Kent Kelly - Gray Rain Exodus

And that was all she saw. Her open door and then Silas’ both collided with the bollard, each slamming shut in turn with a thunderous bang! Bang! Sparks showered and the aluminum alloy of the H4’s door panels shrieked as the bollard’s plated side turned into a spangled wreck, an upright jag that looked like a silver flower.

Silas cried out, his left arm twisted at an abrupt and misshapen angle as the H4’s slamming passenger door hammered him in and down.

God, Sophie, you could have severed all his fingers. You almost killed —

Reeling, tilting.

The H4 was turning, a precarious and dismayingly gradual arc as the wheels scrabbled over warped concrete, rubble and ruptured sandbags. Behind and to Sophie’s left, dozens of sprinting and hobbling skeleton-shapes were chasing after the Hummer, half-envisaged through a cloud of fuel vapor, smoke and incinerated rubber from the tires. If the H4’s speed had not been limited by the first gear of four-wheel, a complete accident and error, it probably would have flipped and both Silas and Sophie would have been trapped to meet their Fate.

Instead, Sophie had a moment to recalculate, to let her foot off the gas. She got the H4 into drive and running perpendicular to the onrushing crowd, she was looking over her left shoulder as they all swept toward her in two blurred striations: one swarm of naked and bleeding women, the other of armed men. Between the two, the girl with the barbed cage around her head had somehow gotten away from the man who had fallen into her. Her belly was streaked with fresh running slicks of blood.

Sophie fumbled away from the steering wheel with her right hand, padding the passenger seat for the submachine gun. It hadn’t yet fallen onto the floor with her wild acceleration, because its utility cord was tangled in the unused seatbelt which had flipped over the console.

Save the girl.

Sophie tried to both seize and ready the shifting submachine gun without looking down, while staring out at the frenzied surge and crush of people running toward her, gauging the distance between the H4 and the two swarms, and the nearing girl. She tried even more to steer, to correct the veering course which had now aimed the H4 at a chained-down Greyhound charter bus, and even to keep Silas from tumbling over.

She tried.

“Save me!” The blood-girl was running straight for her, limping and clutching her belly with one hand, waving her other twisted arm like a mutilated puppet’s limb free from strings. Twenty, fifteen feet away. “God, don’t leave me!”

And then, without meaning, without a fracture of comprehension or the faintest visual sheen of ceremony, there was a crack and the top of the blood-girl’s caged head erupted and became a crimson, gelid blossom, flowering open upon the fluorescent-streamered wind.

Once, afar, in a mundane modern used-to-be world of elder years and long ago, Sophie had been grocery shopping down in Cherry Creek and she had seen a jar of bleached and fatty beef tripe perched up high in Whole Foods Market shelving, pallid bovine stomach matter floating inside a crystalline jar of cranberry jelly.

She had stood casually there in her khakis and her azure and silken V-blouse, biting her lower lip. Stood there musing in an unnerved, deteriorating mimicry of silence. What in the Hell is that? Disgusting. Regarding the jar with detached fascination, she had not felt thirsty any longer. She had shakily put her covered latte down into its holder in the shopping cart. Revulsion had shivered up her throat, the inside of her cheeks, as she realized this jar of exotic “food” poised upon the highest shelf on aisle nine was the most revolting edible thing that she had ever seen.

A pair of young inebriated men, dressed gamely in CU Boulder t-shirts and day-glo flip-flops, had been egging each other on, betting on just which one of their worthy twosome was brave enough to purchase the jar, or at least to take it down from the shelf, to open it and look inside.

Ten dollars for a whiff, perhaps? Twenty for a taste?

A little joking scuffle had broken out, and Sophie (she remembered, guiltily, that she had edged her squeaky cart even closer to the spectacle — not to admonish these overgrown boys who were almost soiling themselves under muffled grunts and laughter, but simply to behold whatever would happen next) had been nearby, with a brown paper bag of almonds held in her latte-freed hand, when the tripe jar slid out from between twenty fumbling boy-fingers and shattered, tumbling down in inexorable slow motion to its end, where it exploded out in a wreath of fatty flesh, the glass shatter-void of the jar designing a sudden, shrapnel-decorated gore-blot across the entire aisle floor.

Clean up, aisle nine. Darcy, clean up…

Half a second, this girl’s horrific death, and this absurd resurgent image from the time before flooded Sophie’s mind. She blinked, and large pieces of the girl’s skull were still falling down through the greasy wind, like pumpkin rind.

“Love of God, Sophie, get us out of here!”

It was Silas’ yelling that snapped her back to reality.

She exploded, her face, her entire skull above the teeth. Silas, her head exploded…

“— Out of here!”

She could barely hear him. Hot and icy crimson washes of rage, horror, disgust were still welling up inside her.

The H4 kept careening forward. With her left hand she was tilting the steering wheel a little, it was slick with a film of sweat. The gun handle was gripped in her right fist.

I’m going to throw up. Pass out. Can’t, can’t…

The girl’s almost-headless body actually took four more staggering steps toward the Hummer before it collapsed, arms outspread, one leg up at the knee and twitching wildly. Sophie never forgot that, it haunted her forever.

The other women had slowed, the men were still running toward her. There were wails, shouts, even gales of brutish laughter as the headless body fell. Skull splinters and bone matter had splashed up the H4’s driver door, up through the open window. Hot blood and some kind of unseen fruit pulp speckled Sophie’s cheek.

That’s when, turning left so that she could see both where she was driving and the men charging toward her, Sophie managed to raise high the submachine gun, cross her right arm over her chest and out the window, and pull the trigger.

The other women had all fallen back, cowed, whipped, throttled and guarded. Seven men were looming over them, many more were running nearer to the Hummer as it wheeled around through the scrap-yard.

There were dozens of men then, all armed. Some were huge, others frail, many limping. Most were bearded, scabbed, ashen. Hispanic, black, white, bandaged beyond recognition. Some were little more than children themselves.

And where was Zachary?

Shots were being fired. They had been, all along. Silas was screaming.

One of the hulking men on the crest of the swarm had halted. He was beaming, gloating over the girl’s mutilated body. Some other were pointing at the guarded women or Sophie herself and hollering, their faces twisted in leers of rage.

“She’s getting away!”

Sophie had never killed anything larger than a roach, a spider. Aiming as best as she dared to in that second, she selected the gloating man as her virgin kill.

She intended to spray bullets left to right, to sweep the swarm of men, to avoid hitting any of the women, to kill as many of them as she could. And why? For slaughtering the girl, for imprisoning the women, for shooting at her, for terror and torture, for the dread of shame and fear, for Zachary’s mellifluous spite, for despising Silas for nothing but the color of his skin.