by McBain, Tim
They fell quiet for a long time. The car thumped over a speed bump, and they began winding their way down the final bends toward camp, toward home. And now her lips moved, finally ready to spill everything without her even telling them to.
“I’ve put this off a while now. I hope you won’t be mad at me.”
Something rattled outside, something like a particularly violent woodpecker interrupting her big moment.
Power through, she thought. Just go.
“Like I was saying,” she said.
“Lorraine.”
“I have something to tell you. Something important.”
“Lorraine.”
His voice sounded more urgent, and the car sped up then, the change in force pulling her back into her seat.
Power through. Power through. Power through.
“No, just let me get this off my chest.”
“Lorraine.”
The woodpecker noise was louder now, the rattle spraying in bursts. Except it wasn’t a woodpecker, she knew now that it was closer. It was an assault rifle. More than one, even. The windows muffled the miniature explosions, muted them, but the sounds were still percussive beyond what was believable. It wasn’t like it always sounded on TV. It was much more violent, with a high-pitched ping almost like something striking metal incredibly hard.
A grenade exploded just next to the driver’s side door, an orange ball of fire blossoming next to them, the force of it shaking everything, the boom felt and heard all at once, like a deep-throated nightmare rattling her ribcage.
So yeah, maybe now wasn’t the best time to tell him that she was pregnant.
Baghead
Outside of Little Rock, Arkansas
9 years, 128 days after
Delfino pointed, his finger aimed at the road in front of them, though for a long moment Baghead simply watched the tip of the finger itself the way a cat or a particularly dim dog would.
His eyes shifted to the dash, then to the windshield and finally gazed through the glass to the road beyond. The highway stretched out into the distance, a weathered gray color, like maybe once it was blacktop but it had been drained, exsanguinated, to this pale state.
Then he saw it. Another one. Bigger. More heavy duty than the last. Another spike strip.
Delfino’s finger retracted, his hand balling into a fist in front of him that he slowly brought to his lips.
“It’s one of them. You know it is,” the driver said, dabbing at the blood seeping from his snout. It looked fake somehow, a little too thick. Like someone had squeezed a couple of ketchup packets onto his nose and smeared it around.
“What?” Baghead said.
“One of the five, man. We need to move. Like now.”
One of the five. Right. That made sense, Bags thought. It occurred to him that his thoughts were a little cloudy, a little distant, like he just woke up. Maybe he had a concussion, a mild one. It was hard to say.
Everyone disentangled themselves from their seat belts and climbed out. Delfino grabbed his shotgun, which had been half-wedged under the seat. Seeing that reminded Baghead to do the same. The gun dangled at his side. He thought about trying to tuck it into his pants, feeling a little weird about having it out in the open somehow, but he was worried, on some irrational level, about the prospect of it leaving his hand. Like if he couldn’t feel it against his fingers, it’d find a way to vanish.
It felt wrong to be out here in the open. The skin on Bags’ neck crawled, a feeling he often got when he felt he was being watched. They took a few steps toward the side of the road, and Delfino stopped.
“Shit,” he said, opening the door and leaning into the backseat. “Everyone grab a water, and let’s get off the highway.”
He peeled the blanket and upholstery away, popped open the large metal cooler and doled out some water. Two more beat up Aquafina bottles for Bags and himself, and a slightly fancier looking boxy blue bottle with a pink flower on it that said “Fiji” on it for the girl. Then the driver fished around under the passenger seat, eventually pulling a tire iron free and tucking it into the back of his pants.
Baghead stared at the water bottle in his hand, felt the lukewarm temp of the fluid radiate through the plastic and into the palm of his hand.
“Off the road,” Delfino hissed. “Go. Go. Go.”
They all hopped over the mud and water at the bottom of the ditch and clambered up to the flat land on the opposite side. Baghead reached out and touched the sloped land for balance as he climbed, and the soggy sod there felt like touching a sopping wet carpet right in the midst of being shampooed.
Ruth and Baghead lingered at the top of the ditch.
“Into the brush,” Delfino said, still sounding agitated. “Let’s go.”
They pushed through the bushiest layer of green at the edge of the woods and stepped under the canopy of the little forested area on the side of the road. It wasn’t a huge swath of woods, but it was enough that the shade welled up around them. This felt a little less vulnerable than the open air, Baghead thought, but not by much. Now the prospect of something jumping out at them lurked behind every tree and bush.
Delfino clapped a hand into Baghead’s shoulder hard enough to knock him back half a step.
“What part of assassins trying to murder us are you not clear on? You’re walking around in slow motion out here.”
“I don’t know.”
Delfino squinted, looked into Baghead’s eyes for a long moment. His lips pursed a little as he examined his client, and then the driver’s expression softened a little.
“You got your bell rung pretty good back there, huh?” he said.
“What? Er… Yeah, I guess so.”
All Baghead could picture was his canvas bag stretched over a big bell, the metal walls of the thing reverberating, shaking like an alcoholic’s hands, a single clear tone ringing out forever with no beginning and no end. The sound was quiet and small perhaps, but it never quite tailed away into silence.
“Damn,” Delfino said, letting his eyes drift up to the layers of leaves above them. “Guess I’m lucky to have gotten out of it with a bloody nose after all.”
As if saying it reminded him of the blood, Delfino pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped at this nose. The first two wipes seemed to smear the red around more than clear it, but the third swipe was more effective. He looked at the girl as he continued working at it.
“What about you?”
She raised her eyebrows.
“What about me?”
“You get whacked on the head, too, or what?”
She smirked. Baghead thought her eyes looked clear, alert, but he wasn’t an expert.
“I hit my head on the window, yeah, but I’m fine.”
The driver squinted at her now before throwing a hand up.
“Alright. Well, there’s probably some series of concussion tests I should perform on the two of you, but I don’t know what those are, so let’s keep moving. Follow my lead.”
Dead leaves rasped and crinkled underfoot. Every step made a papery sound like a toy snare drum.
It wasn’t long before they could see the sunlight streaming through the other side of this little strip of woods. Strands of sunlight lit up individual leaves from behind. It almost looked like they were glowing.
Delfino spoke again, just above a whisper, as they veered right.
“Probably for the best that these woods are narrow and run along the road. Can’t get lost, you know? It’s not a lot of cover, I guess, but it should do. I hope.”
“So what are we going to do?” Baghead asked.
“What do you mean? We’re going to get new tires for the car.”
Ray
The Compound
279 days after
Ray’s hearing was a little blown out as soon as he got out of the car. He could hear, but everything was muted, muffled by a ringing high-pitched tone. There was something almost anticipatory about the sound, like a slide whistle reaching
the very top of its range and just sticking there forever.
Machine gun fire clattered from the woods, and Louis and the other construction workers had taken cover in the cabins to fire back while everyone else took shelter in the cafeteria. Ray made his way to them, stopping once after another grenade blast drowned everything out for a moment.
He crouch-walked among the men, and many of them poked their heads out of the front doors of their cabins to nod at him as he passed, a gesture of such reverence in this heated moment that it made him feel like a civil war general stalking along the front lines. As he stepped into Louis’s cabin, automatic rifles rattled on both sides of him, barrels jutted out of cabin windows. Shoulders jerked next to him with the recoil. It was Louis and another younger guy manning this post. He recognized the other but couldn’t remember his name at first. Jones. It was Jones. The one Lorraine had concerns about.
“How many?”
“We don’t know,” Louis said. “Perhaps fifteen or twenty.”
“Less,” Jones said, rolling his eyes. “Listen to the gunfire. It can’t be more than five or seven men.”
Louis and Ray stared at him a moment, Louis’s eyebrows wrinkled up, his bottom eyelids quivering in a way that reminded Ray of an irritated bird.
“Just my opinion,” Jones said.
The next grenade looked like a black rock tumbling in the sky, the texture not coming clear until it got close. It was terribly underthrown, landing over ten feet shy of the first row of cabins. Someone yelled, and everything got quiet for a beat, all gunfire ceasing, all breath held. The explosion made the guns sound puny, even more than before.
And his hearing suffered again. Sounds were made hollow somehow. Empty. Husks of what they should be. Like the auditory version of being able to look through something solid, the opaque turned translucent. The slide whistle went up another piercing octave.
“Grenades!” Louis cried out next to him.
Like that’s not fucking obvious, Ray thought. Still, it was important. They could handle five raiders with ease, though they were using the terrain to their advantage. Five raiders with grenades could be a different story, especially with the woods shading them from view.
Another grenade lobbed out of the shadows of the woods, arcing through the air in almost lazy fashion like a floated pass. This time the aim was true. It glided into the window of the cabin two doors down.
This time the beat of silence was longer. It stretched out. No gunfire. No chatter. A lump climbed in Ray’s throat as he braced himself for the boom. His mind flitted from question to question. Who was in that cabin? Two men, he was almost certain, but he couldn’t recall which two in particular. Had it been too long? Could that one have been a dud? It almost had to be, right? It had been far too long.
A voice said, “Shit.”
Someone in the grenade cabin, Ray thought. The delivery sounded like someone muttering to himself after spilling a glass of milk, though he doubted he’d be able to hear such a soft spoken murmur even in this moment of silence.
Even over the deafening roar of the explosion, even over the wood splintering and the glass of the window blowing out, even over the rumble juddering the air all around, he could hear the screams of the dying men.
Loud. Shrill. Terrified. Cut off quickly.
And the silence welled around them once more.
Erin
Presto, Pennsylvania
260 days after
She’d been making the preparations for several days, waiting until Izzy and Marcus were distracted or asleep while she packed the supplies they’d need.
She actually picked a day — April 1st — and then a storm rolled in, and it rained for two days straight. An April Fool’s Day joke from Mother Nature.
There was no weather forecast to consult now. She had to rely on instinct.
There were plenty of worries in the back of her mind, of course. It was still early Spring. The trees only had their baby leaves yet, small and still that tender yellow-green color. What if they left now, got a few days out, and it snowed again? It wouldn’t be unheard of, snow in April.
In some ways, she was almost glad for Marcus then. If it had still been just her and Izzy, she might have resisted moving on. But having a third wheel present, an interloper, made it clear. It was time to go their own way.
She woke Izzy before dawn. It was still full dark, but by the time she got Izzy up and dressed and awake enough to steer her bike, there was enough twilight to navigate without veering off the road into a ditch.
There was a chill in the air, so they shrugged into jackets before mounting up.
The bike tires bumped over stones and potholes that marred the driveway. Before they turned into the cover of the trees, Erin looked back at the house. That was the only farewell she made.
“Why is it so early?” Izzy mumbled through a yawn. As Erin had hoped, the disorientation of being up at dawn meant that Izzy had yet to inquire about Marcus. In fact they were a good three miles up the road before it occurred to her.
“Hey wait,” she said, stopping and putting a foot out to balance on. “What about Marcus and Rocky?”
“They’ll be fine.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means Marcus is a big boy that can take care of himself.”
“You mean they’re not coming?”
Izzy turned, like maybe he and the squirrel would be rounding the curve at the bottom of the hill they were climbing. When Erin didn’t answer, Izzy swung her head around to face Erin.
“We can’t just leave them behind! I’m going back.”
She scooted her bike around in a circle, pointing the nose back down the hill.
Fuck.
“Izzy, stop! They’re coming, too. I just… wanted to get an early start, and Marcus needs the extra rest still.” She didn’t like lying to Izzy, but she also didn’t see an alternative. She couldn’t drag a willful nine-year-old along. Not on a bike. Not even on foot.
“For real?”
“Yes. For real.”
“But how will they find us?”
“We looked at the map together. Me and Marcus.” She stopped short of actually saying that this was a plan she and Marcus had discussed. No need to take it that far. But technically they had looked at a map at the same time.
“Shouldn’t we leave some kind of sign?”
“Dude. Trust me. It’ll all work out.”
Because they’d stopped on a hill it was easier to get going again by walking the bikes the rest of the way up. It was slow. Erin figured they’d make it 25 miles the first day. According to the bicycle tour book from the library, that was a conservative estimate. She was hoping they might get up to a 40-60 mile average once they were in the swing of it.
Sweat adhered the fabric of her shirt to her skin by the time they reached the top of the hill. The loaded trailer on the back of her bike made the climb that much harder. She slid her jacket off and tied it around her waist. A robin hopped along a row of mailboxes, still stuffed with junk mail, soggy now from spending all winter exposed to the elements. The way the bird jerked its head to the side reminded her of the squirrel. Her eyes flicked over to Izzy.
Man, she felt like a huge dick, lying to the kid. Well, not lying, technically. Stretching the truth was more like it. But what the hell? Why did Izzy care so much about Marcus and that dumb squirrel?
Ray
The Compound
279 days after
The machine guns clattered again. Bullets sprayed one way and then the other, volleying back and forth with a steady rhythm. The hunks of metal thudded into the wood panels around them, pattering out little drum beats.
Ray, Louis, and Jones took cover, squatting in the cabin. Periodically the men leaned out to squeeze off a few rounds, firing into the darkening woods.
Ray’s finger twitched on the handgun resting against his knee. If he wound up needing to use it, they’d be in big trouble, he knew.
No one in their cab
in had spoken a word since the grenade flew into the window a couple of buildings over. Those fragmented screams still played over and over in Ray’s head.
The last of the sunlight bled out of the sky. The growing cover of night brought Ray no sense of security, however. It only pressed the attackers’ advantage, he thought. Soon it would allow them to come out of the woods, to stalk right up on them unseen. What option did they have? Lighting lanterns? With a beacon like that, they might as well shoot themselves. No. They were the prey, the hunted. There was no getting around it. Not any that he could see, anyway.
Watching the men work for a minute or two, Ray noted that Jones seemed to aim for where the muzzle flashes blazed orange flames in the dusk, though those constantly seem to move. Louis just seemed to fire at random.
“We’ve got to light ‘em up,” Jones said, his voice sounding hollow and distant though he appeared to be yelling.
Louis looked at him like a confused dog.
“Way I figure it, we’ve got them outnumbered five to one, but we can’t shoot what we can’t see, right?” Jones said. “We’ve got to hit ‘em with fire. Otherwise we’re just waiting around for the grenades to come our way, waiting in line to get fragged.”
“Fire?” Louis said. “But how?”
“Gasoline, bottles, and rags,” Ray said.
Jones nodded, something like relief flashing on his face in the way he blinked.
“Molotov cocktails,” Louis said. “That’ll set the woods on fire, won’t it?”
“All the better,” Jones said. “Torch ‘em or light these woods up so we can see ‘em and kill ‘em. Either way works for me.”
Louis blinked twice and then nodded in slow motion.
“There’s a couple of cans of gas in my cabin,” he said. “For the chainsaw. And Lumpy has old glass bottles decorating his cabin.”
Lumpy. Jesus, was that who got fragged in the cabin two doors over? Ray hoped not. He grit his teeth a second to avoid letting this thought show on his face, locking eyes with Louis instead.