by Ryan Schow
“Yes, ma’am,” he says.
“Now Draven, I left the map in the kitchen, as you said. I’d appreciate if you’d make ten copies so everyone can have one and we can have some extras to strategize with. Snap, snap. Let’s get this thing going before the gas kicks in.”
“Gas?” Kamal says.
“Gas,” Ice replies knowingly, holding his nose and fanning the air in front of him with a grin. We all kind of snicker, and then we all sit back and feel embarrassed for having done it.
“Niños tontos,” Eliana says, shaking her head. Silly children.
Draven gets up and heads next door, which gives Eudora the chance to speak freely, by the looks of it.
“I chide my grandson plenty because it gives me great pleasure to push against things, even if it’s my own flesh and blood. But the truth is, he had a difficult life growing up. My husband was not agreeable in any sense of the word. Neither was my son. I loved them both, but they were damn difficult sons of”—she says, looking at the boys and deciding to hold her tongue—“anyway, my husband browbeat my son and he browbeat Draven twice as hard. Draven was forced to take karate from the time he was six years old until my son kicked him out of the house at seventeen. Now that I’ve gotten a hold of Draven, he knows guns and hunting, as well as survival skills I learned from my husband who thought taking us out in the middle of nowhere to be away from the government was a gal’s idea of a good time. It wasn’t. Either way, Draven’s computer business is his obsession, hacking I guess you’d call it, but he’s also responsible enough to take care of me and let me break the law by having a gun. I say that so you won’t think kindness equals weakness. He’s not weak at all. He is, in fact, rather dangerous.”
“You have a gun?” Kamal asks.
“Guns, actually,” she says. “I shot some guy the other day. It felt good. Of course, that’s how I got this shiner.”
We were all wondering if she was going to make mention of the patchwork of black and blue marks on the side of her face.
“You shot someone?!” Kamal says, his eyes wide, his expression that of an impressed kid.
“My dad got shot,” Nasr says, his eyes furrowed.
“Lots of people have been getting shot,” Adeline says. “It’s a sign of the times.”
“These are the kinds of days that put hair under a six year old’s armpits,” Eudora says. “The kinds of days when boys become men too early.”
“I’m seven,” Nasr, says.
“What did I say about manners?” Eudora says, looking right at him. “I was trying to say, you’ll be growing up fast in these next few weeks, or you’ll be dead. It’s an A/B scenario where A is alive and B is dead.”
“My father will save us,” Kamal says.
“Yeah?” Adeline says. “Where’s he at right now?”
None of us speak because we can all feel the fear and pain oozing out of Adeline. If these boys knew how hard it was for each and every one of us to smile, or even act normal when the shit is literally hitting the fan right now…
Ice clears his throat and asks, “How was your meal?”
“Delicious,” Kamal replies.
“My stomach hurts a bit,” Nasr replies, now looking more like the seven year old he is.
“It’s the gas,” Eudora says. “Told you.”
Just then, Draven comes back in with ten copies of the maps he made. It’s a rough sketch of the layout and there are only four homes marked with a large O, for occupied.
“The first one is a single woman, mid-thirties, divorced,” Draven says, pointing to the map. “The next home is a three pack of boys, ages ten to seventeen. Their parents never came home, but they’re thinking there’s still a chance they’re not dead.”
“Is that what they said?” Eliana asks.
“Yes, but I set the record straight. Told them they needed to hope they were still alive, but plan on them being dead.”
“Subtle,” Eudora says.
“And the fourth house is occupied by a gamer with bloodshot eyes and his meth head room mate. I think they may be cooking in the back yard, but I can’t be sure. You can set up a lab just about anywhere these days.”
“How are they?” I ask. “I mean, what’s your read on them?”
“Tweakers,” he answers quickly. “Completely detached from reality.”
A gentle beeping comes from my pocket where I’ve got Ice’s phone. Startled, I jump up like the sound sent a thousand volts of electricity charging through me.
Everyone’s looking at me but I don’t care.
I check the phone and sigh.
Low battery.
“False alarm,” I say, stuffing the phone back in my pocket.
The phone’s now at three percent and in need of some juice. When Eudora and Draven are done explaining their big plans to us, I’ll put it on the charger.
“We’ve got to fortify the neighborhood before it’s too late,” Eudora says, shifting uncomfortably in her wheelchair. “That means we need to quietly collect our resources. But we can’t let the other people in the neighborhood know. These people may be good, upstanding citizens, but in times like these, I imagine most people will end up being rather unpredictable. Ted Bundy was a nice looking young man until he butchered you. Then he was his real self. A killer. When times become desperate enough, there will be a thousand Ted Bundys on the streets, maybe more. That’s the nature of survival.”
“Why are you telling us this?” Eliana asks.
“Remember when I was talking to you about being a grey man?” Ice says to me, not ignoring Eliana but answering her question another way.
“Yeah?” I both say and ask at the same time.
“Being a grey man means blending, not standing out, being able to walk in between raindrops, so to speak.”
“Ah,” I say.
Draven says, “You don’t look people in the eyes when you talk to them because you don’t want to talk to them. Your clothes are plain, your hair forgettable, whatever words you’re forced to utter are unmemorable.”
“Exactly,” Ice says.
Ice looks at Eliana and she looks right back at him. When she and Ice drove into Sergio’s house and she got out of the car and started yelling and shooting people, at first I wasn’t sure if she was a man or a woman. Even then, I had to really look at her up close to tell if she was pretty or really ugly.
“We are not to draw any attention to ourselves,” Eliana says to Carolina in Spanish, “because it could lead to unwanted advances by those who would wish to hurt us.”
As she’s explaining this, Ice is looking at Eliana the same way I’m looking at her. This is a woman who knows how to be a grey man. She is better than all of us at it.
“This matters most to us in terms of survival skills, weaponry, food stores, heat and safety,” Draven continues now that Carolina seemingly understands. “We can’t let on to anyone else that we have what we have, or that we are who we are. That also goes for the women.”
“What do you mean?” Adeline asks.
Aside from being a good mother and eventually becoming and advocate for the homeless in Chicago, Adeline spent her whole life staying in shape, learning to dress nice and do her makeup. Beauty was something she managed to perfect, so the mere idea that she should leave all that behind willingly is going to go over like a lead balloon.
“Most of the men who will be strong enough to survive this,” Eliana says in a tone that’s as grim as the day is long, “are not the kind of men any of us will want to meet. Especially if we’re unarmed. These are the kinds of men who see women like you and Eliana as trophies. These are the kind of men who will do the kinds of things to a woman that is bound to wage wars. That’s why it’s important—especially for you, Adeline—to not be pretty. If you can erase all traces of your beauty, of your femininity, at least long enough for us to get out of town and maybe find a working homestead, you will be safer than if you go around looking like this.”
Surprisingly, Adeline do
es not beg to differ.
“Eliana took two months to prepare herself to come up through the migrant trafficking lines and into America,” Ice says. “When I first met her, I thought she was a filthy boy. She was not appealing. In fact, she was quite repellant. But my eye is better than most, so after a few minutes with her, I realized she was a thing of astonishing beauty hidden in a shell of her own making.”
The girls give a little, unconscious “Awe,” then soften up inside.
“The point is,” Draven says, “we have to hide in broad daylight, and conceal our actions under the cover of night, or under the cover of all out war, if that’s all we have.”
“What are you suggesting?” Carolina asks, speaking slowly, struggling with her words.
“I’m suggesting we prepare for the fall of civilization.”
“We’re leaving,” Carolina says.
We all look at her, but Eudora looks at her hardest. “What do you mean you’re leaving?” she asks, shifting in her chair again.
Carolina looks at Eliana, unsure of how to respond. She has that panicked look in her eye like she said something she wasn’t supposed to.
The smell that suddenly permeates the room has me wanting to hold my nose. People are upturning their noses and looking around with the hint of sour judgement in their eyes. Now I’m looking between Nasr and Eudora and wondering which one I need to put more distance from. In the end, the first air biscuit gets a free pass, but if someone starts to make a habit of breaking wind, I promise, I’m going to say something.
“What she means when she says we’re leaving is that we’re leaving when we get our kids back,” Adeline says.
“Where are you going?” Draven asks.
“Away from here,” I say. “Sacramento, if we can make it. Ice’s brother lives there on five acres outside the city.”
Draven blows out a breath and says, “That’s a journey!”
“It’s not that far,” Eliana says, because that’s what Ice told her earlier.
“You’re from Guatemala, right?” Eudora asks.
“I am.”
“Well then, comparatively, it’s not that far.”
“Well until—”
Just then the phone in my pocket starts to both ring and vibrate, making the kind of ruckus that jumpstarts my heart and humbles me at the same time. I don’t want to admit it, but even though we have the advantage of taking his kids, Diaab killed a child on our front porch and I could never do such a thing. He’s a different kind of animal.
I hold up a hand and say, “It’s him.”
I answer the phone, sick in my gut, my outrage mounting.
“You had better be calling to tell me you’re almost here,” I say, not nice at all. I head into the other room, Ice’s phone now beeping lightly with the low battery indicator.
“Taking my boys was the wrong thing to do,” Diaab Buhari says, his voice like gravel, enough fire in there to burn up the airwaves between us.
“You’re one to talk, you son of a bitch,” I growl, covering the phone so my voice won’t carry. “I get my kids tonight or yours get dead. But not before I cut them up piece by piece, slowly, like it’s done in the cartel.”
“You are not the cartel,” he challenges.
“I am worse. I’m an undercover DEA agent, which means I know the difference between right and wrong and I’m choosing wrong.”
“I am not at home,” he says, softening his tenor.
“I don’t care if you’re staking out day care centers in Gold Coast or Streeterville. My kids are more important than where you are. So get them and come here and I’ll leave little Nasr’s ears alone.”
“I will have them to you in the morning,” he says. “It’s too cold to go out and it’s starting to snow. Plus, the drones are still out in force and I don’t want to get shot because it’s too dark to see.”
“Okay,” I say, bluffing, “looks like I’m starting with the ears.”
And that’s when the phone decides to die. Realizing what happened, what I just did, how I put our kids in serious danger, I run into the family room in a blind panic and say, “Ice, I need a charger. NOW!”
“It’s in the car,” he says just as the lights go out. Not the lights on the first floor. The lights and power in the entire neighborhood. We’re all quite suddenly plunged into a perfect, quiet darkness.
“Fire?” Adeline asks.
“No one move,” I say. “The power will come back on in a minute. Ice, I need that charger and I need it now.”
“I said it’s in the car,” he tells me.
“It’s a car charger, right?”
“No, it is not.”
“So you’re saying the phone is dead?” I ask. “As in useless if the power doesn’t come on?”
“Yes.”
“Does anyone else have a phone?” I say, the dark so thick it seems to bond to me, the same as it would if it were crude oil. No one says anything and that’s when I start to have a panic attack.
“Was that him?” Adeline asks.
“Yes.”
“Does he have our children?”
“We didn’t get that far,” I hear myself say. I manage to sit down, and then I manage to sit here long enough to realize that leaving it the way we did, I’ve probably just killed my kids.
Chapter Nineteen
Rock was conscious when the missile struck the building. He was conscious, scared and in pain. Beneath him, around him, everything shook.
He was going to die, he knew it.
All the building needed to do was collapse on him and he’d be squashed to death.
Another missile hammered the building. Rocking, shaking, the building was filled with the explosive noise of things being destroyed. The pile of debris he was cocooned in vibrated and moved. He might have even felt a slight swaying, although that could be his imagination.
He couldn’t take much more of this. His brain was starting to break.
The wreckage that shunted and shoved against him, and then across him, put undue pressure on his chest. It all happened in an instant—the weight, the heaviness, the compression against his chest, his torso. His ribs suddenly caved, then cracked. Two, maybe three, ribs broke. The agony was as instantaneous and painful as it was scary. The load shifted again, this time upon his left arm, breaking that, too.
He took a breath to scream, but the agony of expanding his lungs splintered his insides, stopping him, trapping all that wailing grief inside him.
Fire bursts of pure, physical torture blazed through him, rattling his brain, his state of mind, his will to survive. He didn’t want to live, not like this. He had to die.
He needed it.
He blacked out from lack of oxygen, or shock.
He woke up, blacked out, woke back up and coughed a few times, which was a few too many times because the pain in his ribs was like fiery pitch forks driving into him.
He blacked out again.
When he woke, everything was tight. The pain was ungodly. Then it was nothing, pure nothingness. He woke again, felt the hollow ache of hunger in his stomach. How much time has passed?
Maisie…
Her body was still pressed into him. She hadn’t moved. The destruction stopped, not killing him, not freeing him. Breathing as high and as shallow as he could, he listened to the silence around him and prayed.
He wasn’t sure when the blackness crowded in, but it did. He only realized he’d passed out when he woke up. It was dusty, hot, dry.
He hadn’t moved.
Why am I not dead yet?! Hours, weeks, days could have passed and he wouldn’t know it. And dammit! This wasn’t his body! A body was never supposed to hurt like this.
But he hurt. Mother of God, he hurt!
Rock tried to move, but he was still pinned down. Pinned down, broken, weak. Slabs of concrete pressed into his back, all kinds of debris covered him and Maisie like a blanket.
“Maisie,” he said.
Right now, her bones were pressed in
to his bones, the hard sides of them ground together. There was so much pain he couldn’t separate one thing from the other. All he knew was an encroaching claustrophobia.
“Maisie.”
His throat was so dry, his tongue sticking to his mouth. He tried to swallow, but he couldn’t. Panic set in. For a second he felt like a fish out of water, but then he stopped trying. He felt his body relax.
Drawing a deep breath, he said, “Stay calm.”
Still, his mouth was so dry, so parched. And it was dark.
But he was still breathing…
How is that?
As he laid there despondent and unable to free himself, the sound of silence pressed into him. It was quiet where he lay—a lightless, pressing void.
“Maisie,” he said once again, trying to lick his lips, trying to gather some spit in his throat and not choke.
He opened his eyes a little wider, but some bits of dust dropped onto the wet surface of his eyeball sending him into fits. He couldn’t move, and things were definitely broken, but now grit was on his eyeball and he couldn’t get it off!
Blinking hard, hurting, scared and now claustrophobic, he laid there.
If he bucked up and took this crap situation like a man, he’d stay logical, dry eyed and in misery. But if he thought about how bad this situation was, how the girl he liked too much for his and Jill’s own good was now dead on top of him and that’s how they’d be found—if they were even found at all—he felt the emotion welling inside him.
Let it out, he told himself as he thought about his emotions. The tears would flush the grit from his eyes. But it would further dehydrate him.
He fought to breathe, but his ribs ached and the air was stuffy. He tried to turn his head, couldn’t. The dust had a weight and smell to it. Am I breathing in asbestos? If he didn’t die right away, would he die of lung cancer from asbestos poisoning? Is that even a thing? Or would he slowly be crushed to death over a matter of days.
If ever there were reasons to let this life go, he was seeing them. That’s when his emotions finally set in.
“Ridiculous,” he uttered as he started to cry like a spanked child.
This wasn’t his proudest moment. The grit slid out of his eyes though, and then he pissed himself and cursed God for this. For all of it.