by Jason Frost
"Four of them. Two of us. One window." Tracy checked her Colt Magnum. "What's the plan, General?"
"We wait. No point in trying to sneak out. At least from up here they've got to come to us."
"They could always wait for reinforcements."
"They could. But they won't. They aren't that smart."
"Not smart like us. Trapped in a hotel with a family of rats." She looked over at the rats. "Boy, are we laughing, huh, fellas?"
Eric cocked his bow, wedged a bolt along the brass runner. Placed it on the floor. He held his Walther P.38 in a two-fisted grip next to his cheek, jumped in front of the window, and squeezed off a round aimed at the base of the Toyota where Dobbs had been snuggled. He knew Dobbs wasn't there anymore, but he had to find out just where they were.
As soon as he fired, he dove to the side, just barely glimpsing the flashes as four guns fired simultaneously. The window frame was pulverized from four different angles.
"Well," Tracy said, "did you kill that damned Toyota?"
"It won't bother us again."
"Whew." He felt her body pressed up behind his as they hugged the wall. She was trembling, but fighting it. She'd been through worse before. But from the beginning she'd been tough about it. Sure, he'd been tough too, but she'd gone him one better. She'd gotten tough without losing her compassion. That was something he couldn't always claim about himself.
The gun flashes had identified where they were but not where they'd stay. By now they had probably shifted to new locations. So should he and Tracy.
"Come on. Let's try another room."
"Yeah, maybe they've got one with Magic Fingers in the bed."
"Sure. Got any quarters?"
They were duck-walking along the floor when they heard the heavy thud on the floor.
Eric saw it immediately. Apple green. RGD-5 in Cyrillic written on the side. Inside were 110 grams of TNT hooked to a percussion fuse with a delay of 3.2 to 4.2 seconds. How much of that precious time had already elapsed?
It was less than a second from the time the grenade came through the window and bounced on the floor to when Eric had bumped Tracy through the open door into the hall. Tracy shoved open the door opposite their room and continued on through. It was only as she took her first step that she realized there was no floor beneath her feet. She was falling. She grabbed for Eric, caught him off balance, and pulled him through too.
They barely felt the explosion as they dropped through the darkness.
3.
Col. Dirk Fallows sat next to the campfire, poking at the burning logs with his knife. The same knife he'd used to carve that scar along Eric Ravensmith's jaw and neck while they were both in Vietnam. On his lap sat the Walther P.38 his men had brought back, the one they claimed belonged to Eric.
"Quiz time, kid."
Timmy Ravensmith, thirteen, sat on the ground within arm's reach of Fallows. Always within arm's reach.
"You hear me, kid?"
Timmy nodded, rolled up his left shirt sleeve, exposing bruised and scabbed skin.
"Yccch," Fallows said. "Starting to look nasty. Better use the other arm."
Timmy brushed down the left sleeve, rolled up the right one. He shifted so the arm was within reach of Fallows. There were fewer bruises and scabs, but not by much.
"OK. Let's see, we'll start with the easy ones first. What kind of gun is this?"
Timmy looked up at it with dull, lifeless eyes. "Walther."
"Walther what?"
"P.38."
Col. Dirk Fallows grinned. "Very good." He patted the holstered gun riding his hip. "Just like mine. Your daddy has good taste in guns. Had good taste."
Timmy didn't respond. His flat eyes stared into the fire.
Dobbs stood behind Fallows and scratched his head. Christ, this was weird. He'd brought back Ravensmith's gun with the blood all over it. Now Fallows was sitting at the fire, watching the sun light up the edges of the Halo, about as close to sunrise as they got since the quakes. It was OK if you liked an orange and yellow sky. Personally, Dobbs didn't. He liked blue, with white clouds and a yellow sun. When he was a kid those were the three colors of crayon he always ran out of first. Then his folks would have to buy him a whole new set of Crayolas. Not that he liked drawing all that much. Mostly he liked the smell of the crayons, a little sweet. Later he took up assembling plastic models of battleships. He didn't like models any more than he liked drawing, but he liked sniffing the glue, and battleships took the longest to assemble. Glue led to other stuff. Pills. Dust. A little burglary, dropping out of school, joining the marines. And the surprise of his life: It was easier to get dope in the fucking marines than it had been in high school.
Dobbs watched Fallows, trying to figure the guy out. Sure, he was a genius, that much was certain. He kept his two dozen troops-minus a few that Ravensmith had offed-in just about everything they wanted. Food, weapons, booze, women, drugs. If they were around, Fallows not only found them, he figured a way to take them. That was the fun part. But this thing with Ravensmith's kid was, well, goddamn weird. The way he played with the kid's head. The physical abuse, then the kindness. What was the point? The kid was worthless. And now, with Raven-smith dead, he wasn't even any good as a hostage. Dobbs thought they ought to just snuff the brat, but he kept that suggestion to himself.
Col. Dirk Fallows twisted the knife into a flaming log. "Next question, Tim. What kind of cartridge does the Walther P.38 use?"
"Uh, 9mm Parabellum."
"Correct. Muzzle velocity?"
Timmy scrunched his face up in thought. "I don't know."
"Try."
"Eleven hundred feet per second."
Fallows pulled the knife out of the fire and touched it to Timmy's wrist. The skin puckered and sizzled, a wisp of smoke puffing around the blistered skin.
Timmy neither withdrew his hand nor cried out. He continued staring into the fire.
Dobbs winced, wrinkling his nose at the sour smell of burnt flesh. Jesus fucking Christ. There just was no getting used to this. He studied Fallows's face a moment. Sometimes if you stared at things long enough, they'd start to form faces. Like if you stared at clouds, or wallpaper, or linoleum floors in bathrooms. Fallows had the kind of face you might start imagining if you stared at a slate cliff long enough. The long V-shaped head with the heavy chin. The scary blue eyes, so pale they almost had no color at all. That short brushy hair, white as a toad's belly. Hell, the guy was only forty-five, not that you'd know it from that steel body of his, but that premature white hair was still kind of a shock. The mouth was thin as a model's eyebrow. Sometimes it smiled, but even then it never looked like a smile. At best a sneer. Like a lizard after it's eaten a fat grasshopper.
Fallows continued. "The exact muzzle velocity is 1135 feet per second. Hell, Eric knew all this shit. Didn't he teach his baby boy anything?"
"He took us out shooting sometimes, just so we'd know. But he didn't like guns. Didn't want them around the house."
Fallows chuckled at that. "Well, for a guy who didn't like guns, he sure as hell smoked enough guys with them. But that doesn't matter. That was then and this is now. In this world you'd better know about guns. And not just guns, all weapons. So, let's continue the lesson." He stuck the knife back into the flaming log, twisted it as if he were cooking an imaginary marshmallow. "Rate of fire?"
"Thirty-two rounds a minute."
"Length?"
"Uh, 8.6 inches."
"Weight?"
"Unloaded, 1.7 pounds. Loaded with full eight-round clip, 2.125 pounds."
"Effective range?"
"Maximum of fifty-four yards."
Fallows nodded, grinned, patted Timmy on the head. "We'll make a soldier of you yet. The kind your daddy was, only better."
Timmy remained silent.
"See that tree over there?" Fallows pointed with the Walther.
Timmy nodded.
"Well, it's about time you learned how to shoot one of these things. All my soldiers know
how to shoot." He released the safety, sighted along the barrel with one eye, and squeezed the trigger. The explosion thundered. A spray of bark puffed from the tree trunk. Fallows flipped the Walther in the air, caught it by the barrel, and handed it butt-first to Timmy. "You try."
Timmy stared at it without taking it.
"Uh, Colonel?" Dobbs said nervously.
"Yes, Dobbs?"
Dobbs stared into the colorless eyes, decided not to say anything. "Nothing, sir."
"Right." Fallows turned back to Timmy, the gun still thrust toward the boy. "Go ahead, Timmy. Take it."
Slowly, Timmy reached out, his thin fingers curling around the thick handle. His face was expressionless.
"Release the safety," Fallows said. "Just like I showed you."
Dobbs backed away a step. Christ, what was Fallows doing?
"Now, all you do is point and squeeze the trigger. Squeeze, don't jerk it. Aim."
Timmy lifted the gun with his right hand, pointed it at the tree.
"Keep your hand steady. It's going to have a bite to it, so be ready."
Timmy's hand trembled slightly as he closed one eye and sighted along the barrel.
"Don't close your eye. Time comes when you'll have to use that gun, you'll need both your eyes open."
Timmy opened his left eye. His finger tightened on the trigger.
"OK, shoot."
Timmy stood still, the gun raised, his finger frozen.
"Shoot, damn it. Pull the fucking trigger."
Suddenly Timmy swung around, the Walther P.38 waist level. He pointed it at Dirk Fallows's chest.
"Shit, kid," Fallows said.
And Timmy pulled the trigger.
4.
"You alive?"
"In a manner of speaking," Tracy said.
Eric brushed some rubble from his chest, noticed for the first time it was daylight. The orange sky filtered through what was left of the Presidential Hotel and he noticed what they hadn't seen in the dark. That the hotel was only a facade now, a lobby and the front rooms. The back half of the hotel had collapsed during the quakes. Only the doors remained. He looked up and saw the door they'd run through to avoid the grenade. The explosion had knocked it off one hinge.
"Quite a drop?" Tracy said.
"Yeah." He nodded at the broken boards and cement blocks all around them. "Good thing we had something soft to land on."
"We're lucky that way."
He looked at Tracy. Pain contorted her natural beauty into a mask of agony. Dust salted her short, reddish hair. She was trying to pull her legs out from under a chunk of plaster wall, not making much progress.
"Can you move?" Eric asked.
She worked one leg free, but her left leg remained motionless. She wiped the sweat from her forehead. "Define move."
Eric climbed over the debris, ignoring the ache in his lower back and the gouge in his right calf where one of his crossbow bolts had dug out a shallow crater of flesh. He hobbled stiffly as he walked, feeling a little like an ape.
"How bad?" she asked.
He hunched over the leg without touching it. He could tell from the angle what was wrong, and that it was plenty painful.
"How bad?" she repeated.
"Broken. In at least one place."
"Well, that does it. You'll have to save yourself, Eric. Leave me here. I'll be OK. It's better this way."
He gave her a look, shrugged. "OK."
"Like hell! What a time you pick to start believing me. Now get me the hell out of here. This baby hurts."
The back of his head pounded as if someone were continuously tapping him with a baseball bat. He touched his fingers gingerly to the area, felt the crusted blood and matted hair. Old blood, at least.
Eric kicked over a hunk of the plaster wall next to Tracy's leg and a fat rat scampered up over her broken leg before burrowing back into the debris.
"Hey, I recognized that face," Tracy said. "We were roomies together up on the second floor."
"Looks like he's shopping for breakfast."
"Forget it, pal. You're fat enough."
Eric shaded his eyes, looked up at the dangling door above them. "I'll be right back, Trace."
"Where you going?"
"Back up there to look for my Walther."
She lifted her right hand, the skin scraped off and bleeding from the fall, but her S amp;W.357 still intact. "Wanna borrow mine?"
"You'd better hold onto it. Just in case."
He limped over the piles of splintered wood, dusty plaster and chunks of cement, balancing carefully on the shifting rubble. By the time he reached the front door of the hotel, his limp was almost gone and the dull throbbing at the back of his skull was only a slight pecking, like a crow nipping at his head.
He climbed the stairs to the second floor and stepped into the hallway. The dust aroused by the explosion still hung in the orange light like snow frozen in midfall. He cupped one hand over his nose and breathed shallowly as he walked down the hallway.
The room they'd been in no longer had a door. In fact, the doorway was twice what it had been. And a three-foot hole in the floor testified to where the grenade had been when it had exploded. Eric stepped over the hole and entered the room.
The narrow single bed had been pulverized, with bits of it scattered all over the room. The walls, oddly, were smeared with splotches of blood. A streak here, a blob there. But whose?
Eric searched the room carefully for his Walther and his crossbow. He found neither.
However, he did find bits and pieces of bloody fur that explained the bloody pattern on the walls. The rats. The ones that had been huddled in the corner had been splattered around the room. That's why Dobbs and the others hadn't hunted more closely for the bodies. In the dark they assumed the blood belonged to Eric and Tracy. So they'd gathered Eric's weapons and taken them back as proof for Fallows.
Eric hopped over the hole in the floor on his way out of the room, glanced down, and stopped on the other side. He knelt down, peered through the hole to the lobby below. The room was directly above the front desk. And there, lying on its back behind the desk, was his black crossbow. He scrambled down the stairs, recovered it, checked it over for breakage, found none. He cocked it and slipped a bolt next to the string. Immediately he felt a little better.
"Well," Tracy said, nodding at the bow when he returned.
"Yeah. They got the Walther, though."
"But why didn't they get us?"
He explained his theory.
"Makes sense. Besides, after seeing what happened to their buddies, they were probably eager to accept the explanation rather than go poking through the dark for us."
"Still, it's a little deflating to think they mistook a bunch of dead rats for us."
She laughed and the movement immediately caused a sharp pain in her leg. "Owww. Damn it, Eric, don't make me laugh."
He unstrapped the canvas knapsack from her back and slung it over his arm. "We'd better get you someplace out of the sun so I can tend to your leg."
"What's your early diagnosis, doc?"
"Well, the main concern is the fracture of the femur."
"Don't dazzle me with footwork, just tell me how long it will hurt."
"Depends. A fracture is a clean break of the bone. The jagged edges of the bone contain a rich supply of nerves and when they rub against each other or any other tissue, it hurts."
"No kidding."
"The pain and swelling could continue for weeks, even months. We've got to be careful that the sharp edges of the bone don't cut a nerve or a blood vessel."
"How long, Eric?"
"One to six months."
"Christ!"
"I'll splint and tape it, that'll help."
"But one to six months! There's no way you can track Fallows with me along."
Eric sat down on a block of cement. "I can always pick up his trail again. He's not exactly keeping a low profile."
"Yeah, but there's no telling what could happ
en to Timmy in that amount of time."
Eric thought back on the Timmy he'd seen walking across Fallows's camp. The slight swagger, the.hint of a sneer. The ice water that had washed through Eric's stomach as he recognized Fallows in Timmy's behavior. The horror.
"What are we going to do, Eric?"
He shrugged, stood up. "Get you out of the sun."
He lifted her carefully to her one good leg, wrapping her arm around his neck and half-carrying her on his hip. They made it around the corner of the building and were heading toward Bob's Big Boy when something caught Eric's eye. He squinted over at where the two men he'd killed last night were. Something was wrong.
"How long you say we were unconscious back there?"
She studied her watch. "Maybe four hours."
"Yeah. Wait here," he said, starting to uncurl her arm.
She clung tighter. "I'm getting used to hopping. Besides, I'd rather not be left alone again. Even to cross the street."
He saw that she was serious. "OK."
They hobbled across the street toward Santa Carlotta's Car Lot like clumsy partners in a three-legged race.
As they got closer, Tracy's mouth opened with shock. "Oh God!"
The two men laid about five feet apart. The guns and equipment had been stripped. That would've been Dobbs. But the other thing, Christ, who knows?
Eric lowered Tracy to the ground at least ten feet from the bodies. She was silent, keeping her mouth closed to preserve whatever food was in her stomach. She cupped both hands over her mouth and nose as if she feared the air might be contaminated.
Eric knelt next to the first man. He was about twenty-eight, with a wispy blond beard. He was naked, the same as his partner. Even the bolts that had killed them were gone. Dobbs wouldn't have wasted time stripping them. Nor would he or his men have done the other thing. The mutilation.
The first man's right hand was missing from his wrist. Scattered in the dust a few feet away were the bare bones of his fingers. One of his buttocks was missing, flesh torn in large hunks all the way down to the thigh. A few feet away his partner lay with only one leg and one arm, the clean white bones of each in a neat pile next to the trailer.