Owen approached the booth where Cyndi, Syd, and Lucy were sitting. Watching, Nathan bit into his lip so hard that he drew blood and felt it spreading across his tongue.
Owen reached out a hand and pulled Lucy to her feet. She didn’t resist, and for all his doubts about the woman, Nathan was impressed that she didn’t cower or look scared. Her eyes were demons, her knuckles white as the snow outside as they made fists.
“You know why we call ourselves the Seven-Ones, blondie?”
Lucy made a show of thinking hard. “Because seven plus one is your collective IQ?”
Nathan felt the air sucking out of the room. Owen was on the cusp of striking her with his fist, and Nathan noted the supreme effort it took him not to hit Lucy where she stood. “No, sweet cheeks,” the tattooed thug said, trying to give the impression her words hadn’t vexed him. “For every man, seven women.”
Lucy’s face grew even more unimpressed. “I knew you incels were crazy, but I didn’t realize you were demanding harems now. I must read Sad Lonely Masturbator Mother’s Boy Weekly more often.”
Owen boiled. He clearly wasn’t used to being back-chatted in this way. “Maybe you like that kinky, tied-up-in-a-cage crap, but I don’t want to have to find the key every time I want you to get me beer.”
“The world has frozen over, but hell would have to follow, too, before I urinated in your cup to quench your thirst.”
“You can join us the easy way or the hard way, lady.”
“Do you have problems staying hard? I understand there are tablets you can take…”
“I admire spirit,” Owen drawled, letting his hand lift from Lucy’s wrist, brushing her breast slowly, to scratch at his stubbled chin. Suddenly, it was the loudest sound in the universe. That was until Lucy reached down to the table, picked up a plate, and smashed it over the side of Owen’s head.
“I hope you like your spirit on the rocks,” Lucy said simply as Owen spun away, crashing into an empty booth with shards of china clattering around his feet as he fell.
Every gun in the room pointed at Lucy.
She just raised a questioning eyebrow and waited.
A hand appeared from the booth where Owen had fallen. “Wait,” Owen said croakily, lifting himself up, rubbing at the damage to the side of his head with the other. “If we’re gonna get the old bird to tell us where the gold is, we’re gonna have to keep her alive for… persuasion.”
With all raiders’ eyes on Lucy, Nathan realized with sudden terror, that in an unthinking reflex action, he’d stepped from behind the refrigerator to defend her. He was out in the open. Fully visible. All it would take was for one of the raiders to turn their head and he would be toast.
The only other pair of eyes in the room not on Lucy were Cyndi’s. Cyndi was looking at him with an expression morphing back and forth between horror and elation.
Cyndi’s eyes were willing him to step back, and so he did, pressing his face against the cool flat steel he’d been hiding behind, trying to fight the rising beat of his heart.
“Stop! Stop! Stop it! Stop it!”
Marty.
Nathan could hear the wailing sobs of the old man’s breath and could feel the wrenching of twisted emotion in his voice. “Don’t! Don’t! Momma! Momma!”
Marty’s dementia-fueled distress popped the balloon of tension in the room for the scavengers. Suddenly, there was sniggering and laughter.
“He pissed his pants!” The remark had come from Bronx, the cruel delight in her voice palpable.
“Momma! Momma! Make it stop!”
“I’ll make it stop for you, grandpa.” Owen’s voice was accompanied by the steely shuffle of him putting a round in the chamber of his pistol. Nathan screwed up his eyes. He’d never felt so useless in his life, just having to listen to this horror show. He ground the back of his head into the steel of the refrigerator and waited for Owen to put Marty down like a dog.
“Please don’t!” Cyndi. Voice wavering, but her intent clear. “If I put the tape player on, it’ll calm him down. I promise.”
“Momma! Momma! Please, Momma!”
“Can I?” Cyndi pressed.
“Momma! I wet my pants, Momma! I wet my pants!”
Cyndi must have been given permission because, seconds later, she walked past Nathan’s hiding place to the cassette player, and within moments, Elvis began singing about Heartbreak Hotel and Marty fell silent.
Nathan watched his wife walk back past him, and as she again didn’t dare look at him, he just blew a kiss and sent every positive thought out to her that he could.
I’m coming for you, baby.
Nathan rendezvoused with Donie and Dave back in the brush. They’d been on their own mission to the parked Airstream. They were ruddy-faced and out of breath, but their faces were alight with excitement.
“You can do this?” Nathan asked, still not sure if his plan was going to work or get them all killed.
Donie brushed imaginary dirt from her shoulder. “We got this. You just say the word and all hell will break loose.”
Nathan pointed to where Mustache and Redhead were trying to wake Freeson up from his battered stupor by rubbing snow in his face and howling like hyenas. “Okay. When I’ve dealt with those two, hit it.”
“You got it,” Dave said, holding up his smart phone. “All I gotta do is hit send. Bluetooth is strong with this one.”
Nathan waited until Redhead and Mustache had their backs to him working on Freeson, and then, keeping the gas pumps between him and the diner to prevent anyone in there seeing him, he broke cover. He prayed to whatever deity was looking after men running across snowy concrete that he wouldn’t slip as he sprinted diagonally across the forecourt.
Nathan shoulder-smashed into Mustache at full pelt. The man crashed into a gas pump as Nathan brained Redhead with the butt of his shotgun. Redhead went down in a crash, his scalp spraying blood.
Nathan smashed the foreheads of both men with the butt of his gun twice more to ensure their unconsciousness, and then, bending, he placed his ear against Freeson’s mouth. He was in a bad way, but he was breathing. Nathan had to be grateful for that. He used his knife to cut Freeson down and then propped his friend against the pump, his head lolling.
“What… kept you?” A broken smile through torn lips, purple bruises, and smears of dark blood split Freeson’s face. “Thanks for not leaving me, buddy.”
Nathan squeezed Freeson’s shoulder. “Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner, man. Now, just keep your head down. We’re not out of this yet.”
“Ten… four.”
Nathan turned and signaled to Dave, whose dark form he could just make out in the brush.
Thub-Thub-Thub Thub-Thub-Thub Thub-Thub-Thub
The rotor sound of a hovering helicopter rent the air. Blue police flashers turned, illuminating the walls of the diner. Sirens wailed and engines roared into life.
Nathan sprinted for the wrecker, hoping against hope that the lights and noise would keep the scavengers’ eyes away from him.
He reached the wrecker, hauled himself into the driving seat, fumbled the keys into the ignition, and had the engine started almost before his ass hit the leather. The engine roared into life, full-throated and glorious, and he stamped on the gas and drove the truck forward, its tires spinning in the snow but gripping just enough to build momentum.
Assmouth and Bronx had panicked and run from the diner with their hands high. The Dodge mowed them down in one easy movement from a direction they hadn’t been expecting.
Nathan hauled the wheel of the wrecker then and turned it so that the vehicle was four-square to the diner. Through the well-lit window, he saw that everyone and everything he held dear was on one side of the diner, and the scavengers were on the other. The only person in jeopardy as he smashed the truck through the plate glass was Lucy—but because she was facing the window, with Owen still with his back to it, she’d seen him coming and dived away from the torrent of glass and busted wood to fall onto the floo
r of a booth.
Instead of raising her SIG, Consumpta raised her arms as if that would ward off five tons of American steel and aluminum. She disappeared out of Nathan’s vision, and he didn’t know if the sudden bump he felt beneath the vehicle was a collapsing booth or her body.
Blackhair had enough time to unhook his AK-47 and level it at the cab, but Lucy had dived from the path of the careening wrecker and was at his feet. As Blackhair squeezed the trigger, she’d already pulled a SIG from his belt, flicked the safety, and begun pumping bullets into his spine.
Nathan ducked as the AK-47 bullets Blackhair had managed to loose dinged the bodywork of the wrecker, but they mostly ended up in the ceiling.
Owen moved quickly enough to dive out of the way of the wrecker as it plowed on through the diner, lifting wood and smashing chairs and booths. The wrecker skimmed past him and, for a moment, Nathan couldn’t be sure if the truck had ground him into the tiles or not.
Then the wrecker grumbled to a halt and Nathan, grabbing the shotgun, jumped down from the cab and faced a fresh horror.
Owen was holding Tony around his throat and had his pistol to the boy’s head, digging it in hard enough to make the boy wince in pain, squeezing tears from his eyes.
“Stay back, or you’ll be wearing your boy’s brains as cologne!”
No one had been near enough to tackle Owen. Betty was bent over Marty, who was deathly pale, laying back in a booth with his eyes rolling. Cyndi had been pushed against the wall by a sliding bench and was pinioned there, helpless. Syd was unconscious on the floor of the booth, looking like she’d taken a blow to the head and slid to the floor.
Lucy was slowly getting up from beneath Blackhair’s fallen body, covered in his blood. She held out the SIG towards Owen, but the useless clicking of her fingers told Nathan that the gun was empty. Her eyes flicked to the AK-47 on the ground.
“Try it, bitch, Just try it,” Owen said, grinding the point of his pistol harder into Tony’s head.
Tony screamed and cried, “Daddy!”
Nathan’s shotgun was loose in his hand, his finger not even close to the trigger, and even if he’d been able to lift the gun and fire at Owen before his son was executed, the spray of pellets from the gun would end his boy along with his intended target anyway.
“For a guy who got shot in the head, you look far more alive than you should be.”
“Just let these people go. Let my son go. You can have me. Do what you want with me. Get all the revenge you want. Just let them go.” Nathan bent, put his shotgun down, and raised his hands.
“You think the cops and everyone out there gonna let me just walk away from here? You think I was born yesterday?”
“There’s no cops, man. No helicopter. Two people I’m with have computers, sound gear, and amplifiers. It was just used to make a distraction while I drove my truck in. You’re free to go. I swear. I just wanted my family back.”
Owen’s face twisted with confusion. “This some wild double bluff, cause if it isn’t, you’ve got balls of steel, brother. Balls. Of. Steel.”
Tony started to cough.
“Shut up, kid!”
“He’s got asthma. Take your arm from across his throat. If you hold him tight like that, you’ll give him an attack. It might kill him.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
Nathan watched as the muscles bunched in Owen’s arm as he purposefully tightened his grip around Tony’s throat. The boy’s eyes bulged, his closed throat trying to cough—his dry lips worked, but he couldn’t find any words or air; it was only his eyes that communicated his fear and distress to his daddy.
Fear and distress that Nathan could do nothing about.
“Shall we watch him die now, before I shoot you all?”
“No!” Cyndi screamed, still pinned against the wall and thumping her fists down on the piece of wood that held her there.
Nathan tried to keep his voice level against all the rising horror he was feeling welling in his guts. “Please, let my son go.”
“Maybe. Hey, Betty. Where’s the gold?”
Betty didn’t hear Owen. She was concentrating on Marty, whose breath was coming in gulping heaves, his lips trembling, his eyes now fixed frozen ahead as he looked at a different view of the world.
He was dying.
Nathan had been with his daddy in the hospital when he’d breathed his last. It had taken him most of the morning to die, gradually running down after the cancer had filled his lungs with death, like a clock running out of ticks. The doctors had told Nathan there was nothing they could do—the cancer had hastened his end, but his drowning lungs would complete the job. Nathan remembered the gray pallor of his daddy’s dying skin; it had been the same pallor that had spread across Marty’s face now.
“I said, Betty, where’s the gold? Tell me now or the boy chokes.”
Before Betty turned, Marty gave a slight moan and his breathing stopped.
It was over.
Betty closed Marty’s eyes with tender fingers and then stood up. “I’ve told you a thousand times already, you jerk, there is no gold. We traded it before you got here. You can kill us all you want, but you won’t find any gold!”
Her voice had risen in a crescendo of old agony and fresh grief, and suddenly she bunched her fists and ran screaming at Owen.
The scavenger fired one shot through the top of her skull and she crashed to the floor without a sound, the lights going out in her eyes as her life spread across the floor in a puddle of red and gray.
It had all happened in a moment, giving Nathan no time to react, and now Owen had put the gun back against Tony’s head.
“No gold? Oh well. No cops is a bonus. Might as well just kill you all and head out again. I guess the Seven-Ones can rise again in another town. There’s always women, and they love a bad guy. Right, bitches?”
At first, Nathan thought the sound of reply was Tony coughing. A harsh asthmatic bark that cut across the shocked silence in the room as if Death himself had snapped his bony fingers.
It took Nathan nearly a second to register the spray of blood that dappled the top of his son’s skull and the side of his face. The thud in his heart telling him that Owen had pulled the trigger and Tony was no more.
But it wasn’t Tony’s blood.
It was Owen’s.
Owen’s grip relaxed. Tony slithered to the floor, pawing at the wet blood on his face.
Owen sighed out a miserable sound. The wind in an abandoned graveyard, the shoosh of funeral feet carrying a coffin through too long grass.
The bullet had entered through his ear and powered through his skull at an angle, popping out his eye with the pressure, distorting his face into a deathly grimace. It was as if he didn’t know whether to stand or fall for whole seconds, so Freeson, leaning ragged and bloody in the doorway with an AR-15 in his hands, put the matter to rest.
Freeson squeezed the trigger again.
This bullet lifted the back off Owen’s head, and he was felled. Crashing into the torn wood, destroyed leather, and smashed crockery of the diner.
“They kinda like a good guy with a gun, too,” Freeson said, sagging in his own broken skin with pain and exhaustion. He stumbled forward towards Lucy and she held her arms open.
There were perhaps ten seconds of silence, in which Nathan was able to bend down, pick up his son, and clutch him to his chest, before the Molotov cocktails Mustache and Redhead threw into the diner exploded in twin balls of flame.
19
“Get in the truck! Get in the truck!”
Nathan threw Tony into the wrecker’s crew cab, then took five steps towards the prone form of Syd. He grabbed her ankle and slid her out from under the table, her head banging and lolling against debris. Freeson had turned to shoot at the scavengers who had thrown the petrol bombs, but they’d already gone off into the night and snow. The flames were filling the front of the diner now, catching already on all the broken wood and plastic, sending up billows of
black smoke.
Freeson half-stumbled and half-ran to where Cyndi was trapped against the wall and pulled hard at the bench that was holding her in place. He moved it just enough to get her free as Nathan and Lucy heaved the unconscious Syd into the crew cab.
The flames were licking at the ceiling tiles now, the front half of the diner almost fully alight and the heat coming through in sledgehammer blows. Nathan didn’t stop to hug his wife as she came past with Freeson; he just pushed both their asses back up into the cab and dived in behind them.
The engine roared and the cab shook. In the rearview mirrors, the conflagration was total. The entire front half of the diner had caught alight now.
It had taken seconds.
Nathan didn’t want to risk going backward through all the debris and flames.
“Hang on!” he screamed, and with that he floored the gas pedal.
The Dodge’s engine boomed and raged, its wheels biting into the debris as the truck stormed forward, smashing easily through the counter and into the kitchen.
The fryers and stoves spun out of the way on their still-locked wheels, smashing into steel units and spilling crockery and cutlery like vomit. Cyndi gripped Nathan’s arm and buried her face in his shoulder as they crashed forward, taking out the refrigerators that Nathan had hidden behind less than fifteen minutes before.
They rolled on.
It wasn’t far across the kitchen, but it could have been miles. The impending impact making it feel like more.
“Brace yourselves!” Nathan roared as the truck crashed through the shelves and steel sinks at the back of the kitchen, flattening the table on which Marty’s cassette player had been located, and powering on and hitting the back wall hard.
The diner was a wooden-framed and plasterboard construction, with a low brick pier for foundations. The wrecker took off and burst through the wall, exploding from the electricity and flame-lit interior out into the cold night of the compound.
Nathan gripped the steering wheel tighter than a triggered bear trap and rolled the vehicle forward as the gas lines that had fed the stoves were finally reached by the flames—and the diner exploded.
After the Shift: The Complete Series Page 20