Pilliars in the Fall (22 page)

Chapter 20

I woke up in a splintered darkness. Cracks of daylight shown down into my little cell. As terrible as I felt, I didn't wake up disoriented. I remembered all too well the last few hours from the previous night.

The explosion and cave in that just narrowly missed burying me alive. Pushing my body to the brink through the dark tunnels as I went back to look
for Blake. The frenzied crowds, the cold, the smoke... I didn’t have any problem re-living seeing him shot, going back through every detail to figure out why we had been so stupid.

It was daylight now and I was holed up in yet another end of the damned tunnel network we had been using. After seeing our “entrance” end blocked by my makeshift propane bomb, I had tried to make it back to the parking garage side and to Blake, only to be driven back by a deadly hail of gunfire, this time from inside the tunnels themselves.

Some of the adventurous rioters must have finally figured out what we had been guarding and came in to check it out. I used my stolen map to get away through other access doors and managed to lose them, slinking away and out of their reach before passing out in an old basement room that connected to the tunnels through a different entrance.

I had to break through a piece of plywood that had been used to cover up the doorway. In this part of the tunnel labyrinth it was nothing more than a dirt floored access point with maybe four foot high ceilings for a good hundred yards. As bad off as my mind and body were at that point, I almost thought I was tunneling straight into hell.

Throwing myself through the plywood I found I was in the storage basement of an art building. I spotted a couple dark windows and scrounged a canvas drop cloth to cover up with before allowing myself to finally shut down. A large part of me hoped I wouldn't wake up.

“Cant we just hide? You know, stay low and ride it out?”

Those words brought me back to the land of the living. Or in my case the land of the semi-conscious and almost coherent. Kathy had asked me that not all that long ago when we were at their house the night after we had picked up Blake and Danielle from the train station. I had agreed at the time and that had been the plan. I guess things don’t always go according to plan.

Shutting my eyes tightly against a wave of heartache, I pried them back open again and experimentally moved all my limbs. I was sore, battered, bruised, cut and exhausted, but I was alive, and laying around in this basement wasn’t going to get me where I needed to go.

And where was that? My place out of town? No, I wasn’t going to go slump away and hide. Clint and Kathy’s house? They shouldn’t be there yet depending on how long I’d been asleep. They should still be at the clinic. Right, the clinic with the blackmailing doctor who didn’t want to treat Kathy with simple medication. Now he had Clint to patch up too, if he even could. Hopefully Danielle had taken my advice and not given him an option.

I pulled myself upright with the help of a leaning pile of boxes and looked around for a door or stairway. The last thing I wanted to do was go back into the tunnels. An unlit emergency sign hanging from the water stained ceiling in the far corner pointed me towards the stairway. Thankfully the door was unlocked and not blocked by anything like an imploded building from all the fires last night.

Using the handrail, I pulled myself along to the top and slowly opened the door. Fresh, cold air streamed in through a broken glass window in the hallway I had emerged into. I let the breeze wash over me and I inhaled deeply, immediately forgetting the stuffiness from the basement.

Raising my eyes up as if for the first time, I saw how the snow had blanketed everything. It covered the ground in a good six inch layer. I looked at the buildings around me, then at the hills in the distance. A winter whitened landscape had erased all the signs of evil done not twelve hours before. Fresh white layers over top a crimson stained ground and frosted trees hid charred bark.

The outer layer of my clothes were dry for the most part as I had spent the majority of my time underground and out of the weather last night. The inner layer had gotten pretty damp from sweat and I was already feeling the chill work its way back into my bones.

Now I had to decide what to do. I felt the need to go look for Blake... for his body, but I had to attend to my immediate needs first. I could stay right here and wait to dry out. Dry was appealing but staying here was not. I could go for the clinic or out to my house and risk hypothermia, or, I guess now was as good a time as any to make use of my other house in town and the supplies I had left there. It was a small town and as such, the house wasn’t too far away. I could get there, get warm, clean myself up, change my clothes, eat some food and basically reset myself to finish off this escapade.

Piles of smoldering rubble still smoked a swan song to last night's carnage. Everything was deathly quiet. No more sounds of gunfights or rioting and very few if any fresh tracks in the snow. I guess the weather had quelled the fires of the people and buildings alike. I didn't like leaving my own tracks in the snow but there was nothing else for it. If I was going to move, I was going to leave a trail. The best thing I could do would be to look as worn out and downtrodden as everyone else. I didn't have to try very hard.

I trudged my way the seven blocks across town to the house where when I was twenty years old I had decided to put my money towards something that would be mine instead of renting. At the time it was a great price and I had thought it was a very responsible and grown up decision. A fat lot of good it did me when the housing market crashed. I hadn’t let the place fall completely into disrepair after I had moved out of town but with no one around able to afford to buy it or even rent it from me, it had been sitting empty.

Coming up the alleyway across the street and with no leaves on the trees to mask the view into the back yard like they did during the summer, I could see the new snow load was making the back porch lean dangerously towards the ground. The fence was still upright and intact and all the windows seemed to still be sealed up too. I didn't have much love for the place although I was glad to see the looting hadn't come into this neighborhood...yet.

Through all the reminiscing I almost missed the divots in the snow along the sidewalk where someone had walked late last night before the storm had stopped. I also almost missed the huddled bundle of a person on the far side of the house.

My body was drained and my mind was working slowly. It took me far too long to decide what I was seeing and to react to it. Finally, my hand found the grip of my AK74 slung under my coat.

I stepped a few feet back into the alley and watched for a minute. There was no approach from this side where I wouldn't be seen and I’d have to back track by two blocks to be able to come around to the back side of the house under cover. We didn't have much of a homeless population that wasn't at a shelter or already squatting in someone else's house, and if the rioting hadn't come this far, it wasn't someone hurt and left behind... then it hit me.

Hurt and left behind.

How in the hell he could have survived last night and made it all the way to my house was beyond me, but the huddled mass could only be one thing.

Abandoning all stealth I ran from the alleyway, across the road and slid to a stop when I saw the discolored hand and splotches of blood under the last half inch of snow. It was Blake. Thinking we had abandoned him, he had made it all this way, badly hurt; only to be abandoned again as I slept in some dry basement as he froze out here.

Gingerly I pulled back the hood from his head. His eyes and checks were bruised and stained black. At my touch, the last dying ember of life left in him sparked and he opened his eyes. I couldn't believe he had lived this long. He had been shot, beaten and exposed to the freezing weather, but the man was still hanging on to his last string of life.

I knelt down in the snow, the sting of tears in the cold barely perceptible. Quickly surveying his injuries I knew there was no way for him to survive. The most I could do was cradle his head. I knew he shouldn't be alive and didn't have any time left. Neither of us could speak. His eyes clouded and cleared as his thoughts came and went. Blame, forgiveness, and at the end, a wish for peace to finally reach him in body, mind and soul.

Chapter 21

Five days later I had finally caught up to Clint, Danielle and Kathy.

After puking and crying out everything I had left, I had passed out again in the sheltered refuge I had created in my house’s basement.
 From there I took Blake’s still frozen body with me to the clinic, having no way to bury or cremate him properly. I had missed the others by three days and left his body in the care of the doctor and other remaining staff with my thanks for the treatment they gave, and the respectful treatment they would give to Blake.

As a token of good will, I left them with some supplies I had scrounged up and brought along with me. The doctor thankfully didn't have the guts to ask for Blake's Beretta that he found as we moved his body into a back room. I hadn't searched him and Blake must have jammed the empty gun deep inside a pocket to keep it safe. That gun would be delivered to his father.

“How's she doing?” I asked Clint as he slowly and quietly pulled the bedroom door closed behind him. It was evening and I was warming my hands on a mug of coffee at their house far out of town.

“I don't know,” Clint ran a hand through his thinning hair. “The drugs have the infection pretty much under control but she won't eat anything and will barely talk to us.”

“So it was all for nothing?” I shook my head.

“No. We did the best we could with what we had at the time. We all knew the risk...” he trailed off, not quite ready to talk about whether or not we really had thought about losing one of our own.

“So what now?” he asked, ushering us into the other room to let Kathy have some peace and quiet, or to at least to keep her from overhearing any more. “Where are you headed?”

"I’ll stop in and see if the Boss is still around, plus there’s some gear at my office I want to pick up. From there I’ve got some friends not too far into the city that I might check on and see how they’re doing in this mess.”

"Hmmmf. I hope you treat them better than your other friends." I heard Danielle mutter from across the room. I managed to ignore her with great restraint.

"The radios say that the city is still in a full-on meltdown. You going to drive or walk?" Clint grimaced as he sat down on the couch and arranged a pillow under his leg.

"I think I'm just going to hike it. There's a cargo van in the back shop at work I can load up and drive home if I need to."

"Load up?"

"Lots of stuff still there; tools, coffee, batteries, water jugs, toilet paper, a few guns I had stashed or was working on..."

"Is it yours?" Clint asked the obvious and irritating question.

"At this point, if its still there, its mine."

Hearing this, Danielle uncoiled from her spot by a window and came over to point a finger at my chest.

“Didn’t you learn anything?”

“Look, this isn’t the time.”

I backed away a couple steps but she kept moving forward until I was backed up against the living room wall.

“You were his best friend!” she snapped at me.

“And you were his wife!” I knew right now that this conversation was not going to go well; even so, I didn't stop myself. She wanted to accuse me? Make me solely responsible for what had happened?

“I might have known him since we were kids but if you didn’t pick up on a sudden onset of psychopathic tendencies, how was I supposed to?”

She suddenly drew a pistol from behind her back and pressed the muzzle to my temple. I didn’t know what she thought I would do but she wasn't ready for me to press my forehead back into the gun’s barrel, not allowing her to pull it away.

“Will this fix it?” I asked her grimly, pressing my head even harder into her gun.

“You just want more killing and death, even if its you!” she finally shrank away from me.

“I have never wanted that,” I tried to tell her.

While completely true, the words fell far short.

“Bullshit! You wouldn't be as good at it as you are if you didn't want to kill things... kill people! Destroy lives!”

“I don't have the stuff I have, know what I know and do what I do because I want to kill, it's because I want to live!”

It was the best defense I could come up with. Whether she could understand the difference in her emotional state right now, I doubted. All I could tell her was the truth as I saw it.

“So what, now you’re just going to go find a new bunch of people to impose on? I mean you have such a good track record with helping your friends, maybe you can fuck up their lives too!” she lashed out painfully again.

This was going nowhere and I was tired of being yelled at, even if I deserved it, which I wasn't completely convinced that I did. Maybe she was
right; maybe I shouldn’t have any friends close to me right now or ever. Maybe I was just destined to be a vessel for trouble to happen around.

No. I knew what would give people the best chances to survive in an environment like we now faced. I knew no one could truly go it alone and live during something like this. The question that she was making me ask myself though was if I was just running to Plan B now that my initial plan had been devastated? Was I just running to find stability?

No, I didn't need stability. Hell I was a virtual master of living in chaos. I didn't need to be around people for my own well being, at least not for the mental side of it anyway. I knew there wasn't any of us that would get through this on our own. I had always known that people needed to band together to survive.

The friends I had in mind to go talk to had a big family that lived pretty close by. They had land and farms and abilities. For me... for us... for them to have the best chance, they would need to be out here, close to their family and out of the city to have the best shot surviving; the best chance at living.

The truth of the matter was that I would need a group like that close by to help me to live too. Shit, was that why I wanted to check in on them? To bolster the probability of my own survival? I had tried to get Henry and his family on board, then Clint and Blake, Now what? Was I doing this for them or for myself? I guess only time would tell.

Danielle’s berating tirade at my expense had worked itself into my head. I knew what I had in mind was a mutually beneficial solution. She must have hit me with just enough truth, and I must have been just vulnerable enough after losing Blake, that I was starting to second guess my motivation and actions. That was a rare and unwelcome occurrence for me.

I looked one last time at Danielle standing with her hands on her hips, her face flushed and tears in her eyes as she waited for me to answer her and give another opportunity to tear me down some more. Well screw it; I had had enough for today. Turning around I looked at Clint. As usual, he knew what I was doing and thinking. He and I would talk again soon enough, one way or another.

Clint started to get up but winced again and thought better of it. He knew I didn’t need him to defend me and that I wasn't looking for him to tell me he forgave me or anything like that, but still, he stepped up with some fatherly words for all of us to hear.

“This is the way things are now. We’re fighters. We have all prepared in our own ways to survive what has happened and what is going to happen. Unfortunately, the terrible byproduct of preparing against violence is that you’re around violence and you have to embrace it a little bit if you’re going to survive it. You do that enough and it becomes part of your personality, whether you like it or not.”

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What is it about fire? Does it destroy or does it remake? Does it remove or does it refresh? When the forest has become overgrown with dead wood, weeds and waste, fire cleanses it and allows the toughest trees the opportunity to grow on, less hindered. A man may find himself in the same circumstance. When someone has always lived in the forest and knows every tree and shrub there, they are really all he knows until one day his familiar trees and shrubs are uprooted. All he knows gets burned and stripped away to leave only the core to either fight and grow, or wither and die. The question then becomes, how long will a spirit lay dormant, recovering and readying itself for its next phase of life?