by Thunboe, Bo
“Let’s get out of here.”
They ran across the lobby and up the stairs, Erin leading. Adrenaline continued to surge as they pounded up the dark stairwell, their panting breaths echoing in the dark. Erin miscounted and tripped at the second landing but sprang right back up. At the fourth-floor landing she pulled open the door to the weak light of the hallway. Melinda stood in the open doorway to their room and waved them inside. They rushed through.
“What happened?” Melinda closed the door behind them. “Why are you all so freaked out?”
Cammie came in from the other room “Did you get food?”
Lisa held up the one bag she’d retained. “Some.”
“Coach! What is that?”
Coach looked down at the tire iron dangling from his hand, a scatter of blood droplets on the carpet below the dripping tip. “We ran into trouble.” His face looked ashen in the dim light.
Erin put her hand on his shoulder. “You had to do it. You saved us, Coach.”
He shrugged her hand off and went into the other room.
Cammie grabbed Erin’s hand and pushed her down into one of the chairs by the window. “What happened?”
“Two guys—one was the guy who broke into my room and the other was the big guy who helped him try to steal that car—cornered us in the food closet. Coach pushed the bigger one out into the lobby and let the other guy past. We took him down while Coach… he killed the other guy. Stabbed him in the throat with that tool.”
Cammie’s face paled. She swallowed, then looked toward the door to the other room where Coach had gone. “But he had to do it, right?”
“They came at us. And they did mean to hurt us—they even said so. Because of me breaking that guy’s ribs.”
“He had to do it.” Melinda said. “He’s responsible for us.” Her breath caught. She closed her eyes. “Jeez. He really killed the guy?”
“Ripped a big hole in his neck,” Lisa said. “You could see the stuff inside there. Tendons and all that stuff.”
“Screw those guys” Sara said. “They got what they deserved.”
Was Sara right? Did Flannel deserve to die? He hadn’t done anything except threaten them before Coach killed him. But if Coach hadn’t acted, those two huge men would have trapped them in that little room and all four of them could be lying down there dead. She shuddered, then straightened and put the event behind her. “Let’s see what we have to eat.”
Lisa dumped the bag out on the bed. Three single serve boxes of cereal, six plastic cups of yogurt, dozens of jam and peanut butter packets, a loaf of rye bread, and a dozen pieces of fruit. The donuts and muffins must have been in one of the other bags.
Erin grabbed an apple and flopped on the bed. She took a big bite, the sweet tangy juice running down her chin.
“Should we ration this?” Sara gestured at the pile.
Erin stopped chewing and looked at the food. It was enough for a day, two at most. Then what?
Erin sat up. She swallowed and wiped her chin. “We need to go home.”
“Coach says we’re waiting it out,” Lisa said.
“What it?” Melinda went to the window. “He can’t still believe it’s just the power that went out.”
Sara put a hand on Melinda’s shoulder. “He’ll come around. We need to stick together.”
“Then we’ll go home together,” Cammie said.
Erin finished her apple and looked out the window. The sun hovered above the horizon. Maybe an hour till dark. She was going to leave in the morning. Even if she had to go alone.
She lay down on the bed. Cammie joined her, snuggling right up under the covers, ignoring a raised eyebrow from Melinda. She closed her eyes, Cammie’s soft warmth next to her, and drifted off.
* * *
Erin woke suddenly, gasping, hair stuck to her face. She lurched upright.
“What is it?” Cammie propped herself up on her elbows. “Bad dream?”
“I don’t know.” She remembered a Christmas tree and a big plaid coach and a weird coffee table with six sides and—their house back before her parents divorced. She’d been very young—two or three, maybe four. Dad had gone somewhere for work and she and…something happened. Something with Mom, but what was it?
Erin wiped drool off her chin and looked to the window. The sun was down, the purple glow of twilight spread across the horizon and lit the room in a soft light that threw dense shadows. “It’s nearly dark.” She pushed aside the blanket and stood up. It was colder now that the sun wasn’t warming the room. She stared at the distant horizon and forced her mind back to that family room and the Christmas tree. Dad always got real trees and the pine smell, and—smoke. Billowing out from the kitchen, then flames licking along the ceiling. Sean screaming. Erin screaming. Mom… gone. She and Sean ran outside and the fire department came and they spent the night at the neighbor’s house and Dad came home the next morning. Much later Erin found out Mom had stopped taking her medication because it made her feel “dulled.” She had forgotten she was cooking dinner, had two children at home, and even that she was married. That was the beginning of the end for the four of them.
But then Mom found Dan and got straight and everything was good—so long as Mom stayed on her meds and everything was normal. This wasn’t normal. And with Dan out of town and her “baby girl” in Elgin, Mom would be losing it. Sean could not handle that on his own.
“I need to go.”
Cammie joined her at the window and put her arm around Erin’s shoulder. “Coach won’t let—”
“He can’t stop me.”
“He’s responsible—”
“I’m going.”
“On that trail you told us about?”
“Yes,” Erin said.
“Coach is kind of freaked out from killing that guy, but maybe in the morning—if the power’s not back on—we can talk him into leaving. Can you—”
“I can’t wait, Cammie. My mom.” Erin shook her head. “She’s got mental issues. With both me and Dan gone she’s going to be… not good. She takes medication so you normally can’t tell, but even with the medication she can have an episode if something bad happens.”
“I understand.”
“Do you want to come with me?”
“I can’t. I’m—” Cammie’s lips pursed. “I’m not as brave as you, Erin. I’m going to stay with Coach.”
Erin said nothing. She wasn’t going because she was brave. She was going because she was scared of what might be happening to Mom right now. She put her shoes on, then pulled on her coat, gloves, and hat. She picked up her backpack.
“That’s mine,” Melinda said. “Yours has the tassel.”
Melinda was right. Erin dropped the bag and found the one with the neon green rabbit’s foot. Mom put it on her bag when they went to Hawaii last year. She swung the backpack up onto her shoulders. She would leave her suitcase behind. She would be home in a few hours and had plenty of clothes there. Plus, she needed to travel fast. “I’ll see you when—”
Cammie kissed her. Erin soaked in the raw feel of their lips and bodies pressed together, a tingle running up her spine. Too soon, Cammie pulled away.
“Be safe,” Cammie said.
“You too.”
Cammie smiled and walked her to the door and then Erin was alone in the hallway as the door closed behind her, the click of its latch making her jump. “Calm down, Champ.” She put her hand on the wall and waited for her eyes to adjust, but even a few minutes later the hallway was pitch black. She felt her way to the end of the hall, found the door, and pushed it open. She took her time descending the stairwell, one hand on the railing, the other hand feeling the way in front of her. The zip of her nylon gloves sliding along the bannister and her panting breath both bouncing back at her off the concrete walls.
At the bottom she felt her way to the lobby door and paused with her hand on the knob, gathering herself for what might lay beyond. The dead man, and Red Hat, and who knew what else. But now that she was alone, she could
just run. She eased the door open, then walked slowly into the lobby. In the pale gray light she saw a trail of paper plates strung across the lobby leading past Flannel’s body—now draped with a sheet—to the open door of the food closet. But she was alone.
She went to the glass doors, adjusted her pack, and pushed them open. Damn, it was cold. She hunched her shoulders and looked around. The sky was clear, the moon so bright it threw sharp shadows.
She walked west through the parking lot and over the grass strip at the edge of the big road that went south into downtown Elgin. The wind came from the west, stiff and cold. She headed south, scanning ahead and behind and to the sides, her heart thumping wildly. The broad open plain of the roadway felt too exposed. When she walked into the shadow under the overpass she paused to regroup. She couldn’t walk twenty-something miles tensed up like that. Hopefully the bike trail would be bordered by trees and bushes like the parts she’d ridden with her family.
When her pulse slowed, she continued on. Movement ahead. She crouched and froze. Unsure what she’d seen. There! A dark shape crossing the road from right to left. Then another that strung out and didn’t end. She looked up. A sweep of clouds shadowed the moon as they moved across it. Calm down, Champ.
She would never get home if she stopped for every shadow.
A half-mile along, the road crossed over a pair or rail lines that went east then curved south, the metal rails gleaming in the shadowed moonlight. She remembered these tracks. They went right along the river in downtown Elgin. As soon as the guard rail ended, she pushed her way through the bushes along the road and scrambled down the hill to the tracks. Trees and shrubs ran along both sides of the tracks shielding her from the wind and the eyes of anyone who might be out. She took a deep breath and exhaled, the tension leaving her.
She walked between the rails, placing her feet on the ties to avoid the crunch of her shoes on the rock rail bed. But the ties were too close together for her normal stride and the short steps they forced her to take slowed her down. She hooked her thumbs into her backpack straps, pulled the bag tight to her back, and broke into a jog, stepping on every other tie. She found the perfect pace and settled into it, the backpack bouncing. Her stride felt awkward because she couldn’t swing her arms but it was doable and ate up distance a lot faster than walking.
Every few steps, she looked up. The land rose up on her right behind a curtain of bare-branched trees and dropped down a slope to her left to the Wolf River. She passed an apartment complex, a water treatment plant, then a thick stand of trees with the Wolf flowing beyond it. Then the trees were gone as the tracks pinched right up to river’s edge. The Wolf was at least two hundred feet wide here and made the Paget look like a creek. Both banks were lined with ice, but the middle moved, great humping swells and white-capped wavelets. It smelled of dirt and decay.
At the first cross street she stopped. Downtown Elgin lay spread out ahead of her on the other side of the river. That’s where the bike trail was.
But she hesitated. On the bridge across the river she would be visible for a long way and people out in this frigid darkness wouldn’t be good people. Maybe she should stay on the tracks, which continued in a near tunnel of scrub brush and overhanging trees on the other side of the street. It looked much safer, but she didn’t know where the tracks went. Stick to the plan, Champ.
She took the sidewalk across the bridge. The wind held the bite of the frigid water and ice it swept across before pummeling her with cold mist. She clenched her body against it and continued, head on a swivel, but saw no one. On the other side she found the “Bike Trail” sign on a pole next to the brick walkway that went south along the river. She got on it, walking quickly, alert and ready. When the moon peeked through the clouds, its light glinted off the ice skim and threw shadows off a fancy wrought iron fence between the path and the icy edge of the river. A series of parking lots on her left were dotted with cars, then the cultural center pinched the path up against the river, then more parking lots. No one in sight.
The crash of breaking glass.
She crouched.
Voices straight ahead. The clatter of tools. A break in the cloud cover sent a shaft of moonlight down that illuminated three men huddled around a car abandoned in the road. Something low and sleek. Pebbled glass sparkled and crunched under their feet. They were not even twenty feet from her path. She’d have to take a detour.
She crept away from the river, dropping into a running crouch as she hugged the low wall bordering a parking lot. When she got to the cross street she broke into a jog, but two men popped out of the shadows ahead of her. She juked but got tripped and sprawled out on the sidewalk, her chin banging on the concrete. She spat out a piece of tooth and scrambled to her feet but it was too late. They’d surrounded her.
Three men now.
They spread out around her.
She dropped into a fighting stance and waited, circling slowly, hands up and loose. They were in their twenties, all wearing thick hoodies and dark jeans. She put the fat one behind her anticipating he’d be the slowest, and waited for one of them—the leader—to speak.
“Where you going?” The one with the weak mustache. “What’s in the bag?”
She launched herself, a fist to his throat then her knee to his torso three times before anyone else even moved. She felt ribs crack under her onslaught. She pushed off him as he fell and landed on the balls of her feet.
“What the hell you do that for?” The fat one knelt next to his friend.
She turned to run and made it two steps when something hit her in the chest, knocking her on her back, the hard angles of the stuff in her backpack between her and the pavement.
She rolled to her knees and got up. Three more men had joined the first three. Two of the new guys carried metal baseball bats. They all hung back now, out of her reach. But with these odds she was now on the defensive and that was okay because she had a hundred ways to counter an amateur’s attack. She would wait.
She put her hands up and started circling. Waiting for them to make their move.
Then she would create an opportunity.
47
Mary waited the full four hours before waking Dan. She spent two of those hours on the couch with him, feeling his warmth, the rise and fall of his chest. She must have fallen asleep at some point because suddenly Sean was asleep on the floor next to them.
She pushed a can of chili into the coals and pulled it out when it was bubbling. She stirred the coals with the poker, then added a log. When it was crackling nicely, she woke both her men.
Sean rose quickly, smiling, his eyes on Dan. Dan sat up on the couch, rubbed his face, then ran his fingers through his hair. “Sean!” Fist bump.
Mary poured the chili into a bowl and brought it to Dan with a bottle of water. He drained the bottle. “What hotel is Erin in?
“The Holiday Inn north of downtown. Near the corner of State Street and highway I-90.”
“I can get up there in a couple hours on my bike.”
“I got it ready for you,” Sean said. “I pumped up the tires and oiled the chain and put my rack on the back for Erin to sit on.”
“I knew you guys wouldn’t just be sitting here waiting for me.” He squeezed Sean’s shoulder.
While Dan ate the chili Sean told him what he’d missed. Dan was a great listener. His attention focused, probing with a question when he sensed an interesting detail had been omitted. He finished the chili about the same time Sean was done talking. He’d left out the deer, probably as a surprise for when Dan went to the garage to get his bike. But he’d also left out the bad parts, and they had to be told.
“Tell him about the three men and about Carson stealing from you.”
“I handled those, Mom!”
“Dan needs to know what’s happened here and how we’ve dealt with it.”
“Tell me, Sean.”
Sean did so, his voice shaking when he told Dan about the three men.
Dan put his
hand on Sean’s shoulder. “Some people are using what happened as an opportunity to act without consequence. I saw it out there on my way home. It’ll get worse.”
“We’ll handle them,” Sean said.
“Damn right we will. Now tell me about Carson.”
Sean related his experiences with the man and Mary explained the co-op Carson had started under his supposed CERT authority.
“What do we know about CERT?”
“I have some info on it from the Citizen’s Academy. It stands for Community Emergency Response Team. Volunteers. Carson says he’s in charge of our court and we have to join the co-op to share in whatever food the city distributes when it takes over the grocery stores.”
“Is everyone on the court going along with that?”
“The Simpsons and Vargas are taking Buddy’s vehicle—it still runs—to a relative’s farm in Indiana. I think everyone else is in.”
“What do you think, Mary?”
“We’d have to give Carson everything we have and then he’d dole it out to the court. We’d get back a lot less than we put in and I don’t want our survival dependent on that man.”
“I saw a lot of looting on the way home so the city’s plan to take over the stores and distribute food will fail. And who would do it? I bet most city employees will stay home to protect their families.”
“What else did you see?” Sean asked.
Dan told them about the old people crashing into his car, walking them home, and then realizing what had happened. “I decided I needed to get home ASAP.” He told them about getting the motorcycle, about finding the gun, and about both times he had to use it.
“You had to shoot that guy,” Sean said. “He deserved what he got.”
Dan grimaced, then finished his story. The longer he talked the worse Mary’s hands shook until she clamped them between her thighs to still them.
“You need to go.”
Dan stood up, swayed slightly, then rubbed his face. “I’m ready.”
He didn’t look ready; he looked exhausted. But he could sleep when he got home. “The gun’s on the mantel.”