Pilliars in the Fall (8 page)

Oh shit.

Mind on auto pilot, my arms raced against hers as she raised herself up on one hand and drew the other back to launch the knife into the air, but I managed to beat her to the finish line, so to speak. The big M1 snapped to my shoulder and my finger touched the trigger once, twice then a third and final time.

Her body jerked from the hammer blows of the big 30-06 rounds as they impacted, and dark holes appeared in contrast to her otherwise pale skin.

“Cassie!” the other girl screamed through bloody teeth as she lunged toward me only to be intercepted by a lineman-esque body tackle from Blake. The element of surprise and his pure strength and body weight played a huge advantage in the takedown, but it was the years of grappling in the Army that was evident to me as he moved.

His hit knocked her over but even as she fell, she caught sight and began reaching for the little crossbow still loaded and ready. Blake was again faster as he landed on top of her, his body balanced and efficient with practiced motions as he spun around on top of his opponent, defending off an arm that lashed out, and finally whip lashing the back of her head firmly into the asphalt with his left arm straight across her lower neck.

Still pinned down, the girl thrashed and bucked, managing to place a knee into Blake’s back. She began to turn and twist, feeling maybe some advantage, and that’s when his Beretta materialized in his hand. He drove the butt of the pistol grip into his own hip and unleashed four rapid rounds into her body. A silence over even our own ragged breathing and thumping heartbeats took hold as we paused in place for what seemed like minutes.

“Did that really just happen?” Blake finally asked rhetorically, swinging his leg over the dead girl’s form and standing upright. It was an impressive and deadly display of his shooting, and now that it was all over, we each were slightly stunned by our own automatic reactions that led to all this. The thinking part of my brain started to recover, and my mind began racing, trying to decide if everything that just happened had been necessary on our end.

“You all right?” I asked him the more important question. We both checked ourselves, our surroundings, and finally the four dead people… kids… just to be sure of what we already knew. They were each dead by our hands.
 

“You think she actually knew how to throw a knife?” Blake wondered out loud as he fingered the edge of the little dagger he had picked up off the cold asphalt.

“Honestly I doubt it. This whole thing was just a desperate attempt at something they probably saw in a movie or something. As soon as I figured out what she was doing…” I trailed off. I didn’t try to hide that I was upset. Not just at myself for escalating the situation out of control, but at the situation itself. None of these kids, or us either for that matter, should have even been out here on this cold day to begin with.

Even so, we had been stupid getting caught by a careless mistake. The two young guys had been stupid in their actions, and the girls, well I plain hadn’t given enough credence to the wicked side that seemed to be in a lot of people these days. You would think I would have learned that about seemingly easy women by now.

“Do we even need to go over everything that just went wrong here?” I asked Blake, pressing a fresh clip of eight rounds into the top of my Garand.

“What do you mean?” he stopped rummaging through their stuff and looked at me.

“Everything that we just did... Everything that tactically just went wrong," I amended, "do we need to actually say it, or can we just know it and not ever let it happen again?”

“Oh, yeah … yeah,” he waved me off, hopefully realizing what I was getting at.

We put ourselves in a bad situation in which the only things we did well was the killing part, which did not need to happen. This was not a mark in the win column in my book.

“When I asked how long you were going to let them go on, I thought you would deescalate, not ramp up,” Blake said awkwardly trying to defend himself after a weird moment of silence.

“Maybe at one point, but honestly I was starting to get a feeling that things were only going to go in one direction.”

“Us or them, and you chose us,” he pontificated proudly. "We're here, they're not. It was a good call."

I couldn’t tell if he was trying to make me or himself feel better about the situation. I actually thought he was justifying my actions and that somehow made me feel worse than if he had been trying to defend his own role in all this, which to me, seemed to have been at all the critical turns.

He had fired that first killing shot into the skinny kid when I probably could have gotten to him… probably. I had chosen us to be the ones to come out alive once it got down to that point, but why did I have to even make that type of a choice? I was flying by the seat of my pants by pissing them off, but I had no intention of actually killing them!

“A good call? Jesus Blake, we just blew away a bunch of kids!”

“Hmm, Jesus Blake,” he produced an unsettling grin and steepled his fingers, “I like the sounds of that!”

“What?” I repelled.

“Huh? Oh, kidding man, just kidding,” his features snapped back to normal. “So should we move them or cover them up or something?” Blake changed the uncomfortable subject.

Not that I was feeling all that sentimental about any of them, the guys I could almost leave where they fell, but the girls, although possibly the more murderous duo, they seemed to deserve better. Looking down at the one I had shot, her cleavage still spilling out from the low cut shirt and her body now rapidly cooling in the air, I reached down and zipped her jacket closed to her neck line, shaking my head slightly in contempt at the whole thing.

The road was relatively dry and clear, although the ground had frosted enough that digging a hole to bury them in would not be easy. Besides, we didn’t exactly have shovels and picks in our day packs, so we elected to leave them more or less as they were.

"Probably should get them out of the road... first time with a dead guy?" I noticed Blake's hesitation at touching the bodies.

"Saw a couple along a road in
Iraq... never up close," he admitted.

I was almost glad to hear it. After getting the weird vibes from him that I had been getting, and still being conflicted on whether these kids had needed to die at all, I figured I could use the opportunity to my advantage and drive a point home with him.

"Well go on then," I prodded.

"What?"

"Get that kid out of the way so we can check out the car. See what they have in those bags, oh and try and find the keys, maybe see how much gas is left in the tank," I clarified.

I hoped that dragging the weight of a lifeless body killed by his own hands, feeling a stiff arm and the unnaturally cool skin... I hoped it all would put a little perspective into his head.

"Barely enough gas to move the needle," he called out to me after a few minutes had past.

"Yeah we don’t have anything to carry it in anyway," I reminded him.

"Well why the hell'd you want me to check then?" he scowled at me.

"To see if you'd do it," I huffed an evil little laugh. Actually I figured that if there was any gas in the tank we could have just driven the car away, but again, I was pushing Blake just enough to find out where his head was at.

Looking over the small pile of their belongings there really wasn’t anything we were terribly interested in. In a final sign of ironic respect, I placed the cheap sword on top of the fat kid’s lifeless body and folded his hands across it. Then taking a black permanent marker he found in the trunk, Blake wrote “thieves & murders” across the hood of the car.

Chapter 10

The walk back to the truck, changing the tire, and driving it home was nothing short of exhausting. The distance wasn’t far but the temperature was steadily dropping and after the adrenaline dump, we were zombies ourselves by the time my house was in sight. When we finally got inside and shut the night and the rest of the world out, Clint’s head tilted up and to one side and his eyes narrowed. He was obviously aware that something had gone on and that I wasn’t really in a hurry to share this last little experience just yet.

“Is that blood?” Danielle’s quick eyes and quicker brain caught the out of place detail. While Clint was content in giving me time, she was seemingly not.

Looking down, I noticed the mostly dried stain on the butt stock of my Garand. The term caught red-handed didn’t quite seem appropriate, as to me this was more like being caught baboon assed.   

“Sure looks that way,” I muttered the first words I had spoken in over the better part of an hour.

“I told you there would be trouble!” she exclaimed at Clint who just gave her a conceding shrug.  

In his own quiet and deductive way, seeing as both Blake and I were here now, he concluded that the situation must have been worked out and he wasn’t going to spend too much time on it until we were ready to fill them in.

“What happened?” Danielle asked while looking over Blake to make sure he wasn’t hiding any injuries.

“Couple chicks and two nerds tried a highway scam. A shank and rob, but my boy here saw it coming,” Blake explained. His summary sounded just a little too excited for my taste, and with a little restraint, I let it go.

“And where are they now?” Danielle continued trying to pump us for details.

“Not here,” I blurted out rudely. I was emotionally drained and didn’t want to think about it anymore. Plus I had more pressing concerns on my mind. “Weather is taking a turn. Temp is dropping and we might get some snow,” I told Clint.

“Radio is forecasting an inch or two, nothing major yet. A bigger system is coming our way by the end of the week,” he relayed to us. “Short wave is buzzing and there’s talk of the city organizing to get people out before the bad weather really comes in.”

“It's too cold to snow... and what do you mean ‘out’?” Blake asked, shedding his jacket and working on pulling off a boot to put next to the fireplace.

“Sounds like voluntary evacuations. They don’t think the utilities can keep up in the smaller areas. They’re concentrating on keeping the larger areas on life support. If we get hit with a big storm, anyone not prepared to be without power is going to have some real problems,” Clint expounded.

“Bigger news, the Mayor put in a call to the Governor for National Guard troops to help with the rioting and evacuations, but they’re tapped out and over deployed as it is so they can't funnel any help out here. Sounds like every official, officer and crossing guard are going to be preoccupied for a while; that could get ugly.”

“And what about us? How are we sitting?” Blake asked.

He had been unplugged from this line of thinking for a while now and hadn’t been home long enough to really look around and see for himself how well or not well stocked everything was. Even if he
had had a chance to survey it, I wondered if he might have forgotten just how much fire wood alone it takes to keep a house running all winter.

"Supplies are fine. What's the violence like in
town?" I answered Blake curtly and then asked Clint.

"Sounds like its starting to boil. It's wide spread in the city already and there are a few calls for demonstrations even out here by us," Clint eyed me, saying more with his look then with his words.

"How will we know if people start doing that?" Danielle asked him.

"Just look for the smoke," I answered her. "If everyone joins up and focuses in one spot, you are going to see blood in the streets. Hope the mayor has his shit together and gets out of town before the masses find him."

"Why, what'd he do that was so bad?" Blake perked up, probably hoping for a good story of corruption.

"Not a thing, but when did fact, logic, or reason ever matter to a mob?" Clint shook his head slightly, finally showing that this was wearing on even him.

That’s when I got up to go find somewhere else to be, but not before Clint spoke up one last time.

"There's something else too. I caught some weird stuff from out towards Wrangle I think."

"What'd you mean?" I rubbed at my growing headache.

"Not much to go off of, nothing to pinpoint a landmark or anything anyway... but from what I can gather, there's some people who are normally pretty active on the radios that haven’t been heard from in a while."

"Let me guess..."

"I crosschecked their handle and numbers in the notebook you had with the radio, it's your buddies."

"How long they been OOC?" I asked using the abbreviated radio slang for Out Of Contact.

"About two weeks."

A big unintentional sigh was my first answer.

"Well if you all are headed back to the house tomorrow then I guess I should take a side trip to see what's going on out in Wrangle.”

"These people that are missing, they're friends of yours?"  Danielle sounded genuinely concerned.

“Yeah, aren't those your buddies that you used to go cut wood with every year? They're from that church that your ex's parents' made you guys go to right?” Blake accurately summarized.

“Yes, thank you for not bringing
them
up. Anyway, the Parvish's are very… like-minded, so they're probably fine. Even so, I haven't seen them for a while and wouldn’t mind dropping by if I can. Also there could still be some good hunting out near there.”

“Sure,” Clint said after checking over the map again. "We might as well all go. We can park where
Jefferson meets Long, and then go cross country easily enough. I also wouldn’t mind seeing what the highway traffic is looking like out that way too. The church and their place is what, about two miles past that?”

“Yeah, just about. I’ve hiked and hunted through there a couple of times before. Its half trees, half hills and fields. Lots of houses along the roads but we should be able to slip through them,” I answered.

"How far is it from here?" Blake asked, never being one to look at a map himself.

"By road, in a car? We'd probably never get there considering what we've just seen," I half laughed. "Overland and hunting it out at a slower pace, it's about a half a days walk."

"Well I guess that’s not so bad," Danielle surprised me with her support.

“You guys don’t need to go. You should get home and check on Karen.”

“We talked to her a little while ago, she’s still got her cough but is doing fine and the neighbors have been keeping tabs on her. A little trip to a church doesn't sound like a big deal right?” Danielle smiled.

“Okay, thanks,
I appreciate it,” I smiled back.

Something in what she had just said was nagging at me though. I couldn't place it, but I seemed to have a foggy memory of just recently hearing, saying, or thinking something very similar, and I was pretty sure I didn’t remember it going well.

Our travel plans for tomorrow having been decided, Clint and Blake went out to haul in enough firewood to last us the night, which gave Danielle the chance to ask me an awkward question that seemed to have been on her mind.

“Hey I didn't mean to snoop, but I found something earlier that seemed kind of weird and wanted to ask you about it.”

"Sure," I shrugged, not really having anything to hide. "What'd you find?"

“A stuffed animal... a little stuffed teddy bear,” she answered sheepishly.

"And that seems weird to you?"

Maybe I did have something to hide.

"Well yes. You don’t seem like the type to sleep with a stuffed animal, plus the tags are still on it. There are literally no other family mementos or anything else, so it just seemed kind of odd."

“Eh, what can I say, I like it. It keeps me cold and depressed at night,” I vaguely hinted at the true answer to her question.

She stared at me for a minute before the light bulb finally clicked on. "It was for a baby wasn’t it? Oh God I am so sorry, I didn’t... does anyone know?" she stumbled over her words.

"Nope, i
t happened a while back. It's why she left. I've come to terms with it and we've got other stuff to worry about right now anyway."

"Okay, still, I'm really sorry."

"Yeah, me too," I said honestly and then felt an old ping of anger rise up again that I thought I had moved on from.

I was still fighting the last of the fleeting residual emotions from the experience. It had been a few months ago by now and I was sad that we had lost the baby, and sad that Heather, my girlfriend at the time, couldn’t deal with it and had broken up with me.

Those emotions I had processed. What I was still at odds with was the anger at myself for feeling relief of not having to deal with an unplanned pregnancy with a girl I had only been seeing for a short while, and also anger at the relief of not having to bring a child into this shit storm of a world right now. I was mad at myself for being so selfish and irresponsible, and also practical. I was mad at my own ability to process and dismiss it all in what felt like was too quick of a period of time. Of course it wasn’t like I didn’t have bullets and arrows and shit being shot at me often enough to remind me that life goes on... until it doesn’t.

It was a full and proper screwed up situation.

That second night with all of us together at my house, I again couldn’t sleep. Clint found me at my workbench, tinkering with an old Krinkov kit that I had bought a while ago and stuck away in a box. Currently, I was wondering if I shouldn’t just put it together and exploit the utility of what it could be, over the possible felony of having an unregistered short barreled rifle.

“You want to talk?” Clint asked me now that we had a second to ourselves, Blake and Danielle having gone to bed already.

"Not really," I answered him a little too quickly and then forged ahead. "Do you remember when you first got me into all of this a few years ago?"

"Sure," he replied evenly.

“The shooting, the tracking, the radio stuff, the patrol and recon... well I don’t know if you remember it, but you also told me one time about your first kill; a biker in some garage right?”

"Oh yeah, I remember," he assured me.

“Well I always kind of figured you were doing that thing you do where it’s half incredible intelligence, and half passive aggressiveness parenting. You know, lead me to water but don’t make me drink...”

“Okay,” he prodded me along.

“Well you told me how much it can change a person. I don’t know, maybe we’re different, or maybe I’m wrong or messed up, but I don’t seem to have a problem with it. I mean, at the trailer with Brad and the tweaker's wife or whatever she was, I took out someone that wasn’t just a threat, it wasn’t just a possibility or to get them before they got us, it was actively taking out someone that was actively trying to kill us. I understand the slippery slope and all that, but it hasn’t made anything harder or easier. It wasn’t harder or easier to do it again with Blake and those idiots on the road today. It just was.”

“You took out threats that gave you a reason to take them out. You might not like having to do it, but I have never had any thoughts whatsoever that you couldn’t do it, and couldn’t keep doing it if it was necessary... and only for the right reasons. If i didn't know that, I never would have gotten you into all this and I wouldn’t be here now.”

“I just feel like I’m supposed to feel more of something, anything, but I don’t. I’m not numb, but, well I don’t know.”

“Hey, you did what you had to do. It might not be what you want to do, but it’s what you had to do. That’s being a man, man,” he punched me lightly in the shoulder.

That was not really all that was bothering me. What was really on the top of my mind that I was struggling with was whether or not to divulge to Clint that I was having doubts on what intentions Blake, his son, had acted on earlier that day. I decided to keep it to myself for now. If I saw any other signs I would address them at that time, but he was my best friend and had saved my life only hours before. It turned out we would have plenty of opportunities to test all of our characters in the very near future.