by Ryan Schow
“All the other gangs will fall if we do this right. We’ll sweep in the soldiers, the lieutenants, the captains if need be. Collect all those willing to share the vision.”
“What you’re suggesting is starting a war of epic proportion,” Gomez said. He was the newest of King’s enforcers, a fierce man, an unwavering man.
“This is the single most important power grab we’ll ever have at our disposal,” King said. “If you think they’re thinking anything different, if you think they’re not in some place exactly like this planning our swift demise, they you are gravely mistaken and in no way deserving of the position I’ve provided you.”
Kingpin Ray watched his right hand man grinding his molars. Finally Salazar drew a short, sharp breath through his nose and lifted his chin. “So we are going to be soft to the people, but hard with our rivals?”
“This is a new world and we have to be a new gang. So yes.”
Salazar ripped his .45 loose, fired two quick rounds into Raymond King’s head. His friend’s skull snapped back, two smoking holes in his forehead, and then he slumped over sideways and that was that.
Salazar was the ranking enforcer, so with King dead, he took King’s place. Yelling at his friend’s corpse, accentuating his points with the thrust of his smoking gun, he said, “We are going to be hard all the time! This city does not need benevolence right now, they need a leader who is not afraid to make tough choices!”
From behind Salazar, a shot was fired and the man’s forehead blew open a wash of red. He fell face first on the ground with a sick thump.
Gomez and Gunderson both spun around, weapons drawn. They stopped when they saw who was standing before them. The killer said nothing. There was no posturing, no grandstanding, no words wasted on people not interesting in listening.
“Do either of you wish to challenge me?” he asked with a soft voice. Neither Gomez nor Gunderson moved. “No? Good. There are community events rising up across the city. We will visit them, introduce ourselves, and we will do what we’ve always done, but with the chains off. We took the police stations. They are no more. There is no law, no national guard, no courts or jails. There is only kill or be killed. These people need to know that we will kill how and when we like and there is nothing they can do about it.”
“Are you planning on leading this gang?”
“Yes.”
“But, you’re a hitman.”
“And you’re politicians with guns.”
Gomez and Gunderson exchanged looks. Then Gunderson said, “So we just show up and kill them and that’s it?”
“No, you kill the men and the children, but you take the women. The women are ours. The spoils of war.”
“Kill the children?” Gomez asked. “Are you pinche loco?”
The bullet blew out Gomez’s front teeth, wobbling him, but not killing him right away. Gunderson neither jumped nor panicked. He just turned and watched Gomez choke to death, wide-eyed and scared, standing on soft knees and buckling legs. Blood leaked from the lower half of his face as he stumbled to a nearby chair, fell into it then slumped over and died.
“Is this going to be a problem for you?” the hitman asked Gunderson.
Gunderson was not a man not to be trifled with, but he was not consumed by ego, either. He was a soldier at heart, willing and able to take orders, and more than respectful of the chain of command.
“No. No problem here.”
“I’m pleased to hear that, Mr. Gunderson.”
“Can I ask you a question?” he asked. The former hitman waited. “What do I call you?”
“The only name people need to know is our name.”
“The Ophidian Horde.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll make sure we get it done.”
“In this day and age, under these uncertain circumstances, benevolence and diplomacy don’t work. We’re on a clock. If we don’t take the upper hand while our enemies are regrouping, we will be like these two cabróns here: shot dead and forgotten.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“You already said that,” he said as he turned and disappeared down the hall.
Gunderson looked at the dead men before him. Instead of cleaning them up, he simply took the opened bottle of Scotch and all of their guns, then left the office, shutting the door behind him.
Taking a swig of the liquid settled his nerves a bit. Thinking of the man who just took over The Ophidian Horde, he couldn’t help the involuntary shiver that ran through him.
This man was not a leader, he was a contract killer. A slight Guatemalan man with no conscience, no hesitation, and absolute surety in what he does, what he did. Gunderson realized it was best to make a man like this a friend because so far, three of his friends had been disposed of already, and he wasn’t anxious to be next.
7
When the drones set in on the city, blowing up cars and buildings and people, Chad and Wagner thought the best thing to do was start building bombs. How else were they supposed to stop the machines?
“We need focus,” Chad said.
“No,” Wagner replied, “we need to chill.”
“What do you have in mind?” Chad asked, anxious, giddy almost.
Chad looked young, too tall for the age of his face, and too much hair for a normal kid. It was long and brown; it was halfway down his neck at the back and falling in his eyes in the front. He lived out of saggy jeans and decorative t-shirts his mother bought him from second hand stores and WalMart when they were on sale for six dollars plus tax.
Wagner, a Japanese kid with a similar mop of hair—his perfectly straight with chopped edges he called geometric funk—said, “Let me tell you what I have in mind. For starters, it’s three choices.”
He pulled out three clear baggies and some rolling papers. On the baggies were white labels with names printed on them. The big question wasn’t which baggie were they going to smoke. It was which order were they going to smoke all the baggies.
“Behind door number one,” Wagner announced, “we have Grandberry Skunkhound.”
“A fine choice,” Chad said.
“Behind door number two is my personal favorite, Plunkbottom Diesel.”
“You have fine taste, my friend,” Chad said in a theatrical tone, grinning and staring at baggie number three while rubbing his hands together.
“Indeed I do. And that’s why I have door number three. Bubblegum Swamp Kush. This little dreamboat,” Wagner said, dangling the clear plastic baggie between them, “is reportedly an eighty percent indica strain from Bulldog Seeds in the Netherlands. Take special care and attention to the frosty, resinous buds.”
Chad leaned forward for a sniff, but Wagner pulled the baggie back, ever so slightly. “In case you’re wondering, and I know you are, the Bubblegum Swamp Kush has a sour taste and smell to it, and its THC content is a gnat’s ball hair south of twenty percent.”
“In other words,” Chad said, “we’d best take this party to the couch, turn on some TV and just chill…”
“Brainstorming session begins right after we roll up two big fat fatties.”
Chad and Wagner smoked to relax, but they nearly relaxed themselves into a coma and there was work to do, so they cut a few lines of coke to even things out. Chad ate a bag of Doritos and played Call of Duty while Wagner stayed up all night moving through the dark web in various chat rooms of friends of friends.
“You buying more?” Chad asked. “Because…wow.”
“Trying to figure out how to make bombs.”
“We got plenty of bongs man. One for every strain. Which reminds me…”
“Bombs, as in kaboom!,” Wagner said. “Those kinds of bombs.”
“Bro, we ain’t like that. Look at us. We’re mellow. Besides, what in Jesus’ name would we blow up anyway?”
“When you have the problem of building bombs resolved,” Wagner said, his fingers flying across the keyboard about a thousand miles an hour, “finding targets becomes easy. Is your laptop stil
l operational?”
“Last I checked,” he said, half his body on the couch, an arm and a leg draped over. “Hey, where’d my other sock go?” He just realized his foot was cold. The right one not the left. As it happened, both socks were on his left foot.
“Your left foot was cold,” Wagner said over his shoulder. “I need you to jump online and see what you can find out about building timers.”
“I don’t think we can smoke and snort together anymore.”
“Timers, Chad. Timers.”
“Yeah dude, I got it,” he said. “Timers.”
Wagner learned how to make bombs with normal household products and some gunpowder, while Chad finally took on the task of learning how to make the timers.
Whenever they struck that perfect balance between too chill and too strung out, they brainstormed about how to turn one bomb into a larger bomb by piggybacking onto things that could be turned into even larger bombs.
“Propane trucks,” Chad blurted out.
“Not common,” Wagner said with an eye roll. “But your regular everyday car…super common.”
“Really?” Chad quipped.
“No, butthole. It’s hard to find cars these days. Especially on the streets and in people’s garages. Of course it’s common. Like looking outside and seeing blue skies.”
“It’s all smoke these days, bro.”
“Focus, man,” Wagner said. Snapping his fingers he said, “Eyes on the prize.”
“Gas stations,” Chad said. “You get like three or four pumps wired up, the explosion would wipe out everything but a person’s shadow.”
Wagner turned and fired him a look. “Is that a Hiroshima reference?”
“What else?” Chad asked, giggling.
“Nothing, just see how to build timers. See what we need. Make a list of parts and stuff. Then we can figure out where they’re sold and go shopping.”
“Brotatochip, I can’t even walk a straight line. I’m so wide awake and exhausted at the same time, it’s like one side of my head is kicking the other side in the balls.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Wagner said.
“You look like your dad right now. It’s…uncanny.”
“You’ve never even seen my dad.”
“Whatever,” Chad said with an eye roll. “The point is, I need some sleep, but I’m going to need some of that Plunkbottom Diesel to pump the brakes first.”
Clicking the window shut, shutting off the monitor, Wagner spun his chair around and said, “I could use a soft landing myself.”
“So?” Chad said.
“Ask and ye shall receive,” Wagner replied, grabbing the baggie. The two of them smoked and laughed and sank into the couch, an easy haze washing over them, pulling them under to places where their dreams were bigger and more colorful, like something you would see if you were on acid, or a sociopath.
“I feel like Jeffrey Dahmer,” Chad said.
“Dahmer’s dead.”
“Yes, but I’m very, very alive, but also not at the same time.”
The next day, when they woke enough to smell their filthy breaths and their four day old clothes, they realized the power was out. Wagner was slow to the jump, but steady in his assessment.
“We’re screwed. Must’ve blown a fuse or something.”
But they didn’t. Everything was fried: the TV, the computers, their cell phones and their brains.
“The drones must have hit the power station, or something like that. You have the list, right Chad? The stuff we need?”
They looked for awhile before finding a list folded to the size of a quarter and stuck in between the double layer of socks that was now on Chad’s sweaty foot.
They spent the day on their bicycles smoking pot and marveling at how nothing seemed to work. There were people in the streets, abandoned cars, drones littering the ground in some places, as if they’d just fallen from the sky. They tried to carry one for awhile, but it was too heavy, too awkward.
“It’s like God snapped his fingers and all the commotion came to a stop,” Chad said, marveling at the sheer destruction everywhere, especially to the downed drones.
“This is Biblical man.”
“For sure.”
Over the next forty hours, they smoked even more as they constructed a small stack of pipe bombs. And then they ate the rest of their snacks and decided if they didn’t have munchies, they couldn’t smoke. Simple as that. So then they lit up one last joint and romanced the hell out of it.
Wagner looked up at Chad and said, “What should we do?”
Chad shrugged his shoulders, made a face, and then—through the haze of fresh pot smoke and laziness—he said, “I say we take another bong rip, or seven, then start blowing stuff up.”
“First off, I like your thinking, but I don’t at the same time. What should we blow up?”
“Dude, where’s your head?” Chad asked, tapping his skull. “If we blow these things up, they’ll explode by themselves. But if we blow up like a car, or a truck, something with a bunch of gas, that’d be way more cool.”
“Oh yeah,” Wagner said, super baked. “Yeah, I like it. Okay.”
“Should we just go now?”
“No way, José,” Wagner said, practically smoking down the last millimeter. He inhaled, held it, then squinted his eyes and blew out a less than enthusiastic stream of smoke. “Let’s go at night. We can turn the midnight hour into sunrise.”
“Man, when you get wasted, you get totally poetic.”
Smiling, scratching his head, he said, “It’s what I do man. It’s what I motherfreaking do.”
8
The bang, bang, bang! of gunshots echoing inside the Walgreen’s puts those of us outside on edge. If Rex and Indigo were fired upon, if they were shot and killed, then any minute now the killers might come running out the front door where Stanton can hopefully take them out.
We should be so lucky.
If they don’t come running out, and Indigo and Rex don’t let us know they’re okay, then chances are I’m going to have a mental breakdown right before doing something seriously stupid.
At this point I’m checking myself for heart palpitations, frantic breathing, hyperventilation. My weapon is in my hand, as awkward and as heavy as it is, and it’s aimed with Stanton’s at the Walgreen’s front door.
Macy, for a change, is doing exactly as she’s told. She’s staying behind us.
Out here with little for cover, the three of us are an ocean of perpetual silence. My worst fears are coming true: nothing’s happening. Now I can’t stop the tide of potential scenarios from flooding into my mind. I have to know if my little brother is still alive.
The guns get too heavy to hold; we lower them to our sides.
Newly minted vagrants wander by us, looking at us funny, or with dead eyes, then turning their attention to the Walgreen’s. They don’t stop, though, and they don’t talk to us. We don’t exactly look like the most sociable bunch.
Then again, the way it was raining sludge earlier, how it’s matted in our hair and clumpy on our clothes, you can pretty much assume we all look like hobos who’ve been asleep in our own filth for way too long.
Then there’s that part of me, the nurse side of me, who can’t stop obsessing over Stanton’s wound. If this crap got in it, if it was packed inside the gash, how long until infection sets in? And do they have any antiseptic left inside the Walgreen’s? Because I’m going to need something to clean it once we find someplace safe to call home.
“What’s taking so damn long?” Macy finally asks.
“Language,” Stanton says too casually.
“Dad, this is the end of the world, no one gives a crap if I say damn,” Macy retorts.
I spin around and say, “I do. And your father does. And if we have any hope of returning to more civil times, it’s going to be in our ability to preserve our respectability. So no bad words and no bad behavior.”
Beyond killing people and stealing their homes a
nd holding up a Walgreen’s after slaughtering a pack of gangbangers…
Softly, more reverently, her voice raspy from breathing smoke all day, Macy says, “Do you hear how crazy that sounds right now, Mom?”
“I do,” I admit.
“Good manners and civility will get us killed,” Macy says in the same scratchy, patient voice, like she’s the voice of reason here.
“No it won’t,” Stanton argues. “Poor judgment will get us killed.”
My mind is beginning to spiral. I’m too worried about Rex to just stand here having such a poorly timed, unproductive conversation. If the girl wants to cuss, honestly, it would be a big improvement over murder, justified or otherwise.
“We can’t just sit here and wait this out,” Macy says, echoing all of our feelings.
I shoot her a cursory look. This whole time we’ve been outside the Walgreen’s, waiting, all I’ve been doing is thinking about Macy. About how she killed that man. How it was like she didn’t even stop to think or hesitate. She just acted.
“Just because you did…what you did back there…to that man, it doesn’t mean you’re some kind of a badass that can just charge headlong into danger. A loaded gun isn’t a get-out-of-death-free card.”
Macy reels, makes a face.
“I get that these are different times,” I say, “that we’re really in a life and death situation on the daily, but life still matters. Yours more than all of ours.”
“Mom, calm down,” Macy says. “We’re all still alive, I just want to make sure Uncle Rex is okay.”
“He’s been to war before, certainly something much worse than this and he’s okay, so—”
“You realize he was shot?” Stanton says.
“Dammit, stop. I don’t need you taking her side with everything I say—”
He raises his hands in mock surrender and says, “I’m not. It’s just…we can’t lose our collective ess aych eye tee right now.”
“Did you just spell ‘shit’ in front of our fifteen year old daughter?” I ask him, aghast.
“I know how to spell, Dad.”