by Alex Mersey
One half stayed right there, felt every inch of the prodding metal, hiccupped pants of sheer terror as she imagined his finger slipping, the gun going off inside her, relived it a million times as if she’d died a million deaths.
The other half went someplace else, a place where indescribable horrors couldn’t exist, a black void, a slated blank, a place where nothing could ever happen, a place of nothing.
- 14 -
Sean
Tension coiled thick in Sean’s neck, bulging chords that threatened to cut off his air supply, and not because he was staring down the barrel of a gun. Not only because he was staring down the barrel of a gun.
How long had it been?
At least five minutes.
Five minutes ago, he’d been standing at the window, soothed by the rhythmic sound of rain drumming on the windows, watching the forest be reborn as the storm washed away the ash.
Five minutes ago, he should have been standing just inside the kitchen door, ready with a butcher knife to protect the lives that had so randomly been placed in his care.
That’s where Clint and his dogs had come through.
From the kitchen.
“Well, if it ain’t our Goldilocks staring wistfully out the window,” the man had called out in an exaggerated Southern twang, gun locked and aimed as Sean whipped around from the window. He lost the twang. “Nice and slow, now, no one needs to get hurt.”
Sean threw both hands up. “I don’t want any trouble.”
“Don’t do anything stupid and trouble won’t find you.” He waved Sean over to a chair with the gun. “How many friends did you bring along?”
“It’s just me,” Sean said, his eyes darting to the other two.
One had a jaded, faded rocker look, wearing black denim and a purple velvet jacket, silver hair hanging to his shoulders in threads, wrinkles cut deep into a harrowed face. But it was the younger man that worried Sean. There was a feral edge to him, a wildness about the eyes that could be drugs, could be the circumstances, could just be his default personality.
Sean returned his focus to the apparent leader. “I’m alone.”
“I’m a reasonable man, but you should know, I take dishonesty downright personal. It shows a certain lack of…respect.” He stalked closer to where he’d made Sean sit, didn’t stop until the tip of the barrel dented Sean’s forehead. “We saw the party mess in the kitchen, so let’s try this again. How many?”
Possible lies and their outcomes raced through Sean’s mind. Nothing stuck. He wasn’t thinking straight. He’d never had a gun in his face. It was like nothing you could prepare for. He didn’t even know what he was feeling, something between dread and disbelief.
The truth was all he had.
And maybe playing on the man’s humanity.
“Four,” Sean said. “Women, and one child. They’re not armed. None of us are.”
The man’s gaze went past him, a single nod, and Sean caught the movement out the corner of his eye. He’d sent his dogs out.
“The name’s Clint, by the way.” The man backed up, pulled a chair about to straddle. He wore jeans and leather, more hair on his face than on his head. Tanned, weathered skin that put his age anywhere between forty and sixty, depending on the wear and tear of the great outdoors.
“This is where you complete the introductions,” he said into the silence. “Unless you’d prefer I just keep calling you Goldilocks.”
“Sean.”
“You in charge?” A hearty chuckle rumbled Clint’s chest. “Ah, I see how that’s a tricky one. Let me put it this way. You the leader of your group?”
Sean glared at him. “Yes.”
“Hmm…” He scrubbed his beard. “Not doing a very good job of that now, are you?”
No argument there. “Look, we only wanted shelter for the night. We didn’t realize this place was taken.”
“And who did you think packed out all those scrumptious goodies?” Clint waved his gun toward the food table. “Your fairy fucking godmother?”
A scuffling commotion twisted Sean around in his chair.
It was the rocker, his hands full with clamping Alli as she squirmed and wiggled against his efforts. “Found this one scurrying in the passageway.”
Her eyes landed on Sean, shell-shocked and frenzied. “Beth,” she gasped. “He’s got…” She faltered as her gaze flashed over him, likely to Clint and his gun. She forgot to fight, her feet dragging as the rocker hauled her along.
“For God’s sake,” Sean hissed. “Is that necessary?”
“That’s okay, Bisson,” the voice behind him drawled. “Ain’t nowhere for her to run.”
The rocker released his grip and Alli stumbled forward.
“Alli, what is it?” Sean said. “Where’s Beth?”
Her eyes came to him again. “The shower room. There’s another—” Her voice cracked as understanding hit, they were out-manned and out-gunned, Sean was in no position to help. “He hurt her.”
Sean jumped to his feet, froze at the barked, “Don’t fucking move!”
A chair went skittering in the wake of Clint’s long, resolute stride across the room and out the door.
To hell with this. Sean took off after him, elbowing the rocker, Bisson, out of the way when he tried to block his path. The man didn’t have a gun and his hollowed out frame was no match for Sean. He broke into a run down the passage, reached the ladies shower room on Clint’s heels, and slammed to a stunned halt—
“Jesus!” Clint swore, swooping a discarded towel up from the floor without missing a step.
The man covering Beth against the wall backed up in surprise, gun dangling in his hand, and suddenly Sean was staring at Beth’s naked body. It took another moment to comprehend, for his mind to process the situation, to avert his eyes, for the thought to register: Thank God the bastard still has his pants on.
By then Clint was already shoving the towel at Beth, growling, “What the fuck, Vince!”
“It’s just a bit of fun,” Vince protested with an oily grin. “No harm done.”
“We’re not animals.” Clint raised his gun and pulled the trigger.
Sean rocked backward, as if his body had taken the full impact of that blast, but it was Vince’s brains and blood and flecks of flesh that splattered the tiles.
“Beth!” Alli cried, bumped into him from behind.
Sean had the presence of mind to spin about and wrap an arm around her, pinned her face to his chest with his other arm so she couldn’t get a look inside. “It’s not Beth,” he said hoarsely. “Beth is fine,” he lied, keeping Alli pinned, swallowing down the sick that shot up his throat. “She’s okay.”
Lynn appeared at the other end of the passage, wrapped only in a towel, hurrying toward them. “Sean? Was that a gunshot? What’s happen—” She cut off as Bisson finally joined them, nearly skidding into her as he came around the bend, but she didn’t stop coming.
“Yes, but it’s not any of us. We’re all fine.” Sean practically shoved Alli into her arms. “Take her. She doesn’t need to see this.”
Bisson pushed past him and he heard the guy moan, “Jesus, Clint, couldn’t you have walked him outside first.”
Sean swung away from Lynn and Alli, into the room, making his way to where Beth had drawn slightly apart. “Beth? Come with me, let’s get you out of here.”
She didn’t seem to hear him, just stood there, calmly securing the towel with a knot at her breast, transfixed by the fallen man and the gore.
“Stop whining and make yourself useful,” Clint said, retrieving Vince’s gun as he stepped over the man’s splayed legs. “Go find a bucket and mop.”
Bisson left and Sean tried again. “Beth, come, you don’t need to be here.”
No response.
No indication she was even aware of his presence.
He restrained the urge to shout at her, to grab her, not knowing the full extent of her traumatized state. First the bastard, Vince, leering at her, pawing her. Then
the gore of splattered brains. Sean was struggling to hold it together himself.
Common sense told him not to antagonize the crazy man with a gun, but anger and disbelief boiled his blood. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” he spat at Clint. “You just killed a man in cold blood.”
“What’s your problem?” Clint drawled as he collected the pink backpack and pile of clothes on the bench and brought them over. “He wasn’t one of yours.”
That was the biggest part of his problem. If Clint could kill his own man without a second thought, where did that put the rest of them? Sean didn’t give a damn that Vince was dead, and that in itself scared him. No man had the right to be judge and executioner. Two wrongs didn’t make a right. Those were the values he’d been raised on, and when you shook that out, this is what you were left with. One man dead with no questions asked, no explanation sought, no hope of redemption.
“I’m glad he’s dead,” Beth said dully.
“You don’t mean…” Dread unfolded in Sean’s gut as she turned a stone cold look on him. She meant it to the core of her soul. “Beth, did he…?”
Her face hardened as she looked at him, waited for him to say it, to put it out there, and then she stopped waiting.
“He didn’t touch me,” she said and took her things from Clint as she shoved past them, had nearly shoved past Lynn in the doorway before she caught herself. “Where’s my sister?”
“With Johnnie in the other showers,” Lynn said, her voice strained with emotion. “She didn’t see anything.”
Without another word, Beth continued out the door, shoulders and head held stiff.
Lynn went after her, or so Sean thought. When he reached the doorway, she stood just outside, her eyes trained on Beth’s back.
“She’s in shock,” Lynn said, putting a hand out to block him. “Let her be for the moment.”
Sean hesitated. He was no psychologist, no expert in these matters, but dammit all, Beth wasn’t acting right. “That man tried to rape her, Lynn.”
“I got that much,” Lynn said.
“She said he didn’t touch her.”
“I heard.”
“And you think she’s okay?”
“I don’t know.” Lynn looked at him, her brow pinched, her expression pained. “All I know is she needs her sister more than she needs our interference right now. I’ll go make them a glass of sugar water and then fetch Johnnie, give them space alone.” Her gaze shifted from him to Clint as the man joined them. “I figure we owe you a thank you.”
“Pleasure all’s mine,” Clint said graciously. “Name’s Clint, by the way.”
Sean ground a retort into his back teeth as Lynn completed the introductions. She didn’t know, of course, that the dead bastard was part of Clint’s merry band. Or that the shoot-out wasn’t as inevitable as it might have appeared after the fact.
He decided to keep that to himself, though. Everyone had been through enough, and he’d done some figuring out of his own. If the trigger-happy man wanted them dead, they wouldn’t be having this conversation. He was also somewhat mollified to see Clint tuck his pistol in the waistband at his back.
Apparently a tentative truce had been declared.
When Lynn excused herself, Clint turned to him. “Come on, we’ve got a body to throw out with the trash.”
The callous humor told Sean more about Clint than he wanted to know, but he didn’t get stubborn about helping to clean up the man’s mess. He didn’t need Johnnie or Alli stumbling across the gross body. For that matter, he didn’t want Lynn or Beth to have to revisit the sight, either.
Clint was in no hurry, though. He stood over the body, scratching his beard as his study moved from the dead man’s boots to Sean’s bare feet. “Looks about the right size.”
“No way in hell,” Sean muttered, drawing a non-negotiable line at shopping off a dead man’s body.
“No reason to let a good pair of leather go to waste.” Clint unfastened the boots and set them aside.
Sean’s jaw squared grimly. “You’ve done this before,” he said. “Killed.”
A heaviness hunkered down on Clint’s thick brow, not quite a scowl. He didn’t answer, just went to hook Vince underneath the arms, leaving Sean to grab the ankles and together they walked, Sean going backwards, the body swinging between them like a human hammock.
I’m carrying a dead man out the shower room, into the passage… It was so ridiculously surreal, Sean actually managed to keep shuffling backward without hurling or cracking his mind. He’d survived an alien massacre, and yet that somehow seemed more real than this.
Bisson squeezed past them as they reached the two steps up into the open plan lounge and reception area. No comment, just a mutinous expression of disgruntlement. He’d scrounged a bucket from somewhere, minus any evidence of a mop.
“You were right about me killing Vince in cold blood,” Clint finally allowed once they’d navigated the steps. “Thing is, once a man turns bad like this, there ain’t no coming back from it.”
“And when did that become your decision to make?”
“Since the world went belly up in a fucking alien chamber pot,” Clint lobbied back lightly, unfazed by the accusatory tone. “Every man is a law unto his self now, Sean. Your decision is the only one that counts. You decide what type of man you want to be, and what type of man you’re happy to send off into the way of other innocent folk.”
“Until someone else goes all vigilante justice on your own ass.”
“Let that be another lesson,” Clint said, gruff and deadly serious. “If you cross a man, you don’t give him any second chances, not unless you want your throat slit in the middle of the night.”
The man spoke as if all law and order had already crumbled. Sean suffered no delusions as to the critical, mass-extinction event that America was fighting, but he’d seen those striker jets in the air, the missile launched against the mothership…and nothing, zilch, in the twenty four hours since.
That was a lot of faith to be harboring with very little substance, he realized.
He bit his tongue as he backed through the kitchen swing doors.
Lynn was there, stirring up a cloud in the glass of water she held. Her mouth pursed, silent as she watched them lug the dead weight through the kitchen. She wasn’t unaffected, but she didn’t avert her eyes either, didn’t shy away from the justice that Clint had carried out.
The remnants of Sean’s self-righteousness indignation slid away. He didn’t much like Clint, didn’t fully trust him. Nevertheless, some of his words resonated with Sean. If society was even half as gone as Clint’s attitude suggested, then it was time to stop judging the man’s actions. It was time for Sean to start thinking about the type of man he might have to become to keep them all safe.
He had urgent questions, too, but those would have to wait as they exited the kitchen into the torrential storm raging outside.
∞∞∞
Vince’s body was dumped unceremoniously into a mud bath just within the forest boundary of the reservation that the golf course butted against. When they returned, slickened with rain and dripping puddles, Clint went straight behind the bar and pulled down two crystal tumblers and a twenty-year aged bottle of single malt.
Sean weighed a stiff whiskey against a cold shower and chose the charred oak swivel stool as Clint slid a double shot over the counter.
Velvet fire stroked Sean’s throat as threw back the whiskey. He grimaced, slammed down the glass and gave the Scottish Highland brewed courage a moment to do its job on his frayed nerves.
Clint topped their glasses again before pushing the bottle aside. “You’re free to take your people and leave, although I’d recommend sitting the weather out.”
“I second that,” Lynn called from across the room.
Sean swiveled around, watching as she settled Johnnie on a sofa, drawing a couple of throw pillows under his head. She bent down to talk to him, then straightened and wound h
er way through the seating arrangements toward the bar.
Clint tipped the bottle at her with a cocked brow.
“I won’t say no.” Lynn dropped onto a stool and stretched her arms over the counter, head hung a long moment before she tilted her gaze to Sean. “Johnnie heard the gunshot. I told him it was a very close crack of thunder, nothing to worry about. I always hated it when parents lie to their kids. Promised myself I’d never do that, but the lies just keep tripping out my mouth today.”
“You’re a good mother,” Sean said.
“Rules ain’t no fun unless someone, somewhere, is breaking them.” Clint delivered her glass of whiskey along with that pearl of wisdom.
Lynn lifted her head to look at him, turned that look on Sean as she cradled the glass, and seemed to collect her. “Sorry,” she sighed. “Bigger problems, I know.”
“Where are the girls?”
“Beth was taking another shower,” Lynn said. “But the water ran out while she was under, so I guess they’ll be along any minute.”
“No pressure to fill the tank once it’s emptied,” Clint supplied unhelpfully.
“Just another day in paradise, right?” Lynn lifted the glass to her lips. “Bottoms up.”
Then Clint started talking about the wider state of affairs, and no matter how pessimistically low Sean thought he’d set the bar on his expectations, it wasn’t nearly low enough.
Within hours of the Silvers appearing—that was the official name, Clint said scornfully, although he refused to call the Scum by anything other than what they were—an emergency broadcast had advised immediate evacuation of all cities from the East to West Coast. All that had done was trap millions of people in a gridlocked nightmare while the ships streaked across the skies to raze entire cities and surrounding suburbs. In keeping with his callous humor, Clint declared that instead of hundreds of millions displaced and desperate people flooding the countryside, there couldn’t be more than a couple hundred thousand other fortunate bastards like himself who lived on the fringes of suburbia and were able to get clear in time.
The country’s infrastructure was in tatters, but in Clint’s opinion, it was an EMP that truly finished them off. The car he’d been fleeing the backroads in with Vince and Bisson last night stopped dead at around nine pm. They had no signal anyway, but their cell phones all died right then, too. They set off to hike on foot, and passed too many cars stalled in the road, coasted off the side, bumped into trees, for it to be anything. If there’d been any planes still airborne, he insisted, they would have fallen out of the sky.