had spent the majority of my time underground and out of the weather last night. The inner layer had gotten pretty damp from sweat and I was already feeling the chill work its way back into my bones.
Now I had to decide what to do. I felt the need to go look for Blake... for his body, but I had to attend to my immediate needs first. I could stay right here and wait to dry out. Dry was appealing but staying here was not. I could go for the clinic or out to my house and risk hypothermia, or, I guess now was as good a time as any to make use of my other house in town and the supplies I had left there. It was a small town and as such, the house wasn’t too far away. I could get there, get warm, clean myself up, change my clothes, eat some food and basically reset myself to finish off this escapade.
Piles of smoldering rubble still smoked a swan song to last night's carnage. Everything was deathly quiet. No more sounds of gunfights or rioting and very few if any fresh tracks in the snow. I guess the weather had quelled the fires of the people and buildings alike. I didn't like leaving my own tracks in the snow but there was nothing else for it. If I was going to move, I was going to leave a trail. The best thing I could do would be to look as worn out and downtrodden as everyone else. I didn't have to try very hard.
I trudged my way the seven blocks across town to the house where when I was twenty years old I had decided to put my money towards something that would be mine instead of renting. At the time it was a great price and I had thought it was a very responsible and grown up decision. A fat lot of good it did me when the housing market crashed. I hadn’t let the place fall completely into disrepair after I had moved out of town but with no one around able to afford to buy it or even rent it from me, it had been sitting empty.
Coming up the alleyway across the street and with no leaves on the trees to mask the view into the back yard like they did during the summer, I could see the new snow load was making the back porch lean dangerously towards the ground. The fence was still upright and intact and all the windows seemed to still be sealed up too. I didn't have much love for the place although I was glad to see the looting hadn't come into this neighborhood...yet.
Through all the reminiscing I almost missed the divots in the snow along the sidewalk where someone had walked late last night before the storm had stopped. I also almost missed the huddled bundle of a person on the far side of the house.
My body was drained and my mind was working slowly. It took me far too long to decide what I was seeing and to react to it. Finally, my hand found the grip of my AK74 slung under my coat.
I stepped a few feet back into the alley and watched for a minute. There was no approach from this side where I wouldn't be seen and I’d have to back track by two blocks to be able to come around to the back side of the house under cover. We didn't have much of a homeless population that wasn't at a shelter or already squatting in someone else's house, and if the rioting hadn't come this far, it wasn't someone hurt and left behind... then it hit me.
Hurt and left behind.
How in the hell he could have survived last night and made it all the way to my house was beyond me, but the huddled mass could only be one thing.
Abandoning all stealth I ran from the alleyway, across the road and slid to a stop when I saw the discolored hand and splotches of blood under the last half inch of snow. It was Blake. Thinking we had abandoned him, he had made it all this way, badly hurt; only to be abandoned again as I slept in some dry basement as he froze out here.
Gingerly I pulled back the hood from his head. His eyes and checks were bruised and stained black. At my touch, the last dying ember of life left in him sparked and he opened his eyes. I couldn't believe he had lived this long. He had been shot, beaten and exposed to the freezing weather, but the man was still hanging on to his last string of life.
I knelt down in the snow, the sting of tears in the cold barely perceptible. Quickly surveying his injuries I knew there was no way for him to survive. The most I could do was cradle his head. I knew he shouldn't be alive and didn't have any time left. Neither of us could speak. His eyes clouded and cleared as his thoughts came and went. Blame, forgiveness, and at the end, a wish for peace to finally reach him in body, mind and soul.
Chapter 21
Five days later I had finally caught up to Clint, Danielle and Kathy.
After puking and crying out everything I had left, I had passed out again in the sheltered refuge I had created in my house’s basement. From there I took Blake’s still frozen body with me to the clinic, having no way to bury or cremate him properly. I had missed the others by three days and left his body in the care of the doctor and other remaining staff with my thanks for the treatment they gave, and the respectful treatment they would give to Blake.
As a token of good will, I left them with some supplies I had scrounged up and brought along with me. The doctor thankfully didn't have the guts to ask for Blake's Beretta that he found as we moved his body into a back room. I hadn't searched him and Blake must have jammed the empty gun deep inside a pocket to keep it safe. That gun would be delivered to his father.
“How's she doing?” I asked Clint as he slowly and quietly pulled the bedroom door cl
osed behind him. It was evening and I was warming my hands on a mug of coffee at their house far out of town.
“I don't know,” Clint ran a hand through his thinning hair. “The drugs have the infection pretty much under control but she won't eat anything and will barely talk to us.”
“So it was all for nothing?” I shook my head.
“No. We did the best we could with what we had at the time. We all knew the risk...” he trailed off, not quite ready to talk about whether or not we really had thought about losing one of our own.
“So what now?” he asked, ushering us into the other room to let Kathy have some peace and quiet, or to at least to keep her from overhearing any more. “Where are you headed?”
"I’ll stop in and see if the Boss is still around, plus there’s some gear at my office I want to pick up. From there I’ve got some friends not too far into the city that I might check on and see how they’re doing in this mess.”
"Hmmmf. I hope you treat them better than your other friends." I heard Danielle mutter from across the room. I managed to ignore her with great restraint.
"The radios say that the city is still in a full-on meltdown. You going to drive or walk?" Clint grimaced as he sat down on the couch and arranged a pillow under his leg.
"I think I'm just going to hike it. There's a cargo van in the back shop at work I can load up and drive home if I need to."
"Load up?"
"Lots of stuff still there; tools, coffee, batteries, water jugs, toilet paper, a few guns I had stashed or was working on..."
"Is it yours?" Clint asked the obvious and irritating question.
"At this point, if its still there, its mine."
Hearing this, Danielle uncoiled from her spot by a window and came over to point a finger at my chest.