by Ryan Schow
As she stared at him, their faces mere inches apart, all he could think about was that he was being killed by a woman.
“You…dog,” he said, his voice like packed clay.
Nothing changed. She didn’t end him faster. She merely stood there, eyes shaking with indignation, with aggression, with decades of pent up hostility.
His legs began to weaken, his body wavering. There was one last belching of blood and spittle that came out all over Nyanath’s hands, face and chest.
And still, the woman didn’t even flinch.
For whatever reason, he looked at her in that moment and felt she could have been a great killer. No one would suspect strength like this in a woman. He certainly didn’t. He thought to tell her this, to congratulate her, but he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t even find the words.
And why is she saying nothing?
For a second, he forgot how beautiful she was. But then he forgot about a lot of things: Jack and the plane, Benny Breaking Balls and Talon, the cargo…Dimas’s three kids.
A smile crept on his face as he thought about Dimas never getting his children back. When he died, he wanted to be thinking about something good and rewarding, so he thought of this.
He’d lost, but in a way, in the end, he’d also won.
His legs finally went. They buckled and he crashed to his knees. She dropped down with him, her hands still gripping the scissors.
“You got my brother killed,” she finally said, her eyes growing wide with the admission, almost like the darkness he had in him infected her, too.
He gurgled, tried to speak, squeezed his eyes shut against a debilitating pain, but could not find his voice.
“I can save your life, Father, but I won’t,” she said in Sudanese. “My child is dead, the husband you refused to call your son in law, he is dead, too.”
He felt his body wavering, his spine weak, black spots crowding all around the edges of his vision. A long string of blood drizzled out of his mouth and he couldn’t do anything about it. His eyelids were heavy—too heavy—and his breath was shallow. He wanted to hang his head and die, put all this pain and humiliation to bed, but she would not let him. She was still holding the scissors.
His head tilted sideways, then flopped over and forward.
Leaning close, looking up into his down-turned face, into his dying eyes, she said, “This is for all the souls you made black, you sick, contemptuous bastard.”
Then, with a final burst of energy, she ripped out the sheers. Standing above him, watching with cruel, unforgiving eyes, Diaab felt every last ounce of her hatred. His body finally toppled over. The second he hit the ground, a warm rush of blood boiled out of the hole in his throat, taking away the light of the world, leaving him shrouded in a darkness of his own making.
Chapter Twenty-Three
He woke up, blinked a few times, felt woozy and closed his eyes against a rush of nausea. The next time he woke up, he felt better. But not by much. He saw he was in a room, but it was not his room.
Am I alive?
Things came into awareness: the beep-beep-beeping of an electronic device, an IV drip at his side, silence everywhere. Outside, the sun was bright, but the sky was muted. Am I dead?
Is this death?
No, Rock thought, this is just someone’s bad apartment.
There was a body beside him in what he realized was a queen sized bed. He saw an EKG monitor, but it was not on.
Other than the soft beeping of his monitor, there was a pressing stillness. When he managed to turn his neck without too much pain shooting down his spine, he saw the woman beside him was bandaged quite a bit, red stains showing through the white gauze. Her head was turned away, her blonde hair matted with reddish-brown clumps.
He looked at her chest, prayed it would rise. He could have waited another ten minutes, or even twenty, and the body next to him would never take that breath.
He turned away. Am I alive or dead?
That was the question.
I am alive.
He drew a breath, felt the tightness in his torso, the cinching in his ribs. His brain was fogged over, like he couldn’t remember things. It was surreal. For a second, he wasn’t sure of his own name until the word “Rock” popped into his head, followed by Dimas.
Fighting through the pain and the cloudiness of thought, he tried to move. Bad idea. The slightest activating of his abs leveled him with a bright and burning awareness of his injuries. He laid back down and tried to relax his muscles.
He was definitely alive.
A recent memory rose to mind. The feeling of his chest being rolled on and crushed, a few ribs breaking. Now he understood. That constricting feeling around his torso was his ribs being wrapped with some sort of tape, medical or otherwise.
He made a small fist of his left hand, felt starbursts of pain there, too. This wasn’t the same kind of sharp agony he felt in his ribs, rather this was dulled, and deep. He lifted his arm enough to see a rough looking cast.
Dread closed in on him. He was in bad shape.
At that point, he needed to know everything—where he was at, who he was with, how he got out of that rubble he’d fallen into and why he wasn’t dead.
The apartment was old, its age showing. The paint on both the walls and the ceiling looked thick, like it had been painted dozens of times over the decades with a flat white paint; the windows were single pane and foggy with age; the aluminum Levolor blinds were bent here and there. On the ledge was a circular black ashtray, plastic with a few cigarette butts piled in there. Overhead, a dual-bulb light fixture was housed under a frosted glass dome with a burnished brass ring.
The room was small with a low ceiling, and made even smaller by the large bed. This place reminded him of when he didn’t have a good job earlier in life.
So who was the woman beside him? Just some random stranger? Am I lying next to a wife, a mother, a widower?
Rock followed the IV drip line right down to his wrist. The steady beep of his EKG monitor brought him back into awareness.
He was of sound mind again, at least when it came to his memories. As in, he remembered everything.
A sudden spasm of noise echoed on the horizon, somewhere out there, not too far away, but certainly not near. It was the sound of bombing, the shaking of the air, a low resonance in the floor of the building.
Suddenly a door was pushed open and a fit, thirty-something man rushed into the room, eyes on him.
“Oh good,” he said. “You’re awake.”
“I am.”
He shut off the EKG monitor.
“How do you feel?” he asked, working at his bedside manner, but clearly flummoxed by something. “Because, bro…you need to feel good. Do you feel good?”
“No man, I don’t feel good. I don’t know where I am, what’s going on, how I got here in the first place.”
“You’re at 5th and P Street. Some apartment tower not far from where we found you.”
“Found me?” he asked.
“We were in the building looking for survivors when it was hit again—the tower across the street, not the one we were in.”
“What building?”
“I don’t know the name of it. I’m not from here. All I know is it got leveled by drones. Fifteen missiles into the base and bam! Like 9/11, you know? But not. The whole thing came down, just smashed into the ground, the rubble spreading out wide and piling up against five stories of your building. The one we were in.”
“You were in the building?”
“We were. I told you that. But man, there was so much destruction. Like I said, the building across the street came down, rode up the side and kicked open massive holes in the structure five stories up. That’s what dumped you out. We found you and a woman.”
“You found a woman?” he said, excitable. “Black hair, short, normal looking face and body, but cute?”
“Yeah, exactly,” he said. “The only thing that saved you is the building across the street pilin
g up the side of yours. If not for that, you’d have dropped fifty feet to your death.”
“The woman,” Rock said.
“Yeah, yeah. We found her right beside you,” he said. “She’s with you, yes?”
He felt the anticipation charging up through him, so much so that he tried to sit up again only to realize he couldn’t do that so quickly. Wincing, cringing against the stabbing sensations, he dropped back down, but lost none of the exhilaration.
“Where is she?”
“Oh, man, I’m sorry…she’s gone.”
All that enthusiasm dumped flat, his body sagging against the bones, his mind delving right back down into that swampy depression. What was the point of saving him if they couldn’t save Maisie, too?
“Who are you?” Rock asked.
“An out of towner. We were at the Holiday Inn on 3rd and J St., just up the block when all this started. Not the drones. The shooter. We heard him and found our way there. By the time we got here, the first drones were attacking. It’s been a nightmare ever since.”
“So you’re just some random?” he asked.
“I guess. Well, here anyway. In Sacramento. Me and the guys, we’re from L.A. In town for a police convention.”
“You’re cops?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you with LAPD?”
“Major Crimes Division,” he said.
“I worked SWAT with Chicago PD for a few years,” he said, not because he was proud, but because talking helped keep his mind off the fact that he was injured and Maisie was dead.
“Oh yeah?”
“I had an…incident. Now I own a custom car shop up the street. On the other side of the river from here, not too far away.”
“We’ve all had incidents, bro. That’s par for the course. As for me and my guys, we’re part of a four man surveillance squad. Judicial surveillance measures that were once legal are now, or were, being constricted yet again by the new governor, who’s a real peach, by the way.”
“We preferred extra-judicial measures,” Rock heard himself say before he clamped his mouth shut.
“We all do,” he said, letting Rock know he was in good company.
“So you were here for a convention then?”
The guy shrugged his shoulders and said, “Something like that. Look, this would be cool if we were at a bar or something, but we’ve got to go, so if you’re in pain, I’ll wrap a washcloth for you to bite down on for when I move you. With your ribs, it could get bad.”
“Why Sacramento?” Rock asked as the guy pulled out the drip line and disconnected the EKG.
“We were here for the unveiling of these new laws as well as the sharing of other law enforcement related techniques that are working today. It was basically a turd run; now everything is a major SNAFU and here we are, not having home field advantage. Here, take my hand, we have to get you up and it’s going to suck ass a lot, but it’s necessary.”
The guy wasn’t lying. Standing up was flat out murder. At least he was strong enough to lessen the struggle. Being that close, Rock had a chance to really look at the guy. He was tanned with very lightly pocked skin, beard scruff and thick black hair. He was in his early thirties by the look of it and steely-eyed, like you’d expect from someone who spent time on the street rounding up scumbags.
“What do you mean a turd run?” Rock asked, fighting to keep the pain at bay.
“It’s our way of saying we’re running down BS. We grew up circumventing judicial measures and just got the job done. Our record is stellar, even though we toed the line a little too much. Now this new governor wants to show how important he is by closing down some of our well-traveled avenues. Not that it matters anyway.”
Grunting, a sheen of sweat forming all over him, his body protesting mightily, Rock said, “So you came to get enough info to find new holes in the system.”
“Exactly.” Wrapping Rock’s arm around his shoulder he said, “How are you doing?”
“Stellar,” Rock replied, grumbling with each and every step.
“This new guy, though,” he said. “This governor...”
“He’s a freaking tool,” Rock groused.
“I was going to say he’s a slimy prick,” the guy replied, walking Rock to an elevator, “but whatever. The power’s been spotty the last few hours. It’s on now and we can risk going down the elevator, but it would be safer to take the stairs.”
“How high up are we?”
“Three stories. The bottom two were hit, as was the other side of the building completely. Dead people are everywhere, but the drones are moving out of the downtown area so that’s why we’re going now.”
“Let’s take the stairs,” Rock said. “Where are we going? I mean, where are we going to?”
“I don’t know. Out of town somewhere? We need to get out of the path of these things because they’re not letting up and when you see outside, you’ll be having flashbacks to wars you’ve never been in. Imagine Beirut. Think of World War II after the last bullet was fired but not a day later.”
“It’s like that?” Rock asked.
“It’s like that.”
The first flight of stairs sent starbursts of pain screaming through him, leaving him nauseous and unstable. Twice he thought he’d pass out from the pain. Instead all he did was grunt a lot, leak out a few drops of piss, and curse under his breath. In the stairwell between the second and first floor, he made up his mind about what he was going to say next.
“How many of you are there?” Rock asked.
“We’ve got five wounded plus my four guys, you and me,” he said, counting in his head. “So eleven total.”
“I have a place outside the city. It’s a little over twenty-five miles from here on five acres. Off the beaten path so to speak.”
“How big is your house?” he asked, stopping for a second because Rock needed to wipe the sweat out of his eyes and catch his breath.
“Big enough.”
“What about beds?” he asked.
“Depends on how bad of shape your survivors are in,” Rock said. “But it’s a much better alternative than you’re suggesting, which is nothing spectacular.”
“We saved your ass, didn’t we?” he said, escorting Rock down the stairs.
“I didn’t mean it like that. I’m grateful you pulled me out of there,” Rock said, huffing and swearing, “but for the next six weeks I’m going to be wishing you hadn’t.”
He stopped, looked at Rock and said, “You want to go the rest of the way on your own?”
“Do you think I do?”
“Try to be a little grateful then,” he snapped. “Not everyone gets to live through this.”
They got down the rest of the stairs, walked through a blackened bottom floor, passed a handful of charred bodies and a tremendous amount of destruction. The front door was blown off, a gaping hole in the side of the building.
Outside, the sunlight was dull against the hot, smoky sky.
He shielded his eyes, then was ushered to one of two large SUV’s. Both were dented to all hell. One had half the windshield spider-webbed. Against a dismal grey background where cars and houses were on fire, and buildings were shelled and collapsed, the SUVs looked inviting.
He slowly, painfully climbed in the backseat with a lot of help and even more cursing. When he sat down, the pain worsened and wasn’t going away.
“Hope the ride to your place isn’t a rough one,” the guy said. “Feel free to pass out, though. It might be the better alternative.”
Rock knew in that instant he was going to feel every single foot of those twenty-five miles.
He wasn’t wrong…
The first few miles were the worst, but after an hour of bumping up on curbs, smashing cars out of the way, driving over things, around things and past some truly awful things, Rock went numb to the sights and the physical agony. What kept him from bemoaning his situation was the thought that Jill was going to be livid about him offering up his house to strangers.
“Where are you from, originally?” Rock asked the guy who helped him out of there.
“Wisconsin,” he said. “Moved to L.A. after college.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah,” he laughed, “it’s cool. You get used to the smog, the traffic, all the assholes you have to put up with just to be in sunny California.”
“You almost sound like a native,” Rock said. “What’s your name, by the way?”
“Gregor,” he said. “You?”
“Rock,” he replied. “Short for Roque.”
“We thought you were dead,” the guy on the other side of Rock said. “After the dust cleared enough for us to see, we saw you moving. Most of us didn’t want to come for you because it looked too dangerous, but we agreed we had to try.”
“I appreciate it,” Rock lied, even though maybe he did a little bit.
“Where to now?” the driver asked.
Rock gave him directions; the driver radioed the SUV behind him. It took the better part of the day to get around the absolute chaos that had befallen not only Sacramento, but the roads and highways leading through Citrus Heights, Antelope, Roseville and Rocklin.
The air everywhere was a dirty grey and smelly. Even though the SUVs had filters and a recirculating air conditioning system, the burning stench got in everything.
Sacramento looked like the center of hell. Like he’d fallen into a nightmare but was now trapped. They hit a massive pothole, drove over a car door, then moved on. The jarring hit him just right. The pain flared, shot straight to his head. For a second he was dizzy, and then he felt himself losing balance and falling over...
“Wake him up,” Rock thought he heard someone say from a million miles away. There was a light slapping on his cheek, then a harder slapping that sufficiently roused him.
He woke up and said, “I’m awake.”
“Where to now?” the driver asked. It took him a minute to gather his bearings. They were stopped in a grassy gully on the side of the highway. Ahead there was a battered green road sign that said Horseshoe Bar Road.