by TJ Klune
He tore his gaze away from Lucas and looked back out toward the destruction where Hank was pointing.
The Dead Rabbits were regrouping. Those who could stand were pushing themselves up, picking their guns and knives and machetes out of the snow. One had a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire.
“Jesus,” Hank muttered. “How many are there?”
“Enough,” Cavalo said. “Patrick?”
Hank shook his head.
Cavalo couldn’t see him either. He hoped Patrick was lying in pieces in the snow, buried in limbs and smoke and ash. He didn’t think it’d be that easy.
The Dead Rabbits were starting to move. Cavalo couldn’t see any one Dead Rabbit who seemed to be in charge. From what Lucas had told him, Patrick had a dictatorship, almost revered as a deity. Lucas was meant to be his second-in-command, but the hierarchy quickly dissolved below that.
He didn’t know which one of them picked up their battle cry again, but there was a roar from the Dead Rabbits, and it was quickly followed when others joined in. It chilled Cavalo completely, his eyes skating over the Dead Rabbits. He saw one whose head was rocked back, his heated breath blowing steam into the air as he screamed. He would have looked like the others around him, except his arm had been blown off in one of the explosions. The stump was ragged and wet, cut off just below his bicep. He screamed like the rest of them.
And they started forward.
“Do nothing,” Cavalo barked in a low voice. “Save your bullets. Save the arrows.” The Patrol looked back at him uneasily.
The Dead Rabbits crossed into the open. Rifles were raised. Ancient handguns, covered in grime and rust. He never found out who fired the first shot from the advancing tide. Never saw the Dead Rabbit who did it.
The shot was fired. The Patrol ducked against the wall. Bad Dog whined quietly. Lucas barely flinched.
But that first shot was the opening of the floodgates. More came. The air was suddenly filled with the whine of bullets, the soft hush of arrows. Cavalo pulled Lucas down against the wall as it chipped and cracked above them. He heard a low cry off to his right and looked over. One of the Patrol, a young woman, held her arm, blood welling through her fingers. He heard Aubrey curse loudly before she rose to her feet, keeping her body below the wall line. Hank snapped at her to stay where she was, but she ignored him. She ran along the wall, the Patrol moving away and lying flat to let her by. She slid next to the girl and tore off part of her undershirt, wrapping the fabric around the girl’s arm. The girl cried out as Aubrey tied it off, pulled it tight. She glanced back over her shoulder to Cavalo and nodded sharply.
Cavalo turned his head to look over his shoulder into the thin space between the wood of the wall. It wouldn’t be much longer now, he knew. Just a few more steps and—
He didn’t see the first one. He heard it, though, a muffled thwump above the gunfire followed by more screams. There was a second and third, and he could hear the moment the bullets flying overhead lessened. In that growing silence, he thought wildly of his father and how one day, when Cavalo (James James James) had been twelve, his father had laid into him after a particularly harsh bender the night before. Cavalo had ended up with two broken fingers and bruises that darkened his face and chest. “I’m sorry,” he’d told Cavalo days later, and Cavalo had believed him. He was sorry. It was this memory Cavalo had thought of when he’d been told his father was found dead in a ditch, neck broken, the stench of alcohol as thick as the mass of flies that landed on his hardening skin.
And it was this memory Cavalo thought of now as the gunfire above their heads became sporadic as the Dead Rabbits ran into more and more of the land mines hidden in the snow. He could hear his father’s voice in his head, and he was sorry, and all Cavalo could think was maybe they did have a chance. Maybe this didn’t need to end in the destruction and death of Cottonwood. The thought was almost enough to tilt the ground beneath Cavalo’s feet, and he took a breath, and then another. A man less hardened than Cavalo would have called that feeling hope. Cavalo couldn’t recognize it for what it was, even if it burned like wildfire in his chest.
He was angry now. Very angry. He unshouldered his rifle, the metal cold against his skin. Bakalovs, SIRS had told them when he’d opened his metal box. From Before. Bulgarian, I’m told. Nasty, nasty things. Has an alt fire mode. 40 mm rifle grenades. Don’t have many of those, but there should be enough to get things started. Even though his mouth couldn’t move, Cavalo was sure SIRS was smiling.
The others along the wall watched him, waiting.
“Bad Dog,” he snapped. “Go. Get to OldBill. It’s started. Then find me. Hurry.”
Bad Dog bumped his head against Cavalo’s knee. I will find you, he promised and then was gone.
He glanced over at Lucas, who nodded before Cavalo could speak, as if he knew everything Cavalo was thinking. For all Cavalo knew, he did.
He waited only a few more seconds before he heard what he was waiting for. When the low booms of the land mines became more frequent than the gunfire, James Cavalo knew the moment had come.
“Now!” he roared, pushing himself up the wall.
The second before his finger pulled down on the trigger, his eyes darted across the divide in front of him. His eyes stuttered for a moment, because it looked as if the snow had fallen red all over the ground. There was a low boom, and the snow globe was filled with a crimson mist, and the bees just laughed and laughed.
He pulled the trigger to drown them out.
He felt his hands shake.
He felt the stock of the rifle vibrate against his arm.
His mouth was open, teeth bared. No sound came out.
He saw the bullets as they left the barrel of the rifle. Heard the shells bounce off the wood at his feet.
He smelled the flash of gunpowder, acrid and hot.
He smelled blood on the wind.
There were still too many of them standing. Cavalo felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of Dead Rabbits who had poured into Cottonwood. He thought of the shadows on the wall as Lucas had told him his story and hadn’t remembered seeing this many of them. Of course, he hadn’t actually been there, but the line between what was real and what was in his head had blurred so long ago that he no longer knew which side he stood on.
Only a second or two had passed since he’d first opened fire. He was joined moments later from all sides as the Patrol lit up the lines of Dead Rabbits below them. He thought some of them might have been screaming along with those being slaughtered below, but he couldn’t be sure.
His clip was spent, and he was handed another by the man who’d lit the arrow. He switched out the clips and fired again.
The Dead Rabbits were trying to scatter, trying to push forward, but they kept stepping on mines and dirt, and snow tinged with red burst up from the ground.
Cavalo saw a female Dead Rabbit raise her hands as if in surrender before she fell forward, a surprised look on her face, a red stain blooming across her chest.
A male Dead Rabbit with black sores on his arms ran forward, trying to zigzag through the minefield. He made it halfway through before he slipped on the snow and fell face forward. The moment he touched the ground, he exploded.
They kept coming.
Cavalo thought of razor-thin wolves while voices around him screamed about DEFCON 1. They had kept coming too.
Cavalo didn’t know why. What the Dead Rabbits’ motivations were. What Patrick had promised them. How much they revered him. How much they were terrified of him. If it was Patrick, then he had a hold on them like nothing Cavalo had ever seen before. Yes, there were stragglers. There were a few that seemed to be trying to edge away from the rest, clawing their way to the back of the wall of flesh. But the majority pushed forward. They paused when those in front of them exploded. They hesitated when bullets struck the ground in front of them, tossing little arcs of snow into the air. But they did not stop.
One managed to make it through, slipping only once in the blood of t
hose who had come before him, their deaths clearing the nearest mines. He was grinning around a knife in his mouth. Cavalo could see trickles of blood running down his chin from where the knife had cut the corners of his lips when he’d stumbled to his knees. This was more than reverence or fear. This was downright insanity. Cavalo should know. He’d seen it enough when he looked in a mirror. When he looked at SIRS. Or Lucas.
The Dead Rabbits were snapping, the rubber bands in their heads long since rotted. And they were swarming because of it.
As the Dead Rabbit crested the snowbank, he looked up at Cavalo. He was younger than Cavalo had first thought, far younger, maybe no older than Deke or Aubrey. His eyes were blown out, almost all black. His face and hands were coated in gore and grime. Cavalo took aim. The Dead Rabbit laughed around the knife. He knew he was going to die. And he didn’t care.
He did die then. But not because of Cavalo. He ran up the snowbank and didn’t see the trench stretched out before him until it was too late. There was an aborted attempt to jump across the trench, but his feet slipped in the snow. A look of surprise came over his face, as if he couldn’t believe he’d been tricked. As if he couldn’t believe this is how it would end for him. He didn’t scream. He didn’t have a chance. A wooden pike pierced his stomach. Another went through his right leg. His head bounced off a third, but Cavalo doubted he even felt that. His weight pulled him down the pike through his stomach. The wood was red as the boy thrashed, his knife lying at the bottom of the trench. Snowflakes stuck to the red and melted. The boy gave a great shudder, his back bowing, his head arching up. He froze like that for a moment, as if posing. And then he exhaled, dropped back down, and did not move.
It had only taken seconds. The whole thing.
Cavalo was shocked how well their plans were working, as flimsy as they were. He was surprised they’d made it this far. And just when he began to think that maybe they’d survive this, that maybe they’d have a chance and they’d walk out of here with most of their parts attached, everything changed.
“Reload!” Cavalo barked, ejecting the spent clip. He was handed another. He slammed it into the rifle and took aim again. He was conscious of Lucas at his side, how he fired the gun and took out his own people. He wondered if he recognized each of them before he shot them down. If he skipped over ones who had been kind to him in favor of ones who had wronged him somehow. He didn’t think Lucas would be that discriminatory, but it made him feel better to believe he could be.
Not that Cavalo was being discriminatory. Every single Dead Rabbit who came into the sight of the rifle went down in a spray of blood. That made him feel better too.
And then it all went to hell.
“RPG!” someone farther down the line yelled.
Cavalo couldn’t find the rocket launcher. Couldn’t see who had it. Couldn’t find him amongst the crowd. A second had gone by. And then another. And then another, and the sweat dripped down Cavalo’s neck as he thought WHERE WHERE WHERE.
“There!” he heard Deke cry. Deke rose to his feet, above the wall, and fired once. He screamed in triumph. He must have hit the Dead Rabbit.
He fired again. And again.
“Get down!” Hank shouted, reaching for his son.
But there was the sharp whine of a bullet slicing air. Cavalo could hear it above everything else, and for the rest of his days, he would never forget the sound. Nor would he forget the sound when the bullet struck Deke above his right eye. Of bone cracking. Of gray matter separating. Of Hank letting out a sigh, light and broken. Of Aubrey’s soft cry that turned into something more.
He would remember those sounds for the rest of his days. But out of all of them, it was Deke who gave him the one he would remember most.
He fired his gun.
He shouted in joy.
Hank: Get down!
The bullet entered his skull.
Left through the back.
Hank sighed.
Aubrey cried.
And Deke looked down at them, one eye left, but still unseeing. He said, “Daddy? Is that you? It got dark. I can’t find my way out of the dark. But it’s okay. There’s someone here with me. He says that Mr. Fluff will help us if we get lost.”
And then he fell, his head rolling toward Cavalo as it thumped against the wood. Deke’s chest didn’t rise. His unseeing eye stared at Cavalo. A single snowflake fell into it and melted as Cavalo watched. It ran down his cheek like a tear.
“No,” Hank said almost conversationally. “No. No.” He reached for his son but stopped at the last second, hands hovering over Deke’s face. Blood pooled underneath Deke’s head.
“Dad!” Aubrey cried.
“He’s not—”
“We don’t have time for this,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “Not now. They’re coming!”
“Deke!” Hank cried, touching his chest. “Get up. Get up, boy!”
Cavalo reached for him and pulled him against his chest, his mouth near Hank’s ear. Hank struggled, almost throwing Cavalo off.
“Don’t do this,” Cavalo hissed at him. “Not now.”
“Let me go!” he cried. “Deke! Your face…. Ah, God. Your face.”
“Hank!” Cavalo barked sharply. “We need you. She needs you.”
“He’s not,” Hank moaned.
“I know. And I’ll mourn with you, brother. But not now. If we stop now, all of this will have been for nothing.”
Cavalo could feel Hank pulling himself back together, or at the very least, shoving the broken pieces of his heart and soul away. He felt a stirring like cold admiration, not because of Hank’s ability to focus, but from a hunter’s understanding of compartmentalization. Sorrow could come later, if they survived this. It would bring them nothing now. Now, he needed Hank to use it as fuel for his fire.
“We’ll kill them,” he said quietly in Hank’s ear. “We’ll kill them all.”
“Withered and sere,” Hank whispered.
Cries of alarm went up around him, warnings shouted in raising tones.
Cavalo didn’t have time to react before a warm body pressed against his back and pulled him sharply away. He tried to hold on to Hank, but his fingers slipped and then were empty. He lost all sense of direction when something exploded under his feet in a bright flash, knocking him back. He heard the wood splinter and crack, smelled the sharp acrid sting of fire and smoke. The bees swarmed angrily in his head. He was airborne, and he told himself this was nice. Learning to fly. The bees screamed he had lost something, Charlie, and they were going into DEFCON 1. He told them the coyotes were long gone, now nothing but bones and dust in a forgotten bunker. They didn’t believe him.
He landed with a jarring crash, suddenly wet and cold, the breath knocked from his body. His ears were ringing, and he opened his eyes to a gray sky and swirling snow. He turned his head, and Deke lay next to him, his body cocked at an odd angle, bloody tears streaming down his face. It looked as if his arm had been broken in the fall. Cavalo hoped it hadn’t hurt too bad. But then he remembered the bloody hole in Deke’s head and thought the arm was the least of Deke’s worries.
There was pain in the side of his head, and he reached a hand up to brush against it. It came away wet, his fingertips a deep red. His vision threatened to tunnel, but he closed his eyes and shook his head, trying to clear it away.
Get UP! an angry voice said. Get UP! A warm tongue against his face. MasterBossLord! Get up, get up, get up!
He opened his eyes again and saw Bad Dog standing above him, looking worried. A cold nose pressed to his cheek and tickled his ear as the dog huffed his skin. “I’m good,” he muttered.
Blood, Bad Dog whispered. I can smell your blood.
Bad Dog crowded him as he pushed himself up. His back hurt. His head hurt. His legs hurt. He was getting too old for this shit. Another reason why Lucas—
Lucas.
He could hear shouts in the distance, angry voices that were swallowed occasionally by muffled thwumps that Cavalo ignored.
Others lay around him, groaning and beginning to move. Hank. Alma. Aubrey. Frank. Bill and Richie, farther down the way. Some of the Patrol didn’t move at all, the snow around them stained red. One was the boy whose mother did not want him on the wall with the rest. It looked as if his neck had been broken in the fall.
Cavalo’s stomach clenched. His skin felt hot as he frantically searched the snow around him, shoving debris out of the way. He was sure he was gone. Not dead, but gone, disappeared as if he’d never before existed. Maybe this whole thing had been a dream. Maybe he was now awake and Lucas wasn’t real, that none of the last months had been real.
Of course it hasn’t been real, the bees said as they swarmed. He couldn’t even talk, and yet you held conversations with him, as if by some magic you knew what he was saying. That’s not real, Cavalo. None of that was real. You lost your mind. For the longest time, you were crazy. Now you’re finally awake. It’s that ache in your head. That stutter in your chest. That catch in your breath. You’re awake now.
“Daddy!” he heard his dead son call, but when he looked up, Jamie wasn’t there.
“Lucas!” he shouted, crawling toward the wall.
A hand fell on his shoulder and gripped him tightly. Cavalo took a shuddering breath and sat back on his heels. He reached back and took the hand in his own, wrapping his other arm around Lucas’s legs. He pressed his head against Lucas’s stomach and felt fingers against his ear. Bad Dog pressed against them both. He took a moment because he didn’t know if they’d have another.
Lucas pulled him up. His mask was streaked across his face. Blood dribbled out of his right ear. His lip had been split. His cheek bruised. His coat had been torn and singed. But his eyes were clear, and he held his knife in his hand. Lucas nodded his head toward the shattered wall. RPG, he said. Almost didn’t make it in time.
“Are you okay?” Cavalo asked.
Lucas nodded. Winced. Okay. Head hurts. It’s fine.
“Don’t do that again,” Cavalo snarled at him. He couldn’t tell Lucas of the momentary flashes of fear when he couldn’t find him. He couldn’t even focus on that himself. It was too much for him to take in. That Lucas might have been gone. That he might not have been real.