Charlie's Requiem: Democide

by Walt Browning

  Being one street off the main thoroughfare had definite advantages. The homes were not a likely place to find anything worth stealing. Non-medical professional offices had nothing to offer, so they were quickly looted and left empty as the more lucrative buildings on the major road to the north were torn apart. The only thing to really worry about was that the gangs might retreat to one of the unoccupied houses to sleep for the night.

  Sounds of strife could be heard as it echoed down the road. Occasional gunfire seemed to bounce down the now-empty streets, making it hard to triangulate where it had come from.

  Finally, after a few minor deviations from our planned path to avoid a couple of occupied homes, we took an alleyway north from Hillcrest and hid in the shadows between two buildings. I crept to the corner of the Korean restaurant we had found ourselves next to, and looked down the major thoroughfare.

  Colonial Drive, also known as Highway 50, is the main east-west artery in Orlando. The six-lane concrete road was full of stalled cars and a few busses. John had warned me about these obstacles since they provide a perfect spot for someone to lie in wait.

  So far, we had travelled for a little over an hour. Now, I knew I might have to give myself at least that much time to scout our crossing. I crept back to the others and had us all return down the alley to Hillcrest road. Behind the restaurant was the backyard for a house that had been converted into a professional business, a psychologist’s practice. The house had been ransacked as the looters looked for drugs that the practice never had access to. A PhD in psychology didn’t confer a license to dispense drugs, but whoever had raided this house obviously didn’t know that. Survival supplies such as food and water had been left undisturbed in the office’s kitchen while every drawer and closet had been torn apart.

  We all moved through the destroyed building, grabbing snacks and water while passing through. In the backyard, I had everyone settle down for a short stay, then I returned to the Korean eatery. A long handicap ramp extended from half-way down the alley, along the side of the restaurant and up to the front entrance of the building. A sturdy railing ran the length of the ramp, allowing me to squat-walk up to the corner of the business, and its metal tubing camouflaged me as I lay on my stomach. I spent over 40 minutes watching the area, searching for any signs of an ambush or other activity. Finally, satisfied that a safe crossing could be accomplished, I returned to the group and gathered them all together.

  “Let’s go,” I started. “I haven’t seen anything, so I think we’re safe.”

  We quietly slinked up the alley and waited at the corner.

  “You guys go first. Run over to the corner of the building on the other side. I’ll follow when you’ve made it safely.”

  Janice and Garrett moved from cover onto the street. They were quickly followed by Jorge and Maria, the four of them stopping when they came to a Suburban that was stalled in the eastbound lane. They gathered themselves and sprinted through the rest of the six-lane thoroughfare, passing several cars and a van, and finally ending up at the corner of the building across from me. They disappeared around the side of the two-story structure, and as John had suggested, I planned on waiting for at least two minutes before I followed them.

  Less than 30 seconds after I saw them disappear from sight, I saw movement to my right. Down the road, about a hundred yards away, two men appeared from inside of a stalled bus, and began to stealthily move in their direction. I lay still on the wooden ramp, my right hand clutching my Hi-Point 9mm, as they made their way to the road in front of me. Stalking my friends, they stopped at the corner and I saw one of them peek around where the other four had disappeared.

  A flash of moonlight glinted off their weapons, and my stomach dropped as I recognized that they were toting rifles. Within a few seconds, they disappeared down the path my four friends had just taken.

  There was no time for stealth now. I sprinted after the two thugs, but before I could get across the highway, gunfire erupted.

  I dropped to my belly as I approached the far curb. Peeking up from the road, I heard a couple of bullets zinging over my head. I rolled to my right, putting the building between me and the gunfire that was coming back at me, and sprinted off the street and against the office’s front wall.

  The sound of Garrett and Jorge’s handguns was overwhelmed by the high-pitched cracks coming from the two men’s rifles. Rapid shots from the rifles finally suppressed any return fire, and all I heard was the sound of death spitting downrange at my friends as the attacker’s bullets looked to end the gunfight.

  With no shots coming back my way, I brought my pistol up and spun around the corner, searching for the riflemen that were trying to kill my companions. In the shadows of the building, the sight of the two rifles firing downrange was momentarily overwhelming. Tongues of bright flame erupted from the end of their barrels, briefly lighting up the shooters’ faces. Without a clue to my presence, they concentrated their fire at a block retaining wall at the end of the office building.

  One of the men broke cover and moved to the right, hugging the wall of the big two-story structure. Facing away from me, he kept his rifle pointed at my friends, and slid into a recess in the side of the building.

  His friend continued to lay down suppressive fire, keeping Jorge and Garrett pinned down. If I were going to save them, it had to be now.

  I moved quickly to my left, angling in on the rear shooter, who was changing his magazine. As I approached him, his companion began to shoot from his position on the right, giving the man in front of me a chance to advance himself.

  As he started to stand up, I arrived behind him. Taking my heavy pistol, I whipped my hand back and clocked him at the base of his neck. The results were instantaneous. He dropped to the ground as the nearly two-pound chunk of metal smashed into the back of his head, right where the spine meets the skull. I didn’t hear him utter a word as his body flopped down and lay still.

  With his friend firing rapidly, I walked quickly to the right and came in behind the shooting man. He was in a recessed entrance to a travel agency’s side door; and with no way to get directly behind him, I raised my handgun and pulled the trigger.

  My first shot went wide, missing his head as I fought to control my emotions and stress. With more rounds in the magazine, I dumped the rest of my bullets at him, aiming for his body where I had a better chance of success.

  How many shots actually hit him is still a mystery to me, but the man dropped about half way through my magazine dump. When my pistol went empty, I ducked into the building through a shattered picture window and fumbled with my spare magazine as I tried to reload. I couldn’t be sure whether more were following, and I had to get my gun back in the fight. The adrenaline coursed through my blood, making my hand shake and my thumb quiver. Finally, I dropped the empty clip and slammed the new one into the pistol’s magazine well. I racked the slide and I was finally armed and dangerous once again.

  Peeking back the way I came, I waited for more to follow. Just when I thought it was clear, another person slunk from around the corner, his rifle up to his eyes as he searched for his friends and for me. With a lull in the gunfight, I heard Jorge rally the others. Suddenly, the third attacker heard his voice and started shooting once again down the side of the building at the group. With no return fire, the man sprinted toward my companions while I waited for him to come lateral to where I was hiding.

  He finally saw the downed man a doorway further down from my broken window. He moved to the side of the office building, following my footsteps. I retreated a bit into the darkness and raised my handgun, pointing it out the shattered window’s opening.

  A few more shots rang out from his rifle and he sprinted by me, taking a firing position above his now dead comrade. I moved back to the outside wall and peeked back where he had just come from. With no movement to the rear, I turned back and watched as the
man leaned out of the doorway he had taken refuge in. Less than 20 feet away, I aimed at his back and pulled the trigger. Two shots rang out from my handgun, each round causing the heavy pistol to kick back in my hand, and each explosion sending a deadly lead pill into the man’s neck and back. He flew forward, bouncing off the corner of the wall, and spinning out of the door’s landing, landing face-up in the building’s garden bed.

  “JORGE! GARRETT! It’s me! Are you guys OK?”

  A head popped up from the wall, and Jorge rose and sprinted toward me.

  “Come on!” I practically shouted. “All hell’s going to come down on us if we don’t get out of here!”

  “No! We need their weapons!” He yelled back. “GARRETT! A little help!”

  Garrett popped out from the side of the building where they had broken into one of the other offices to take cover. Jorge moved to the two men who lay in front of me, rolling the first man over and searching him for weapons and spare magazines.

  Garrett stopped and stared at the second man I shot. A low moan came from the downed thug.

  “I can’t move!” he whimpered. “Please help me. I can’t move my…”

  A single gunshot spat from Garrett’s Glock as he put the man down with a shot to the head.

  “Screw you!” Garrett hissed. “You tried to kill us. You tried to kill Janice!”

  He stood over the now-dead body, frozen as he assessed the damage he had wrought.

  “I’m going to get the other one!” Jorge said as he finished stripping the dead thug. “Garrett, get his rifle and check him for magazines! We need to move!”

  “I didn’t kill him!” I yelled at Jorge who was running back to the first man I felled.

  “What?” He stopped and asked. “What do you mean you didn’t kill him?”

  “I hit him over the head,” I said. “I didn’t want the other guy to know I was back here.”

  “Oh, OK.” Jorge replied.

  He brought his revolver up and advanced on the man I had knocked out. I watched as Jorge carefully, but quickly made his way back to the downed criminal. A single blast from his handgun ended the man’s life, and within another 30 seconds we were all running down the street, ducking into several backyards of homes that were either burned or had been broken into. We didn’t stop running until we had passed the elementary school and found a safe house beyond it, almost a mile from where the gunfight had occurred.

  Out of breath, we flopped on floor of the bungalow and lay silently, trying to catch our breath and shaking as the adrenaline that had been dumped into our blood burned itself away. As I lay on the hardwood floor, I couldn’t decide if I needed to cry or laugh. I took two men’s lives and wouldn’t have hesitated to take more if it had meant the safety of our group, and that made me sad. So I closed my eyes and lamented the fact that I had become a killer, not by choice, but by necessity. It helped that there had been no other way to save my friends; and it really made it tolerable that it had been dark enough that I didn’t see their faces.

  After reflecting on it for a moment more, I decided that I was going to be alright. It was a new world now and you either fought, or you died. There were no other choices left to me. With my heart finally slowing down and my friends at my side, I did what I had to do and I began to laugh. I laughed at death and how I had cheated it so far. I laughed, because for the first time in weeks, I finally felt in control in a world full of death and confusion.

  Strangely, I was the only one to have that reaction. The others lay silent, the dark hiding their reaction to my emotional outburst. Finally, I stopped as my feelings leveled off. I sat up and found my pocket flashlight. Turning it on and covering it with my hand, I let a bit of light filter out from between my fingers. I rose and did a quick survey of the house while the others continued to recover in the home’s living room.

  “In here!” I whispered to the group. “And bring the stuff we got back there.”

  I found a hallway bathroom with no windows and put my flashlight face down on the floor. The light that escaped from it was enough to illuminate the hallway without creating a lot of additional light that would give our position away.

  Three “black” rifles and eight additional magazines lay on the floor. A pistol similar to Garrett’s was recovered and two extra magazines for the handgun were salvaged as well.

  Jorge seemed to have some firearms knowledge, and my father had taken me to the range, giving me some rudimentary knowledge of the AR-15 style rifles we had recovered. Also, my dad had a few of these in his gun closet, and it’s my hope that I’ll find them still there when we get to his house.

  “OK.” Jorge said. “Who’s used one of these before?”

  I raised my hand, the only one of us other than him that had fired an AR-style rifle.

  “You pick!” He said.

  I looked over the three rifles, picking each one up to feel its weight. The third one I held was distinctly lighter than the other two. It didn’t have anything attached to it other than a small scope that was the size of a spool of thread. I put the gun to my shoulder and looked through the little device that was attached to the top of the rifle.

  “Nice choice!” Jorge said. “That’s an Aimpoint.”

  “I chose it because It’s the lightest rifle you had there,” I replied, admitting my ignorance at the lucky choice I’d made.

  “Have you ever used a red-dot sight before?” He asked.

  “No, my dad has regular telescopes on top of his rifle,” I replied.

  Jorge chuckled. “They don’t put telescopes on rifles, but I know what you mean. He has the long tube scope on his gun?”

  “Exactly, a telescope!”

  Everyone laughed but me. I didn’t get why they thought that was funny, but I don’t know guns too well. But I do know how to operate them; My father saw to that.

  I took the rifle away from Jorge and, pointing it in a safe direction, I ripped the magazine from the gun, pulled the charging handle back and released it to clear the rifle of a bullet that might be chambered. I locked the bolt back and inserted a fresh magazine from the spares on the floor and released the bolt back into a firing position. Shouldering the rifle, I looked through the scope and saw the image it projected.

  “Cool,” I said as I observed the glowing red dot that floated in the scope’s glass.

  “Now you know why they call it a red dot sight. Just look through the scope and put the dot on what you want to kill, then pull the trigger. It’s that easy.”

  Jorge took the next rifle, leaving the last one for Garrett. We quickly reviewed the operations of the guns; and after practicing several operations, including flipping the safety on and off and replacing the magazine, we continued our journey north.

  Janice was given Jorge’s revolver since it was the simplest weapon to use with no magazines to swap, just point and shoot.

  We moved with purpose for the next hour, stopping often and listening as we went from street to street and sometimes, just backyard to backyard. Each house presented a potential trap, and each street, with its dead cars and blocked road, was a possible ambush site. We took no chances; and although our progress was slow, it was safe.

  After midnight, we came to Leu Gardens, a 50-acre botanical site that hosted weddings and weekend outdoor movies. Approaching from the backyard of a home across the street from the lakefront garden, we scouted for an opening in the wrought iron gated facility where large vines spilled out over the top of the 8-foot-high fence. Unfortunately, the Virginia Drive entrance had been locked shut, preventing us from gaining easy access to the property.

  The home we were hidden behind was empty, its back door open to the outside, and not a peep coming from within.

  “Let’s take a break in there,” I said. “15 minutes of rest and we can decide our next move.”

&nb
sp; The old home, a wood-framed house from the 1920’s, had original wood floors that creaked as we walked on them. In the tomb-like air of the old house, it sounded obnoxiously loud.

  “Well, if anyone is in here, they know about us now!” I whispered as we all stopped in the kitchen, which was the first room we encountered.

  “Yeah,” Jorge replied. “But they can’t move without us hearing them too. Let’s just stay in this spot and avoid any problems.”

  He spread out the map and we reviewed our pathway north. It still didn’t look good. With the town of Winter Park between us and our destination, and multiple lakes to go around, we still had a lot of work cut out for us before we reached my dad’s house.

  “I don’t like this at all,” I said as we planned our route. “There are too many choke points as we pass between the lakes.”

  “Agreed,” Jorge said. “They’re natural ambush points. I know if I wanted to waylay any travelers, those spots are where I’d set up my trap.”

  Jorge pointed to three areas where we had to pass between adjoining lakes to make it past the town itself.

  “We need to get by Lake Sue,” I said, pointing to a large body of water just north of the botanical gardens. “We can cut through Leu Gardens and take Lakeside drive west of Lake Sue and approach Winter Park from the south.”

  “Yeah,” Jorge said. “But I agree with John, we need to avoid the downtown area. I went to school at Rollins College, which is at the south end of town, and it’ll potentially be a mess with the student dorms full of kids that can’t get home. Besides, with the jewelry shops and other high-end stores, there’s no way the gangs haven’t taken that area over.”