by Ryan Schow
“You’re right,” he said, now realizing he was in the direct center of all of them. “I’m not a good person. I’ve killed innocents. Dozens of them, maybe more. But I’m not that person anymore.”
“Killing your own only proves you’re a murderer and a turncoat,” Rider said, flexing his fists, egging on a fight.
Jagger looked at his silver-haired friend, at those fists, and then he turned his eyes on Gunderson. He couldn’t help wondering how this was going to end.
“That’s the thanks I get?” he hissed at Rider. “You sanctimonious prick!”
“Careful,” Indigo said, still standing dangerously close to him.
She moved in between Gunderson and Rider, constantly putting herself in the worst spot possible. Did she want him to engage her? Was she prepared to kill him with her bare hands? It’s always the ones you least expect who come to claim your life, Jagger thought. He took another step forward when all eyes were off him. Rex did the same.
The two of them traded looks.
If he hadn’t seen Indigo in action, Jagger would be more worried, but Indigo fought out of self-defense, and this Gunderson character was a man who fought to kill. This was a man who looked like he was once a bloodthirsty vampire, preying upon his enemies and the weak. Jagger disliked his look immensely.
There was something…vile in his appearance.
Now he understood Sarah’s concern.
“If you want me to leave, I’ll leave,” Gunderson said, strangely apathetic. “You’ve been very kind up to this point, and though you’re not being unreasonable now, I must admit, part of me wants to club this little baby seal in front of me just so the three of you will put me out of my misery—”
“This baby seal clubs back,” Indigo said, the air around her getting dark, turning cold. A slight, almost sinister grin cut through the stone cold look she’d had since she first heard about Gunderson’s gang affiliation. Now Jagger was sure she was spoiling for a fight.
“But that is not my intention,” Gunderson continued, ignoring the threat. “So I’ll just leave.”
“We didn’t say you could leave,” Jagger finally said, breaking his silence. In a lightening quick move, Gunderson was in Jagger’s face, hissing at the man.
“If you’re going to do it, if you want to kill me, then take me!”
Just then Gunderson was grabbed by the back of his hair, had his head yanked back and realized there was a blade at his throat. “If we wanted you dead,” Indigo whispered into his ear through gritted teeth, “then you’d already be dead.”
“Then what do you want?” he barked, eyes wild, yet working hard not to flex so much as a single muscle against a very sharp blade.
“To see how you’d react to this situation,” Rex said.
“And?”
“You failed,” Rider said. “Pack your things, I’ll escort you out.”
Indigo pulled the blade back, a thin line of blood trickling down Gunderson’s neck. She then let go of his hair, pushed his head away and said “I’ll grab you a bottle of water and some food.”
“That won’t be necessary,” he replied, coolly, touching the spot where she’d traced him. He looked at the blood on his finger, then at her, as if he couldn’t believe it.
“If you’re wondering whether or not that was an accident,” Indigo said, “it wasn’t.”
Ten minutes later, they were escorting the ex-enforcer out of the building. Indigo handed him his food and said, “If you turned on your own people when they were most like you, then what’s to say you wouldn’t turn on us when we’re nothing like you?”
“Do you believe a person can change?” he asked, standing out in the street, a backpack, a bag of food and a bottle of water in his hand.
“I think circumstances like these only shine the light on a person’s true nature, and your true nature is murder.”
“You’ve killed, too,” he said. “Don’t act like some saint with me.”
“In self-defense.”
“My ass.”
She grinned but her eyes stayed dead. This sinister smile caused Gunderson to take an involuntary step backwards.
“Jesus,” he said, a tad bit rattled. “You’re just a kid, but you’re like me.”
“We’re the same weapon,” she agreed, “just pointed in different directions.”
Standing up a little straighter, drawing a deep breath then releasing it audibly through his nostrils, he said, “Well I appreciate your hospitality while it lasted.”
“Godspeed, friend,” Indigo said.
“He’s not your friend,” Rider said. “He’s no one’s friend.”
And with that, Gunderson turned and walked away. To Jagger and Rex, Rider said, “I want to check out that hospital. See if he’s telling the truth.”
“What would be the point?” Indigo asked.
“Confirmation. One less enemy to worry about means safer passage when it’s time to leave this city and head someplace safer, someplace we can be more self-sufficient.”
“Our people are skilled hunters, trackers, and killers,” Indigo said.
“Still…”
Chapter Sixteen
Earl followed Ben into the White House, hung around in the shadows on the hunch that there was more to the man than he thought when they first stood together on Pennsylvania Ave. It was when Ben went into the President’s bedroom and broke down that Earl knew for sure.
“Don’t do it, Ben,” Earl said quietly, hands out in surrender. “This wasn’t your fault. This attack on the country. You couldn’t have known.”
The man was clearly in tatters. He sat on his knees, trembling, one hand shaking over his face, the other with a gun pressed to his temple. Lost in a world he no longer understood, he seemed to be grasping for another world, one he couldn’t reach but one he could see, almost as if it were in a different dimension and the bullet was the way.
“They stole all her clothes,” Ben said, gun hand shaky. Without even looking Earl’s way, in a tortured voice, he said, “They took everything.”
Daisy moved beside him, her grey body leaning against his, and she looked so helpless. She’d protect him if she needed to, even at the cost of her own life, but right now, she could do nothing more than just be there and hope for the best.
This is the beauty of dogs, Earl thought. Their loyalty required so little love, but he could tell by the dog’s behavior that Ben loved her immensely.
But did he love her enough to not kill himself?
“Your loss is worse than all of ours,” Earl said. “You had the weight of the nation on your shoulders, and it’s clear the first lady and your daughters are gone. But right now you have Daisy.”
“You should take her,” he muttered, tears streaming from eyes so red and swollen Earl knew he was stuck in the swirling center of his own worst nightmare.
“She loves you,” Earl said, raising his voice some. “Don’t be an asshole and leave her.”
Now the President turned and looked at him. When those bloodshot eyes lasered in on him, they were not the same casual eyes Earl had first seen. This was a man stepping off the edge. This was a man who once embraced power and poise, yet in this bleak existence, Earl was interrupting his most shameful act, an act that required great courage, an act born by worlds of unending grief. None of these emotions on their own were worth disturbing, yet here he was, trying to stop them all at once.
Ben opened his mouth to say something, but then he stopped, turned and looked at Daisy who gave a small, but clearly tortured whine. She leaned forward, licked the side of his face, then pressed her head into the President’s side and made little whimpering sounds.
“See? You can’t leave her. She was not yours before, but now she is and that’s something. It’s a start.”
“Everything that ever meant something to me is gone,” Ben said.
“You’re Daisy’s whole world,” he said softly.
Earl could see Ben wanted to pet the dog, but somewhere in his mind he had the look t
hat said he’d planned on leaving Daisy to fend for herself. Now he was doubting it. To Earl it seemed Ben was seeing through the foggy veil of his logic. Daisy was still there with him. Right down to the bitter, violent end.
“If you do this to yourself, then you will pass that burden on to Daisy.”
Earl let that sit.
He hoped it would marinate, take hold.
Slowly, the gun came down, but this is when the fits of grief took over. Ben couldn’t help himself, and Earl didn’t know what to do. He went and sat down in front of the man, faced him and did nothing to hide the look of immense sorrow. For a second Earl thought about his own loss. The stab of pain was familiar, but unwelcome. He tried to bury it, the same as he always did, the same as he always would.
“You were the best President we’ve ever had,” Earl said. “You were the first to actually put yourself, your future and your family on the line for the American people. This was a den of corruption, heralded by vampires and thieves, and it was at a near boil when you came in.”
“But now it’s gone. The good with all the bad.”
“It was going to be gone either way. Maybe it was nuclear war with China, or maybe we were going to be flooded with migrants, absorbed into the UN, overrun by the EU, pitched into Communist style censorship until citizen went to blows with citizen on the streets over…whatever, their bitter opinions, their hurt feelings. Even that rodent Kim Jong-Un could have put that little fat finger of his on his big red button and kaboom! You couldn’t predict this, or see it coming, or stop it. None of us could.”
“But I didn’t see it. I should have. But I didn’t, not until it was too late.”
“No you didn’t. But you’re not that man anymore. None of us are who we were, myself included.”
“What did you do?”
“I sold cars.”
“That’s a good job,” Ben said, sniffling.
“You only say that because you’ve never stood across from some power couple telling you that you are irrelevant and it should be easier to buy a car for three grand under invoice than this.”
Ben gave a jovial laugh, but it was short lived.
Just saying it, just thinking about one jerk or after another asking, asking, asking—demanding Earl figuratively “drop his pants” and just “give the farm away”—filled Earl with that old, angry spark. In the end, before this happened, he had a hard time stomaching the selfishness of people.
“You first start in the business because you love cars,” Earl said, talking about something the President might find meaningless, something he might find distracting. “You want to earn a good living and you aren’t worried about the hours, which are horrendous by the way. But then things start to happen. The years peel back the layers of people and you find yourself becoming jaded. It’s not bad at first, but it is a progressive disease. The cars you once loved aren’t as exciting as they used to be. You see all their cracks and flaws. You see them in service over and over again reminding you that for a hundred grand, you’re selling people pieces of crap. But they already know this—these same people who have driven into that same service drive for years—and they accept it. Because it’s true.”
“Silver linings tend to fade,” Ben said.
“Eventually these same customers get bitter, then they become bitter buyers and they take it out on you. The sales guy. This starts a tiny spark inside you, one that festers over the years, then one day you wake up and you think, when did I come to hate people so much? Really deep down in your soul you develop this dark light of rage that grows with each shift and you take this hate for granted until one day it’s gone. One day everything you ever hated is gone, but so is everything you ever loved.”
“You talk about customers the same way I feel about some of the people I used to work with,” he said. “All those charlatans, perfectly aware of what they were doing, wrecking the country for the sake of their own politics, not the people they were supposed to represent or report fairly to.”
“In the end,” Earl said, not sure where this conversation was going, but knowing it was pulling Ben out of the dangerous funk he was in, “forget about politics or cars, or houses or whatever. What bothered me most was the selfishness. The entitlement. The million little temper tantrums along the way to people throwing fits to get what they want.”
“Yeah,” Ben said with a laugh. “The selfishness was paramount.”
“Now all that is gone. It’s been washed away and we can create some good in this world once more.”
“I never looked at it like that,” Ben admitted.
“So let me ask you a question,” he said, the President now looking up at him. “If you do this to yourself, and you leave Daisy all by herself after admittedly taking a long trip to get back here, will you be a good person for giving her a companion, or will you be the selfish jerk who left her behind?”
Now he looked down, then over at Daisy. Slowly, he put his hand on her shoulder, felt the muscle, her soft coat, the warmth of a living, breathing thing that needed him.
“I don’t think I can shake this,” he said, not looking at Earl.
“I watched my wife burn to death in the car with her friend,” Earl admitted. “I didn’t tell you that earlier, because the words elicit the emotions, and those emotions are tough to fight. But she did. I saw it. And now it haunts my sleep, and most of my waking hours. But there are new people with me now. Not my family, but my family. You understand? Daisy is not your flesh and blood, but she is your family now.”
“I get it.”
“We have to make ourselves think about other things. We have to get lost in other struggles, in other people’s struggles, sometimes in all their little selfish tantrums. But on a larger scale, we have to find something bigger than ourselves to throw our heads and hearts in to. For us as men, if we’re not building something, we’re brooding over something, trying to figure it out, thinking about what we could have done differently, or how we can fix things. There is no fixing this. There’s no OFF switch, or RESET button in this life. Unless you consider that next bullet a solution, but then you have to ask yourself, if you lived when most everyone didn’t, then don’t you think you might have survived for a reason?”
“Darwin called it,” Ben said.
“Darwin was an agoraphobic who was always sick, scared of crowds and people, and he dealt with constant anxiety. He was a shut-in who spent most of his time on a rack. If he was in today’s world as opposed to the eighteen hundreds, he’d be singing a different tune. He’d be saying something no one was listening to. He was not the fittest. He was just a guy who lived a tortured life and through his suffering he found something more.”
“I don’t care for the man’s writings,” Ben said, “but I can’t argue a lot of what he said either.”
“What must you do to say good-bye to this place and move on with your life?” Earl asked.
Ben looked around, then he looked at the dog, and finally be put those weary eyes on Earl. “I think I just need a few minutes.”
Earl thought about asking for Ben’s gun, but that just wasn’t something you did in times like these. So he stood, and he went downstairs, giving the man his privacy, hoping he wouldn’t use the time to kill himself.
Chapter Seventeen
Ben, Earl and Daisy rambled through the filthy streets of D.C., a dry, veritable wasteland filled with a constant, pressing silence. Dirt and debris drifted across the asphalt in eddies, making deposits in small drifts, or just carrying along the street unabated.
A pack of dogs wandered past Ben, Earl and Daisy, skinny, but not ravenous, curious, but not curious about them. The old, weak smells of burnt cars and fire ravaged buildings, and every so often the stink of the dead, threaded itself through the soft, northerly breeze, not enough to sting the nostrils, or offend, but enough to let them know this violent upheaval wasn’t fresh, but it wasn’t forgotten either.
Up ahead, a pair of carrion birds picked at a body in the street. The
vultures stood on this body, a woman who looked like she’d died recently, a body new enough to attract the attention of these ugly, winged meat eaters. Overhead the skies were clear though. Not a cloud against the soft blue canvas, real or otherwise.
“Why were you there?” Ben asked, sunglasses on, Daisy beside him, his embarrassment all but sitting on his sleeve. Deep down, however, he was glad Earl intervened. He didn’t want to leave Daisy. She didn’t deserve that.
They walked for half a block before Earl answered him.
“I’m obsessed with the look at it,” Earl said. “The White House. It reminds me of what liberty used to feel like. The brilliant bozos of this world got the best of us, so maybe I go there to be sad, too. Staring at the White House, now seeing it as a symbol of what this country became, and how far we’ve fallen, it makes me wish I’d appreciated more when I had the time.”
Earl was a tall, lithe man with silver hair, a wiry frame and a loping gait about him. He was different. A man used to walking fast, a man who got things done because they needed doing. Ben had met a few competent car guys over the years and they all had that same walk. Steady, purposeful, a man on a mission.
“I was too busy to notice anything good,” Ben admitted.
A couple of vagrants cross the street in front of them, taking the other sidewalk over risking potential contact. They don’t say anything, but the pair keeps glancing their way, like at any time Ben and Earl could attack.
Earl waved and they gave him a nod.
“You know,” Ben continued, “you get it in your head you have a hundred things to work on, so you make a list, you create your team, you start making notes, you obsess over direction, and next thing you know, your whole life is a to-do list and you’ve enjoyed nothing. You’ve just done things. Now that all that’s gone, I’m not sure what to do with myself. Or how I even fit in this world.”
“You’ll find your place,” Earl said.
After walking up Connecticut Ave NW for five or six blocks—dodging abandoned cars, cars shelled and roasted to a crisp, half destroyed buildings that looked vacant and unstable, some of them collapsed completely—Earl turned to Ben and said, “They won’t trust you with your glasses on. Take them off for a second.”