by Joshua Gayou
“Again, if you want the van, take the van. You’re welcome to it. Let me and the girl leave.”
“Well, that’s a problem, isn’t it? Is she your daughter?”
“No.”
“I see. Well, what are you doing with her?”
I started to see where this was going. Though I hated to admit it, I understood where she was coming from. I was in her same position only a few days ago when Billy and I were deciding what to do about Amanda and her situation. Was she dealing with someone who needed saving or someone who was where they wanted to be? Unfortunately, I could also tell by looking at her that she had already made up her mind. I don’t know why she bothered to continue talking to me.
“She’s my friend. I’m watching her until her mother gets back.” It sounded lame and I knew it.
“Your friend.” Statement not question.
“That’s right.”
“You want me to believe someone your age is lugging around this little kid because you enjoy her company?”
“Ask her, why don’t you?”
“Oh, yeah, I could. But how do I know you haven’t coached her? How do I know you haven’t frightened her into telling me whatever you want her to say?”
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes, which also hurt miserably, by the way. “You’re right, lady. When we woke up this morning, just after I finished doing unspeakable things with her, I told her, ‘okay, here’s your story just in case we get ambushed by a really suspicious broad and a crew of gun wielding henchmen! Listen up now…’ Are you insane? In what god damned universe does that sound even remotely plausible?”
I felt a barrel press into the side of my neck. “Easy, there, shit for brains. You don’t get to talk to her like that.”
“I haven’t decided what happens to you…yet”, the lady said to me, hanging on that last word. “I do know that I can care for this girl better than some caveman who runs around killing people he doesn’t even know…”
“Yeah, again, people who were stealing our supplies!” I interrupted.
“We stole. You killed. Who’s the real bad guy here?”
“Well, I would have been pleased as punch to let them live. All they had to do was not stick guns in our faces.” Her superior, schoolmarm attitude was really starting to get under my skin. “Besides, where the hell do you come from talking about her wellbeing? One of us has saran-wrapped this girl to a chair and it sure wasn’t me.”
“None of this conversation matters. The girl stays with us.”
“Now listen, you…” I groaned as I started to get out of my chair. When I came to a standing position, the entire planet (never mind the room) tilted on its axis. My thigh slammed into a desk and I had to brace my hand on it to keep from going over. I leaned forward again because that seemed to be the only position my inner ear was happy with. The pressure in my sinuses immediately built up to intolerable levels. It seemed that no matter what position I put myself into, there was some portion of my body waiting to tell me why my ideas were stupid. I reached my hand up to my nose and fingered around the wreckage gingerly. It felt all crooked and mashed in again. I gave a gentle squeeze and pain blossomed from my nose and wrapped all the way around my head. The tear ducts in my eyes shot water like a couple of sprinklers.
“Which one of you shmucks broke my nose again?”
“S...sorry”, a voice said from my left - who I guessed was the guy standing next to the door to the main warehouse floor. “You fell on your face when I clubbed you.”
“Yeah, about that…” I began, “what did you club me with anyway, a Volks…” I had raised my head to look forward. The woman I had been talking to was standing behind Elizabeth. She was holding a knife pointed at the girl’s eye.
I froze. The guy behind me said, “Hey, Brenda, come on…”
She silenced him with a look. Turning her attention to me, she said, “Not another step now.”
“What happened to looking out for her wellbeing?”
“Well it’s clear you have no regard for your own safety. Something had to be done to get your attention.” I scanned her face for any trace of shame or guilt for what she was doing. There was none. If I made a move on her, that knife was going in Elizabeth’s eye, best as I could tell.
A great sense of calm and acceptance came over me then. It’s the kind of feeling you get when you realize what comes next will be ugly but that there is also no other alternative.
I had resolved at that point that either I was going to be killed or I was going to kill everyone in the room not wrapped up on a chair. There was no reason for me to say anything else.
“What, that’s it? Nothing clever to say?” she asked.
I didn’t need to say anything else. The sound of vehicles approaching outside could be heard through a small window set in the concrete wall of the office. It immediately became clear to me what had happened. These people had been in this building when we arrived; probably doing the same thing we were…scavenging. They must have heard us pull up and watched us the whole time we were out there making plans, waiting to see what we’d do. Billy and Amanda drove off and two people appeared much easier to handle than four.
But if that was the case, why the whole line of questioning about the girl just now? What was the point of that? I decided I didn’t care. I looked down at the knife hovering by Lizzy’s left eyeball. No matter what else happened, there was only one possible outcome for Brenda, assuming I lived.
“That’ll be her mother,” I said. “Here’s your chance to straighten all this out.”
She looked at the two men and said, “Go look. I’m fine here; he can barely stand up without holding the edge of the desk.”
Both men went to the door and exited, disappearing into the shadows of the warehouse as soon as they left the lantern light in the office. In the distance, a door opened to admit two shadows and closed again.
“You’ll be giving my friends the same warm welcome, I take it?”
“If they come waving a white flag I’m sure it will be fine.” She removed the knife from Elizabeth and stepped away. She lifted her other hand to show me a revolver, which appeared to be the same one I had in my back pocket a moment ago.
“Nothing stupid, huh?” she said. She was interrupted by several loud reports of what I had learned to identify as Billy’s shotgun, peppered with higher pitched bursts of gunfire.
Brenda jumped and turned to look out the office window. She didn’t exactly have her back to me but I decided it wasn’t going to get any better. I rushed her. Halfway to her the world made another one of those asinine tilts and my vision started to swim with blackness. I could see her turning towards me, raising her gun in slow motion, her face drawn up in shock and anticipation of a body check.
I slammed into her head and shoulders first. From far, far away I heard screaming and the sound of my name. I fought to keep from passing out, certain I would lose consciousness at any second. I felt something writhing under me and I realized it must be the woman I had just smeared across the floor. I brought my hands up in front of me and started grabbing blindly, trying to find anything to hold on to so I could rest a second and catch my breath. Maybe wait for my vision to come back if I was lucky.
Something stung me across the back of my hand, which immediately started to burn afterward. This concerned me, so I gave up holding on and instead began to punch in the direction I deemed most likely to contain her head. I connected a couple of times and I felt the body under me jolt like it had been electrocuted with each hit.
I sat back and rested on my knees a moment. Having gone from prone to vertical, the vertigo wave returned and I had to wait yet again for it to pass. I finally opened my eyes and was able to see in front of me without a bunch of black spots whirling around in my vision. Brenda was on her back on the floor holding her hands to her face and moaning. I noticed that her knife was close by. I lurched to my feet and kicked it away. I saw the revolver lying on the floor by the door. I went to it, braced
myself for the nausea wave I knew was coming, and squatted to pick it up. Squatting seemed to help with the dizzy spell; it didn’t seem so bad that time. I turned back to Brenda, thumbed the hammer back, and pointed it at her face.
“We weren’t going to hurt her. I was going to take care of her.” Her voice was pleading now.
“Maybe or maybe not,” I said. “Regardless of intent, the one thing you never do is fuck with a kid.” I pulled the trigger.
9 – Reunited
Amanda
Billy and I returned to the meeting area by the warehouse not long before dusk. I was following him in the Jeep and when we came over the hill and brought the area into view, he immediately sped up. It caught me by surprise but I soon saw what he was doing. We were at least a hundred yards away but that was still close enough to see that the van was gone and that there was a body in the dirt.
We both pulled up to the body and jumped out to examine it. I was so convinced that it was Jake when we came up that I became confused at the unfamiliar face. I stood there a few beats trying to reconcile what I was seeing. My brain kept telling me that he must have been beaten unrecognizable but that didn’t make any sense; there was no trauma to the face outside of the small hole just underneath his chin and the larger, baseball sized hole in the top of his head.
Billy took his hand off the pump of his shotgun and pointed to the dirt next to the body. “Look,” he said, “someone stumbled away from this.”
A part of me giggled internally when he said that (Really? You’re going to do the Indian Tracker thing?) but most of me just wanted to know where the hell Elizabeth was. Also, being fair, the tracks were hard to miss. No one had been this way for a while.
He followed the path of the footprints down the side of the building, hunched over slightly, shotgun shouldered, barrel down. I followed behind with the Tavor pointed out in front and to the right so the muzzle wouldn’t be in his back. It seemed Billy had forgotten to be afraid of having me behind him with a loaded gun.
We rounded the corner and started to run the length of this new wall. At the end we came to a door. Billy came to stand in front of it and then motioned for me to come around him and get on the other side. The door opened outside, right to left, so he wanted me positioned to get in behind him without having to navigate around the door. He grabbed the handle, turned it, and pulled the door open, plunging in with me trailing close after him.
Just as my eyes were adjusting to the lower light, I saw a door closing on the other side directly across from us with two men rushing into the room. I felt Billy’s hand on my shoulder as he shoved me down in front of one of the line machines and he took a knee right next to me. As soon as his knee touched the ground, I heard gunshots from the other side of the warehouse.
He peeked his head over the top to look, and then pulled it down again as a few more shots rang out. He lifted his shotgun over the machine and sent a few blasts back their way, more on general principle than any real hope of hitting them.
“Assholes are placed behind their own line machine. We gotta get closer or something.”
“Hey!” I called out. “What are you shooting at us for?”
“C’mon out and we’ll tell yah!”
Billy looked at me. “I don’t have to tell you, right?”
“You got my daughter back there?” I asked. They didn’t answer for several seconds and I felt my heart skip a beat. They knew who I was talking about.
“I’m telling you right now,” I said. “If I find anything wrong with her I’m going to kill you motherfuckers a piece at a time, starting with your god damned kneecaps and work my way up!”
“Jesus, woman!” Billy grunted as he looked at me, shock painted across his face.
A few more shots came our way but they were being stingy with them. Billy noticed this too. He said, “I don’t think they have that many bullets.”
I crab-walked down to the end of the line and peered through a break in the machinery. There was just enough of a gap through the steel framing, drums, and wheels of our machine that I could see the end of one of their asses hanging out from behind their own cover across the way. I waved at Billy, pointed in their direction and mouthed the words, “GET...READY”. He nodded, pulled a few shells from his belt, and started thumbing them into his weapon. When he was ready to go he nodded to me over his shoulder.
I steadied myself as well as possible and rested the barrel of my rifle on a nook of the machinery frame. I positioned the dot of the rifle’s optic on the backside of the man in the distance. I took a breath and squeezed the trigger. The gun jerked back against my shoulder and I heard a scream from across the warehouse (strangely, I can’t remember hearing a gunshot when I did this). The man’s back end was replaced by a complete body sprawling along the floor. I repositioned the dot to the newly discovered head and pulled the trigger again. I didn’t miss.
Billy was already running along the shop floor by the time I got off my first shot. The man who had not been hit was distracted by his buddy sprawling across the concrete just long enough for Billy to get in and blow a hole through his ribs.
I ran to meet him where he crouched over the two. “Done,” he said, and moved to the door through which they had emerged.
On the other side, the room was dark enough that we had to slow our pace down considerably. I heard screaming now in the distance ahead; the screaming of a little girl. I pushed past Billy and started running blindly down the aisles. He shouted for me to wait but I wasn’t hearing it. I heard my baby screaming.
It wasn’t long at all before I saw a dimly lit enclosed office in the distance. I could see Jake standing up in the window with a revolver pointed down at the floor. Just beyond him was Elizabeth’s head.
I grabbed the handle and pulled the door open. I heard Jake say something that sounded like, “…eye kid”. It was hard to make out because I was in the process of opening the door when he said it. Maybe he said “bye kid”, because he shot her in the face right after that.
Billy pushed into the room behind me, looked around at the mess, and said, “What the hell, Jake?”
Jake collapsed into an office chair. He slumped there, panting. “I…could use…a drink…of water.”
-
“We don’t have a lot of time,” said Jake. He was still sitting in the chair, leaned forward over the desk with his head in his hand. “The one who stole the van…she said she’d be back to pick the rest up.”
I was just cutting the rest of the plastic wrap off Elizabeth. I was taking my time, afraid I would cut her if I moved too fast.
Speaking of cuts: “You have a nasty cut on the back of your hand,” I said, looking over at Jake. “We might have to sew that one shut.”
“Later,” he mumbled, panting heavily. “Billy. Go around and search everyone. Get the guns. Bullets. Want my damned Glock back.”
“What happened here?” I asked as Billy went out the door.
“Ambushed. They were in this building the whole time. Snuck up on us after you left. Someone hit me with a bus or something.”
“And the van?”
He took a few breaths before continuing. I started getting really worried about him from the way he was acting. “So, one of them, a female, came out and drove off in the van. Said she was going to unload it and come back to pick everyone up after sundown.” He took a few more breaths. “What happened to the other two? What’d you do with them?” He wouldn’t look up when he spoke to me and he slurred his words like a drunk.
“We ended up shooting them both. Look, are you okay?”
“Nope,” he said promptly. “Knocked me out I don’t know how long. Think I’m concussed.”
Billy came back into the room just then with a couple of pistols in his jacket pockets and an additional rifle. “So how about my van?” he asked.
Jake pointed at me with his left hand and then made a throwing gesture at Billy. I updated Billy on what had happened as quickly as possible. Lizzy looked like she
was torn between holding onto me and checking on Jake; she kept stealing glances in his direction. Finally, she went over to him and rested her hand on the back of his neck. “You’re bleeding, Jake, from your head,” she said.
“Just a day fer…good news!” Jake rumbled and gave her a pat on the knee.
“So, she’s coming back with the van. I suppose we could wait for her.”
“Billy, no,” I said. “Look at Jake. He could have a concussion already. He’s in no shape to fight; he can’t even lift his head up.”
“Can,” Jake grunted. He lifted his head an inch and then put it back in his hand. “Uh…shit.” He burped softly.
“We don’t know if she’s coming back alone or with friends. I don’t want to have any more gunfights with my kid around, okay?”
“Think we killed enough people today already, Billy”, Jake said. “You get her a car?”
“Yeah,” Billy said. “Nice one.”
“Well, good. Let’s call this a draw and get out of here.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. It’s just…” Billy fanned his hands in the air, “there was a lot of good hardware in that van, man! It just galls the hell out of me. It’s galling.”
“Forget it,” Jake said. “We got the kid. Good enough. We get settled in Wyoming, I’ll drive all the way back to Nevada and get another load myself. We didn’t clean that whole place out by half.”
Billy brightened up at that. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“’Course I am. Now help me out of here before what’s-her-face comes back.”
Billy and I each took an arm and lifted Jake onto his feet. He grunted and moaned - some very unsavory things came out of his mouth. I felt naked walking out of there like that, with Jake draped over both of us and our weapons hanging uselessly from their slings. Goosebumps ran up my back as we passed through the door into the loading area with the line machines. That would have been a perfect time for a hidden someone to come jumping out at us. Such a thing never happened, thankfully.
When we got outside, the sun was sitting on the horizon under a red sky. Billy said, “He’ll ride with you. Put him up front and roll the window down. Don’t let him recline. Don’t let him fall asleep. Soon as we get a ways out of town we’ll pull off the road and I’ll see about cleaning him up.”