by Ryan Schow
He doesn’t start crying, but he comes close.
Nasr just crosses his arms and tilts his chin up, almost like a dictator, if dictators came in extra small sizes.
With a map in hand, Ice says, “When we get them, we’ll bring Nasr back. You have our word on this.”
Nyanath and Kamal say good-bye to Nasr. Nyanath promises once more to get him when this is all over. He stays strong, says he’s fine. When they’re gone, Adeline takes Nasr over to Eudora’s house to warm him up and get him some food, and then we round up the weapons.
Eliana is suddenly there. Her energy is direct and abundant.
“I’m going, too,” she says.
“We got this,” Ice replies. “But thank you.”
“I don’t think you understand, that wasn’t a request,” she says in Spanish. She’s looking at the pile of loot we took from SAC Wright’s weapons grab a few days back, as well as the weapons we got from Sergio’s place. When we don’t say anything, she says, “You helped me get Carolina, let me return the favor.”
Without looking, Ice hands her a Ka-bar knife that was seized from some raid. It was a US Marines issue knife, but guys with big egos like to carry big knives, and this one has seen its fair share of street war.
“I want a gun, too,” she says.
I toss her a Glock, fish through the extra mags and find one that fits. I toss her that, too. And a box of ammo.
“Start loading,” I say.
She just stands there, long enough for me to look up. When I do, I see a determined woman that looks nothing like the sweet, matronly type she’s been.
“How can you flip the switch like that so quickly?” I ask.
Ice looks at me, then up at her, then back to me. “And that’s why we like each other so much. We can both flip that switch.”
Her mouth is a flat slash as she starts feeding the mag with 9mm rounds.
“Can you fight with that thing?” I finally ask, thinking maybe it wasn’t such a good idea giving her the knife.
“I can fight with anything you put in my hand,” she says.
“What if I put a banana in your hand?” I ask.
“Then I’ll beat you to death with it,” she replies, dead serious, eyes on her task and not on me.
“You know, I actually believe that,” I tell Ice.
“Me, too.”
The snow gives us cover. The Audi’s all wheel drive system makes our driving safe. Still, it takes us awhile, and we have to take all kinds of detours. When we finally reach the railyard, I take a breath thinking it’s enormous.
I look at the map Nyanath drew. “She said it was at the back of the yard in a white shop, like for maintenance or something.”
“So let’s drive back there,” Ice says, gun out, ready to go.
We crunch over the fresh snow, moving through the silence at a snail’s pace, hoping not to miss anything, unsure of what’s ahead. I’ve never seen so many railcars.
“Up ahead,” Eliana says, scooting up in between the front seats. She’s got her gun out, the Ka-bar in a sheath she attached to her belt.
We see the white building, almost like an airplane hangar, but with a rolling door that’s almost all the way closed. There are no other buildings around. We slowly drive up to it, park next to a lump in the snow. The huge rolling door is cracked open about a foot and a half and there’s heat wafting out from underneath it. I step back, nearly slip on the lump, then somehow manage to get my balance. Looking down, I see the lump is a frozen body.
We exchange glances.
Eliana is the first to duck down and peek inside the massive structure. She looks up at us, then rolls under it, heading inside.
“Unbelievable,” I say, thinking this girl either has a death wish, or she’s a lot tougher than me and Ice.
“Sexy, right?” Ice says. “She’s like this all the time.”
Inside there’s a standing barbecue in between two sets of rail cars. On top of the barbecue is a burning scrap of wood. Looking around, there is no one.
Ice motions for me to check the two cars on the left, that he’ll check the other two on the right. “Make sure no one sneaks up on us,” he tells Eliana.
I know the drill, but it’s okay that Ice runs the show. Right now I’d charge into a firing squad if it meant saving my kid. That makes me reckless and unsafe, a danger to all of us. In this case, Ice will be smarter about everything, so that’s why I’m good taking his direction.
I step into the passenger car and the first thing that hits me is the smell of urine and feces, and something far worse.
There are tall, fabric seats running down either side of the train. Above the seats on both sides are luggage racks and hand rails. At the end of the passenger car is a metal door. It’s closed. Strewn throughout the car is garbage, blankets, a toy here and there, someone’s filthy sock. Walking down the aisle, my eyes see everything. The stained seats, the fast food wrappers, a half-dozen wadded tissues, a smear of excrement on one of the seats.
Plugging my nose, I tread lightly, gun ready. I suspect there is no one here, but I’m not taking any chances.
That’s when I see the body.
I turn away, collect myself. It’s the body of a small girl, her eyes sunken in, her skin shriveled. Not Brooklyn, but a child nonetheless. Things in my brain begin to devolve.
This is someone’s little girl.
A great and terrible sadness infects me. Rage wells inside me, too. This child is the source of the smell, the underlying stench fermenting just beneath the other, less fetid odors.
I make a quick sweep of the rest of the train, then head out and try to take a deep breath. Eliana is at the rolling door, peeking under to keep watch on the outside.
That’s when I hear a scuffle and the sounds of glass cracking in Ice’s train. Bolting into action, I hustle up the stairs and burst into the passenger car. Ice is wrestling with a huge man with long hair. Judging by his facial features and his color, he looks to be Native American, but it’s hard to tell just then. All I know is that this guy is manhandling Ice, which is something I’ve never seen before.
Behind him, I see my kids. Both of them and Orlando’s girlfriend. Their eyes flash wide when they see me, and this fortifies me. They’re huddled against the back door, on the other side of the ensuing fight.
I charge straight for the middle of the scuffle, but something grabs me from behind, a mammoth hand that damn near hauls me off my feet. I manage to get a finger hold on one of the seatbacks, trying to slow the attack, but a hand chops down on the bone on my arm.
It goes dead.
I fall on my butt and the kicks rain in. I can’t turn around in such a tight space, but now I can’t get away either. The torrent of violence will keep on going whether I move or not, so I move. Scrambling into a seat, taking a half dozen body blows in the process, I manage a half-second’s reprieve. My attacker follows me in there, giving me a good look at him. He’s a huge white guy with a monstrous build. His face is placid, his eyes dead, his will to break me abundantly obvious.
At least now I’m able to size up this psycho.
He comes after me, but I kick out at him and he grins. He doesn’t see Eliana. The second he does, it’s too late. She’s got the twelve inch Ka-bar out, and the man becomes a pin cushion to her wrath.
The speed that this woman works the big knife is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. She sticks him seven or eight times in the back, in the kidneys, working each and every angle with the ferocity of a prison inmate with a shank.
He wobbles forward, arching his back and howling. The blonde Hulk drives an elbow backwards in the tight quarters; she checks it with her free hand, drives the blade into his other armpit. He moves forward, slowing. There’s no place left to go.
I’m watching all this happen in seconds and trying to figure out where she learned to work a blade like that. It’s both horrifying and beautiful at the same time. And just when I think there’s no where left to go but for the kil
l shot, she drops down—and in a deluge of savagery—opens his femoral artery.
That’s a death sentence.
It should be over in no time, which has me thinking Eliana can pump the brakes, save her energy.
But she’s not done.
He hobbles forward, his face a mask of sheer terror. The man is done and he knows it. So when she continues slashing and stabbing anything and everything about him, he no longer tries to fight her.
He collapses forward, landing on his knees. The brute halfheartedly swings a hand out in a final defensive effort. Eliana swipes the blade across it, really flaying the skin.
The smells in the cabin begin to change: sweat, adrenaline, blood.
The second he draws his hand back, she goes in for the kill. She opens up one side of his neck and then the other, and then she kicks his body over where it lands face down in the aisle.
I’m mesmerized by the mess Eliana made of this stalwart animal. It’s like a violent daydream, something you know is real, but feels ultra surreal at the same time.
The fight’s not over, though. Ice and the long haired nightmare are still going at it. It’s all fists and feet, all hard-packing punches. Both men are bloody. Neither can seem to end the other.
I’m already climbing over the seats, scrambling past Eliana. Launching forward, my eyes locked in on my target, I dive onto the Native American.
In a fight of brute force and hard core, all-out-knock-down-violence, soft targets are the winning ticket. A finger in the eye, for example, can change the direction of a fight in a second. Then again, so can a groin strike or grab. We haven’t talked about the line drive to the throat with a balled fist.
With this beast, however, I’m taking no chances. Things happen, though. You know what they say about a good fight—the plan goes out the window with the first real shot.
Enter my nuggets into the record as Exhibit A.
When your family jewels get slapped so hard your life literally flashes before your eyes, some guys buckle while others take those critical seconds before the real pain charges in and they go straight primeval.
Naturally, I’m all about option B.
There’s no way to say exactly what happened, but the second I got hit in the baby maker by this clown who was holding my kids hostage, it felt like pouring a drum of gasoline onto an open flame. The insanity thundered out of me like a hurricane, and somewhere along the line, blackout rage had its way with me.
The next thing I know, Ice is pulling me off, yelling at me to stop, trying to restrain me. My body is fighting on its own, or there’s some beast hiding in me I didn’t know I had.
Looking around, then down, I blanch at what I see.
That’s when I realize there’s something in my mouth. I spit it out. It’s half an ear. Stepping back from the carnage, trying to figure out what happened, I reel in horror at what I’ve done.
Now everyone’s looking at me funny and I’m thinking if I had their eyes, I’d look at me funny, too.
“What the hell was that?” Ice asks, his face pummeled, his knuckles cut open and raw, his nose pushed sideways under his left eye, obviously broken, but not so bad he can’t practically hiss at me.
I see my kids, step over the fallen behemoth on the floor and free them. Brooklyn and Orlando practically mob me with hugs and sobbing and a rush of words I don’t understand but know are words of relief. Veronica even gets in on the mix, but she’s less enthusiastic, undoubtedly traumatized by this whole ordeal.
When I turn around, Eliana is pulling the white guy she killed out of the aisle and Ice is moving the ball crusher.
For some reason, I can’t seem to connect what happened to a part of me. Why did I black out? Who was that? Whatever that was that took over me, I think it needed to get out, that it had been building for days, months, years even. Then, seeing my kids, knowing I might not be able to hold them, or hug them—that I could very well be killed in front of them—sparked something primitive in me, something wild and hostile, something utterly unspeakable.
I still taste the blood in my mouth, which nearly makes me gag.
“I knew you’d come,” Brooklyn says, her voice shaky, scared, grateful. I stand back, look at my beautiful, terrorized child and she says, “Mom was right, you are a badass.”
Orlando looks traumatized.
“I’m sorry you guys had to see that,” I say, “but it’s getting bad out there and I’ve been so scared, so angry that you were taken from us…”
“It’s okay,” Orlando says. “Those guys were starting to get grabby with Veronica. And I…I couldn’t…”
He starts to tear up and Veronica is now crying and this is the moment where no words can soothe quite like the love of another person. Brooklyn and Orlando hold Veronica and I can’t imagine what the three of them must be feeling, what horrors ran unimpeded through their heads from the second they were taken until now.
That’s when I see Ice jump back and I hear the moaning.
“Holy God,” he says.
The big ball breaker with the long black hair is still alive, although I don’t know how.
The second he started to squirm, Eliana rushed in and drove the Ka-bar into his chest. This cut the man’s racket short. Turning to look up at me and Ice with the sort of wild expression I’d never seen in a human—an animalistic resonance that struck me at the core with fear—I realize this is the look of an animal having conquered her prey.
With a sudden and mighty force, Eliana gives the blade a ferocious twist one way and then the other, turning it back and forth until the man stops breathing.
Ice and I stand there, speechless.
When she gets up, Eliana says, “Never leave a job unfinished. Entire nations have fought and died over such a mistake.”
I back away from her, my mouth hanging open. “Who the hell are you?” I hear myself ask.
She wipes the blood off the blade, slides it into her sheath.
“My father made me this way.”
“What way?”
“Savage,” Ice says.
Her eyes soften on him. She looks down at what she’s done, and it hits her. She settles in to one of the cushioned seats and says to Ice, “Does it bother you, that I’m like this?”
“Hell, no,” he says. “I find you completely irresistible.”
“And I thought I had issues,” I grumble.
“Say it, brother,” Ice says, looking right in Eliana’s eyes. She can’t pull her gaze from his, and he’s zeroed in on hers, even though he’s talking to me.
“You two are perfect for each other,” I admit, my kids now coming up beside me. Brooklyn takes my hand; Orlando is holding Veronica nearby.
“You hear that, Eliana?” he asks. “He thinks we’re perfect together.”
“Yes, I heard.”
My little brother steps over the dead man’s legs, wipes a smear of blood off her face, then leans in and kisses her deeply.
“Don’t fall in love with me,” she says.
“You first,” he tells her.
“We need to get that nose fixed,” she replies, cradling his battered face. Right now he’s almost unrecognizable. “Perhaps Nyanath can help.”
“Let’s just get the hell out of here,” I say, Brooklyn hugging me so tight I feel like my bones might break. “These kids need to get them home, cleaned up and fed a decent meal. Plus I need to rinse my mouth out with something because, damn…”
“What about the other kids?” Veronica says.
I look at Ice and he looks at me. “Did you check the other car?”
He shakes his head and that gets us moving. As it happens, the fourth car has nearly a dozen girls inside, the door locked from the outside.
“Wow,” Eliana says, looking at all those little faces.
Ice finds the keys to the transport van on the dead white guy while Eliana loads the girls inside.
“We need to go to Nyanath’s house to see if we can fix your nose,” I tell my brother.
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br /> “What about all these girls?” Eliana asks.
“Back when we had a DEA, I had to pass by the United Center. They were taking refugees. We can’t take these kids with us, but perhaps they can.”
“After I get my nose fixed up with Nyanath, if she can do it,” Ice says, “Eliana and I will take them over there.”
“You sure?” I ask.
Ice nods his head, then fires up the van.
Orlando and Veronica squeeze uncomfortably into the back seat of the beat-to-hell Barracuda; Brooklyn sits up front and I take the wheel. We head straight to Diaab’s house. Nyanath comes out front to meet us, sees the children in the back of the car and Ice and Eliana in the van and visibly sighs with relief.
Ice gets out of the van and says hello, his voice compressed and nasally sounding because of his stuffed, broken noise.
Nyanath looks at him and says, “Something seems off.”
“You think?” Ice jokes.
“Come inside, let me fix that. Do you want to bring everyone inside? I have a fire going. There’s water, too.”
“It’s warm inside the vehicles, but thanks,” I say. “Plus, if any of us actually get out of here, we won’t want to pile back in.”
A few minutes later, Ice comes back out with a straight nose and an ice pack. Nyanath heads over to the Barracuda, which has definitely seen better days, leans in and says, “If you want, I can take a couple of you home. I want to pick up Nasr.”
She’s not even done speaking and Orlando and Veronica is telling Brooklyn to move. She gets out and the two of them crawl out of the back of the ‘Cuda saying, “It would be nice to breathe on the way back.”
Ice honks on the way by, both he and Eliana waving. Brooklyn and I wave back as they head off to the United Center on Madison to drop off the kids. When Brooklyn gets back in the car, she says, “Looks like it’s just you and me, Dad.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” I say.
She takes my hand and gives it a squeeze while we wait for Nyanath in the Subaru. “Thank you for coming to get us,” she says, an incredible tenderness in her eyes.