“It’s screwed up they’re making us do this,” Chloe declared.
“The whole thing is screwed up,” Max told her as he worked his shovel into the muddy earth of Judge Distefano’s backyard. “I don’t know why he doesn’t just come with us. There’s room in the back seat.”
Max’s voice was uneven from the lump in his throat that had been there almost from the moment his mother had shaken him awake with the disturbing update.
I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is you’re getting a dog!
He desperately wanted a dog. But not like this.
It also wasn’t how he would’ve wanted to find out about the judge being sick, or about what was going to happen next. Mom had fucked that part up. She’d tried to make it sound like it wasn’t a big deal. Or maybe she just thought all he cared about was getting a dog.
That wasn’t true.
“I think he’s just giving up,” Chloe mused as she heaved another shovelful of upturned earth onto the growing pile next to the ragged three-by-eight-foot hole they were digging. It was over a foot deep, and tougher going now that the black topsoil had given way to lighter-colored, more densely packed clay that was much harder to turn over. “Like, everything’s going to hell, and he just doesn’t want to deal. You know?”
Max didn’t reply. He had to get his mind off the situation and think about something else, or he was going to start bawling. He pursed his lips, working the spit that was accumulating in his mouth into a loogie, then spat onto the grass at the edge of the dirt pile.
“Why are you spitting so much?”
“I just am.”
Chloe’s face screwed up in disgust. Now that it was starting to get light outside, she could see the lump in his jaw. “Are you chewing tobacco?”
“No.”
“Ohmygod, you are! That is so gross.”
“Don’t tell Mom and Dad.”
“Just don’t do it when we’re in the car.”
“I won’t.”
They tossed a few more shovelfuls in silence. The predawn light in the yard was turning from deep blue to a pink-tinged gray.
“I feel like we’re in the gravedigger scene in Hamlet,” said Chloe.
“I never read it.”
“You will junior year. If you’re in Finch’s class.”
“Is there even going to be a junior year?”
Chloe looked over at her brother, pounding the shovel blade into the ground with his heel. “Of course there will be. Don’t get dark like that.”
“Then quit talking to me about gravediggers!”
She was about to say something snarky, but when he turned his head and she saw the look on his face, she held her tongue.
“I’m sorry.”
“Whatever.”
Max went back to digging. Chloe stepped over to the picnic table and shut off the Coleman lantern that the judge had given them to see by. With the sun almost up, they no longer needed artificial light.
“Think the judge would care if I use his bathroom?”
“He’s not going to care about anything pretty soon,” Max said in a mournful voice.
“I just don’t want to track stuff on his carpet.” She contemplated her muddy feet. “Shouldn’t have worn these shoes. We’re going to be so filthy by the time we get in the car.”
“Change them when you’re done.”
Chloe weighed her options. She had a second pair in her bag, which Mom and Dad were currently packing into the trunk of the judge’s Mustang along with the rest of the water and food. But there was no point in fetching clean shoes now, when they still had several feet of grave to dig.
“I’m going inside for a sec. You okay out here?”
“Whatever.”
Max watched his sister walk to the door that led to the screened-in rear porch. After she disappeared inside, he waited a few seconds to make sure she was gone. Then he wedged his shovel into the ground and stepped over to the dirt pile. With his back to the house so nobody could see him through the porch windows, he worked the plug of tobacco out of his lower cheek and spat it onto the dirt.
He was staring into space past the hedge that separated the judge’s yard from the Altmans’, coaxing another mouthful of saliva to rinse the leftover tobacco bits from his mouth, when he saw a cop in a riot helmet run across his backyard.
WHAT THE HELL?
Max bent his knees and ran in a half crouch over to the property line. As he inched up to peer over the hedge, he heard a loud, heavy blow.
HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT.
Two cops in full body armor had just busted open the Altmans’ back door with some kind of mini battering ram. Max watched them enter the house, leading with their rifles.
He turned and ran for the judge’s enclosed porch.
The door slammed shut behind him as he leapfrogged the ottoman in front of the judge’s reading chair. Turning the corner into the kitchen at high speed, he found himself on a collision course with a balding ogre in a leather jacket who was entering the room from the hallway that led to the open front door.
Max stopped short at the sight of the enormous stranger. Then the man’s hand rose, and Max saw the revolver.
Jen would have preferred that the judge not don a suit in advance of his murder-burial. It put them on an awkward footing—a constant visual reminder of you’re about to shoot me, and this is a solemn occasion.
To be fair, it was a solemn occasion. But the constant reminder of her impending duty as executioner was starting to weigh heavily on Jen’s mind. As the minutes ticked by, she found it harder and harder to focus on packing the trunk of the Mustang. It was turning into a real spatial-reasoning nightmare, mostly because of the two thirty-pound bags of dog food the judge insisted they pack.
She’d also begun to seriously question her ability to pull the trigger while sober. And the problem with that was that she’d squirreled away Carol’s Grey Goose in her backpack, which was already deep inside the trunk behind three other pieces of luggage and the remaining gallons of Poland Spring. Besides which, the Grey Goose was earmarked for future emergencies, not current operations.
If Jen needed a drink to drown her conscience, she’d have to get it from some other source. But she didn’t want to enlist Dan to retrieve the booze from the half-mangled trunk back in their basement, because under their new arrangement, she’d be obligated to cough up the AR-15—currently resting within easy reach on the roof of the Mustang—in exchange. Her only other options were running back to Carol’s house, which she couldn’t do without alerting Dan, and asking the judge.
She’d already struck out with the judge. It had been embarrassing.
“Slightly awkward question,” she’d muttered to him in an undertone while Dan was preoccupied on the other side of the garage with sawing through a garden hose in the hope of siphoning extra gas from the judge’s Prius. “But do you . . . by any chance . . . have any liquor in the house?”
He gave her a pained half smile. “Sweetheart, I’m thirty-six years sober.”
“I know. Sorry. Just checking.”
The judge glanced over at Dan before whispering a follow-up question. “Do you need to run back to Carol’s?”
“Maybe. We’ll see.”
He didn’t seem to be judging her too harshly for the departure from AA orthodoxy, but she couldn’t help thinking the exchange had cost her some goodwill a few minutes later when they began to argue over the dog food.
“Do we really need to bring both bags?”
“Are you planning on stopping at a PetSmart? Because if not, then yes.”
“It’s taking up more space than the human food.”
“And if it weren’t for the dog, you wouldn’t have a trunk to pack in the first place.”
“Fair enough. We’ll make it work.”
“Good on you.” He gave her shoulder an avuncular squeeze. “It’d be an easy fit if we didn’t have to put the gas can in there. But I wouldn’t recommend that.” He turned and called out to Dan. “How’s it coming over there, Danny?”
By now, Dan was crouched on all fours between the two cars, an empty red five-gallon can beside him. One end of the recently sawed-off hose was snaked deep inside the Prius’s gas tank while Dan held the other end to his mouth, trying to get his head lower than the tank so he could get a suction going.
“Not great,” Dan reported, hoping the judge wouldn’t notice his limbs were shaking. He’d failed to eat anything since dinner the previous night, and low blood sugar coupled with both the frantic exertion of evacuating their house and whatever illness he’d come down with had left him a quivering mess.
Not only that, he had no idea how to siphon gas from a tank. He was terrified of accidentally aspirating the gasoline. “Are you sure this works?” he asked the judge.
“I don’t know,” the old man replied. “I saw it on a TV show. Does everything you write in your TV shows work in real life?”
“Not even close.”
“Just keep trying,” Jen told her husband. She took a few steps around the side of the open trunk, stopping in front of Dan as she peered through the passenger window into the back seat of the two-door Mustang. “How much floor space is down there? Can we pack some of the canned goods below the kids’ feet?”
“Max?”
The judge’s shout was taut with alarm. Jen glanced at him, then turned in the direction he was staring, toward the door to the house.
Max had just emerged from the door to the kitchen, walking across the front of the Prius with his hands up like a prisoner.
Stepping into the room behind him was a man whose face Jen instantly recognized, although it took her a second to place the name.
It was Barry Kozak, the disgraced police chief. He was holding a handgun to her son’s back.
Jen turned to reach for the AR-15 she’d left on the Mustang’s roof.
“Don’t!” Kozak roared, shifting his target from Max to Jen.
She froze.
“Step back. Both of you. Keep your hands up. Frank, get away from that trunk so I can see you.”
With a dismayed grimace, the judge did as he was told. So did Jen.
Still on his hands and knees between the Prius and the Mustang, Dan wasn’t sure what the hell was happening.
He saw Jen step backward, her legs passing out of his field of vision.
Then Max appeared, up ahead at the end of the aisle between the two cars. His hands were in the air, and his face was anguished. Seeing his father crouched on the ground, his eyes widened.
“Keep going,” the unseen man barked at Max. “Over with the others. Hands up. Don’t touch the rifle. Is that the one we gave to the TV idiot?”
Standing beside the judge with her hands up, Jen’s heart sank when she saw Kozak’s face brighten at the discovery of the missing AR-15.
That son of a bitch. He’s going to take my gun away.
Max stepped around his father, careful not to acknowledge him as he joined the judge and Jen against the garage door.
Kozak was grinning. “Looks like I played the right hunch stopping in here.”
Crouched out of sight, Dan started to get some clarity on the situation.
It must be Shreckler. Or Kozak. He doesn’t know I’m down here.
“I got a little two-for-one going in this house!” the unseen man chortled.
Dan crept forward. The shakiness in his limbs was gone, obliterated by adrenaline.
I’ve got the element of surprise.
I can tackle him.
He might kill me. But I’d give the others time to get to the rifle.
I can save my family.
I can be a hero—
Then Barry Kozak and his large-caliber revolver stepped around the front corner of the Prius.
“What the fuck? Get up!”
The opportunity for heroism had passed.
“Get up!” Kozak yelled again, pointing the gun at Dan’s forehead. He did as he was told, stepping back to join the others with his hands up in a grudging surrender.
Kozak turned his attention to the judge.
“You lied to me, Frank. Said you sold that car.”
The judge shrugged. “It is what it is, Barry. Don’t take it personally.”
“Give me the keys.”
“C’mon. Whaddaya gonna do with one more car?”
“Protect the community,” Kozak replied with an almost straight face.
“You don’t have to do this,” the judge pleaded. “Why don’t you just let these poor people get out of town? Huh?”
Kozak gave Dan, Jen, and Max an appraising look. Then he snorted. “You three? Want to hit the road in that?” He jerked his head toward the Mustang. “Shit, you’d get eaten alive out there! Be smart. Stay home. Let the big dogs take care of you.”
He turned back to the judge, the gun in his right hand as he extended his left with the palm up. “Gimme the keys, Frank. Don’t make me take them from you.”
The judge didn’t move. Kozak took a step toward him, adopting a threatening glare that was wiped off his face by the flat end of a shovel blade humming through the air at high velocity.
The force of the metal crashing against the side of his head sent Kozak staggering sideways over the Mustang’s hood. Before he could right himself, Chloe sprang forward, following up her perfect backhand with a second one that finished the job, knocking him senseless.
Kozak’s limp body slid off the car, collapsing into a heap on the concrete at Chloe’s feet. She lowered the shovel and stared down at her unconscious victim.
“Who is that?”
“Used to be the chief of police,” Jen explained as she stepped forward to retake the AR-15. “He got Me Too’d for grabbing his secretary’s ass.”
Chloe reacted to this information with a swift kick to Kozak’s rib cage, hard enough that it made the judge suck in his breath in sympathetic pain.
“Whoa! They rang the bell, kid. Fight’s over. You won.”
“Get his gun,” Jen told her daughter, pointing at the revolver on the floor with the barrel of her rifle.
“How did he get in here?” Dan wondered out loud as Chloe picked up Kozak’s weapon.
“He just walked in,” Max explained. “The door was open.” Then he remembered. “They’re breaking into our house!”
“Who?”
“The cops! I saw them bust down our back door!”
A moment later, Dan, Jen, and the judge were standing to one side of the bay window in the living room, their necks craned to watch the goings-on at the top of the cul-de-sac next door. Max joined them, having just retrieved Ruby from the foot of the bed where she’d been sleeping.
Out the window, they could see the El Camino parked in front of the Altmans’ house. Eddie and Marty were crouched behind the car, peering at the busted-in front door. Eddie was holding a shotgun. Marty appeared to be unarmed.
A gun-toting Steve Shreckler exited through the Altmans’ broken front door, flanked by a pair of body-armored cops. He was shaking his head in frustration.
“They’re going to come here next,” Jen said. “We’ve got to go.”
She headed back to the garage. Dan and Max followed. The judge retrieved his Beretta from the drawer in the hallway and trotted after them.
“Okay, plan B,” he called out. “Take the rug from the dining room, you can wrap my body in it—”
“There’s no time for that!” Jen yelled over her shoulder. “We gotta leave!”
“You can’t go shortchanging me on this, kid! We had a deal!”
They reached the garage. Chloe, with Kozak’s revolver in one hand and the shovel in the other, was keeping watch over the ex-cop. A weak moan escaped his still-prone body.
“He’s starting to wake up! Should I hit him again?”
“Just get in the back seat,” Jen told her. “You too, Max. We’re leaving.”
“Put Ruby in the carrier!” the judge told Max, pointing to a small dog crate on the wall shelf. Then he held his pistol out, grip first, to Dan and Jen. “Who’s doing the honors here?”
They did their best to ignore him. “What about the gas from the Prius?” Dan asked Jen.
“There’s no time,” she replied. “But bring the hose and the can. We’ll find more on the way.”
Dan collected the hose and can and took them to the trunk. “Can we lose half the dog food?”
“No!” yelled the judge.
“Yes!” Jen overruled him.
Dan pulled out one of the dog food bags, replacing it with the gas can and the hose. Max was already in the back seat, holding Ruby on his lap in the dog carrier. Chloe joined him as the judge stood watching their parents, still holding his pistol and looking incredulous.
Jen turned to him. “Can we get the keys? Please?”
He shook his head and held out the pistol to her again. “You’re not keeping your end of the bargain here, Jennifer.”
“Judge, please!” Dan begged him. “We’re running out of time!”
“Fine. Don’t bury me.” The old man pulled the car keys from the pants pocket of his suit and held them up to his chest, while offering the gun again. “But if you want the keys, you’re damn sure gonna have to shoot me.”
Jen and Dan traded a look.
What are we going to do?
“Come with us,” Dan told the judge.
“Not a chance,” the judge insisted.
“We’re going to California,” Dan told him. “That’s where your kids live, right? We’ll take you there!”
“Get real, Danny!” the judge scoffed. “It’s the apocalypse out there! You’re not even going to make it to Ohio!”
“I’ll get us to California,” Jen declared. “All of us. You included. Come on!”
“It’s three thousand miles!” the judge yelled. “And my kidneys don’t work! I’m dying!”
“Not yet, though, right?” Jen pointed out. “Just give us a chance! If it looks like it’s terminal, I swear to God, we’ll pull over and shoot you by the side of the road.”
“For cryin’ out loud,” the judge moaned. “All I wanted was a clean ending.”
“It’s not going to be clean,” Dan admitted. “But it’ll be happy. We’re not going to let this be a tragedy. We’re going to drive till we find you a hospital, and dialysis, and our credit cards work, and we’ll fix it! Then we’ll take you to your kids.”
“Aaahhh, Mary Mother of Jesus.” The judge’s face was furrowed with indecision. He turned to Jen. “Swear to God you’ll shoot me if you have to?”
“Swear to God,” she promised him.
His face gradually unwrinkled. He uttered a grunt of resignation. “Okay. But put the dog food back in. And bring the shovel. I’m driving.”
He headed for the driver’s side of the Mustang. After a quick exchange of triumphant glances with his wife, Dan swapped the gas can for the dog food and slammed the trunk shut as Jen fetched the shovel Chloe had left on the hood of the Prius.
“I got shotgun!” Jen called out.
“That goes without saying,” the judge told her as he deposited himself behind the wheel.
Dan passed the gas can to Chloe, who was already trying to accommodate the shovel her mother had handed her. After a final glance to confirm that the incapacitated Kozak wasn’t about to resurrect himself, Dan squeezed into the back with the dog and the kids.
Jen reached into the front passenger seat and laid the AR-15 across the transmission hump. Then she trotted to the garage door.
“Ready to go?” she called to the judge.
He turned the key in the ignition. The engine roared to life.
Jen yanked up the garage door, flooding the room with daylight and capturing the attention of the cluster of men who were standing in the cul-de-sac next to the El Camino, discussing their next move.
As Marty, Eddie, Shreckler, and the cops all gaped in surprise, she ran back to the car, hopped in, and slammed the door.
“Hold tight,” said the judge.
He threw the car into reverse and hit the gas.
The Mustang leaped backward into the driveway. As it crossed the sidewalk, the judge whipped the wheel around, knifing the car ninety degrees and bringing it to a brief, lurching halt before roaring forward to Willis Road as the Watchdogs began to move in response.
“Hang a left!” Dan told the judge. “The parkway’s a mess. If you head up Summit to Broadhurst, we can take surface roads to the interstate.”
All four Altmans craned their necks to look back as the judge negotiated a sharp left, tires squealing into the turn. When Brantley Circle passed out of sight, the Watchdogs were scrambling to get into the El Camino.
“I think they’re coming after us,” Jen warned.
“Don’t worry, kid,” the judge told her. “If I can’t outrun an El Camino, I deserve to die.”
True to his word, Frank Distefano proceeded to defy every stereotype of elderly drivers Jen had ever held. He took the winding curves of Summit Avenue with the bravado of a reckless teenager. When they started downhill on Broadhurst, he abandoned the main artery in favor of a roundabout descent through the narrow residential side streets, executed as inconspicuously as any muscle car with a V-8 engine could be in the post-technological silence of the autumn morning.
The El Camino never got close enough to appear in the Mustang’s rearview mirror. As the topography flattened out and they made their way west through the suburbs toward the interstate, Jen rolled down the window, took a few deep breaths of the cool air, and let the tension in her shoulders subside. Her sober companion was at the wheel, her family was safe in the back seat, and the judge had assured them that the dog in the carrier on Max’s lap would eventually quit pissing herself.
Everything was going to be okay.
And if it wasn’t, she had a gun in her lap and a bottle in the trunk. One way or another, she was confident they could handle whatever version of America was waiting down the highway.