Jim unlocked the back door of his house. He urged the girl and me to hurry inside before locking the door behind us. The girl pulled out a flashlight and turned it on, once we were inside. Like Darlene, Jim had to place two-by-fours in brackets mounted to the wall to bolster the door.
While he was doing that, I looked around and listened for the sound of other people in the house.
The girl noticed what I was doing and said, “It’s just us.”
In the flashlight’s dim glow, I saw that we were in another kitchen that was laid out much like the one at Darlene’s house. None of the windows was boarded over, though, and the house didn’t smell like cigarettes. The kitchen was clean and organized, but well-used. The top layers of vinyl on the floor had worn through to expose a black underlayment. The wallpaper, patterned with large yellow flowers amidst languid green foliage, was peeling at the seams. The Formica countertops were worn through in big browns spots beside the sink and stove.
Volleys of gunfire exploded from the direction of Darlene’s house.
“Fools,” grumbled Jim, as he turned on another flashlight.
“You’ve had riots here before?” I asked, guessing the reason all these people had put so much effort into preparation.
“Three or four.” Jim glanced at the girl as if for confirmation. She nodded.
“Are they always like this?” I asked.
“You don’t need to worry,” he told me. “We’ll be fine here.” He glanced at the girl. “We’ll all be fine.”
That sounded like bullshit to me. “I’m not an adult, but I don’t need to be soothed. We left Darlene’s house because you think they’re endangering themselves. Why?”
“That’s right.” Jim walked to the kitchen doorway to get a look into other parts of the house. “Each time the riots come, they get worse. Last time, some people were killed a few blocks down. Over behind the Kroger supermarket, about a mile that way,” Jim pointed, “a couple of blocks got burned out. Nearly every house. Nobody knows how many people were killed there. After the last one, some of us neighbors who shared the gardens out back decided to set up Darlene’s house as a fortress to protect ourselves.”
“Why isn’t Darlene’s house safe for you and…” I looked at the girl.
“Addy,” she told me.
“I’m Christian,” I told her.
“Don’t know why we chose Darlene’s house,” said Jim. “Maybe because she was willing. We agreed before we started we’d only shoot the degenerates who tried to break in.”
“Randy agreed,” said Addy, “but you knew he was just saying it. You said so yourself.”
Jim nodded and frowned.
“Shooting them makes them more dangerous?” I asked.
Answering for her dad, Addy said, “People on the Internet say that when the degenerates get like this, they just want to break things and start fires. Shooting at them makes them mad, makes them want to get you.”
“Makes sense, right?” Jim asked me but didn’t wait for an answer. “They’re all degenerates out there, but not all of them are completely stupid. They’re still people. Most of them have the good sense to know when somebody’s trying to kill them, and they get real mean and vindictive when they think that.”
“But most of them aren’t smart enough anymore to be afraid of guns,” said Addy. “They say it on the news, too. At least on some of the channels.”
“That one fellow on Channel 13, though—” said Jim, “the one who’s always preaching about this and that, always complaining about how the law needs to change so we can just shoot ‘em all down in the street—Randy and some of them others in Darlene’s house like to listen to him. They think he’s right. And now with a riot going on, they know nobody’s gonna prosecute them for shooting degenerates. I suspect this is what they wanted all along, to set Darlene’s place up like a fortress so they could slaughter as many degenerates as they could. I think maybe all the riots pissed them off too much. I suspect they’re tired of seeing things go out of control.”
I listened for a moment to the sounds from outside. The guns were firing steadily now down at Darlene’s house. More and more wild voices were hollering angry nonsense. “Does it sound to you guys like the riot is growing?”
Jim’s lips tightened into a crease across his face as he cocked his head and listened. “Sure as Dickens, all that shooting is bringing them in. Dammit! Most times they move on through, just breaking stuff nobody cares about, sometimes getting into houses to look for food. People don’t understand it’s best to just stay out of their way.”
Addy asked, “What are we going to do, Daddy?”
Banging on the front door silenced all three of us.
Heavy pounding against the door stopped our hearts.
Feet kicked the front walls and fists beat the windows.
“Addy!” Jim pointed out the kitchen door. “Bug out!”
Addy ran through the door with Jim right behind her. I followed. Addy stood aside in the living room and let Jim lead down a narrow, dark hall.
Once halfway into the hall, Jim reached up and tugged hard on a braided piece of rope. An attic access panel swung down and a ladder unfolded. He turned to Addy. “Up.”
Addy squeezed by Jim and all but ran up the ladder. Jim waved me to follow behind.
The attic space was cramped and hot despite the cool autumn weather. Addy coughed on fiberglass dust kicked up from the insulation piled between the joists. The crap got into my throat and lungs, and scratched until I couldn’t help but cough, too.
Jim pulled the ladder up behind us as Addy scooted across the attic toward a wall covered in sheets of new pink fiberglass insulation.
I followed, thinking the wall had been built as a hiding place that would keep us from being seen by anyone taking a casual peek into the attic from the ladder we’d just climbed.
Once I rounded the thin plywood wall, I saw Addy pushing open a small roughly-made door through the roof.
I silently complimented Jim on the choice to build an escape hatch.
Addy climbed through the door on a homemade ladder. I followed her through and squatted on the roof near the door, just as she did.
Outside the house, the sound of the riot was deafening. Thousands of voices were raging. All around, I heard the sound of breaking fence boards and shattering glass. Degenerates were jumping up and down on cars parked along the road. Rifle fire was pouring out of Darlene’s house.
A large section of fence gave way down at the far end of the garden plot and a solid mob of degenerates poured into the space behind the houses. Weapons fired through the rifle slits in the fortified windows on the back of Darlene’s house. Rioters fell and were trampled.
“Daddy,” Addy urgently told her father, “the fence.”
Jim shook his head as he climbed out through the doorway in the roof. “No way that fence was gonna hold with those fools shooting like that.”
The gunfire coming from the back of Darlene’s house had no hope of stemming the tide of the mob. There were too many degenerates. And just like that, they were at the house, enraged, beating on the wood siding with their fists.
Something banged so loudly below us I felt it through my feet as I squatted on the roof shingles.
“They’re in,” Jim told us, closing the doorway behind us.
Addy stood up and looked around.
“Don’t,” Jim grabbed her shoulder and gently pulled her back down. “We’re behind the roof peak here. They can’t see you from the road.”
“Are we staying here?” she asked.
I was looking across the combined yards at the degenerates coming through the broken fence. “The ones in the backyard garden will see us up here, right?”
Jim nodded. “They might think we’re with them and leave us alone, but mad as they are right now, they’ll probably believe we’re with that bunch in Darlene’s house.”
The sound in the house below us changed.
“I think they’re in the attic.” I looked at the roof hatch to see if there was a way to lock it closed from the top side.
Jim crouched and walked into the midst of a tall tree’s branches that were overhanging one end of his roof. Addy went right after him, also in a crouch. I followed.
It was even darker being surrounded by the tree’s branches, but I saw where we were going. A ladder spanned the gap between Jim’s roof and the roof next door. Long two-by-fours were lashed along the ladder’s length to give it strength. The end of the ladder on Jim’s roof was loosely secured with brackets. I assumed it was secured on the far end as well.
“Go,” Jim told Addy, pointing at the ladder and looking through the tree’s branches and remaining brown leaves. He was worried the degenerates would be coming onto the roof at any moment.
Addy raced across the ladder, perfectly balanced on the rungs, as though the fifteen-foot fall off either side was nothing at all.
Once she had her feet on the roof of the house next door, Jim waved me to follow.
I crossed the ladder on all fours, going as fast as I could move, given that the ladder shifted in the loose brackets that held it in place on each end.
I guess I had a shamed looked on my face when I reached the other side and looked at Addy. As an explanation for her nimble crossing, she simply said, “Gymnastics.”
I turned to see Jim crossing the ladder, going slowly on all fours as if he expected the ladder to collapse beneath him.
When Jim had only a few paces to go, the doorway to his attic flung open, and a degenerate’s head popped through. The degenerate screamed and pointed at us.
“Hurry, Daddy,” said Addy.
Jim stood and bounded over the last few steps.
I dropped to a knee, lifted my pistol, and pointed it down the length of the ladder.
Jim squatted and went to work on the bracket securing the ladder to the roof. “Don’t shoot,” Jim told me, “unless he starts to cross.”
The degenerate was out of the doorway, and another was coming up behind.
“Why are they chasing us?” I asked.
“Like I said,” Jim cocked his head toward Darlene’s place without taking his attention off the metal bracket in his hands clinking against the ladder, “once you start shooting them, some of them go on a rampage.”
The degenerate reached the far end of the ladder, gave it one apprehensive glance, and stepped out to plant a foot on a rung. I lined the sight on the pistol with the degenerate’s chest, held the gun tightly, stiffened my arms, and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked and a red haze blew out behind the degenerate as the bullet knocked him backward. He bounced off the shingles on Jim’s roof and fell into the gap between the houses.
“Nice shooting,” said Addy.
“Yup,” Jim agreed, though he didn’t look up from what he was doing.
Another degenerate was working his way through the branches as a third was climbing out of the door through Jim’s roof.
Addy aimed her pistol.
The ladder clanged as the brackets came loose. Jim lifted it from our end, pushed it toward his house to collapse its length by a few feet, and let it go. It fell into the gap between the houses. He smiled grimly as he glanced at Addy and me. “Let’s go.”