Kent Kelly - Gray Rain Exodus

“Shit!” Sophie pulled out her gun, fumbling it with gloved and shaking hands.

Somewhere out there, a door slammed open. Someone not very far away kicked a shorn piece of lead pipe or something similar across the concrete, and it gave an eerie skirling clang-ang-ang , an under-beat as the klaxon droned ever on. Heard clearly then, the voices of men were in the air, vying, conflicting.

“You trip that?”

“No!”

“Where’s Zeke? He fueling?”

“Hell no, he’s on lights.”

“Perimeter?”

“Neg.”

“They’re in the fuel bays!”

Oh, fuck fuck fuck.

“Get in! Pull out, Soph,” cried Silas, positioning his pistol and scrunching his bandaged body further in onto the back seat. “Go! Now, now, nownownow!”

But the men’s intruding voices were not just behind the fuel bay. They were all around.

The alarm klaxon warbled itself into a gout of static clicks, then echoing silence. Scudding boot-steps came closer, gravel crunched. Someone very near was whistling, of all things. Like a prison guard, Sophie thought, some guard ambling toward Solitary to give his favorite hated prisoner a beating. That animal, trapped in its little cage? Nowhere to run. What’s the rush?

The whistling edged nearer, the enforced casual melody of a killer, stalking in slowly toward trapped prey, ready to linger over a slow and luscious kill. It was the iciest, most disturbing human sound that Sophie had ever heard.

The whistling stopped, but there was a huge man’s shadow now. Fluorescent lights of some kind had snapped on out there and the beams were casting the greasy air into streamers of white and gray. And there were more boot-steps coming up behind the lurking man, a lot more.

Sophie was ready to slam Silas’ door when she heard the casual, almost ruminating drawl of a deep-yet-muffled Louisiana voice from just behind her.

“Well now, darling. Hey la bas . Not quite expected, is what you are. What do we have here?”

Her knees pressed in together, suit surface to surface. She felt her bowels begin to loosen.

She turned slowly. The man walking in to stand in the fuel bay’s maw did not possess a face.

His mouth was covered over by something hand-made, something that looked like a surgeon’s mask, but it was fashioned from black leather stitched up and through with fishing line. Two crumpled bolts of yellowed tissue paper were stuck up his scabby nostrils. He was wearing ski goggles, a bloodied rag wrapped around his head, a poorly-buckled Kevlar vest and a singed and flapping hoodie draped over it all. Below the waist, he wore faded jeans caked high with filth and oil, and what looked like a reflective barbecue apron. He held the butt of a splintered Rockies baseball bat, tapping, tapping, its length idly resting upon one shoulder. His other hand balanced a sawed-off shotgun. He pointed both barrels over at Sophie’s chest with an air of relaxed ease.

Sophie backed slowly closer to the H4, into the open passenger’s side, where Silas was gripping at the back of her armored suit. He was trying to push her away, to get a clear shot. No. Silas, you can’t see this. She concealed him as best she could. You’d never be fast enough to save me.

As she opened her mouth, desperately trying to think of what she could say, Anything, anything to defuse this rising catastrophe, she had time for one clear, lucid thought. It was a glimmer only, but something her beloved Tom would have been very proud of: She knew the man looming before her was supremely overconfident. He was holding two weapons, neither easy to wield one-handed. And his goggled eyes had parsed over her lowered submachine gun, and dismissed it.

He thinks I don’t have a hope in Hell.

“I don’t want any trouble,” said Sophie.

“Oh, Tifi , sad to say you’ve earned it,” said the man. His voice was baritone behind the mask, almost jarringly agreeable. Yet the nasal tincture, his parched and plugged-up rumbling, these betrayed the deadly truth beneath the pleasantries.

He gestured at her face with the shotgun barrels, while nodding his head toward the pumping hoses. “For here you are, stealing from my boys and me, you see.”

He somehow slotted away his baseball bat, like a boy’s wooden sword tucked back to a makeshift scabbard. He was still holding the shotgun in only a single hand. He couldn’t fire it safely if he tried. The recoil, Sophie guessed, would probably break his jaw or worse. But at this range, the scattershot…

Sophie let go of her corded gun, let it slip down into the utility pocket across her chest. The man huffed in disdain.

“Fancy shooter there, miss. Dare say now, you even think you know how to handle it, right by an open fuel tank? Very sweet.” His voice was droning, disarming even, but his free arm was dead straight down his side, the fist a trembling, angry slab of meat and bone. His head was lowered, his goggle-tinted eyes gazing up at her, yellow slivers. Sophie tried to remember when she had ever seen that stance, some movie poster. The Joker. Every line of his silhouette spoke sugared hatred, rage at bay. A wolf waiting to pounce.

He’s not toying with me. He’s waiting.

Seven more rag-men — oil drifters, derelicts — strolled in behind the man. One was swinging a police nightstick, another had a grimy crowbar which had been sharpened into a stake of steel, something you might stab a vampire with. All were armed, some smiling. Leering, even.

They’re not just going to kill me, Sophie thought.

Panic began to surge in over everything.

She swallowed. She managed, “I’m sorry. I’ll trade you very well for this, and go. I’ll never tell anyone where you are. I just want to leave.”

“Will you, now?” The man was chortling, only the shotgun he held was perfectly still. “Oh, my aching eyes. You see what she say?” He pulled down his leather jaw-mask without hands, by rubbing his chin against his shoulder. His lips were covered in black scabs. “All this lovely cargo, here-ah, and a running engine too, all this materiel just for lady-you? You caravan? You all alone, Tifi ?”

Sophie disregarded this deathly play. She answered the unspoken instead, the questioning need she could see glinting deep in the eyes of the other men. “I mean it. I can trade well for the fuel. I’m a doctor,” she lied. “I have medicine.”

The triggerman actually looked back over his shoulder, a full second in which he could not see Sophie’s gun or her face. “Oh, she can trade so well now, services, can she?” He looked to her again, a terrible smirk at his unshaven jaw. “You’re in a position of great power, Tifi , in your very own kingdom of the mind there, aren’t you now? Isn’t that just sugar.”

One of the muscled men behind the triggerman chuckled drily. Emboldened, the man with the crowbar-stake tapped his booted foot against the H4’s back left tire.

“Riding low,” said this other, “and leaking, too. Fuel line. Hell of a lot of supplies back up in here.”

“Hell of a lot and heaven as well,” the triggerman agreed, “and damsel in nice vêtements , too, to top her off. Very fine,” he said to Sophie. “That I grant you. A good man could go for vêtements like that, miss-doctor-you. Something very cozy to get into. But oh, not sure am I, you’re in any position to trade now, love. That I fear. No. You’ll be sharing, see? You’ll be sharing everything, miss-doctor-you, and then some.”

“I’m far from defenseless,” said Sophie. “Open fuel tank or no, I’m certain you don’t want—”