ZWD: King of an Empty City (33 page)

Roland glanced at his watch and shook his head. “I’m hungry and I got Mrs. Greenbaum in twenty minutes,” he said.

“Go.” I didn’t want him to get in trouble with Mrs. Greenbaum.

“What about you? Do you have Mrs. Greenbaum?” I asked Jr.

Sheepishly Jr. said, “This morning.”

“But you were with me this morning.”

“About that, could you talk to her?”

“I’ll see if I can’t get you a presidential pardon. Why didn’t you tell me you had her class? I could have gotten someone else to help me.”

“I already know the stuff we were covering today.” We walked out the door and there on the curb was the car. It wasn’t in the same shape I’d given it to Jr. in. There were a lot more scrapes and dings on it than when he drove off with it. The passenger-side door was now crunched in where it looked like he’d hit a tree. The front bumper was missing and something was dripping from under the engine.

              “I’d better drive,” I said. He kicked a pile of snow and went to the driver’s door. “I’m driving,” I said.

The passenger door won’t open,” he said and got in, scooting over to the far side. Our first stop was the Safeway. The girls were up on the roof making lunch and we stopped long enough to grab a bite to eat. Jamie looked better than she had this morning. The two were interacting like they were mother and daughter. It was nice to see my girl like that, all mom-like.

“What are you two going to do for the rest of the day?” she asked me as she handed me a jar of jam.

“We’re headed over to Gaines Street by the access road to see if we can’t set up a place where we can meet the black truck people in a controlled environment. If we can control the meeting place, then I think we hold a better advantage for dealing with them and getting them to leave us alone,” I said. I didn’t bother to tell her that earlier in the day, I’d just killed one of their members. Since they’d tried to burn me alive, this whole thing had become kind of personal. But I was certain I could talk reasonably with them and get them to leave us all alone. I guess on some level I could see their actions as their way to survive this new world. It was a different approach, not the best, but different, and I was certain we could come up with a way to live in harmony or at least in a way where we never interacted with each other.

              She came back to me with a small hand towel balled up and handed it to me with a Cheshire cat grin across her face. “Try this,” she said. “Do you really think you can negotiate with them after all they’ve done to us?” In the towel were several small round fresh pieces of bread that Jamie had baked. That with the jam was a little taste of heaven.

              “Have you forgotten that they tried to capture us, kill you?” she said as I ate.

“No, I haven’t.” That was when I told her about Danny and the raccoon house, his relationship to Patrick and our traitor from the bathroom.

She listened quietly, not asking me the usual string of questions, and when I was finished she said, “You could meet them anywhere, why do you need to prepare a place to meet them?”

I didn’t say anything.

“You plan on killing them, you’re not going to talk to them at all.”

“I’m going to try talking to them, but if they won’t change, I don’t think I have much of a choice. To protect everyone, I think that’s the last resort,” I said.

“When do you plan on doing this meeting with them?”

“As soon as I hear from them. They haven’t answered the notebook request we hung up at the church. So I need to get a jump on this meeting place and make it my own.”

“Why there?”

“We have Philander Smith on one side and the Mount Holly Cemetery on the other. They’ll be in the truck or some vehicle and I’ll be on foot. If I control the streets’ in and out points, I have a foot advantage. I can easily get out of there if I have to. Plus there are plenty of hiding places around there.”  Stager’s taunt came screaming into my mind, “Run, rabbit, run.” What the hell did he try to tell me in that dream when he was warning me about them?

“What’s the matter?” she asked, putting a hand on my thigh.

“Nothing.” Stager was right, we either made peace with them or we killed them. I couldn’t run anymore. Not after killing Danny, they wouldn’t allow that to go unpunished.

“What about you, what are you doing the rest of the day?”

“Getting ready for this surprise you have planned,” she said through pursed lips. I could tell her mind was locked on something else and she didn’t want to say just yet what it was. I finished a second ball of bread and we readied ourselves to go. I picked up my hot-wiring toolkit and a few other tools I thought we’d need, then we said goodbye.

“Be ready when I come pick you up,” I said.

“Are you going to do it here?”

“Let’s say at Trinity. At sundown.” We kissed and I climbed down the ladder with Jr. behind me. A press of the button and the gargoyle’s eyes came to life. We got in the car and drove to our future ambush site.

ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter 30

ZWD: Dec. 24.

Nailed a notebook to a telephone pole with a message; the answer wasn’t what I hoped for. And now we’re no better than them.

The spot I’d picked out for this meeting didn’t look so promising once we got there. It was too open. After walking around a little, I decided to move it two blocks over to Center and Thirteenth Street. There were empty buildings and houses, trees and a gated parking lot. There was a warehouse and hiding places mixed in among the homes that surrounded a converted church; the church was in recent times converted into apartments. Now who knew what was in there. But I liked the street; it was a good location for this meeting.

              We decided to let them come in from the south, so we parked the beat-up car that Jr. had been driving across the north end of the street and we moved over to Larry’s Pizza and hot-wired a few more cars, moving them to block the rest of the street. They’d have to come in from the south. Chain link fences lined the open ground along this street and a car could have easily driven through them, so we decided to give them some reinforcement by lining them with cars. We were lucky that there were cars parked all around here, but because we’d already blocked off the entrance to the street on the north end, we had to drive each car around the block and park it.

We’d just covered the gate to the EMOBA parking lot when we heard the rumble of the black truck. It had turned off Main Street and was headed our way along Daisy Gatson Bates Drive, the street that intersected with us on Center. Even over the noise of our current car we could hear that truck rumble. We stopped our car short of its goal and left it in the street. This wasn’t the time and not yet the place to meet the black truck, not yet. We weren’t ready. Leaving the car door open, we got out and ran to the blue warehouse at the other end of the street. We’d driven enough over the snow to pack it down and hide our tracks on the newly made ice. We’d barely crawled through the corrugated cover of the window when the black truck stopped at the end of the street, then turned and drove up to where we’d left the car.

              James, the big burly black guy with the rough bushy beard, and the one I feared the most, got out of the back door of the extended cab. Patrick followed him closely on the other side, with his flat-top haircut and pointed red beard. He stood there beside the truck’s bed with his forearms resting on the bed’s walls. He watched as James moved over to the car we abandoned and felt the hood. Then James moved down the street looking at the parked cars we’d lined the chain link fence with. He then came back to his side of the truck and rested his forearms on the truck bed walls facing Patrick. He kept looking around at the buildings with squinted eyes till Patrick asked him, “What do you make of it, Bubba?”

“This here is the makings of an ambush.”

“Do what?” asked Patrick in a whimsical voice.

“Look here,” he said, and he pointed to the cars that lined the chain link fence. “They don’t want us to drive out that way.” He pointed to the end of the street. “They don’t want us to drive out that way. They’re trying to box us in.”

“Then shouldn’t we leave? I mean, we’re in the middle of the street they’re trying to block off.”

“Naw, they isn’t finished yet. We showed up and stopped them from what they was doing here.”

Patrick laughed. “Like we got a damned thing to worry about,” he said, slapping his palm down on the truck bed wall.

Jr. and I watched through a slatted window as they talked. We were close enough to hear every word clearly and were afraid to move for fear the slightest sound would attract their attention. All I had was a pistol in my pocket and a bunch of hand-to-hand weapons. Jr. and I were both holding our breath as we waited for them to leave.

“The good thing is,” James continued, “we know about this place. We now know they‘re going to want us to—” James’s words stopped abruptly and I panicked that we’d made a noise to alert them to where we were, but instead he fell backwards flat on his back. A pool of blood formed around the back of this head. From our vantage point I could see that most of the back of his head was missing. Patrick, who’d been looking down the street, turned to look at James, who was no longer talking. He looked around when he didn’t see him standing there on the opposite side of the truck. Patrick stretched up on his toes to look over the bed of the truck. He saw James there on the ground and anguish crossed his face. Then his face exploded out and he slumped over the bed of the truck and slid down the side out of view.

“Holy crap!” muttered Jr.

I seconded his amazement. “Holy crap!” I exclaimed. The driver’s side door popped open and the tall guy with his head shaved and a tattoo of a name across his neck jumped out of the truck with a pistol in hand. His blue denim jacket was open, revealing another gun in his belt. He looked at James, and then he ran over to the other side of the truck and looked at Patrick. He came back around to the driver’s side and shouted to someone inside the cab. “They’re both dead, shot.” Then his body jerked and he staggered back a little. Blood was spurting out of a hole in his chest and streaming down his body. If it wasn’t a heart shot, it was damn close. A moment later, the side of this face was blown off. He fell to the ground dead. The door to the black truck slammed shut and it went into gear. The reverse light came on and the driver had no trouble rolling over the bodies of his dead comrades. The driver slammed on the brakes and slid the truck around, almost facing out the open end of the street. When the black truck hit Daisy Gatson Bates Drive it fishtailed and sped away as fast as it could east towards Main Street.

              We stood there motionless for a while listening to the silence after the sound of the engine faded in the distance. When we came out, we walked over to the bodies. I’d seen this kind of damage done to deer and elk when we were hunting in Colorado. I couldn’t ever have imagined a .50 caliber could do this kind of damage to a human body. It had to be a .50. It had to have been a long way away to cover that kind of ground and us not hear a shot fired. It would also have to have a silencer on it. I only knew of two such riffles, the M82 and the Barrett M107. Both of them were on top of the Safeway, and only two people I knew of could fire them with any accuracy. I was one of them.

I stood between Patrick and James and looked around. The shooter would have to be up high, would have to be a good ways away, and would have to have been shooting from the south and a little west given the angle that James, Patrick, and this other guy’s heads were blown open from the opposite direction.

              It never occurred to me that I could also have been a target standing there in the open. I thought, if they killed these guys, they must be friends. Or they were at least sympathetic to our cause. I looked around. There was only one building in sight that fit all the criteria I thought were needed to make these shots. Paris Towers. The shooter had to have done it from the roof of Paris Towers.

              “Come on, Jr., let’s get,” I said and we took off running. We traveled from Daisy Gatson Bates Drive to Louisiana, moving through the streets zigzagging till we cut across to Main Street and the Safeway. I ran down the back alley and up the stairs. Clicked the fob in my pocket and scrambled up the ladder. My girl and Jamie were there puttering around.

              “What have you two been up to?” I asked breathlessly.

“Nothing really, just getting some things ready for this surprise you have for us.” I went over to the gun bags and opened the one that had the Barrett M107 in it. I felt the barrel. It was warm.

“Haven’t been anywhere?”

“We did some hunting,” she said, turning to face me. My hand was still on the warm barrel of the M107 in the bag. “We picked off a couple, three things,” she said flatly, staring at me with cold eyes, challenging me. I knew how she was when she got like this, defiant. Even with my hand on the M107, even with
Harold
by my side, even with all the knives on my belt—if she wanted to fight, I wasn’t going to win this battle, because she was going to tear into me with words and in such a flurry that I wouldn’t be standing after the storm passed. I pursed my lips as I stared back at her.

              “We picked off a couple, three things.” I thought about her words. She’d just told me she killed James and Patrick and that other guy in cold blood and she wasn’t upset about it. She was actually challenging me to say something about it, to accuse her of murder. She was glad she’d done it and she’d do it again and again if given the opportunity. She’d probably have called it pre-emptive self-defense. I knew she’d said she was going to kill James for peeing on her after trying to run her down and kill her, or worse. She’d probably bring up me killing Danny earlier today. But that was in self-defense, he was going for his gun; she was nearly a mile away.

              I let out a heavy sigh. My girl was a cold-blooded killer and I couldn’t really blame her for her actions. I knew sooner or later we were going to have to kill these guys. I’d rather the blood be on my hands, not hers. Especially now since there seemed to be no remorse, no guilt anywhere around her about it. I know some might call me naïve, but I...I just didn’t know her anymore.

              Jr. must have felt the tension between us and he was the first to say anything as we all stared at each other. “Any more of that bread left?” he asked Jamie.

              “I got two left,” she said quickly and went over to one of the storage tubs we kept our food in. The pieces weren’t much larger than biscuits, but she gave us both one. I took mine and walked over to the edge of the building and stared out over in the direction of Center and Twelfth Street. I took small bites of the bread, nibbling at it with my mind elsewhere.

My girl came up to me and slid one hand into mine, then leaned against me, resting her head on my shoulder. She might have been a stone-cold killer, but I still loved her. I kissed the top of her head and kept nibbling the biscuit. My chest felt tight.

“It’s a lovely day,” she said.

I grunted.              

“With this sun out and this amazing blue sky, I feel like a lot of our problems have gone away.”

I didn’t say anything. I knew what she was doing and I let her speak.

“Things have been so gloomy for so long I thought the sun was never going to shine again. I felt that there was a huge weight around our necks. And now it’s been lifted. Not completely taken off, but it’s not as heavy as it once was. Starting with yesterday at the towers, I felt once that was cleared, we had a fighting chance of surviving. And now today the sun is shining. I could do without this wind, but at least the sun is out and with each new hurdle we cross, each new challenge we take down, even if it’s one, two, or three challenges a day, I think we’re going to make it.”

I squeezed her hand and she looked up at me. Her face had softened. This was the closest I was going to get to an apology or explanation and we both knew that. I’d take what I could get. I kissed her lips then turned to her and hugged her for the longest time.

“Do we need to leave?” came Jr.’s voice behind us. “So you two can be alone?”

              We were grinning as we pulled apart. Jamie cried, “Get away from the edge!” with urgency. She was pointing down South Broadway. A Chrysler 300 was coming over a little rise in the distance, moving slowly over the icy streets. We slunk away from the edge of the building and ducked down. Minutes later, the car was directly across from us and headed north. The windows were tinted dark so we couldn’t see just how many people were in the car or who they were. I knew who they weren’t. The knot in my stomach drew tighter. There was going to be hell to pay for our sunny day.