Kent Kelly - Gray Rain Exodus

For everything.

There was no justice, only fury. Vengeance both for horrors seen and those imagined. She did not need a good reason. The fury was burning out of her, the thrilling, electric spirit of Patrice was at last in resurrection, clawing its way carnally and free, from the fire, screaming hatred of the men, a horrible broken sound that carried even over the cracking of guns and the auto-fire of the SMG.

Left to right? No. The bucking kick of the barely-braced gun caused Sophie to fire an erupting stream of bullets in an arcing vertical stream. The first shots chewed ashy craters out of the pavement, the next went between the grinning (then grimacing) man’s legs and ricocheting out into the crowd of men.

Two men’s bodies surged up and then down, frantic puppets strung up on the air on gouts of blood. Pieces of the hand and arm of a third man sprayed back into the fuel bay. The next bullets caught the grimacing man himself up in the thigh and then belly, stitching up under the ribcage, and swelled there.

The last bullets flew through the space where his head had been. His shattered body blew back. The men behind him fell to earth, cowering and screaming. Other men were diving to the ground, leaping back into the fuel bays, limp-leaping behind stacked tires or dented barrels.

Sophie’s gun fired for almost two seconds. The thrumming barrel clanged as it hit the top of the H4’s window frame, still firing until it bucked and juddered out of her hand. She reflexively flipped her sweating hand around to catch it — You fool — and while she could not grasp it, she slapped its butt-stock with her fingertips. It flew farther back into the H4, bounced off the center console and back into Silas’ shoulder.

He cried out in surprise.

The H4 had completed its careening turn, was almost aimed back at the opening between the lines of trucks where they had first driven in. Sophie had less than a hundred feet to correct her course at thirty miles an hour.

Some of the men behind were back up and firing then, but not at her. No. Sophie gaped at the flaring light of crimson imagery in her side mirror. Two of the naked women had somehow secured a dead man’s bloody rifle, and both had lain hands on it. One was firing it at a man’s face, the other woman was getting stabbed in the belly.

Off to the right, dozens more men were storming out of the gusty fog, where the truck stop ruin was turning into a labyrinth of doorways. They were wearing winter parkas, cut ponchos, rags, duct tape, garbage bags.

Surely there were other women trapped inside. Were any of these men innocent? Yes, almost certainly. Was there anyone there who could hope to overthrow the others’ tyranny? Were there children?

Any, I cannot save you, Sophie thought. She tried to melt the infernal vision of the girl’s staggering, headless body out of her mind. She never would. Can’t save any of you, any, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Lacie, my Lacie —

She pressed the brake, somehow steered the H4 into the gap between the trucks, swung a hard right. Silas grunted as he hit one of the windows.

Blindness, a glare of sparkling light. More men, a flatbed trailer off to the left. Shotguns and capped-off emergency flares were popping off, gold and scarlet. Holes blew open in the back of the H4, shattering supplies.

Silas was sitting up, with blood and opened bandages spilled down into his lap. He had lowered the left back window all the way and he was cracking off shots with the fully-loaded assault rifle.

Sophie’s ears rang as the deafening shots erupted behind her head.

Screams blew in from the flatbed trailer. Sophie caught frantic glimpses of the carnage Silas was causing, one man going down without a face, another without a throat, more men whose legs had all been flensed into scarlet clouds and strips of shattered bone.

Godless, she thought without any coherence, I thought people were made of meat, just flesh and bone but they explode, Patrice. They explode, like paint balloons.

There was giggling, guttural sobbing under the gunfire. Sophie realized that until then, she had been screaming.

That horrible weeping, choking, suppressed vomit struggling to find its time. Gagging. Is that me?

Still twenty miles an hour, much too fast for blind and spiral tunnels. She raced between the lines of semis, almost colliding with a crumpled and black delivery truck. No!

She yanked the wheel to the right, she had to. She slammed on the brakes to hold traction, to avoid colliding with another parked bus around the bend, a wreck whose windows were jagged over by bolted plates.

The H4 almost tilted up on two wheels. Silas lost hold of the rifle, it fell and clattered out the window. Gone. “Nine!” He was crying out, jubilant, grieving. “Nine of the dead heart bastards, I got nine …”

By the time Sophie managed to swerve out to the cratered down-ramp and back onto I-25, she was going close to forty through the black. She swerved around lumpy metal silhouettes, a line of demolished cars and then a pile of sandbags.

Why isn’t Silas yelling any longer?

She swerved again to the left around a pile of rubble. Silas’ body flopped, hit hard against the door and then back down.

He’s unconscious. Sophie, you killed him.

She looked into the rearview, but it had tilted its face askew. She dared a glance back over her shoulder and Silas was sprawled out in the back, bleeding freely not from a gunshot but from many places, his ruined skin, his own decay. The assault rifle was gone, but the SMG dangled near his hand, his trigger finger tangled in the loop of its nylon sling-strap.

To the end, he tried to save me.

His mouth moved, soundlessly. Pale tongue, red cheeks. His eyes rolled white.

That was all she had time to see.

She heard warped and muffled shouts over the wind, revving engines, the echoes of banging metal in the distance.

Two hundred yards behind. We’re out of Pearson’s Corner. Gehinnom. Why can I still hear them?

“Because they’re coming after you,” she whispered to herself in answer.

She hit a pothole, a tilt in the pavement and the H4 lurched and came back down hard. Silas bounced and groaned. Can barely even see. She did not dare go any faster.

Reaching behind her seat during a clearer stretch of road, swerving out of the breakdown lane and back across the gridline, Sophie yanked the SMG away from Silas’ hand, checked the clip. She was steering with her knees.

The clip was empty.

She glanced down —

An overturned wreck with melted tires loomed directly up in front of the H4. She hit the brakes, still ran over one outstretched arm of a very old and withered body, then a broken crate, some foil trash.

No choice. She needed to stop to do this.

“Stay with me, Silas,” she breathed as she slowed the H4 to a halt. Foot on the brake, she popped out the spent clip of the SMG and let it drop. It clattered off the console. She reached over into the open glove compartment, pulled the last SMG clip out and grimly clicked it home.

Those aren’t trucks. The sound of engines carried over the wind was getting louder, up behind her on the down-ramp. Cars, or jeeps? A motorcycle?

“Dare you to come after me,” she whispered. No one had ever warned her that killing was a drug, a pit, a key. It felt incredible, rapture peeling outward, the black silhouette of ecstasy.

No one but Patrice.

I loved it. And horror.

She clicked the gun’s safety on, stuffed the entire weapon into her torn suit so that it rested across her shaking thighs. Come after me. The adrenaline was still high, electric fire turning into a numb and strangled gel inside her veins. But if she was going to die, never to see her daughter, to love and hold her Lacie, she was going to die fighting. Come on.