Mark Tufo - A Plague Upon Your Family

“FIRE!” I yelled.

Bullets screamed! Lead struck. Metal, plastic, rubber and wood shattered under the assault. The noise was deafening and the clouds of smoke were blinding. Screams of savagery and pain were muffled by the explosions. The gunman closest to us was fatally struck. He leaned forward and pitched out of the truck bed. His crudely fashioned harness had not saved him from the disgrace of being unceremoniously dragged along the side of the truck. Redneck number one watched as his friend bounced and skipped along on the ground. A smear of blood and bone trailed for miles. Talk about chumming for zombies. BT roared in pain as a bullet struck. I didn’t have the time to look how bad. I was fumbling with a new magazine. My thinking was that if he had enough life in him to scream, then he was still breathing. Travis’ shotgun ripped through the rear quarter panel of the truck, fuel was leaking from their truck like a sieve. Our front windshield exploded outwards, Tracy yelled and swerved and she smashed sideways into the truck. The impact loosened the body of the hijacker. He tumbled backwards, seemingly gaining new heights as he bounced like a super ball. His springiness landed him onto the windshield of one of the trailing trucks. Our luck wasn’t strong enough to hope he would take them out. They swerved sharply but recovered quickly.

We had all been watching the macabre accident. As I turned back around I caught the gaze of redneck number one. We locked onto each other for a heartbeat. I could feel his malice.

“Kill them all!” He screeched so loud, Tommy’s special skills weren’t needed.

A renewed vigor of bullets whined through our shell-pocked car. The cars were going so fast, the slightest imperfection in the roadway made anything less than a pure luck shot damn near impossible. But that didn’t keep Travis from pumping round after round into the shredded gas tank. I kept waiting for the Hollywood explosion but apparently they only know how to do that in Hollywood. It never happened.

Wisps of smoke emanated from our chase minivan. Brendon and Jen had joined into the fray. Sometime during our sea battle they had pulled in behind the leading Ford and were now adding their two cented lead. The two gunmen in the rear swung their attention to the new threat.

“Wrong move motherfuckers.” I took a calming breath and unloaded a full magazine into them. They danced like marionettes on springs as round after round of high-powered steel jacketed rounds burst through their bodies. Blood arced, teeth shattered. Their paid out bodies dropped faster than my spent bullet casings. My reverie was short lived as redneck number one had at some point pulled out a Desert Eagle 45 and was busy trying to place a hole in my forehead. The top of our steering wheel exploded into fragments of ragged materials. It was long moments after that thunderous concussion that I noticed there were no more shots being fired. The odds were beyond hope that the spectacular weapon had jammed or the idiot was too dim to keep it fully loaded. No Travis’s fuel tank shredding tactic had come to fruition. I watched as redneck number one slammed his fists in frustration against his dashboard. I would have loved to hear his expletives. By the way he was going I was convinced I would learn some new and interesting words and colorful phrases.

“Talbot, I’m hit.” BT said through a clamped mouth.

Fucken reality. “Shit where BT?”

He moved his hand slightly on his thigh, blood pulsed through his fingers.

“Is it bad?” He asked without looking down.

‘Fuck if I know?’ “Naw it’s only a flesh wound.”

“Yeah but it’s my flesh.” He said trying to joke.

Tracy had completely turned around and over her shoulder to look at the wound. Sure we weren’t going the earth shattering speed of 120, but at 70 we could still get into a lot of trouble real quickly. “Do you want me to stop?” She asked.

“Can’t.”

“What?” She asked incredulously.

“Do you think our friends back there are going to stop? They’re just transferring their stuff over and will be following us in a minute or two.”

Tracy looked over to BT. “He’s right.” BT answered.

Now I’m no doctor and I didn’t even play one on TV, but even if BT's wound wasn’t fatal now, I could tell he would bleed out sooner rather than later.

“Fuck that.” Tracy said quietly.

I was thrown against the passenger door violently as she did something physics wise I didn’t think was possible. She had u-turned a minivan at 70 miles per hour and we didn’t violently flip down the roadway. Somehow Tommy had had the foresight to grip the roof- mounted handgrip and hadn’t even lost a beat as he popped what appeared to be the remainder of a Kit-Kat bar into his mouth. It would have been humorous if I wasn’t pinned nearly upside down by the g-forces being applied to my body. Brendon respected applied pressures (even if Tracy didn’t) and slowed his car down to a saner but still scary 45 miles per hour before he tried to do the same maneuver. Within a quarter mile he was alongside our right side.

He nearly shattered his voice to be heard above the whistling wind as it came in through our now defunct windshield. “What’s going on Mike?”

I wanted to give him the full story about BT’s injury and the need to get him some attention and quickly. Being succinct seemed more prudent. “We’re going to finish what they started.” He nodded gravely to my words. Jen had replaced Nicole in the front seat and was busy loading her extra magazines. There was a barbarous set to her features. BT was breathing laboriously through the haze of pain as Travis and Tommy fashioned a crude tourniquet on his upper thigh.

“Dad I think it broke his leg but we got the blood stopped.”

“Holy shit BT, does it hurt?” I asked stupidly. It’s common knowledge that there is no greater pain on the planet than a broken femur, yet he hadn’t cried out since the initial shot that caused his injury.

“What do you think Talbot.” BT winced as Tommy pulled the slipknot tighter on the tourniquet.

I winced in sympathy with him. And then like an idiot, I let my thoughts wander and wonder. Is a broken leg worse pain than say, someone gripping one of your nuts in a pair of pliers and crushing it? Oh, God, I nearly vomited at my own speculation. Better not to go there at all.

Within thirty seconds of cresting a small rise in the road, our quarry was in sight. The hunters had become the hunted. Redneck number one might be an asshole but he wasn’t a dipshit. While his traveling companions were staring at awe at us as we bore down on them, he was punching and cajoling and kicking them into action. They were nearly done with the transfer of supplies and the unceremonious disposal of their brethren when we had come upon them. If they got behind the wheels of those trucks and got them moving this was going to become a very dangerous game of chicken.

I saw Tracy hesitate. She wasn’t sure if she should keep going or turn around. The odds of making another 70 mile per hour u-turn unscathed weighed heavily against us. She pinned the gas pedal down. I tasted tooth fragments as my head slammed into the dashboard. Tracy had used the minivan like a guided missile as she smashed the living fuck out of the nearest redneck that had not been thoroughly convinced to get his ass moving. His ass was moving now, at least what was left of it. His broken body hurtled into the air like he carried his own jetpack. I prayed that I would not be able to hear the sound his body made when it struck back to earth. What was not already broken would shatter like dry sticks under a heavy moose’s hoof. I barely had time to recover as Tracy peeled the car off to the left. I’d like to say she narrowly missed the parked truck but that would be an outright lie. The shower of sparks and the squeal of metal on metal would have made me a liar. The caustic smell of burning paint assaulted my nostrils. Sparks showered my lap looking for fuel to grow into a larger version of itself. A loud tell-tale report let me know that someone’s tire had burst. I could only hope it wasn’t ours. I was thinking it was going to be a bitch to get triple A out here on such short notice.