People screamed and yelled unintelligible things. Men and women ran past, beating the car with whatever object they were using for a weapon. More gunshots cracked. Feet by the hundred pounded the asphalt.
The bulk of the mob was closing in.
Bullets were no longer tearing through the car, but my animal instinct told me to get the hell out and run.
I rolled around on the seat and got the bounty hunter’s knife in my hand and sawed at the plastic strap binding my wrists.
I poked myself with the blade, but didn’t relent. The strap had to go, and time was against me.
A degenerate woman punched her way through the shattered safety glass of the driver’s side window and started pawing at the body in the front seat.
The plastic strap around my wrists flexed and then separated at the weakened point as I yanked hard to pull my arms apart. I sat up straight and took a quick glance to assess the situation before getting out.
One of the back doors flung open.
I threw myself to the far end of the backseat and reached out with the knife, ready to stab.
Guns were still firing outside.
A fatherly man dressed in camouflage leaned through the open door. He was armed and anxious. He glanced at the dead bounty hunter lying across the front console. He grimaced and snapped his eyes back to me. “You hit? You okay?”
Still holding the knife up, I contorted to reach the door handle behind me to let myself out.
“Don’t,” he told me. “Come with me.”
I didn’t move.
“We need to hurry. Most of these degenerates won’t hurt you, but with that riled-up bunch coming down the street and the dipshits back there shooting everything, things are going to get bad out here.” Glancing at the dead bounty hunter, he said, “That was an accident. C’mon.”
Go, stay, run the other way. None of my options were good, and the worst of the mob was bearing down on us. I took one last hard look at the camouflaged man, trying to find something I could believe in for the next few minutes. I didn’t. Instead, I took a chance, and I said, “Okay.” I climbed halfway over the front seat and snatched the pistol out of the dead bounty hunter’s hand.
“C’mon,” urged the camo-clad man. “Hurry.”
With a pistol in one hand and an open lock-blade knife in the other, I got out of the car. The degenerate woman pawing her way into the front seat through the door window didn’t pay us any attention. Manic people were running in every direction but many of them toward the house from where guns still fired.
At least a dozen people were down all around us, degenerates bewildered with their bloody wounds, those overwhelmed with the pain of their torn flesh, screaming to heaven, and the dead, fallen with arms and legs at awkward angles.
“You coming?”
I looked up at my would-be rescuer a dozen steps ahead of me, slowing down for me to catch up. Without realizing it, without thinking about the coming mob, the sight of the butchery had stopped me cold. I looked away from the carnage and sprinted.
He pointed toward a gap between two houses, one of which was the source of the shooting. The windows of that house were boarded over with layers of plywood and two-by-fours. Long slits, like those in a deer blind, were cut at shoulder level through each boarded window. As we passed between the houses, a volley of fire erupted from the guns poking out through the slits on the front of the house.
Ahead of us, a degenerate was fumbling with the gate that led into the backyard. The camo-clad man ran up behind him and splintered the back of his skull with the butt of his rifle. The degenerate stumbled to his left and fell, smashing his face into the wall of the house next door.
I was astonished by the cavalier attitude these people had for dishing violence out to the degenerates, not to mention the bounty hunter they’d shot.
The camo-clad man opened the gate and waved me through.
I ran into the backyard. The house’s back windows were boarded over just like those in front. All the fences were down—no—disassembled. The fences that had separated ten back-to-back yards on the block had been taken down and used to reinforce and heighten a perimeter fence now standing in the gaps between the houses, leaving a space the size of a football field where all of the decorative shrubs that had lined the fences had been cut away. The lower branches on all of the trees that hadn’t been sawed down to stumps had been pruned to let sunlight down to the gardens that filled the area.
But it wasn’t just a communal garden behind the houses on the block. It was a kill zone for anyone shooting out of the fortified house.
“Over here,” said a woman holding the fortified house’s back door open. “Get inside.”
I ran toward her, and the man who’d come to get me out of the car came along behind.
Once inside I looked around in a dim kitchen that smelled of cigarettes and sweat. Cigarettes? Those were rare these days. The woman who’d called me to come inside looked me over, her eyes settling mostly on the pistol in my hand. Two other men with rifles looked out through a slit in a window above the kitchen sink.
My rescuer came through the door and the woman slammed it shut and immediately went to work putting wooden braces in brackets mounted to the back of the door’s frame. She intended for it to stay closed when the mob arrived.
“Don’t,” the camo-clad man told her. “I’m leaving soon as I get my daughter.”
The gunfire intensified from the other rooms in the house.
The woman took on a derisive tone. “Don’t be an idiot, Jim.”
The camo-clad man—apparently Jim—spun on the woman. “Darlene, don’t. I told you that hothead Randy would get us all killed if you let him in here, and now he’s got everybody shooting and drawing every one of those degenerate bastards right to us because he can’t stop acting like Sylvester-Goddamn-Rambo. Half these dumbasses can’t shoot to save their lives. They killed this boy’s father while they were trying to shoot degenerates near the car.”
I said, “He wasn’t my dad.”
Jim paused and looked me up and down. His eyes stopped for a moment on the plastic straps still on each of my wrists.
“Ain’t nobody gittin’ in here,” Darlene spat. “Don’t matter if Randy shoots everybody or nobody.” She kicked the back door to demonstrate its strength.
“Yeah,” said Jim. He looked at me as he brushed by. “You can stay here with them or come with me. Hell, you can run off on your own. I don’t care. I’m sorry about your uncle or friend, or…” His eyes looked down at the straps on my wrist again. “Was he kidnapping you?”
I nodded.
“Then Randy did you a favor,” said Darlene, as she put a hand on my shoulder. “He’s a short-tempered putz most of the time, but he’s a good man in a fight.”
Jim disappeared deeper into the house.
Darlene sat herself in a kitchen chair that had been pushed against an interior wall. She pointed a cigarette-stained finger at my pistol. “That’s a big gun. You know how to use it?”
I’d never had a pistol of any kind in my hand before but knew enough to see that the safety was off and the trigger ready to pull. “Yes, ma’am.” I folded the knife closed and put it in my pocket.
Men started arguing in the front room. I recognized Jim’s voice.
“Don’t mind them,” said Darlene. “That’s just how they talk. You want me to cut them straps off your wrists?”
I nodded and held my left arm toward her, keeping my right hand by my side with the gun gripped tightly. I didn’t like the situation. Outside was hazardous in an obvious way. Inside, danger seemed to be all around me but hidden behind veils of yellow-toothed smiles and words that were almost kind.
Darlene pulled a big knife from a sheath hanging from her waist. She fumbled getting the tip between the plastic and my skin. In her clumsiness with the big blade, she gouged a shallow trough through the skin on my wrist. I flinched.
“Sorry, honey. You be still.”
I stayed quiet.
The blade cut the plastic, and the strap fell to the floor. I switched the gun to my left hand and let Darlene do her sloppy work with my right wrist.
Jim stepped into the kitchen, herding a dark-haired girl about my age. She had to be Jim’s daughter. Like everyone I’d seen in the house, she was armed. She had a pistol in a holster on her hip, and her hand rested on the butt. Through the doorway, Jim shouted, “What are you going to do, Randy, shoot every degenerate in Houston?”
“I got forty-thousand rounds,” Randy laughed as he called from the other room.
“It’s legal now,” someone else in the front room added. “Mayor said so himself.”
“That’s right,” Randy loudly told us as he came into the kitchen. “He said anybody that had to defend themselves is in their rights to shoot any degenerate on their property.”
“And you own the street?” Jim asked, as he guided his daughter toward the back door. “Is that it?”
“Don’t matter,” argued Randy. “They’re coming this way.”
“They’re all coming this way because you’re shooting them,” Jim argued. “They’re not as stupid as you think. They know you’re trying to kill them and the ones that are still smart enough to want to get revenge are going to come get it.”
“You can’t believe everything you see on the Internet,” Randy scoffed as he looked around for support from the other men in the kitchen.
Jim turned to Darlene. “Open the door, please.”
She looked at me. “What about him?”
Jim looked at me, too. “Like I said. Do what you like. Up to you.”
The only thing I knew about any of these people was that they’d gone trigger-happy on the car I was riding in, and Jim had taken a risk to come out and save me. I looked at Darlene and pointed at Jim. “I’m going with him.”
“Open the door, Darlene.” Jim’s tone made it clear he was ready to escalate if she didn’t comply.
His tone didn’t make sense given what little I knew about the situation inside the house, but I inferred a great deal from it. The fortified house was a dysfunctional mess, and whatever was the source of the tension, it had been building toward a breaking point that looked like it might come at any moment.
I stepped away from Darlene and put my back to the stove so everyone in the kitchen was in front of me. Whatever was going on, I didn’t plan to take any punches, and I wasn’t going to get shot for a load of crap that didn’t involve me. I put both hands on the pistol and held it the same way I’d seen cops hold guns in the movies.
The gun in my hand had a fat bore in the barrel, which meant it fired a big round. Aside from our family’s shotgun, stories from relatives who hunted, and loads of videos on the Internet, I didn’t have any experience with firearms. Guns were one topic of my Internet research in the early days of the H5N1 outbreak. Back then, driven by fear of the coming apocalypse, I’d tried to learn a great deal about things that I thought would help me navigate my future.
Long story short, I knew the gun would kick, maybe a lot. I needed to hold it with both hands if I wanted any control. I hoped the information I’d gleaned off the Internet was enough.
“Let him go,” announced Randy, as though he was pardoning a horse thief out on the range. To Jim, he said, “Don’t come crying back here when you find out you can’t defend your shitty little house.”
Looking at Randy, Darlene said, “Don’t be an asshole. You need to remember who this house belongs to—me. You don’t make the rules here.”
“We all fortified this place,” Randy shouted, redirecting his foul temper at her.
A man put a hand on Randy’s shoulder and said something softly to try and calm him down.
Darlene took a brace off the door, only one of several she’d put in place after Jim and I had entered. Looking at Jim, she said in a soft voice, “You come back if you want.”
Jim nodded slightly and looked down at his daughter. “You stay close, you hear?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
Darlene opened the door.
Jim looked out. “The backyards are still clear.” He looked over at me. “C’mon.”
Jim jogged through the door. The girl followed, and I was right on her heels.
Degenerates were screaming everywhere. They were pissed.
The door slammed shut behind us, and Darlene banged the braces into place.
Jim continued jogging along a path through the gardens.
The rate of gunfire from Darlene’s house increased.
The reinforced fences between the houses swayed in places—rioters were pushing from the other side. Not one was yet through, but even I could tell the fence was going to come down. It was only a matter of minutes.