by Schow, Ryan
Hudson shot both men dead, then tucked back into the shadows and waited breathlessly. Almost instantaneously, he watched a couple more of the guys stagger outside into the wet weather, shivering and hugging themselves.
Both guys had guns, and both found the dead bodies in the street. This seemed to wake them up immediately, judging by their animated language and behavior. One of them ran back to the station while the other stood vigil, gun out, completely on edge.
“What an idiot,” Hudson muttered from the shadows.
He set his sights on the man left behind, playing God over this clown’s beating heart. At any minute, if he so chose, he could end his life.
“You only get to live if I let you,” he muttered as he slid his finger over the trigger and waited.
Pretty soon, a bunch of the guys from the fire station gathered outside, the loudmouth runt, too. He’d stirred so much enthusiasm in the mob earlier. It was Hudson’s turn to motivate them.
“This is you having your panties in a twist,” he said under his breath. “Me against all of you, and I’m winning.”
They weren’t dressed for the cold or the drizzling rain, but they were mad enough to retaliate.
He counted six of them. Instead of picking them off one by one, which he wasn’t sure he could do anyway, he pulled his mask up over his face, then quickly and quietly moved through the shadows. He snuck around the back of the fire station, moved up the stairs, and successfully slipped inside. There he found dozens of sleeping bodies, an abundance of stale, sweaty air, and the white-noise sounds of a few sleepy conversations. Within moments, several conversations fell silent, and the ragged drone of snoring dominated the night.
Hudson lifted his mask off his face and sat down between a couple of guys who were sleeping. He closed his eyes and tried to get some shuteye himself, or to at least give others the impression that he was sleeping. He felt it was best to be seen among the ranks so as not to stand out as a stranger later on. Was it the smartest thing in the world to do? Probably not. He was doing it anyway because, really, what did he have to lose?
“What happened?” the guy beside him asked, startling Hudson awake.
“Someone shot two of our guys,” he mumbled. “Before you ask, I don’t know who they were and I don’t think we got them.”
“They get the shooter?”
“I just said I don’t know that,” he muttered.
“Where you from?”
Hudson finally opened his eyes. They had low-light oil lamps around the building, giving him enough light by which to see, but what he saw was little more than the silhouette of the guy speaking to him.
“Cincinnati,” he lied. “You?”
“No man, I mean, where’d you do time?”
Hudson heard most of these anarchists had been sprung from jails and prisons all across the nation. They used the Covid crisis of 2020 as the guise for “humanitarian treatment.” At least that was the rumor. It made sense, though. With none of the early-release prisoners having jobs, it was easy for the ultra-wealthy forces to subvert and subjugate the state’s emergency policies. Flush with cash, the nefarious organizations behind the chaos hired these suddenly-freed criminals to do their bidding. Without warning, rapists, murderers, arsonists, burglars, and kidnappers were kicked loose with nowhere to go but the streets. Here, there was cash to be made and little or no law enforcement to persuade them otherwise.
“I migrated here a year ago from California,” he said. “Pelican Bay.”
“Nice,” the guy said, leaning back. “What’d you do time for?”
“Assault with a deadly weapon, battery, and kidnapping.”
He laughed. “I was a lifer until our beneficiaries came along. Thought I was gonna catch out, but low and behold, here I am.”
“What were you in for?” Hudson asked.
“Diaper sniper.” A pedophile.
Hudson suddenly sat up straight. “We killed guys like you in prison,” he growled.
“Yeah, well out here, we’re just like you, and you might as well be one of us. No one cares what we did, only what we’re doing now.”
“Which is?”
Turning sideways, a tiny, reflective glow gleaming off his eyeball, he said, “You don’t know?”
“I was just told I could make a few bucks and act upon my more immoral instincts without pushback from the cops.”
“Dude, you seriously don’t know?”
“No,” Hudson said, irritated.
“This is an overthrow.”
“I know it’s an overthrow attempt.”
“No man, this is phase one,” the guy whispered with delight. “The EMP was phase two.”
“What’s phase three?”
“Us and our benefactors working together.”
“You keep mentioning our benefactors. Do you know who they are?”
“Everyone does.”
Next to him, the guy sleeping said, “Will you two shut up and go to sleep?”
“Sorry, bro,” the diaper sniper said, “just educating the fish.”
“Do us all a favor and catch your z’s,” the complainer said. His breath was like old broccoli, not as bad as farts, maybe half as toxic, but certainly unpleasant. “Tomorrow’s gonna be legendary.”
The guys from the street, the ones who responded to the shooting, finally came back inside. Hudson heard Short Stack the tiny tyrant speaking. He tried to listen in.
“Before he died, Bill whispered something about a girl and a kid,” Short Stack said.
“So?” one of the others retorted.
“So they killed two of ours, which means we have to do something about it. You know the rules. They hurt us, we kill them.”
“So, you want to track them down or what?”
“Shouldn’t be hard.”
Next to him, the diaper sniper started to breathe heavy, the booger-clogged nostrils starting to wheeze like a child’s broken toy or an old muffler.
“Grab a handful of your guys to go with me,” Short Stack said. “If the girl’s halfway cute, we’ll get her and bring her back here. We can pass her around to boost morale.” A few of them snickered, but one guy scoffed. “What? If we can’t use and abuse her, then what’s the point of going anyway?”
“The point you said earlier was that if they hurt us, we kill them.”
“Yeah, but you have to pick your delights when you get them,” a girl said, which surprised him. Then again, he recognized that voice. She was the girl who had been with Short Stack earlier. She continued. “Who knows, maybe a few of these dogs will take to the kid.”
“Meet me with your guys in five,” Short Stack said. “Out front, on the main road.”
They split up, each going their own separate ways. He watched the tiny tyrant weaving his way through the sleeping masses. The man himself wasn’t what concerned Hudson most. They were preparing to go after the girl and the kid he’d just saved.
I don’t think so, he thought.
If the odds proved to be in their favor, he wasn’t sure what he could do to stop them. All he knew was that he needed to do something!
Instead of waiting around, he unsheathed his knife, leaned over, and sliced open the diaper sniper’s neck, quickly sawing through the sinew just above his Adam’s apple. Deftly, he cupped his hand over the pervert’s mouth making sure he died in relative silence. When the man slumped over dead, he turned to the other guy and found he was still snoring and stinking up the room with his broccoli breath.
Hudson wiped his bloody hands on his pants, drying out the webbing in between his fingers, then he leaned over the other way and stabbed fart-knocker in the throat, killing him the same way he’d killed the diaper sniper. Beside the man was a rifle. He quietly relieved the dead man of his weapon, checked his pockets, found a handful of rounds.
“Thank you very much,” he whispered to the corpse.
He took the rounds and transferred them into his coat pocket, then waited for the right time to leave. He only ha
d to wait a minute or two before the coast was clear.
On the way out of the fire station, he stabbed three more men when the opportunities presented themselves, hoping to either slow the mob down or even-up the numbers as it were.
Once he slipped out of the fire station, he stuck to the shadows, then broke into a run through the adjoining land to get ahead of the posse, and maybe catch up with the girl and the kid.
Fifteen minutes of running, wheezing, and walking later, he thought he saw the girl and the child walking up the middle of the street. If that was indeed them, walking in the middle of the street was stupid. Especially after what just happened. Then again, it was nearly pitch black outside.
He spotted them through the stolen rifle’s scope. The girl was walking funny, like she was favoring some injuries, and the child kept pace with her, but only barely. He looked tired, too.
Slowly, and at a distance, Hudson followed the two of them into Melbourne, a tiny town with only four-hundred souls. He wasn’t sure where she was going or how far she planned on walking, but on the rural fringes of town he began seeing indications that they were close to their destination.
The girl turned on a side street, walked a few blocks then turned down another long street. Hudson saw various houses ahead, all of them spread apart the way rural homes often were.
She walked up the driveway of one particular house, raised her hands like she was under arrest, then knocked on the front door and waited.
But no one answered.
That’s strange.
After a quick look around the house, she reappeared, then lay down on the porch swing. A few minutes later, the kid joined her, and the two of them seemed to fall asleep within a few minutes.
Hudson laid low, wondering if Short Stack and Silver Grove posse would find her.
Overhead, the skies split open again, distant streaks of lightning once again illuminating the skies. A moment later, the skies rumbled with a peal of distant thunder.
He timed the thunder to the lightning. The storm was getting closer. Hugging himself against the cold, trying to ward off the shiver that started to rattle his teeth, he thought, Can’t we get a freaking break already?
Not long after the kids dozed off, Hudson saw them coming. In his scope, sizing up their silhouettes, he was certain this was Short Stack and the posse. There were nine of them, each one armed. How had they tracked her down? And would they know which house she had gone to?
He couldn’t take that chance.
When the posse was closer to the house and he found an appropriate hunting blind, Hudson lined up the shot, the crosshairs hovering over what he now saw was Short Stack’s ugly face. When the time was right, he released his breath, held it, then gently squeezed the trigger.
Gore misted out the back of the tiny tyrant’s skull and he dropped like a sack of rocks. Hudson worked the bolt action and took aim again, but the others scattered fast, faster than he could ready the unfamiliar rifle.
A moment later, the eight remaining men started shooting back.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Hudson Croft
The second the shooting started, Hudson changed position. If he’d learned anything from fighting the HR, it was to stay mobile, never get caught flat-footed, and slow is fast, fast is accurate.
He was able to take out two more guys fairly quickly. These were the most inexperienced, he imagined. But how would he stack up against the remaining six?
He moved through the brush, tripped over a half-buried rock, crashed down to a knee in the mud. Grunting, he stood back up, limped to a nearby tree, then watched the shadows and rubbed his knee.
He saw movement a few minutes later, lined up his shot, fired. The bullet struck the man’s chest judging by the way he fell. He was a goner for sure, so Hudson felt no need to waste a round finishing him off.
Moving again, Hudson closed in on the others, scanning the streets, the brush, the nearby houses. A few shots rang out, but those shots were targeting the first location Hudson had shot from.
He jogged along the sides of the street, staying out of sight. But then a bullet struck the ground in front of him and he faded back and shot sideways. More bullets peppered the ground around him as he sprinted back through the foliage.
When he stopped, he hunkered down and spun around, fear scratching at his resolve. Frantically, he searched the night for them. When he found them, they were closer than he thought. He hastily lined up the scope, took two shots, hit two targets, but dry-fired on the third.
Cursing to himself, the opposition opening fire, he fell back a dozen yards, fished a couple of spare round out of his pocket. Squatting behind a low rock outgrowth, he slid a round in the chamber, set the action, and scoped out the direction he’d just come from. He saw two men, not one, quietly closing in on him. If there were two there, he reasoned, doing the math, where was the third and final man?
He fired on one of them, hit him in the throat, dropped him. The remaining man put on a burst of speed.
Hudson turned and ran, gunfire chasing him down the road.
He jumped over a thicket of brush, spun, then loaded the last round, aimed, and fired on the man who had closed the distance down to only five feet away. The round struck him in the sternum and he crashed face-first into Hudson, who stumbled backward in response.
The second he realized he’d been victorious with this pack of mongrels, he was tackled from the side.
The question of the last man standing was finally answered.
Hit sideways in the ambush, Hudson went down hard, dropping the rifle in the process. The body landed on him hard. They both tried to scramble out of the mud and undergrowth, each fighting for position, but the other guy was faster. He got the mount first, started raining in blows.
The degenerate didn’t expect Hudson to go for his blade, so when Hudson drove it in his side, it came to him as a big surprise.
Hudson had taken a few glancing blows to the side of the head and another to the cheek before he ripped his knife free. When he did free the blade, he punched it back into the man, burying it into the outside of his thigh this time.
He twisted and turned the knife with all his might, then tore it out and drove it up under the man’s floating rib, working it there as well. The exertion after being punched took its toll on him, but he would not give up, nor would he quit, not when this was the last of them.
When the guy finally stopped punching, when he looked down at the knife in his side and realized what had happened, Hudson turned the blade edge-out. Then, with a final force of exertion, he shoved the blade through as much meat as he could, ripping open his entire side. The gutted man snorted, his eyes wide, his mouth burping up little, sputtering sounds of defeat.
He slowly fell off Hudson, collapsing on his side in the mud. Hudson got to his feet, dizzy from the blows, unable to maintain his balance. The bloody knife fell out of his hand and the world started to tilt.
His head was doing something funny. He felt funny.
He had known the risk of fighting. One big blow to the head was a death sentence for him. Now that he was fading in and out—now that he was losing control of his body—he wondered if he shouldn’t have been more judicious in his tactics.
Just before he blacked out completely, right about the time he ceded all control of his body, he saw the muddy ground rushing up to meet him. His last thought before accepting his fate was that this was a good death. He never even felt himself hit the ground.
It was all just darkness and disconnection.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Amell Benson
Amell arrived in Highland Heights, Kentucky on his 1961 Harley Davidson, the EMP-proof Panhandle FLH that he’d custom painted in a rich canary yellow. It had a rebuilt engine, brand new brake calipers, and sixteen-inch chrome lace rims with fresh white walls.
He cruised down University Drive weary from the ride and irritated by the weather, his mood only changing for the better when he saw Northern
Kentucky University’s campus in the distance. He turned on Kenton and saw Norse Hall in front of him. Parking the motorcycle in the lot across from the dorms, he stood and stretched. That’s when he looked at his bike.
Glancing down at his white walls, he frowned and tried not to be upset. The tires that he’d always kept so clean, were now splattered with road filth. Colorful, pointed profanity left his mouth in fits. He never wanted to make this trip in the first place. Not with the crappy weather or the declining society. But Diesel insisted he go, and when Diesel spoke, everyone listened, including Amell.
“I need something back, she has it, you get it,” the big man had said. “If she doesn’t have it, get me something else, bring it in a bag.” Most people wouldn’t know what he was talking about, but Amell understood perfectly.
“Sure, Diesel. Can I borrow the car?”
“Yeah, grab the one that doesn’t work,” Diesel said flippantly. “When you’re done being a wise guy, just remember my missing gun doesn’t care about rain or shine. And it sure doesn’t care about the shine you put on your bike. Just go get it, okay? Just do what I tell you.”
With everything going down, with so much on the line, he didn’t argue. Amell just smiled and said, “Sure, man. No problem.”
“I’ll do you a solid, my friend,” Diesel said. “The girl, if she’s got my gun, you do what you want with her. Do her, get her done, put her face in a freaking toilet for all I care, JUST GET ME BACK MY GUN!”
So he was the gun-recovery task force, party of one. According to Diesel, no ride through a wicked storm cell on a classic bike was too much for a freaking pop gun made a billion years ago.
Diesel and that stupid gun…
The girl, however, was an interesting proposition to him. He’d grabbed a picture of her, and though she was a little young, he wasn’t too old for her. So before he donned his leathers and saddled up for the ride ahead, he took one final look at the photo, then he hopped on his Harley and rode out into the post-apocalyptic landscape.