by Justin Bell
“Can I help?” Angel asked.
Greer glared at him, a look of uncertainty passing over his face.
“Still?” Angel asked. “After everything we’ve been through? Still you don’t trust me?”
Greer extended an arm over Angel’s shoulder and accepted his assistance. “Not always about trust, man,” he said. “Sometimes pride plays a part.”
“I got into a bad situation,” Angel said. “I am not a bad person. I will prove it to you, eventually.”
Greer smiled, though he didn’t let Angel see it.
“How are you doing, Win?” Phil asked, dropping back himself to walk alongside his daughter. He’d seen how she’d reacted to Jerry’s death, but talking about your daughter’s first potential crush wasn’t something fathers were always comfortable with.
“I’ll be fine, dad,” she whispered. “Hardly the worst thing that’s happened in the past week.”
Phil put an arm over her shoulder. “It’s okay, you know.”
“What’s okay?” she asked, looking over at him.
“To be sad about things. The big ones and the small ones.”
A thin tear broke free and ran down the smooth contour of her young cheek.
“There’s lots of big stuff going on, but like your mom and I keep saying, you still have to hold on to the small things. Without the small things, what do we have?”
Winnie shrugged but leaned in closer to her dad, letting him tuck her tight as they walked. He smiled, a soothing warmth radiating through his chest. It was amazing; with the world falling part around them, a child’s touch could still elicit such a feeling of pure contentment.
“You excited?” Max asked Brad as they walked.
Brad smiled and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”
“We’re going to miss you, buddy,” Max said. “But I’m glad you’re getting back with your parents.”
“I’m not trying to get too excited. We don’t even know if they’re still there.”
Max didn’t reply. That thought had certainly occurred to him more than once during this cross-state voyage, but he’d kept it quiet out of respect for his friend.
“I bet they are. They’re waiting for you, I know it.” As Max walked, he could feel the soothing steel of his pistol tucked into the belt at his back. Since first stealing it from the guy at Vernon Academy, it had been with him nonstop. If he couldn’t feel it, if he didn’t know it was there, he felt exposed. Vulnerable. Even now, walking through the deserted streets of a smoke-stained city, out in the relative open, the feeling of the pistol there was calming to him.
“You feel better just being in the city again, don’t you?” Max asked. “I can tell. You seem more relaxed.”
“I’m a city guy,” Brad replied. “What can I say?”
Max slapped him on the back. “Well I’m glad you’re getting back where you belong. We’ll have to keep in touch. Maybe we can train some carrier pigeons or something.”
Brad barked a shrill echo of laughter. Childlike glee seemed out of place within the confines of the burnt and smoldering remains of St. Louis.
Every shop they passed was locked and dark. A few scattered cars were parked haphazardly at the side of the road, and Rhonda thought she’d actually seen the slumped form of a body in one of them, but tried not to look too long or hard.
“We’re going to hang a right up here,” Phil said, pointing to where a street branched off from the main drag they’d been walking down. At the junction of the road a small red car had plowed into a street lamp, its hood twisted and wrapped around the narrow, metal pole. A spill of some kind of fluid had spread out beneath the vehicle but sat dried on the pavement.
They were quiet as they rounded the corner and walked to the next street. Up ahead a dark colored brownstone stood, a short row of stairs leading from the sidewalk up to a double-level structure, a simple dark green building with brown shutters. If the surrounding city wasn’t so obviously falling apart, it would have looked quaint, like any number of urban apartment buildings, sandwiched tight between two others, about as close to home ownership as folks in the guts of the city got. Brad slipped out around Phil and picked up the pace walking towards the house.
Phil and Rhonda slowed down, looking out towards the home, hoping to see a door open, or a window, or some kind of indication that somebody was home there, that Brad wasn’t just running up to an empty shell. The boy picked up his speed, walking even more quickly, and that’s when Rhonda saw it. The front door at the top of the stairs was thrown open, banging against a concrete rail of a small, square landing.
She stood there, framed for a moment. Her hand shot out and held the door open, her eyes wide and her short cropped dark hair swaying above her ears. It all seemed to be moving in slow motion.
“Bradley!” she shouted. “My Bradley!” She threw herself forward, charging down the stairs, and he appeared at the landing just behind her. Rhonda recognized him, she’d met him more often than she’d met his mother, and as Bradley DeAngelo’s father dashed down the steps, she couldn’t help but feel the warm salt of tears brimming in her eyes. In that split second she pictured the same reaction she’d have when reuniting with Lydia, that feeling of a fraction of a family finding its missing piece and once again becoming whole.
Brad ran forward, swallowed up by his mother, who drew him tight, tugging him close to her, enveloping him inside of her aggressive embrace. Just to her left, Brad’s father caught the two of them, engulfing both of them in his own all-encompassing arms, and the Frasers stood watching, all of them feeling simultaneously proud and intimidated by the pure strength of the family’s love.
It was easy to be enthralled by the sight as the three DeAngelo’s sucked all the energy from the world down into their knotted bodies, the raw emotions of parents and a child who thought they might never see each other again. All attention focused on them.
They never heard the whining roar of the car engine, an old school American diesel cranking up at the far end of the street, accelerating as two tons of Detroit steel hurtled down the narrow road, flanked by the tall apartment buildings lining each side of the two-lane street.
Rhonda caught the motion and realized there was actually a car coming. It was the first running and moving car that they’d seen since they’d left Salina, and it was barreling straight down the road towards them. Nothing about the situation made sense. Who was driving it and why where they there, of all places? She looked at the windshield, glaring at the huddled figure behind the steering wheel, trying to decipher what her eyes were seeing, trying to translate this picture into some kind of sensible story.
“Gun!” the shout was swift and immediate, the single syllable word snapping Rhonda out of her hypnosis. It was Clancy Greer stepping forward, his hand going to the holster at his thigh and she sprang her head around, looking for some sign of someone, of something, some indication of the weapon that Greer said he saw.
Then she realized what was happening. Too late, she knew where the gun was. Who was holding it. Where it pointed.
Greer’s hand snapped up, the Glock clutched and pointed at the speeding vehicle.
“Get down!” he screamed, but he might as well have been shouting through syrup, his words slurred and nearly inaudible against the thrumming adrenaline pounding through their ears. At the last minute, Rhonda saw the extended barrel thrusting from the window of the speeding sedan, and saw it thrashing as bursts of silent white light vomited from it. Her eyes widened, the warm tears now turning to bitter salt, stinging her.
Brad’s father spun his back towards the car, pushing the other two away. The first two shots hit him in the lower spine and the upper left shoulder, throwing him into a swift, clumsy spin. His wife threw up her hands as the next round knocked a chunk out of the stairs behind her, but the two following shots punched into her chest and tore through her throat. Rattling gunfire shattered the silence as Greer came up to the left, swiveling and firing. His Glock jumped as shell casings spat fro
m it, bullets spattering against the windshield of the car.
“No!” the scream was Max shouting, his neck straining with the agony of the word, seeing not just Brad’s parents, but Brad himself struck by the next rounds, jerking right and around, his mouth open, but no sound coming out. Max charged into the middle of the road, the revolver in his hands now, drawing down on the driver. He held a picture-perfect firing stance, legs wide apart, arms locked straight, one hand supporting the other, his pistol roaring flame. The front windshield starred, then shattered, exploding inward as the car surged forward, bearing down on the young boy.
A shadowed form in the backseat of the car thrashed as Max fired, and a weapon spun out of the opened rear window, arcing through the air as if in slow motion. The entire world was a scene being filmed through cold molasses and Phil could see the weapon as it tipped end over end, spiraling away from the relaxed hands of the man who had just fired the shots. Bruce Cavendish glared back behind himself, then turned angrily to look at the boy in the street.
“Max, no!” shouted Phil, turning towards him and starting to move his way, knowing it was already too late. Rhonda thought she saw one of the people in the car lurch as if struck by one of Max’s shots, but then the car was upon him, and even as he tried to jump clear, the vehicle struck him in the left hip and picked him up, tossing him into the air like a discarded soda can.
Rhonda had her weapon out now, clumsy in her non-dominant hand, and glared as Bruce sneered at her from the driver’s seat, his mouth forming some insidious words that she couldn’t hear. Her pistol was out and she was firing, a rapid slapping of gunfire chasing the vehicle. A window shattered, metal puckered along the rear left door, but three seconds later, the vehicle rounded a corner and disappeared, its growling engine fading into the burnt embers of the city on fire.
Chapter 10
The world itself remained scuffed and worn, a gray and damaged overlay cloaking the sky above. Smoke still lingered in the sky and clung to the buildings, and the entire city smelled of month old burnt charcoal from a city-sized campfire that had been extinguished, yet was still throwing singed ash into the air.
But it wasn’t just the persistent, underlying scent of flames and abandonment. Since the events of ten days ago, a dark curtain of misery shrouded the world, shifting everything to grayscale, a stark reminder that even in a world of global catastrophe, the seemingly small tragedies could still cut the deepest.
It could have been worse. As much as it pained Rhonda to even consider these words, they were the truth, and deep down she knew it. It could have been worse. Even as she stood out on the sidewalk, enjoying the warm breath of spring air as it brushed past her, she knew that things could have been a lot worse, and she wasn’t sure why they hadn’t been. A stab of fire pit stench dug into her nostrils and she winced, turning from staring at the buildings across the street. She felt clean and strong for the first time in over two weeks. She no longer had the sling on her arm though pain still echoed in her shoulder on an almost constant basis. As she turned back towards the apartment, her eyes lingered on the dark stain on the sidewalk and her stomach churned, tucking into a ball and rolling in on itself, driving a nauseous sensation up into her throat. She forced it back down and walked towards the stairs.
The door opened and Winnie emerged. She wore fresh clothes and a shoulder holster with a pistol tucked inside. None of them went anywhere without a weapon anymore, not even walking a few feet towards the stairs. If Rhonda and Max hadn’t been armed and so quick on the draw, it was quite possible they’d all have been shot down in the streets, not just Monica and Jeffrey DeAngelo.
And Brad. Brad had been cut down in the same cluster of gunfire that stole his parents, yet somehow, in some miraculous way, he was alive.
Greer still couldn’t explain it. All he could think was that the bullets went through his father before they went through him, which slowed their velocity enough that his wounds were messy, but shallow. Some simple surgery had removed the slugs lodged into the muscle tissue, and using their trusty first aid kit, they sewed him up and he was up and moving less than forty-eight hours later.
Well, he was capable of moving. Still now, ten days after the drive by, he wasn’t moving much. He’d locked himself in one of his grandparents’ guest bedrooms, tucking his knees into his chest and staring out the window into the pale gray sky. Ash still fell like snow, and though none of them had seen any fires, the smell and the air was telling them that fires were still raging somewhere, growing more intense with each passing day. They could see the Arch from where they were, and it looked tall and strong and unencumbered by the violent surroundings, though every night they could see the dull orange glow of a city consumed.
“How’s Brad this morning?” Rhonda asked as Winnie stepped onto the landing.
“Same as usual,” she replied.
“We need to think about going soon.”
“I know.”
The loss of Brad’s parents and the injuries suffered by so many in the group had forced them to stay and rest, licking their wounds and trying to pull together instead of continuing on to Chicago where they hoped Lydia still remained. As they grew stronger, though, Rhonda was beginning to feel more antsy about staying in one place and she wanted to try to find Lydia before her eldest daughter changed locations yet again.
“Do you think he wants to stay here with his grandparents? Or does he want to come?”
“Haven’t asked. I think maybe Max should have that talk with him.”
Rhonda nodded, thinking of her only son. His swift reaction had pumped half a dozen bullets into the windshield of the car, and quite possibly killed the gunman in the back seat, then helped drive them away. He’d taken a hit, a pretty nasty one, the car knocking him high into the air as it drove by, and he was walking with a deep, painful limp even ten days later.
But he was walking. Again, like the shooting itself, things could have been much, much worse.
Two people were dead. They were the two most important people in Brad’s life and all she could think was, It could have been worse. If nothing else, at least she had learned over the past month or so that somehow, some way things could always be worse.
Brad’s grandparents, still living in the house when his mother and father came to seek refuge, had welcomed in the ragtag group and made it clear that they could stay as long as possible. Bernard and Vicki had even smiled and welcomed in Angel without hesitation, declaring that anyone who would travel so far and risk so much to bring back their grandson was a lifelong friend of theirs. They had stockpiled enough food and fresh water to last for months or more, but each bite and each sip felt foul in Phil and Rhonda’s mouths, constant reminders of the tragedy that had caused them to stay longer than they had expected.
“Is Maxie in bed still?” Rhonda asked.
Winnie shook her head. “I think he’s patrolling. He was up and out before I even woke up.”
Rhonda turned and glanced out towards the city, thinking of her twelve-year-old son. Her ‘little boy’ who had grown up far too much in the past month. Even with his partially dislocated hip and his clumsy, stumbling gait, the boy had been determined to patrol the perimeter a few times a day, making sure Bruce Cavendish and his cronies weren’t lurking about. He’d learned to roam in the shadows, even during daylight, and now carried two pistols instead of just one. During their ten days with Bernard and Vicki, in the suburbs of St. Louis, they’d managed to raid several sporting goods stores, a few convenience stores, and even a big box store. They had stocked up their supplies quite nicely along with adding to the supplies for Brad’s grandparents.
They were still struggling with what to do for transportation. On his last patrol, Max had confirmed that someone had discovered the two ATVs and made off with them, leaving the garage of the gas station vacant. They no longer had trustworthy transport, and even if they could get Angel to hotwire a car, Rhonda felt pretty sure that the roads between St. Louis and Chicago were just a
s congested as the ones farther west. It would be a long, hard walk to the Windy City, though it was a walk she still intended to take.
None of them had expected the trip to St. Louis to take as long as it did, or to remain stuck there for ten days afterwards, and part of her wondered if it was even worth venturing to Chicago, knowing that there was a good possibility Lydia was no longer even there. A small city like St. Louis had been consumed by fear and uncertainty, set aflame by its citizens as they struggled for a logical reaction to what was happening around them. If a city under half a million had fallen that quickly and that aggressively, what in the world was happening in a city of over 2.5 million? The possibilities were, frankly, staggering.
But they would go. With our without Brad, they would go.
“You’re still up for a trip to Chicago, aren’t you?” Rhonda asked Winnie, who was staring out into the gray sky.
Winnie nodded. “I don’t want to stay here. It smells like butt.”
Rhonda chuckled. “The apocalypse usually does,” she replied, already hating the glib tone the conversation was taking on. Still, if you couldn’t joke about the end of the world, what else was left?
“Rhonda?” the voice was thin and fragile, like a fallen vase that had not quite broken.
Rhonda looked up at Vicki and smiled. Brad’s grandmother—his father’s mother—had been only too accommodating to them in the aftermath of the drive-by shooting, a fact that Rhonda was grateful for. She’d been a nurse at one of the regional St. Louis University Hospitals and had been instrumental in removing the bullets from Brad’s back and right side, and she had helped Rhonda and Clancy in their own recuperation. There hadn’t been a lot she could do for Max, though she did help get his hip joint back in its socket and reinforce Rhonda’s directives that he stays off his feet and quit doing the city patrols.
A lot of good that had done either one of them.
In spite of the unexpected death of her son and his wife, Vicki had taken them in, had helped them, and while being on the verge of breakdown for ten days, had managed to hold it together, mostly for the sake of her only surviving grandchild.