by Schow, Ryan
“Yeah, we absolutely do,” Ice agrees. “Get Eudora and the women and—”
We’re interrupted by the sound of someone trying to kick in the front door. It’s already been broken down once before when Diaab Buhari took the kids, so I don’t expect it to hold off these idiots very long.
In my infinite wisdom, I think it can take maybe one or two more shots.
Ice and I take defensive positions, ducking out of sight. I’m crouched behind the couch, he’s closer and tucked into the hallway. Eliana, however, just puts her hands up and walks toward both men as the door swings inward and the intruders enter.
I give my brother a WTF? look. He shrugs his shoulders and shows me the sign for crazy, the one where he makes circles with his pointer finger right by his temple.
Our intruders are yelling for Eliana to get down, but she’s whimpering and pleading in Spanish about a hundred scared miles a minute. She’s going on and on saying she needs help, that some men were killed upstairs, that she’s terrified because her mother is up there and she’s sick and really, really scared.
Shaking their heads, the men don’t shoot.
The closer she gets, the more she seems to fall apart. Lowering her body, her eyes and her head, she continues to drone on with her fears and concerns.
Then she’s in striking distance.
It’s startling to see how the Guatemalan beauty can flip on a dime like that, how she can go from heartless mercenary to petrified and mewling in no time flat. And by startling I mean both awesome and chilling.
One of the men holsters his weapon and relaxes. To his partner, he says, “You know what in the blue hell she’s saying?”
“Farging gibberish,” his partner mumbles from behind a white painter’s mask. He’s holding a small plastic device out in front of him, staring at the screen and listening for small, tight beeps.
Geiger counter?
Both men look like they’re in their late thirties, early forties. Neither look like they were ever decent people before all this happened. Then again, who knows where they came from. For as much beauty as Chicago has (had), there are still neighborhoods even the rats avoid.
I’m not saying these guys are super shysters. They could be sweet as pie, these two. But they don’t look sweet. Not at all. I learned to read looks a long time ago and these guys are all kinds of bad news.
“You just calm down little lady,” the one guy says, speaking louder and slower, hoping the extra volume will suddenly help her understand English. He pulls down his mask, a good sign, and he’s got all his teeth. Another good sign.
“Do you even know what the words leaving my mouth mean?” he says to her.
His buddy snickers under the mask, then pulls it down, too. He sees how beautiful Eliana is, even though she’s been working on hiding her looks again.
I’m looking at these two dunce caps thinking, Yeah, she understands all right. Better than you think…
The moment the second man sets his gun aside, Eliana attacks. Ice is closer to her and the two men than I am. He goes after them. I pop up and provide cover just in case more of them storm the house. Ice gets to the second guy before they tag team Eliana. My finger comes off the trigger. Ice hammers the first guy, strips him of his weapon, then locks him up in a chokehold and asks if he values his life. I’m thinking he probably does, which is why I turn and head out back, as agreed.
The instant I push through the back door, someone starts firing. I scamper back inside, the door splintering under gunfire.
Now my heart is at a full gallop.
Xavier steps out of the foil room, shuts the door behind him and says, “What the hell, Fire?”
“We have company,” I tell him. “Out back and in front. Maybe twenty or thirty of them. Plus two more on the third floor, although those two are now drawing flies.”
“I gathered as much,” Xavier says with a grin.
I step past Xavier, open the door and to everyone still in the room I say, “We’re in a jam here, but everyone stay out of sight. Move into the closet if you have to. And if anyone gets past us, fight like your life depends on it, okay?”
My eyes find Adeline’s eyes and in those lovely spheres is a gathering terror. The last thing I want to do is incapacitate anyone due to fear, but right now this is all about survival and to survive they have to be alert and ruthless.
“I’ll be back,” I tell them, my gaze falling on Adeline one last time. I step out of the room, close the door and turn to Xavier.
“You ready?” I ask him.
“I’ll pop out back, draw their fire,” he says, his eyes as dead as ever. “You make sure I don’t catch a bullet.”
“That’s not a great plan, X.”
“I got this,” he says, giving my shoulder a reassuring pat. “Besides, I need to get home for a second.” Home meaning the house across the street where he’s been squatting for a week.
“Tactically, that’s not bright, X,” I tell him, “but you already know this, don’t you?”
“You don’t understand,” he says, a little fire in his spirit. “I have guns and ammo over there, a lot more than we have here. You guys are running low and if there’s as many as you say there are out front, we’ll need every last round.”
Before I can even object, he’s saying, “You ready?”
“Dammit, Xavier,” I growl, running a hand over my scalp in frustration.
“Don’t say crap like that,” he shoots back. Without a second’s hesitation, he pushes open the door to the booming sound of lone shotgun.
He jumps back inside, slams the door shut then looks at me and says, “Unbelievable!”
“Good God, man, I told you!”
In the other room, Ice and Eliana are walking their captives out front for God only knows what reason. Is anyone using their heads anymore?
Xavier looks at me, takes two breaths and rolls his eyes like he can’t believe what he’s about to do. He explodes through the door a second time, this time diving into a roll. He draws a second burst of gunfire. I’m out the door in nothing flat, putting a tight grouping of three shots into the guy taking shots at both me and my friend.
Chapter Two
Draven was in the third story window looking through the scope of his rifle when the screaming started. What he was seeing in the street below was too much. Then again, everything that had happened these last three days was no cup of sugar either…
He was forced to leave the aluminum foil room early. He was pissed that their plans went to hell, but he was also relieved. Being trapped inside a regular sized bedroom with a bunch of other people became a bit maddening, even though two of those people were Eliana and Brooklyn.
When he thought about an EMP going off to solve the drone problem, he imagined it might go this way if they found themselves in a worst-case-scenario kind of situation. Which they did. The reality was more taxing than he’d imagined.
When you’re forced to keep such close company for days on end out of fear of being radiated to death, the reality is, you quickly learn to make concessions. You do things you wouldn’t do as a regular, decent adult. No one wanted to talk about the bathroom issues, but the truth was, they’d planned for it. As a group, they made their aluminum foil wallpaper, gathered their food and water stores together in one location, then brought in the emergency toilet.
Before the EMP he wondered if it was all just overkill, but in the event of a nuclear bomb going off in the skies above you, Eudora said, “There’s no such thing as over-planning.”
Building a do-it-yourself toilet was easy, you just had to find the right things. Start with a five gallon bucket (Home Depot), some tall white kitchen bags (13 gallon), a garden scoop, some cat litter (or bags of dirt if you’re in a kitty litter drought), some gloves and a spray bottle of disinfectant. No one wants to flop their bare butt on a thin plastic rim, so pool noodles work best if you want a comfy toilet seat. This was Chicago, though. No one had pools, let along pool noodles. So instead of us
ing rolled foam for a toilet rim, they wrapped bath towels into cotton noodles and secured them around the rims of the two buckets with a couple of strips of duct tape. After that, all you needed was a lid. They’d stolen two of them from the toilets next door.
It sucked thinking each towel was going to see a variety of ass, but whatever, the alternative was a hundred times worse.
The thing about building an emergency toilet is, you don’t just come up with these things on your own. Someone has to help you with them. That someone was Eudora. His grandmother.
Just before the EMP went off, the whole conversation of toilets became a discussion they had on more than one occasion.
“Now when you get done doing your thing,” Eudora said to the group as if this was Poopology 101: a Guide to Excremental Preparedness, “wipe, and douse. Use the kitty litter, but don’t get too carried away because we can’t run the risk of filling the crap bag too quick and running out of room. And don’t just dust your turds either because we’re not on a budget so much that any of us wants to smell what the other had for dinner.”
Gosh, what a terrible God-awful conversation, Draven thought as he listened to his grandmother talk to the entire group about such a depressing subject. This had been after dinner five days ago. Eudora gathered them in the living room where they spent the evenings planning and strategizing for the moment something like that happened.
The assault on their home came two and a half days after the EMP. Two and a half days into their three day stay in the aluminum foil room. This was the attack that had driven Eliana next door and Draven to the third floor with his 30.06 hunting rifle.
After the EMP and before they were attacked, Draven had given a lot of thought to the six other people around him. Eliana, Veronica, Orlando, Brooklyn, Alma and Constanza.
In the short time he’d known her, Draven had come to respect Eliana for what she did to get up into America. The woman said she missed Carolina already, and wished they hadn’t run in different directions when the nuke went off above them. This didn’t have her curled in a ball in the corner though. The woman had others to care for. Namely Veronica, Brooklyn and the two little girls from the rail yard who didn’t want to be offloaded at the Chicago Stadium with the others.
He didn’t say much to Alma or Constanza, even though they smiled at him whenever their eyes met, and he didn’t talk much to Veronica because she was hot and cold, her grandparents having succumbed to the drones.
A couple of times he talked to Orlando, and though Brooklyn’s brother was friendly, he was busy consoling Veronica, or distracting her with conversation. That was just as well. Draven wasn’t much of a conversationalist, not in good times, and certainly not in bad times.
But Brooklyn…lately he’d been thinking a lot about Brooklyn. His hot neighbor. The girl of his dreams if not for the end of the world and the buzzkill it created. With nothing to do all day but ride out the seventy-two hours the group agreed upon and think, it was hard for him to drag his mind to other things. His business was dead, their world was in smithereens, his grandmother was old and in a wheelchair and the entire grid had most assuredly collapsed.
But Brooklyn was right there.
Thinking of how beautiful she was felt like his only lifeline to happiness. And who would blame him? This situation was beyond terrible.
It took only moments for an attraction to form, but for a nerd like him, it took a couple of days to finally admit to himself that he was into her. And that’s why he didn’t want to go to the bathroom. Being forced into that situation in front of not one hot girl, but a super hot woman like Eliana, too? Talk about embarrassing!
He held out as long as he could.
But two days after the EMP went off, after he couldn’t sweat or clench or hold it anymore, he finally joined the rest of them by christening the makeshift toilet.
Talk about a bad day.
Sitting in the closet, groaning inside, perspiration slicking his brow, he cringed and gripped his legs, his breathing short and labored. He nearly passed out, that’s how much he didn’t want to dump in hearing distance of others. When it came down to it, though, it was go time whether he liked it or not. Alas, his body had forsaken him. So he even squeeeeeeezed and released in perfect, contemplative silence, hoping for a hissless, barkless execution because he knew from personal experience that you could hear everything on the outside of that dark and cheerless closet.
Modesty was hard-fought that day, but in the end, he lost the war and felt he must hold his head in shame. He was not alone in his thinking. Everyone heard everyone doing their business and everyone made that very same look when they first came out of the closet (that closet, not the closet).
Veronica was first to honk out the dreaded dirt snake, and next they listened to Eliana and Brooklyn pee, and then everyone fought not to listen to Orlando create a symphony of hollow starts and stops, but he was making the kind of noise even the deaf would have cocked an eyebrow at. Then it was the two girls, Alma and Constanza. Constanza was the older of the two, so she took Alma in with her and they did their thing together.
Draven held out the longest. This was not a contest to see who could go last, or even hold out for the three days. For Draven, this was a point of vanity, although he’d call it modesty if anyone asked.
God, the things you give up in an apocalypse!
The good news was, before he had his day on the bucket, he reasoned that the group began to build up their immunity to these really embarrassing, very awkward moments, and that made it okay. He watched with keen awareness how, with each and every deposit made, people bathrooming before other people wasn’t such a big deal anymore.
What did him in was the pain.
His stomach started to roll, gurgling and cramping, forcing him to have some super uncomfortable moments as he struggled to ward off the revolt occurring in his body. With little hope of lasting the seventy-two hours, he began the planning stages of his own emergency e-vac.
For him, simply holding out wouldn’t do. He needed to employ some genius level strategy lest he best Orlando in the outrageous sound effects department.
At first he thought he could just sneak out into the house and do his business in a bathroom, all the while pretending to be an underpooper and just more disciplined than everyone else. That would be just groovy, he thought, but there was no excuse he could invent that would explain him leaving the room when everyone explicitly agreed that seventy-two hours was the shortest amount of time they needed to ride out the aftereffects of the EMP.
Fortunately for him, Brooklyn broke in the number two department just before he did. His dream girl suddenly became his pooping dream girl and after that he couldn’t look at her the same anymore. Then again, she wasn’t looking at him either. For God’s sake, it wasn’t like they shared something special together! There was a lifting of the veil, though. A sort of relaxation of his nerves.
Now you may be thinking, this is all very stupid, very pedestrian in these dark, unfortunate times, but nerdy guys being guys around hot girls? This is the world of anomalies and the forgoing of common sense. Or maybe he was just different than everyone else.
He couldn’t really say.
Either way, after Brooklyn broke first, things started to look up. The reality was, like everyone else, Brooklyn’s poop stunk. She was no longer this goddess in distress; she was a real girl with real issues. She became even more real to him that day, and it was almost delightful how she was embarrassed.
Of course, that had him thinking, what will my face look like? Will my cheeks be as red as hers? He wondered if he would feel sick and hot, if his stomach would tie itself into nervous knots, if his apocalyptic future was suddenly ruined because he decided to eat too much dried fruit the day of the bomb.
All the joy in her breaking first suddenly evaporated to a groaning deep inside his colon. More than ever, this had him thinking he needed alternative plans!
There was no alternative though. After the water
went out and power became spotty, just before the EMP, they’d duct taped all the drains shut to prevent a potential back-flow of sewage into the sinks and showers. They didn’t know if there were back-flow valves in the system, and so he decided he didn’t want to chance opening up the seal and flooding the house with sewage.
In the end, he knew he had to do what everyone else did, and that was man up to the orange, plastic toilet. So he did. On the morning of day three, he broke. Filled with shame, teeming with dread, he sat there in the dark of the closet, armed with a wad of toilet paper, a scoop of cat litter and whatever wits he could summon.
He didn’t know that taking that crap at that very moment was the thing that was going to save their lives.
As he sat there unloading some red-level death and three days of fecal mayhem, he thought about Eudora and laughed to himself. If there was anyone who would hold out longer than him, it would be her. Of course, she was a cheater. She was in her cross-countries. That’s what she called her diapers—her cross-countries.
It’s amazing the things old people will share if you just listen.
“If you put these on,” she’d said when he first found out she was wearing adult diapers, “and let go of all your uptight inclinations, you can cross the entire country in a single pass stopping only for gas and food.”
When she told him this, he’d laughed. When she sat in the living room less than a week ago and told everyone else, he paled at the mere mention.
“So you just take a dump right there?” Orlando had asked her, pointing to her lap. Veronica looked away, color rising to her cheeks, a barely-restrained giggle sitting on the edge of her lips.
Eudora couldn’t just let it lie, though. She had to go and one–up herself.
“Wait and watch,” Draven’s lovely, humble grandmother had said as they all sat around the living room waiting for Eudora to show them what’s what. Of course, this caused everyone to hold their breath and turn away.
Ice looked at Fire, and Draven read the question between them. Is she really going to take a crap in front of all of us?