Kent Kelly - Gray Rain Exodus

“ Bon . Now move,” said Zachary. “Round the door, close it a little with your hip, hands up on the front fender and look away.”

There was almost silence, all the men were listening. The only voices, the men in the back were coughing in the still-running H4’s fumes.

He didn’t tell me to turn off the ignition. He must think that will keep us from shooting. Does he think Silas has a gun? And what about when Rob sees? When he sees Silas with the pistol…

Sophie realized in that moment that there was no way out. She was going to die.

As she turned to move out toward the H4’s front, there was a huge bang outside followed by a wailing, girlish shriek.

What in the Hell?

The screaming went on and on. A girl? The screaming was getting closer, and quickly. Sophie looked back. The effect on the men was as if liquid fire had been poured over their heads. Jakey went rigid, Rob flinched and looked back to Zachary for reassurance. Zachary had bared his teeth. The others behind Zachary backed away, cursing and gripping their weapons. The younger derelicts were silent, the eldest began arguing with one another. Somewhere, somewhere inside, guards had been overpowered.

This is the only moment, Sophie realized. Only chance we’re ever going to have.

There were many screams then, dozens. Girls were shrieking, old women sobbing. A babble of women’s voices arose over the wind:

“Help us!”

“There! They’re in the fuel bays!”

“Save yourselves!”

“You hear?”

“Her car! Her car is working ?”

“God! Help us, they’re raping us!”

“Don’t let them touch you!”

“Kill yourself! They—”

Two seconds had passed, if that. Rob had made his choice and moved in toward the open passenger door, and was staring down in horrified disbelief. He managed, “What the — ?” And that was all.

The barrel of Silas’ pistol was shoved between Rob’s scabrous lips, up against his teeth.

All of what happened next, the frenetic, chaotic splicing of simultaneity, Sophie never quite understood. She revisited the scene every night, in nightmares, a reluctant somnambulist forever exploring the same dread ground of an eternal trauma which refused to fade away. The Mercy Ground , she called the fuel bay ever after.

But what all took place in the next moments? There were so many people to behold, so many nightmares, intricacies of gore and chaos. And the girl.

Oh, the horror of the girl.

In the same second that Silas’ pistol swept up and chipped Rob’s teeth, a young teenaged woman stumbled around the corner of the fuel bay. She was naked, emaciated, blistered and splattered in dried streaks of oil and blood. Some kind of ghastly, filth-trailing head-cage — made out of a bicycle wheel, with some of the spokes half-torn out and then turned into barbs, surely to restrict the movement of her throat — was chained around her neck and face. A black leather leash dangled from this contraption and trailed out behind her, dripping blood. One of the young woman’s eye sockets was badly patched over, and there was very little hair left on her head. Most of it had been yanked out in tufts, the gaping sores stitched over and cauterized.

She had once been beautiful. Now, she was gaping and her mouth was a perfect O of mortal terror. She shrieked, the barbs piercing her neck and letting out trickles of blood as she did so, “Help me! They’re torturing us! Take me! Take me, God, oh God!”

Jakey was grabbing the girl then, wrestling her to the ground. More women were rushing into the fuel bay’s open hollow, sobbing and screaming, and most of the men were turning around with weapons upraised to throttle them.

Sophie was a split second away from jumping into the running H4 ( Open doors be damned, get out of here, get out ), away from the human maelstrom of rage and limbs surging just behind her, when Silas pulled the Luger’s trigger.

Crack. Deafening.

Rob’s face shrank, imploded.

There was no other way to describe it. It was as if a black hole, a tiny cosmic singularity, had formed inside his mouth, its sudden impossible swell of crushing gravity sucking the rest of his head’s bone, teeth and fleshly matter inexorably in toward a single point. There was only a faintest haze of blood clouding in scarlet mist around the entry wound, but with the upward angle of Silas’ weapon, half the contents of Rob’s head sprayed up over the clamped tops of the fuel hoses.

Bandages flew in streamers, gouts of oiled hair tumbled up in spirals. Ghost-white chunks of skull, each with yellowish curds glued poorly to the inside surfaces of their triangles, sprayed high like deadly shrapnel, rebounding off brick and bouncing down onto the plastic carry-alls strapped over the H4’s roof.

There was a burst of some animalistic scent, moist and raw. Something smelled like fragrant cheese.

The slug’s hot remnant ricocheted out over someone else’s head. The oldest of the other men shouted out, his face an almost comical twist of shock and revelation, O! And the nailed-through piece of lumber this man had been holding dropped between his feet, bounced, then angled outward in the air.

The nearest other man, it may have been Morty, tripped over the rebounding board and into the screaming blood-girl. They both fell over in a tangle of limbs, one clawing, the other shielding.

Another man was erratically aiming a vintage green Springfield carbine — a moment earlier, perhaps he had been trying to decide if he could very carefully shoot the blood-girl in the face — while two filth-caked naked women, one very old, were lunging toward him with broken fingers, their fingernails turned into searching claws.

That was the last vision etched into Sophie’s memory. The next she knew, she had pushed her submachine gun further over to the passenger seat and was in, one leg trailing, clutching the H4’s wheel. Without thinking she shunted out of park, hoisted her left leg in. In her panic she fisted the stick over to four-wheel instead of drive. Her right foot stomped down on the accelerator.

The engine roared, hacked and roared louder. The H4 lurched forward out of the bay with men and women running after it. Someone shrieked and fell, perhaps slipping in Rob’s blood and gore or stumbling over his body. Perhaps Sophie had run part of him over, with her back wheel. She didn’t know.

Even over the engine the babbling voices were rising, shouts, cries of panic and rage: “Stop her! Don’t shoot! Please! Christ, Zeke — Stop! Don’t let them get away! Fuck! Get out of the way!”

But there was a louder voice, a trill of lust, a goddess song. Patrice was chanting in Sophie’s head, Yes! Finally! You see? A bicycle wheel with razor spikes. That, my love, is what happens to all the bad girls in a world destroyed by men. Face in a cage. Raped and dead alive and dead and dead and dead! All dead, all dead… cackling. But more solemn than this rose Sophie’s own conviction, in silence and commandment:

Save the girl.

She had to try to save the girl.

Immediately after firing his LCP, Silas had somehow managed to jolt and sit up, turning himself over. His fingers were bleeding where he had torn some of his nails off, scrabbling upright. The pistol went flying from his fingers when Sophie hit the gas.

Silas almost fell out of the Hummer as Sophie veered left and away, trying to circle so far out from the fuel bay that no man could find the time to open fire as she sped onward.

Swerving out of the bay, she had no time to calculate risk or repercussion. There were only life and death. There was a candy-striped concrete bollard sheathed in dented gray aluminum to her left, it read in stencil-painted letters, TRUCKS BEGIN TURN NOW / CLEARANCE ONL —