by Ryan Schow
But he knew.
These girls survived the impossible, the unfathomable. This had him standing back and looking at them with different eyes, and a profound feeling of respect.
The second they got the gas can in the back of the truck, the girls piled in. One of the other kids, one of the pre-teens, she climbed in the truck as well and the other girls didn’t say “No.”
He had no idea how they all fit in there, but then again, when matched with the determination of these survivors, their willpower was a force to be reckoned with, certainly not a force he was willing to stand in the way of.
“Thank you,” the girl in the driver’s seat said.
“Be safe, and good luck,” he told them. Before they could drive off, he said, “Wait,” and then he pulled his pistol from his jacket, as well as his spare mag and handed it to the driver.
“Thank you,” she said, taking it.
“Do you know how to use it?” he asked. She nodded. Then: “Good. In these times, if you feel you’re in danger, don’t hesitate.”
“I won’t.”
He and a few of the other girls watched them drive off in to the smoke filled distance. When he turned back around and looked down, there were five little faces looking up at him.
“I have an idea,” he said to them. “Treasure hunt for a new car?”
A few of the kids smiled, although he wasn’t sure they knew what he was talking about. They went with him anyway. What else were they going to do?
It took them a good two hours, but they finally found another vehicle, an older Suburban a few blocks down with some gas and keys available. No one had died in it, and no one was home, so it looked like in the new world of car shopping, he was the proud new owner of another SUV, this one a little larger than the last.
They fired up the engine, saw the gas on half, then stopped off at the house where he got the shotgun and a box of shells. He knew the girls didn’t have anything of value—save for a warm bed, people who cared about them and their freedom—so they all piled back into the SUV and set off for Fiyero’s house.
If anything, these girls were better off with Eliana, or Adeline. His paternal touch just wasn’t what it needed to be.
Outside Fire’s place, Adeline walked out to meet him. Eudora was on the porch with a shotgun and a ventilated painter’s mask, the kind you can easily slip on. She was also in a big jacket with a scarf. He waved. She smiled and waved back.
Draven was in the window with his rifle, as well. Xavier looked up and gave him nod.
He nodded back.
“Xavier,” Adeline said, looking over at Eudora with a wave.
“I need you to take them,” he said, the snow falling lightly between them. “The others went back home, but I…I can’t…I mean, with Giselle, we’d be willing to keep them, but now that there’s…that there’s no we, it’s just…they need a mother figure, not some guy who can’t even keep his thoughts straight.”
“What do you mean the other girls went back home?”
“They left.”
She shook her head, blew out a breath and said, “What they did was bet a losing hand.”
“I tried to tell them that.”
“You should have stopped them,” Adeline said, her voice climbing in pitch.
The silence between them, the silence of a dying city, had a weight of its own. The snow was a beautiful death sentence.
“So you want me to hold these girls hostage after having rescued them from men holding them hostage?” he said, frowning, tilting his head and shoving his hands in his pockets.
“It was for their own good.”
“Well my Spanish is a little rusty,” he quipped, “so just take these ones and let me be. I don’t need you making me feel any worse than I already do.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just…I’m so frazzled with this.”
“We all are.”
She stepped forward and pulled him into a hug that was fierce and loving, something he needed from his own wife, not Fire’s wife. He took it anyway. At times such as those, a man got his love where he could get it and he didn’t say no.
“Tell Eliana I got the other girls everything they needed,” he muttered, stepping away from her, “and that they were insistent on going back home.”
“Do you want to see Fire before you go?”
By now her cheeks were red, she was holding herself a little tighter and her body held a light shiver that was bound to intensify the longer she stood out there. He let out a breath, watched it materialize in the air between them.
“I just want to go,” he said.
“You’re going to be alone, though,” she replied. “You don’t have to be alone, you know. You can come here whenever you want. Maybe take one of these homes and get a fresh start. Or maybe just a change.”
“I thought about that,” he said, noncommittal. “Thank you.”
And with that he turned, got back in his Suburban and headed back home. With the smoke being what it was, and the snow coming at a gentle but steady pace, it was going to be cold.
When he got home, he set the shotgun down on the kitchen table, thanked God for the return of a quiet household, and walked straight out back to where Giselle was buried.
He didn’t even bother with a coat.
For a long time he just stood there, talking to her as if she were there, wishing things could be different but knowing in the days to come things would only start to feel worse.
He sunk to his knees in the snow-dusted dirt, his shoulders slouching forward, his head falling. And then he rocked back on his butt, sat down and cried. He let his emotions run free until he heard the sound of whirring overhead and this stopped him. Looking up, he saw the drone. It was hovering down into the backyard, unarmed, a robotic eye mounted to its belly. Sitting there, black against an ocean of soft, white flakes, the noisy machine had a menacing feel.
“What?” he barked, wiping his eyes. The thing just hovered there, dropping down and facing him head on. “You did this! You killed her! You killed them all!”
Getting to his feet, his grief replaced with rage, he went inside, snatched his shotgun off the table, then went back outside and shot the thing. The drone exploded, bits and pieces of it raining down on the thin layer of snow that now dusted his back lawn.
Standing there, breathing hard and angry, wishing he had the courage to shoot himself the same way he shot the drone, he heard another whirring sound.
He looked up, saw it.
A second drone flew over the roof of his house, dropped down into his back yard. He took aim, but the drone took off.
He charged after it, scampering through his house and out the front door to where he saw it in the street. Xavier tromped right out into the street, aimed the weapon and fired. The drone spun around, half of it shattered, the other half falling to the asphalt in a spinning heap of scrap metal and plastic parts.
The collective sound of whirring, almost like a bee hive amplified. He looked up, pinned down the source of the sounds. Half a dozen more drones descended upon him. He took out three, four, five of them with the shotgun before he ran out of rounds.
They kept coming.
He stood in the street, the sound of his weapon clicking, plastic parts of blasted drones littered all around him.
Now, more than a dozen drones circled around him.
He started swinging at them with the shotgun, catching a few of them. But when he spun one way, the other drones nipped him in the back with their propellers, making him jump. The next thing he knew, he was getting nipped by all of them.
They were in too close for the shotgun. He dropped it, then lashed out. Swinging wildly with one arm, shielding his face and eyes with the other, he went after them, grabbing what he could, throwing them down when he caught them, taking propeller blades right, left and sideways. One nipped his forehead and his hands. He got a hold of the landing rail—got nipped in the head again—threw it down and stomped on it. He did this over and over agai
n trying to fight them off. For his efforts so far, his face, neck, hands and arms all opened up in lines of long, thin cuts.
That’s when he went from defense to offense.
He ducked out of the circle, grabbing onto the baseball-sized HD lenses where he could as if they were low hanging fruit. The second he got a hold of one, he hurled it down will all his might. He did this one after the next, moving fast, acting like his life depended on it. Bloodied up, constantly being nipped, he told himself this was a street fight, one he could win if only he kept moving and never backed down.
“C’mon!” he shouted at them as they started to back away from him. By this time, blood was running down his arms, his face, his back and neck. His shirt was splotched red, none of the cuts more than superficial wounds, but all bleeding with vigor.
Dozens more drones appeared over head, dropping down from the sky to surround him, albeit just out of range. For the first time, he felt juiced more with trepidation than adrenaline. He only hoped his anger could stem this dark tide enough for him to renew his advantage. If he was to do that, he’d need more shotgun shells.
“What do you want?!” he screamed up at them.
He lunged toward them. They moved back, keeping the same distance between them. All over the snow covered street were the shuffle marks of a fight, and the plastic debris of a dozen fallen drones. If the still active drones could think, or fear, they would have to think about this.
He’d make them!
And if something was controlling them, he prayed it was now weighing its odds against him and reconsidering. Unfortunately for him, these odds weren’t good, not if this inexhaustible supply of drones kept him the center of attention. Of course, it didn’t help that he was feeling winded now, too. His adrenaline had spiked five minutes ago. He was now wearing out, coming down.
Turning toward the house, ready to be done with this fight because his stores of energy were officially sapped, he decided to make a calculated retreat. But he wouldn’t show fear. He bent down, snatched up his shotgun. The drones stayed in a circle around him, hovering but not attacking, that incessant buzzing noise now agitating him deep inside his brain.
It was as if they were of one mind, which was truly frightening.
“I’m going to load this shotgun,” he said to them, “and then I’m going to come back out here and shoot every last one of you!”
When he got close to the house, the drones in front of him moved to the side and he walked right through the front door. One tried to follow, but he slammed the door so hard, he smashed and broke the drone.
“Creeper,” he muttered as went to reload the weapon.
When he returned, the drones were gone. Only the remnants of their former army were left behind.
Making a decision, he walked out back, knelt before Giselle’s grave, then said, “I’m leaving you at our house to look over it and protect it, and to remember all the wonderful memories we made here, but I have to go.”
He broke down sobbing, just as he knew he would. The grief tore through him, leaving him drained, his body now fully depleted, his overheated face swollen and sad.
He was nothing without her.
“I know your body is here, but your soul is free,” he said, nose running. He wiped his eyes, but could do nothing with his broken heart. “If you can, please come with me. Let me feel you. Let me know that even gone, you’re still here with me, at my side, being the force of my strength.”
He got to his feet, blew his nose and said, “I can’t kill myself for fear of not being with you on the other side, so I’m going to fight these things, and maybe go up against some bad people, too. So I guess that means I’ll be here a bit longer. But it’s time to go. It’s time to do what I do in this world, and hope I can have a good death and join you on the other side.”
And with that, he packed all the food in his house and the one next door, as well as everything he thought might be useful in the future, and he drove over to Fire’s and Adeline’s house.
When Adeline came out, she was happy to see him. “I’m here and I need a house. But I also want to be useful, so I’m ready to work.”
“For starters,” Adeline said, “we have to get you patched up. You can’t be bleeding all over the place. Then after that, I’m going to be your real estate agent, and we’re going to find you a house. Or you can just sleep in ours.”
“I need to be alone,” he said. Then he added: “But it’s nice to know you’re here.”
“I am here, Xavier,” she said with such tenderness in her voice. “For you, we’re all here.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Diaab left O’Hare and managed to make his way back to the railyard without having a complete mental breakdown, although one was near. He ran into the drones, but he survived. Perhaps the fear was what kept him from spiraling.
He was lucky to be alive.
A pair of them caught him twenty minutes ago, but he spun the wheel the second he saw them and ducked under an overpass. Their bullets ripped a line across the back of the van’s roof line, but they weren’t interested in him.
He was just a drive by.
They got me, he told himself as his heart shook and he fought to catch his breath, but they didn’t get me.
In truth, the incident distressed him, but not as much as losing his inventory, his pilot and his plane. Half his exit-strategy just went up in flames! If anyone would have said, “This isn’t the end of the world,” he would have argued that it felt like it. And then he would have shot them.
He had more kids, he reasoned. More cargo.
And a way out.
Diaab knew this was salvageable, but his losses were mounting and he was having a hard time staying out of the miasma of this indefensible situation. Everything was happening too fast! And nothing was going his way. Now he would have to contend with the snow, the unseasonably cold weather, his kids getting kidnapped and this graveyard of a city…
When he pulled into the now abandoned coach yard, he drove the van to the back of the railyard and parked directly in front of the maintenance warehouse.
Inside the four passenger trains that had sat for nearly a year collecting dust was the rest of his exit strategy. He’d paid for these trains to not be repaired, but he also paid for them to not be inspected.
Parking next to the beat-to-hell Ford Ranger he’d taken, he ignored the fresh coat of snow settling on it. The snow was settling on everything.
Soon it would be too much.
Diaab got out of the van, walked past the dead body on the ground—his railyard contact, Charlie—and headed inside where a standing barbecue pit served as their only source of heat. Talon and Benny Breaking Balls stood over the brilliant orange bed of coals warming their hands and faces.
He walked past them without fanfare, climbed into the first passenger car and saw them—the kids he’d taken from Adeline Dimas and her coward husband.
All three were tied up, their mouths duct taped shut, their eyes wide and swimming with fear. Blankets were draped over their shoulders. They were shivering. One of the girls, the nerdy one with the glasses, had a big wet spot near her crotch.
Storming out of there, even more irate than ever, he screamed, “She pissed herself!” Benny Breaking Balls and Talon just looked at him, attentive but reticent. “If you have to take the tape off their mouths to hear them ask you to go to the bathroom, take it off!”
Benny looked at Talon and both men went up into the passenger train and tore the duct tape off their mouths.
“Anyone else have to go?” Diaab heard Talon ask.
When they came back out together, Talon said, “It was just the four eyes, and she already went.”
“Did you re-tape their mouths shut?” Diaab asked.
“With fresh duct tape,” Benny said, confident in his abilities, almost irritated that he was constantly under such scrutiny. Unconsciously toying with his waist length hair, the oversized Ojibwe said, “So are we going or what? It’s not
getting any warmer or safer here.”
“They shot the plane down,” Diaab grumbled, angry but chomping down on the growing pain in his arm while trying not to lose his composure.
Even if the entire world is falling down around you, he heard his father saying from the deeper recesses of his memory, you do not show it. Never pain, never frustration, never defeat.
“Who shot the plane down?” Benny asked, his Ojibwe accent thick, the smell of aftershave too much for Diaab’s nostrils even in the open air.
“The drones, Benny. They shot it down right after liftoff,” Diaab said. It was a sobering moment for them all. “Get me a head count on the remaining inventory.”
“What about the three kids?” Talon asked.
“They count.”
“So they’re coming with us?” Benny asked, although it was more of statement.
“For now, yes.”
He was fashioning his long black hair into a ponytail. Recently one of the cargo—a feisty young girl—made the mistake of grabbing his hair when she didn’t want to be shoved into a van. He hit her so hard she died. It was a rule from that point on: ponytail first, kids next.
The Ojibwe Indian was appraising him now, not blinking, still gathering up his hair, which was a complete odds with the stern look he carried. If Diaab wasn’t feeling so weak right then, he wouldn’t be afraid of Benny. But he was. Benny Breaking Balls was a force to be reckoned with, a murderer, a desecrator of the body. Diaab watched him scalp an undercover agent they caught trying to infiltrate their “organization” last year. The look on Benny’s face that day was almost worse than the scalping itself.
Regarding taking the Dimas’s kids, though, his mind was not entirely made up. He wasn’t sure what the play was here. Dimas took his boys—he took them both! He had to get them back, but if he didn’t, if something happened…no, he couldn’t think like that.
“Head count!” he screamed when the pair failed to move. “NOW!”