Rough Men (17 page)

“Look over there,” said Jason, pointing to the shoulder of the road. If there had been footprints, they were erased by the wind, but a distinct blood trail, likely only minutes old, was headed north. “Chris isn’t in the van,” said Jason, “and neither was his backpack. From what I remember, and counted, there’s at least one of these fuckers missing as well, maybe two of them. I smell gas. Let’s go.”

Jason began moving down the highway, Isaac slung over his shoulder, the small AK in his free hand. Will was the rear guard, wondering to himself if anything could kill or even scare Jason.

The blood trail went up the next exit ramp, and they followed it through the wind, ice, rain, and snow, the storm becoming as much an adversary as the room full of armed and angry gangbangers had been. If Jason was having trouble with Isaac, he wasn’t showing it, or at least wasn’t mentioning it.

The blood trail was visible off the ramp and headed down on a street called Fruitridge. Just off the exit ramp, Will could see a gas station, its sign and pumps destroyed by the storm, as it became visible through the maelstrom.

Jason led them to the gas station, a battered Sunoco that had not only lost its pumps and sign, but also its windows and electricity. Setting Isaac down next to the door, Jason fiddled with the lock through the shattered glass and then opened it. Will grabbed his brother’s shoulders, attempted to pick him up, and
settled on dragging him into the gas station. He had no idea how Jason had carried him down the highway and up the ramp.

Stopping once they were inside the station, he found Jason across the room, looking around. “Over there,” he said, pointing to a wooden door that looked like it still had some integrity left.

Jason opened the door to the windowless manager’s office, and Will dragged Isaac inside, leaning him against a desk. Jason took a coat hanging off the back of the door and wrapped it around Isaac.

“Do you think he’ll be OK in here?” Will asked. “He’s totally out of it.”

“Well,” said Jason, “if the pumps were going to blow, they’d already be tits up. Looks like somebody had the good sense to hit the cutoff on the gas before they got the hell out of here. Hey, small miracles.”

“I mean, just leaving him, though. Will he be all right?”

“I don’t know, and neither do you. I do know that neither of us have a cell phone and that, even if we did, there would be no fucking reception out here in this storm.” Jason picked up a wired phone receiver from the desk, held it to his ear for a second, and replaced it. “Landlines are down too, so either we sit here and hold your brother’s hand while we wait for morning or we go after this asshole. To be entirely honest, I’m going either way. Those fucks were going to kill me, and that’s not something that sits easy.”

“All right, I’m in too. I’m going to get some water and food to put by him, in case he wakes up. Will you find something in here to write on and leave him a note?”

“You want me to put on some lipstick and kiss the note too?”

“No, I think the note and supplies will be enough.” Will grinned despite himself. “I’ll be right back, and I’m serious about the note.”

Will walked into the store part of the gas station, grabbed two bottles of water from a cooler with blown-out glass doors,
then also grabbed a can of Pringles and a couple packs of beef jerky.

When he came back into the office, he found Isaac lying on the floor with a note on his chest that said,
Back soon, stay here
. Will set the food and water next to his brother, then stood watching as Jason half-racked the bolt on the AR.

“They’re both loaded,” Jason said, “but we don’t have any spare magazines, so if you have to shoot at someone, make sure it’s worth doing. You see these?” He pointed fore and aft on the small carbine. “If that cute little dot sight gets fucked up, hit the buttons on the sides of those, and you’ll be back in the game, assuming you’re worth a shit with iron sights.”

“I’m not.”

“Well,” said Jason, “better than nothing. Are you ready?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Then let’s hope that fucking asshole is still bleeding.”

Will gave his brother one last look as they left the office. The expression on his face stayed with him as they left the relative comfort of the gas station and returned to the storm. Isaac looked as though he were having a lovely dream.

The savagery of the weather was on them before they were even out of the gas station and grew worse the farther they drew away from it. Jason ran, and Will kept up as best he was able, the blood trail coming and going in the same spurts in which it had left its injured former owner. Will found himself following Jason and ignoring the rapidly disappearing trail, stealing glances to the side of the road to see if perhaps whoever had left it had ventured from the streets to find refuge, whether at their intended destination or just one of convenience.

Some of the buildings, Will was able to see from their position in the road, had been shattered by the storm and others left
alone. Giant warehouses were torn asunder, while nearby farmhouses remained undisturbed. This was an angry storm, a wind that was attacking at random, and it showed no signs of letting up.

The clothing Will wore was both soaked and frozen, he was cold to the bone, but the only thoughts in his head were of his dead son, the trail of blood, and one foot passing before the other, over and over again. The gloves Jason had handed him just a few impossible hours before were the only thing allowing him to hold onto the carbine, which, for all he knew, wouldn’t function in this sort of weather at all.

Will thought of mountain climbers desperate to reach the summit. When asked why, they’d simply say, “Because it’s there.” He’d always thought that answer was a cheat. Sure the mountain was there, but so was the way around it. Now it occurred to him that walking in the storm to find the man who had killed his son—and maybe also the reason for the death in the first place—was the same as saying, “Because it’s there.” If asked, Will would have said that he was walking on because he loved Alex, had even loved the stupid things that he had always found himself doing. He loved his son for giving him a reason to live, even as an angry and resentful teen convinced that he was scraping the shit from another man’s child.

Alex had become so much more than that, though, just as Will’s mother had said that the boy would. The family celebrated Alex’s triumphs, and his miscues, as unfortunate as they were, had mostly come after Will’s parents had passed. Alex had been a gift given by a woman who had no idea of the wonder of the life she was giving away, a life no less a wonder because its owner had proven, over and over, unable to escape the curse of his bloodline, no matter which tainted father might have been his.

Jason spoke, and the words shook Will from his fugue.

“We need to move more slowly, stay off the road,” Jason said, pointing down a path that could have been a six-lane freeway for
all Will knew. But still the blood trail was visible in the glow of the few surviving streetlights and occasional bursts of lightning. “They went this way. Let’s go see where.” Jason launched himself into the snow beside the road, and Will followed him, images of Alex smiling and a smug Chris spitting at Jason alternately rotating in his head.

They were walking along a driveway now, keeping to the tall pines littering both sides of it. The pines provided dual protection: from prying eyes and from some of the wind and snow. Even in his Thinsulate-lined boots, Will’s feet had gone from cold to fire to now just two wooden blocks that were attached somewhere below his knees.

Even Jason was slowing. Will hoped it was the weather wearing him down, and not some additional injury that had been hidden in his clothing. If it was an injury, he knew Jason was a lot more likely to just keel over dead than complain about it. He also knew that he was in no shape to do what remained on his own.

Every few hundred feet of walking in the pines, Jason would loop out so that he could see the road, making sure that they hadn’t passed the owner of the blood trail and that they hadn’t been doubled back on. After doing this for the fourth time, Jason returned, walking toward Will instead of just continuing forward.

“Looks like they went into a building,” he said. “And unless I’m going blind, there’s nobody posted by the door.” Jason managed a grin, his mouth ringed in ice-crusted facial hair, the cut over his eye caked with snow and fused shut. “The place has taken a beating, but not like some of the shit we’ve seen. The blood trail ends before it gets to it, or at least it looks that way. We’ll see when we get closer.”

“Are you ready to do this?” Will asked, not sure if he was ready himself. The snow and the storm had saved them, but it
could still be the death of them about as easily as a warehouse full of gangbangers with tattooed faces could be.

“I’m ready,” said Jason. “It’s only a little further, and then it ends either way. I sure would prefer the winning side, though.”

“Hey, at least we should be able to make it inside. Do you think they have heat? Maybe we can dry our boots off before we try and kill each other.”

“I think we’re lucky just to still be kicking. They got sloppy, should have killed us off at the house, and me being able to take a gun off one of those scary-ass motherfuckers just goes to show that a little more time spent shooting rather than getting their faces all done up might not have been a bad plan.”

“Hey, just in case we don’t make it out, thanks for your help.”

Jason shrugged. “Shit, this is the first worthwhile thing I’ve done in a long time, even if we have had to torture and kill some people. I feel alive, and my head is clear for once. I’m not going to waste your time with some dumb speech, but this almost makes up for everything else.”

“Did you do it?” Once he’d said it, Will wondered where the fuck it had come from.
Now
he was bringing up the girl in the B and E twenty years ago?

But Jason just nodded thoughtfully at him, and when he answered, it was like they were just finishing an interrupted conversation. Like it’d never left his mind. Which it probably hadn’t, Will thought.

“I don’t know,” Jason said. “Isn’t that just the most fucked-up thing? If you would have asked me the day after the break-in, I’d have said no. But then, when I got to prison, everybody thought I’d pulled a fast one. My reputation was in place, waiting on me to get there. I never denied it, but it didn’t happen the way everybody thinks it did. That’s why I was never charged with it, I guess. Bottom line, I didn’t put a gun to her head, but I probably had scared the shit out of her, and she felt like she had to do it. Not like it matters, though. No one would ever believe me, and
it’s fucked up my life enough that, even if they did, there’s no fixing what’s already happened.”

Will wasn’t sure what to say to Jason about any of that, and Jason grunted and began moving again before he could come up with anything. Will kept his pace, following his mysterious and damaged friend farther into the trees.

They walked next to each other through the pines, the wind whistling and whipping the branches, distorting sounds so that every cracking branch sounded like a gunshot and everything else eerie and unnatural. The two men were moving at a faster pace than they’d managed since they had left Isaac at the gas station, even through deeper, crusted snow. When they made the edge of the driveway, the warehouse visible to both of them, a few scattered cars in its lot, Will felt almost elated.