by Schow, Ryan
One of these people—a clean-looking woman—seemed to be yelling at Leighton. She was fifty feet away, maybe a little more.
Leighton didn’t know what to do. Wave at her? Ignore her? Smile? She gave the woman a slight smile, followed by a half-wave. The woman started shaking her hand, really pointing her finger at her. She glanced over her shoulder in case this woman was warning her. There was no one else around. Suddenly a glass bottle exploded beside her, shards of glass hitting her ankles and calves. She turned to the woman, pulled the paint gun off of her shoulder, lined up a shot, and started firing at her. It took a second to calibrate, but she got the woman twice in the torso as everyone else ran for cover.
“Unbelievable,” she felt herself say.
Picking up her pace, she moved into the southbound lanes, weaving in and out of abandoned cars, using them as cover.
The silence was like pillows pressed to her ears. She couldn’t help feeling deeply unsettled by all of this. If the woman who threw the bottle had better aim, or a stronger arm—if the bottle had hit Leighton in the side of the face—would this same person be robbing her right now? Beating her up? Would they kill her with her own weapons?
Questions like these held her in a perpetual state of fear. Should she be walking in the dead of night? Using the cover of darkness instead? Would that be safer that way? Or should she be slinking along the buildings, trying all possible entrances like some of the other people she’d seen? This wasn’t a multiple choice question with a clear answer in sight.
Maybe it was best just to stick to the middle of the road. She wouldn’t be safe from shooters if there were any out there looking for people like her. But from those unarmed degenerates looking to take her backpack, or her life? Well, this felt like the safest approach. Or not. She didn’t know. Good Lord, it hurt her brain to think about everything happening! But it also hurt her heart thinking about how much she needed her family, even Chandra, as strange as that sounded.
The gathering of tears in her eyes bothered her. When they began to roll down her cheeks, they were warm against the cold rain. The shivering that gripped her from the storm, the chill it left behind, intensified even more with her breakdown.
Keep it together! she told herself. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other. You’ll be there soon enough.
Sometimes all you had was your next step. She couldn’t stop the tears from draining down her face, but she could keep her feet moving.
Leighton continued her trek down Alexandria Pike, walking down what her friends at school called “Bank Boulevard.” She passed Stock Yards Bank & Trust, BB&T Bank, Fifth Third Bank. Farther up the road, she passed the US Post Office and Huff Realty, and then she walked by hers and her friend’s favorite off-campus hangouts: Pizza Hut, Firehouse Subs, City Barbecue, and Applebee’s (when everyone was desperate for something that maybe, once upon a time, resembled someone’s mother’s halfway-decent home cooking). To her left, she saw Busken Bakery, which was sandwiched between WesBanco Bank and Northern Kentucky Educator’s Federal Credit Union. Inside the bakery’s parking lot was also Acute Hearing, a hearing aid store she’d frequented a few times since she had arrived in town. Up ahead, still to come, was the PNC Bank and the US Bank, thereby finishing off Bank Boulevard. But that wasn’t concerning to her. She was across from the Bluegrass Liquor Store and Walgreens. The big glass panes on the front doors of both buildings were smashed, bits and pieces of them lying all over the ground. Worse, looters now scurried in and out of the stores with little or no concern for either the rain or the law. She had expected the looting, not because it was normal, but because they no longer lived in normal times.
After the excitement of burning cities swept the nation, you didn’t have to be a genius to know places like liquor stores and drug stores were hot spots for opportunists. With looting, however, came the potential for violence, depending on the people or the temperature of the raid. Naturally, she steered clear of these people.
Deeper down Johns Hill Road, she got a better view of Bluegrass Liquor. She knew the glass doors were broken, but now she saw the surrounding glass panels had been compromised as well. Where before a few people were moving in and out, now swarms of people flooded inside. They looked like students based on their attire, but she couldn’t be sure.
Fortunately, many of these opportunists were either heading up Johns Hill Road toward Hampton Farms apartment complex or they were crossing the field between the liquor store and the student housing at Northern Terrace. In between Hampton Farms and Northern Terrace was the City Clerk and the Police Administration offices. Standing there, dumbstruck, she thought, Good Lord, these people are brazen!
The rains began to intensify, bringing about even more despair. If there was one thing she hoped she could count on, it was that the good people of Highland Heights would not devolve into a vicious crime spree. Northern Terrace, however, was proving to be a concern. The massive wagon-wheel structure housed three floors and seven wings of NKU students.
There was no telling where these looters came from or what they would do. Most would likely hunker down and wait out the storm, praying all the while for the lights and heat to come back on. Last night was cold though, a truly powerless night. That meant the night ahead would be worse.
When the chill settled into a structure with no heat to suppress it or move it out, the restlessness would start and people would become desperate. After that, they’d get angry, or drunk, or high. When you mixed substance abuse with high anxiety, it wasn’t tough to imagine law and order going out the window. She had to be off the streets by then. Preferably with Niles.
Fearing what lay ahead, she picked up her pace.
Leighton passed the Country Square, which was where the Kroger grocery store was at, as well as places like T-Mobile, a Subway sandwich shop, Great Clips, and the US Bank. People were in the drive-thru teller windows, trying to pry open the machines like they were going to somehow cash in big. Who knew, maybe they would. With the bank’s alarm system down, with no functioning back-up system to alert law enforcement, people had broken the bank’s windows and were now crawling through the small openings. It could be they needed a dry place to stay; it could be they were hoping for easy access to a cash drawer. All those maybes, just swirling around in her head in perfect silence.
She trekked down Alexandria Pike until she hit the Christ Baptist Church on the corner of Alexandria Pike and Industrial Road/Route 1998. Industrial was a three-lane road that would take her past a few commercial buildings before walling her in with guard rails, dense foliage, and steep hillsides. She only needed to travel through a handful of miles more to reach the banks of the Ohio River where Kentucky and Ohio shared state lines.
Fortunately, the ever-changing weather took another shift. The winds still whipped here and there, but the sky seemed to lift off of her, the heavy rains becoming a cold, misty drizzle.
She walked up the empty roads unobstructed by traffic of any sort. It was like she was walking through a movie set where the rain machines were cycling through what the directors would probably call “natural variances in the weather.” If she screamed now, no one would hear her. If she screamed as loud as she could, she wouldn’t even hear herself.
For a short walk up Industrial, she spotted several squat-looking office buildings and industrial warehouses, but then she saw the familiar foliage ahead. Walking this route versus driving it was so much different. Without the safety and speed of a car, she found the landscape to be…creepy. With every passing foot, she saw places in the brush to hide, places where anyone could just step out into the roadway and attack her. She checked over her shoulder, scanned the road she’d already traveled, then quickly turned back around in the vacuum of silence. God, she hoped the road ahead was just as empty!
At the Winter Lane overpass, she saw a couple of guys sitting on the dirt slope to her left. Both were smoking cigarettes, both looked like they’d been rolled in dirt, sprayed with bottled body odor then pat
ted dry with used fast-food wrappers and grease. These weren’t your typical homeless guys who hung out in the local haunts with signs saying, WILL WORK FOR $5. Then again, she told herself, she wasn’t some regular traveler. She put her fingers around her pepper spray canister, slid it out of her coat pocket, held it at her side. She knew she could get to the Glock, but it would be slow and she wasn’t wanting to walk by these guys with it in her hand. She didn’t want them thinking she was some sort of thug spoiling for a fight. If they came at her, though, if they saw her as weak, vulnerable, or worse—an opportunity to get a gun—she’d have to shoot them.
She wasn’t sure she was ready for that just yet.
Passing by them, she made her face neutral, like Walker’s face—the face of a killer. One of the guys looked like he was mumbling something. The other looked at him and gave a subtle nod. Both men took drags of their cigarettes and then one of them waved. She waved back, breathing easier. Normally, she would imagine being so close to them was the most dangerous place she could be, but it wasn’t. As she pushed on, so long as she had her back to them, that would be the most dangerous place.
After a few yards of paranoia and near paralysis, she glanced over her shoulder, saw the two vagrants hadn’t moved. They were chatting with each other like she’d never passed through in the first place. Turning around, walking backward, she smiled to herself, certain they wouldn’t take chase. When they stopped talking and looked up at her, her expression froze. Both of them gave a half-hearted wave to her, which she returned before turning around and feeling better, safe.
It was when she rounded the first bend that she saw a lot of mature, densely packed trees and foliage. When she rounded the second lonely bend, she realized she was not alone. Stepping out into the middle of the highway, now glancing her way, was a big man with a wide-brimmed farmer’s hat, overalls, and a tire iron. She stopped walking, her heart accelerating to a quick, stomping beat. For a second, she couldn’t breathe.
What had she interrupted? Oh, no. The brute stopped walking. He turned and just stood there looking at her, a heavy shadow falling over his eyes and face, longish hair sprouting out from the back of the hat. If it was possible, the sky darkened in that exact moment, the temperature dropping a degree or two.
She tried to make herself walk toward him, but everything in her head was clamoring out its many warnings. Inadvertently, she took in the more dangerous details of this creep. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up his forearms—big country-boy arms that could crush a girl like her if that’s what they were directed to do. She didn’t want that. That rough hillbilly-look and those hulking arms had her mind inventing all kinds of concerns. But when he started walking toward her, not only did she panic, she flat-out froze.
Overhead, the sky continued to darken, an angry gloom settling over the land. These same unsettled skies would open their floodgates once more, drenching her with yet another cold, windy cloudburst.
Looking left and right, she decided she could pull the gun, or she could run. Her paralysis finally broke, and she bolted like a jackrabbit, running up the hillside as best as she could through foliage and wet, uneven ground.
Before she lost sight of him, though, she saw him start for the same hillside, sending bolts of terror crashing right down through the center of her.
Chapter Twelve
Hudson Croft
After Emily’s adamant departure, Hudson was too depressed to think about the anarchists he had killed. His mother’s friend, Adrienne, was always posting coffee memes, talking about how the only way to start and survive the day was with a cup of coffee, so he thought, Yeah, I need coffee.
By the time he was on his second cup of cold brew, he was wide awake but numb. He couldn’t believe she was gone. Looking at a photo of them on the mantle, he shook his head and tried not to lose it.
Before long, he was thinking of the anarchists he had killed. Were they worth it? Was the woman’s life he saved worth what he did to Emily? Was it worth his life with her? He couldn’t measure that decision with any certainty. Then again, what was the point? She was gone. And what in God’s name were the anarchists doing in Silver Grove?
Even to that day, it made little sense.
In the ambush that had saved the old woman’s life, Hudson had officially killed fourteen members of what he later learned was an offshoot of the Hayseed Rebellion. As far as he could tell, before the power winked out, there was no official investigation. Everyone dead had been taken from the streets when the anarchists fled. Witnesses say the rioters even dragged the old man’s body away. These same witnesses said he was clearly dead.
The knock on the front door startled him. Standing up, grabbing his XD9, he proceeded with caution to the front door. He didn’t need someone shooting him in the face when he looked through the peephole.
He saw his friend, Pete, standing out front. He breathed a sigh of relief, then opened the door and hustled the forty-year-old mechanic inside.
“Well?” he asked Pete.
“No one knows her, or even recognizes her,” Pete said about the woman Hudson had saved the other night.
“How many people were at the meeting?”
“About thirty, maybe forty. Some people wondered if she was from Melbourne. Where’s Emily, is she up?”
“No man. She left me.”
“Oh, bro…”
He held up a hand. He didn’t want any sympathy. He didn’t deserve it, for he was the one who had driven her away, not the other way around.
Melbourne was a nearby town with half the population of Silver Grove. Without local cops to investigate the crime, Hudson was sure he would never know anything about the woman he saved, other than she was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and her husband had died for it.
“What about the Hayseed Rebellion?” Hudson asked, changing subjects.
“Rumors are already flooding through town that they’re coming back. You saw that cellphone interview the other day, right?”
“Yeah.”
Scratching his head, looking at him funny, he said, “So she’s really gone?”
He nodded, his eyes starting to shine. Clenching his jaw, missing Em already, he willed his emotions away, then took another sip of his coffee.
This offshoot of the Hayseed Rebellion all but promised retaliation during a Facebook Live interview a few days earlier. This from the people in Cincinnati smashing up cars and harassing people in the suburbs.
This interview is what caused Hudson to lose so much sleep. Invariably, it’s also why he lost Emily. She was scared.
“Whatever you do, please don’t tell anyone what I did,” Hudson said, discretely wiping his eyes. “I don’t need everyone turning on me. Not after Em taking off.”
“I already said I wouldn’t.”
The weight of the secret, the weight of having taken so many lives, and now the weight of losing Emily, was having a profoundly negative effect on him.
“People are taking up arms, though.”
“Really?”
“There were other more rational voices present. They said this was all blustering and chest-beating from those commie pukes. I’m not so sure. They looked pretty upset over the whole ordeal. Not that I care about their little feelings.”
“Honestly, what do you think?” Hudson asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want some coffee?” Hudson asked. Pete shook his head, no. “So, what did everyone else think?”
“They started asking about you,” Pete said.
“Me?”
“Not you in particular. They want to know who the vigilante was who shot those fourteen skin sacks.”
“And?”
“No one knew. It was all just speculation.”
“But my name came up?”
“No, it didn’t.”
“Good,” he said. “Let’s keep it that way.”
First they love you, then they turn on you…that was how it always went.
; “We’ve got bigger problems,” Pete said. “A twister dropped down and tore up the countryside a few miles away. It leveled two houses and a barn.”
“Really?”
“They found a horse on the banks of the Ohio River, the skin practically torn from its bones.”
“I don’t want to know that,” Hudson said, frowning.
“Well, now you do.”
“So why are you telling me about twisters and a dead horse?”
“Apparently, another storm is on its way,” he said. “Betty Barclay’s brother is the weatherman on Channel 3—well, he was, he’s retired now—but he says more storms are headed this way and things aren’t looking good. He’s got a HAM radio, so he’s in contact with people who saw it coming through their town. Do you have a HAM radio?”
“Why would I?” he asked. Pete shrugged his shoulders. “Where exactly did the twister hit?”
Pete shrugged his shoulders again, but this time he added a stupid look on his face. “I’m just sayin’ what I heard. You know why all the power’s gone?”
“The storm.”
“Did you try your cell phone?” Pete asked. Hudson frowned. “Well, did you at least try your car?”
“Got nowhere to be.”
“It’s all gone, brother. Dead.”
Hudson fetched his car keys off the counter, walked out to his Ford F-150, tried to start it, and found it wouldn’t work.
“What the…?”
“People are saying it’s an EMP,” Pete said, standing by the open driver’s side door. “Like in Red Dawn before the Russians attacked, a precursor or something.”
A few minutes later he saw the pitter-patter of rain starting on his windshield. It was time to make a fire and hope to God that Pete was wrong.
He picked up his cell phone to call Emily, to make sure she was okay, but just as Pete had hinted, the phone didn’t work either. First the lights, then his truck, now this? He looked at Pete, who gave him that same ridiculous shrug.