The Rabid: Fall (6 page)

The glass crunches under my feet as I approach, each step a bitter reminder of my carelessness. I can feel the weight of the pistol in my jeans, the cool metal against my skin.

“Wait a minute.” Martha’s eyes widen, as if she’s just remembered something important. “Lift your shirt!”

I’m close enough to make the grab, and her finger is far enough away from the trigger that I just might succeed.

I go for it.

I snatch the barrel and force the shotgun up.

Martha gets hold of the trigger and it barks and bucks, blowing a hole in the ceiling,causing debris to rain down on both our heads. I’ve got youth and speed, but she’s got size. Martha is latched onto the shotgun like a Doberman on a butcher’s bone. “Lying, no good…you’re just a lying no good…a liar, that’s what you are!” She tries to kick me in the balls, but can’t get the height; her foot deflects off the inside of my thigh instead.

It’s not long before Katia and Sonny are beside me. Sonny helps wrestle the shotgun from her and Katia lets loose with a sweep kick that plants
ol’ Martha
on her ass.

I draw my pistol and level it off at Martha’s head.

“Do it! Go on, you little snake in the grass! I shoulda finished you when I had the chance!”

“You remember when I told you we didn’t come here with ill intent?”

She doesn’t say anything. She just lays there beneath Katia’s boot, staring up at me defiantly.

“I meant what I said.” I lower the pistol. “Let her up. Give her back the shotgun.”

Katia looks at me like I’m crazy as she removes her foot from Martha’s chest.

Sonny drops the shotgun into her arms and then jumps back behind me.

“That’s a hell of a stunt you pulled.” Martha struggles to her feet.

“Call it a trust exercise.” I’m watching her closely; watching the barrel of the gun and the placement of her trigger finger. “You don’t shoot me and I don’t shoot you.”

She nods slowly, the fat around her jawline pooling with each dramatic tip of her chin. “Well,” she sets the shotgun against the ticket desk, “I dare say it worked.” Her belly shakes with laughter. She extends a chubby, ring draped hand. “Martha Turkins, pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“I’m Timmy. This is Katia and Sonny.”

Martha leans back against the ticket desk, next to her shotgun, arms folded across her stomach. “Lemme give y’all the nickel tour.”

9

It’s more like a penny tour. We make it to the second floor before I start to become dizzy and nauseous; the pain has become too much to ignore.

“Don’t be a baby.” Martha has cut my shirt away and is going after the pellets in my skin with a pair of tweezers from her
medical bag
.

“Oh, you ain’t seen nothing.” Katia sits beside me, wearing my hat and stroking my hair.

I wince as the tweezers yank another pellet free.

Sonny is outside walking the lot, making sure all the commotion didn’t attract the Rabid from the bottom of the mountain.

“My husband was like that,” Martha wipes away a fresh stream of blood with a balled up piece of gauze, “talked tough, walked tough, but show him a little blood and he’d turn to putty.” She shakes her head. “I loved that big-eared bastard. I miss him.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Katia says.

“Huh?” Martha looks up at her. “Oh, no, we divorced fifteen years ago. Came home one day and found him with his dick in the next-door neighbor. I just about killed the sumbitch. I split his lip and blackened his eye up good before he finally escaped through the backdoor. He came back the next day with the sheriff so he could pack his stuff. Guess he was afraid I was gonna lay another whoopin’ on his ass. I would have too, believe me, I would have.” She yanks another pellet from my shoulder.

The lobby appears to be Martha’s main living quarters. There’s a mattress, buckets of water, food stores, and enough guns and ammunition to hold off an army.

“How long have you been up here?” I ask.

“Since the beginning.” She rips the last pellet out and begins patching me up with a gauze pad and some tape. “There were four of us; me and three of my neighbors. We fought like hell to get up here. The road was clogged with them damn things. They were on every side of us the entire way up. Our truck stalled out on one of the bends and ended up rolling off into the woods. After that, everyone started dropping; neighbors went one-by-one. I survived, took the weapons, and hoofed it. I basically shot my way up here.”

“What about food and water?” I lay my head back so she can begin picking the glass out of my face.

“There was a good bit up here from the café; lots of non-perishables. I had some stuff from the truck too. As far as water goes, it comes out of the mountain about a mile from here, fresh and clear.” 

Katia grips my hand as I squirm beneath the tweezers. “You’ve done well for yourself.”

“Settle down,” Martha wags a finger at me, “this next piece is near your eye.” She ensures my compliance before chasing the shrapnel. “What about y’all?”

“It’s a long story,” Katia says.

“Always is. Lemme make it simpler. Where y’all headed?”

“We’re looking for someone. But to be honest, we’re sort of stumbling around in the dark right now.”

“And you just so happened to stumble into my neighborhood?”

“I suppose we did.”

“What happened to this someone? They take off on you?”

I expect Katia to change the subject. There’s a tremble in her voice, but she soldiers forward. “We don’t know. They may have run off or they may have been taken or they may…well, we’re hoping for the best.”

“Taken? By who?”

“It’s a—”

“Long story. Gotcha. Not looking to pry, just trying to figure out what made y’all think coming up here was a good idea. Seems to me the only thing it’s gotten ya is hurt.”

“It was his idea.” Katia raises my hand, volunteering me for the teacher.

“I thought maybe…ow!”

“That was the last one.” Martha holds the sliver of glass in front of me. Damn thing felt a hell of a lot bigger than it looks.

“Like she said, we’ve been flying blind, with no landing zone in sight. I remembered this place from when I was a kid. I thought maybe there’d be some form of communication up here…I don’t know, some sort of working infrastructure; sounds stupid saying it now.”

“Sounds downright foolish.” Martha stands and begins repacking her medical bag. “No internet or telephone up here. I can’t imagine you’re going to find that anywhere, at least not until someone a hell of a lot smarter and more capable than you or I comes in and starts rebuilding. That kinda stuff requires electricity, first and foremost. To my knowledge, most folks don’t have that anymore, including yours truly, though I do have a ton of batteries.We’re back in the stone-age, years of evolution, down the drain. Everything is gonna have to be reinvented. You are young. Stay alive. Give it a few decades. You can help restart this engine, be the next George Washington and…what’s the name of a famous broad?” She turns and squints at Katia.

Katia seems mildly insulted.

“Betsy Ross,” I volunteer.

“Who was she?” Martha asks.

“Sewed the first American flag.”

Martha nods. “That’ll do.”

“I don’t sew.” Katia sprouts thorns.

Martha is unfazed. “You can learn.” She drops the medical bag behind the ticket counter. “I have been hearing a lot of chatter over the CB lately.”

I forget my arm is wounded and shove myself up into a sitting position. “A CB radio?” My words are pain-soaked grunts.

“Why, yes.” She seems amused by my sudden burst of excitement.

“What have you heard?” Katia sounds excited as well.

Martha shakes her head. “I don’t remember it all off hand, but I have been jotting it down in a journal. You’re welcome to come up and have a look.” She motions towards the stairwell.

I’m not excited by the idea of hoofing it up multiple flights of steep metal, especially with the way my face and shoulder are feeling right now. However, I’d run this mountain barefoot to see what Martha’s got written in that journal.

***

We hike up flight after flight of red, metal stairs, gripping yellow hand rails the entire way. We have a hell of a view; the outside wall is a solid sheet of Plexiglas. In the distance, we can see the Rabid, appearing like ants, aimlessly wandering the expanse of Bathhouse Row. By the time we reach the top, I’m soaked through and my face is burning from the salt in my sweat.

“Sorry ‘bout the hike, but the higher up you are, the better signal you can get.”

The room is shaped like a circle. It’s got metal walls and a wooden floor. Carved into the walls are large rectangle windows, spaced out every two feet. Beneath each window are large display cases. Me and Katia start in separate directions around the room, while Martha stands in the center of it, watching us. We run our hands across the tops of the cases, briefly taking in the contents of each one, before moving onto the next. There’s nothing too interesting; mostly just the mob history of Bathhouse Row and some stuff about Clinton (he was the governor once, something I didn’t know).

“I hated that sonofabitch.”

“Come again?”

“Clinton,” she nods to the display case I’m fondling, “my husband loved him; figures, they were both cheating bastards.”

“Ah, gotcha. I was too young to really care, to be honest.” I turn back to a black-and-white mural of Bathhouse Row. It’s an aerial shot, with paragraphs of script delving into the history of illegal gambling and the two criminal families that fought for control of the town.

“I know everything in those cases by heart; every word, every punctuation mark; had to do something to keep my mind from flipping. I would walk the stairs and rooms, pretending I was some sort of tourist guide, experimenting with the lilts and tilts of my voice, waving my hands all around.”

“I suppose you gotta occupy yourself somehow.”

There’s a little wooden desk on the far side of the room with a brown, wooden chair sitting off center in front of it. The CB sits atop the desk, surrounded by a few sheets of white copy paper, an empty glass containing (what looks to be) congealed milk, and a brown journal with a red ribbon sticking out from between the pages.

I walk up to the desk and run my hand across the top of the radio box, brushing away a thin film of dust. The mic is plugged in below a glowing frequency panel. The face is covered with silver dials. On the right-hand side is a channel knob. The display above the knob reads
19
.

“What sort of distance do you get on this?” I ask.

“It’ll easily do fifty miles. I’ve got a hundred before, but that came with a fair bit of static.”

“That’s impressive. My dad’s CB was lucky to get twenty on a clear day.”

Katia appears beside the desk. “Can we go ahead and get a look at that journal, please?”

Martha rolls her eyes and drops the journal in front of her.

Katia flicks the cover open with the back of her hand and begins thumbing through the pages.

“You’re not gonna be able to understand all that,” Martha says, leaning across the desk on the heels of her hands.

“I can read.” Katia is curt with her dismissal.

“No, sweetheart, I mean it; you can’t make heads or tails of that.” Martha smiles and waits patiently for Katia to admit defeat.

Katia, in all of her hardheaded glory, flips through half the journal before barking, “Fine! What’s the thing say?”

Martha’s smile grows wider as she picks up the journal, unmoved by Katia’s display of frustration. “You’ve still got some things to learn if you plan on surviving out here long term.” Martha moves around behind me and pulls the chair away from the desk, the legs scraping the floor as she goes.

“I don’t need lessons from you, lady. I’ve been through it, I’m still here.”

“Luck will only get you so far.” Martha plants herself in the chair. “You gotta learn to trust people. Admit when you don’t know something and let the ones that are stronger than you in those areas fill in the gaps.”

“I don’t need the pep-talk, Mom. I know how to trust people.”

“Timmy?” Martha raises her eyes to me.

“Oh, hell no, leave me out of this. I gotta be on the road with this girl.”

“You were saying?” Katia crosses her arms.

“You got that boy wrapped around your finger something tight, gotta respect that. Get over here, I’ll show you what’s what.”

Katia swells with the slightest hint of pride as she walks over and kneels down beside Martha. Yeah, she has me wrapped around her finger. I’d go to Hell and back for her. She’s the last bit of thread connecting me to this tapestry of madness, if it breaks…hell, I don’t want to think about what happens if it breaks.

Martha has the book folded open in her lap. “You see these numbers? This part is easy enough; it’s just dates and times. Then you’ve got this number here. When I talked to these folks, I asked each of them how many were in their group.”

“Twenty? This person had twenty people?” Katia asks in disbelief.

“Yep, that’s what he said. Was hauling them in the back of a moving truck.”

“D.C.?”

“That’s where all of them said they were headed. Washington. And that’s just the ones that had radios. I’ve only got a page worth of logs here. According to one of the gals I talked to, there are rivers of folks floating to D.C.”

Martha has my full attention. “Did she say why?”

“Oh, I know why.” Martha eases up out of the chair and holds onto the back of it until she’s sure about her footing.

Katia huddles up next to me and puts her arm around my waist. We’re both jittering with nervous excitement.

“Every night, a few hours past sundown, a call comes over this channel. It’s the same voice, same man, every night. He talks about a colony, a
beacon on a hill
, his words, not mine. They claim there’s food, water, beds; room enough for everyone. Claim it’s the beginning of the new world.”

Katia wraps her hands around my bicep and starts pulling at my arm excitedly. “I bet that’s where Ruiz is! And if he’s not there, I bet one of the people in charge knows where he is!”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…yeah, maybe. I’m not trying to crush any dreams. He may very well be there. If he’s there, it’s probably not by his own accord; I can’t see Ruiz living under government protection. So what do we do?”

“We go in and get him!”

“Really? The three of us against how many? We’re still shooting in the dark here. For all we know, your brother got away and he’s out there on the road, just like us.”

“At least we go down fighting!”

“But what if we don’t have to go down at all? Listen, these guys don’t know what we look like. There’s a way to play this where we all come out alive. I’m not saying we don’t go in. We go in. We get the lay of things. And we hit the root system before the flowers even know we’re there.” My words seem to work like a bucket of water, dampening Katia’s fiery wrath.

Martha laughs and thrusts a thumb at me. “I like this kid.”

Katia’s face flushes and a smile begins to take form at the corners of her mouth as she digs at the floor with one of her combat boots like a schoolgirl with a crush. “Yeah, I like him a little too.”

“Aw, shucks, you guys,” I feign embarrassment and play the clown, hugging myself and twisting away from Katia’s attempted embrace. It gets a laugh and, for a brief moment, our task is forgotten; mission accomplished. “When does that broadcast come on next?”