The Gates of Byzantium

CHAPTER 2 BLAINE

“This is some kind of bullshit right here,” Deeks said.

Blaine laughed and tried to blink away the sweat dripping into his eyes. It was hot, but hot meant day, and day was good. “You always say that.”

“This time I’m right.”

“You always say that, too.” Blaine finished cranking the jack when he had the Jeep high enough to pull out the blown tire. “Grab the spare, old man.”

Deeks grunted and walked back to the Jeep, slinging the Mossberg shotgun over his shoulder. Blaine carried a similar Mossberg model, except his didn’t have the elaborate camouflage pattern of Deeks’s.

Blaine pulled off the flat tire, careful to avoid the big metal chunk sticking out like a sword, sharp enough to cleave his flesh from his bone without effort. It looked like something from a car, probably shredded in some kind of high-speed accident. The tire blew almost immediately after running it over, and it was a miracle they didn’t careen off the road and into the ditch the way the steering wheel was fighting him.

It was stupid, and all his fault. He was going too fast. Fifty miles per hour on a road filled with debris, cars, and God knew what else was a stupid way to travel. He should have known better, but the road down here, far from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, opened up, and there were so few cars that he had let it lull him into a sense of security.

He heard footsteps and looked over at Sandra, walking back toward them along the flat, empty road. She played with her blonde hair, cut short to combat the smothering Texas heat.

She smiled at him, the sun glinting off deep green eyes. “Look at you staring. Like you’ve never seen a pair of tits before.”

“You know I can’t help it.”

“Of course not. That’s the point. Or points.” She put her hands on her hips and posed for him. She wore jeans, cowboy boots, and a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt that was probably a size too small. “Let’s go, let’s go,” Sandra said, clapping her hands for effect. “Vamos, amigos!”

Blaine tossed her a crooked grin. Sandra was probably the whitest person he knew, but she liked to throw in some Español every now and then for his benefit. Not that she knew more than a few words.

“We’d be done by now if this asshole would hurry up,” Blaine said.

Deeks grunted and rolled the spare tire over, his face glistening with sweat. He stood back to catch his breath. Deeks was only about fifty years old, but those were hard, city years. His eyes drooped, and Blaine sometimes wondered how much longer the old man would last out here.

“Where are we?” Sandra asked, looking around them.

“About ten miles out of Lancing,” Blaine said.

“What’s in Lancing?”

“Hell if I know. We’ll grab whatever supplies we can, then keep on trucking down south.”

“‘Keep on trucking?’”

“What, you don’t think a Mexican knows what ‘keep on trucking’ means?”

“Half-Mexican,” she corrected him.

He grinned. That was technically true, but he had the dark complexion, and one look at him and all anyone ever saw was “Mexican.” He never corrected them, because it didn’t matter. Blaine was always good about taking what God gave him and running with it. Like the end of the world. While people were getting turned and eaten, Blaine was surviving. He was good at that, too.

“Correctamundo,” Blaine said.

“That’s definitely not proper Spanish.”

“Close enough.”

Blaine was halfway to putting the lug nuts back into place over the spare tire when he felt the road underneath him tremble slightly. It came from behind them, back up the highway. Approaching vehicles.

Blaine quickly spun the fifth lug nut into place and tossed the crank into the back of the Jeep, then unwound the jack. When all four of the Jeep’s tires were touching the asphalt road again, Blaine stood up and unslung the Mossberg.

Deeks glanced over. “What is it?”

“Cars coming down the road,” Blaine said.

“I don’t hear anything.”

“You can’t feel them?”

“No.”

“Damn, you’re old.”

Deeks grunted back.

“I hear them,” Sandra said.

She walked over to stand beside Blaine. She was a foot shorter than him, even in boots that gave her an extra three or four inches. But then, most people were short next to Blaine. Sandra wore a gun holster with a.32 Smith and Wesson in it. She put her hand on the handle of the revolver now, her body stiffening noticeably, the way it always did when she was scared.

“It’s okay,” he said. “We’ll be fine.”

She looked over at him and tried to smile, but it came out badly.

“It’ll be fine,” he said again.

“What’s happening?” Deeks said, nervously unslinging his Mossberg.

Three vehicles, little more than black dots, materialized out of thin air down the flat road behind them.

Blaine quickly went over his options.

They could take off now in the fixed Jeep, try to outrun them. But if they decided to pursue, then what? Sooner or later, they would have to stop and seek shelter for the night. That was the problem. Sooner or later, they always had to stop for the night…

Blaine glanced at his watch: 4:16 p.m.

They were cutting it too close. It was June, and summer in Texas meant 8:15 p.m. sunsets. That was four hours away. Usually that was more than enough time to look for shelter, but the flat tire had thrown his schedule out of whack.

“Who are they?” Sandra asked.

“I don’t know,” Blaine said.

“What do we do?” Deeks asked anxiously.

“Jeep’s fixed,” Sandra said. “Maybe we should go before they reach us?”

Blaine shook his head. “They’ve already seen us. They’d just follow.”

“So just stand here and say hi?”

“Maybe they’re friendlies,” Deeks said.

Like the last three groups we ran into? Blaine thought, but said instead, “Maybe. But grab the rifles anyway, just to be safe.”

Deeks came back with two AR-15 assault rifles. He tossed one rifle and a spare magazine across the Jeep to Blaine. Blaine stuffed the extra mag into one of his cargo pants pockets.

“Do you really think we’re going to need those?” Sandra asked.

“Just to be safe,” Blaine said.

“Never hurts to show them we have firepower, darling,” Deeks said.

“I know, but still,” Sandra said. “It might give them the wrong impression.”

“Deeks is right,” Blaine said. “Show of force.”

Blaine watched the vehicles get larger as they drew closer. The road was a four-lane highway, flat and low to the ground. A thick wall of trees separated the north and southbound lanes, and there was green wherever you looked, with woods to both the east and the west. It was a long, flat corridor, with the road extending north-south for miles.

Out of the blue, Blaine caught a whiff of Sandra’s perfume settling in the air next to him. Chanel something that had been sitting around in an expensive mall in Kilgore. They had found a lot of useful stuff there, which was why both Sandra and Deeks had hated to leave.

Blaine could make out a Jeep moving up the road. It looked similar to the one they were driving, moving at the front of what looked like a mini caravan. A GMC SUV and a Ford F-150 truck trailed the Jeep. Blaine would know those vehicles anywhere. Gas guzzlers. He hoped the people driving them at least had hand cranks for siphoning gas, because they probably had to do a lot of gassing up on a regular basis to keep those two monsters on the road.

But he hadn’t seen anything yet. Coming up behind the first three vehicles was the towering cab of a big rig, pulling a large trailer behind it.

Jesus, where do they find the diesel to run that monster?

He felt Sandra tightening up next to him. He reached over and squeezed her hand. She smiled back, putting on a brave face he easily saw through. Sandra didn’t scare easy, but she was scared now.

“It’ll be okay,” Blaine said. “Just follow my lead.”

“Okay.”

“Deeks,” Blaine called.

The older man glanced back at him. “Yeah?”

“Get back here.”

Deeks had absent-mindedly wandered twenty yards up the road, and he quickly jogged back to the Jeep. By the time he reached them, he was huffing and puffing, his cheeks flushed red, sweat caking his forehead.

“Go to the front of the Jeep,” Blaine said.

Deeks nodded and hurried over to stand behind the hood of the Jeep.

“Shouldn’t we get back there, too?” Sandra said.

“You should. I’ll stay here. I don’t want to give them the impression we’re afraid of them.”

“But we are.”

“They don’t have to know that, babe.”

Blaine listened to the sound of Sandra’s cowboy boots as she hurried back down the length of the Jeep. Blaine remained standing where he was, near the rear tire. He unslung the Mossberg and put it on top of the Jeep, making sure the handle was turned toward him for an easy grab. Shoot-outs weren’t something Blaine knew a lot about, but he wasn’t a total idiot.

He spent the next few seconds checking the AR-15’s magazine. If shit hit the fan, he would unload with the rifle, then switch over to the Mossberg as a last resort. He wasn’t exactly the best shot in the world, but the simple red dot sight on top of the rifle helped with accuracy. Mostly. If all else failed, he would make up in quantity what he lacked in quality.

The three vehicles were fifty yards away now, and Blaine could just make out two men in the front seat of the Jeep. His initial instincts about the Jeep had been correct — it was an older, more beat-up model of theirs. Blaine looked past the Jeep at the GMC. The front windshield was tinted, and so was the F-150’s. He was sure there was more than one person in both trucks. Counting the two in the Jeep, that made at least six people.

At least.

The vehicles finally came to a stop forty yards up the road. First the Jeep, then the two trucks. The big rig was next, stopping behind the other three vehicles, its brakes squealing loudly, the highway groaning underneath its efforts. They turned off their engines, and Blaine saw the man in the passenger seat of the Jeep talking into a radio. Blaine was too far away to hear anything, but he could make out the man’s large shock of white hair.

“Blaine?” Sandra said behind him. “Maybe you should come back here with us…”

“I’ll be okay,” Blaine said. “Just stay calm and follow my lead.”

The man with white hair stood up in the Jeep, waved over at them, then shouted, “Hello over there! You folks have car trouble?”

“Not anymore!” Blaine shouted back.

“I’m coming over,” the man said, and started to climb out of the Jeep.

“Not necessary!”

The man didn’t seem to have heard him. Or if he did, he didn’t care, because he climbed down to the road anyway.

Shit.

The man with white hair began walking toward him. He wore a sweat-stained white T-shirt, cargo pants, and a gun belt with the holster tied low around his right leg like some kind of gunfighter’s rig. Blaine thought that was amusing, but not enough that he cracked a smile. Instead, he scowled at the guy, hoping to intimidate him into stopping.

It didn’t work, and the man with white hair kept coming.

“Maybe he didn’t hear you?” Sandra asked nervously behind him.

“He heard me,” Blaine said.

“This is trouble right here, Blaine,” Deeks said.

Tell me something I don’t know, old-timer.

“That’s far enough,” Blaine shouted, even though he didn’t have to.

The man stopped twenty yards away. Closer now, the white hair looked more pronounced, like a dye job. How could hair be that white? The man looked to be in his fifties, but it was hard to tell with all the white hair.

“What’s with the hostility?” the man asked.

“I don’t know you,” Blaine said.

“And I don’t know you. But that’s no need for all this aggressive behavior.”

“Sorry. But it’s a dangerous world out here.”

“That’s true. Which is why we’re offering help. Nice Jeep, by the way.”

“Yours don’t look so bad.”

The guy looked back at his Jeep. “Not as nice as yours. Got a lot of wear and tear on it. You folks came out of Dallas?”

“Around there, yeah.”

“Us, too. Took a while to get down here. Looks like it’s the same for you guys. Dangerous out there, especially at night. But that’s why we’re together.” He indicated the mini-caravan behind him. “Safety in numbers.”

“We’re doing just fine on our own.”

“We have supplies. Maybe we can trade. I’m sure we have something you might need, and I’m sure you have something we might want.”

“We don’t have anything to trade, and chances are you don’t have anything we want.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. You should go back to your Jeep and keep heading down the road.”

“We don’t want any trouble,” the guy said. And he held his hands up in surrender, then casually smiled at Blaine.

“There won’t be any if you just go back and—”

Blaine never finished, because at that moment someone popped up behind the roof of the F-150, the sun glinting off the steel barrel of a rifle as the guy laid it across the roof and took aim. Blaine saw it two seconds before the guy fired and he felt the bullet chop into his left side, exit, and bury itself in the asphalt highway behind him.

He heard Sandra’s voice: “Blaine!”

Blaine didn’t think, didn’t try to figure out what the hell was going on, and instinctively lifted the AR-15 to open up on the guy with white hair. But the guy was anticipating it and was already running sideways, and he leaped into the ditch before Blaine could fire. Suddenly without a target, Blaine swiveled the assault rifle back to the F-150 and fired off two quick shots. His bullets stitched the front windshield of the truck, and the sniper ducked back behind cover.

Blaine saw the Jeep’s driver scurrying behind the Jeep. Meanwhile, two men had rushed out of the GMC, both armed with rifles.

“Blaine!” Sandra screamed behind him again.

He turned and began running back as the two guys at the GMC opened up on him with full-automatic rifles. The highway around him exploded into big, scorching chunks of asphalt, and Blaine swore there was no way he was going to survive this. He could hear bullets ricocheting off the sides of the Jeep and zipping past his ears.

Sonofabitch!

He and Deeks were stuck with semi-automatic rifles while the bad guys were unloading on full-auto. That was some shitty luck right there.

Deeks was at the hood of the Jeep, shooting back with his AR-15. Casually, like he had all the time in the world. The old man was either delusional or didn’t realize how much trouble they were in.

Sandra was crouched next to the Jeep’s front grill when Blaine reached it. Her eyes, wide with relief at the sight of him, quickly turned to horror. “Oh my God, you’re bleeding!”

“I know, I know.” It was all he could get out.

He knew he was bleeding because he had felt the throbbing pain all the way from the back of the Jeep to the hood. The bullet had gone clean through, which he thought was a good thing — not that he knew anything about getting shot. He was sure of one thing, though — it hurt like a sonofabitch.

Blaine popped up from behind the Jeep and fired off four quick shots at the guys at the GMC. They had retreated behind the vehicle now and were firing back from safety. Blaine saw the Jeep’s driver hiding behind his own vehicle, shooting with an assault rifle. Blaine thought it looked like an AK-47.

Suddenly, the driver of the F-150 opened his door and dived out and ran for cover behind the truck. As he did so, the sniper in the bed of the truck popped back up and fired over the roof. Blaine felt the bullet zip past his head, an inch from taking it clean off at the shoulders. He ducked back behind the Jeep, thankful he still had a head to duck with.

He became aware of Sandra fumbling with his waist, trying to stanch the flow of blood. He had no idea when she had started doing that, but he didn’t stop her. He was bleeding too badly and he was already feeling light-headed from the blood loss. At least it wasn’t a gut shot. He wouldn’t be dead right away from a gut shot, but he wouldn’t get better, either. A bullet that went clean through his side meant he could survive it. Probably.

Then Blaine heard a loud pop and turned and saw Deeks falling to the highway behind Sandra. There was a hole in Deeks’s left temple and one side of his head was completely gone. His AR-15 clattered to the hot asphalt next to him. Sandra saw the body and clutched her mouth to keep from screaming, though her eyes screamed plenty for her.

The guy with white hair! That fuck!

It had to be. The gunshot had come from up close, and it was from a handgun. No one was going to hit Deeks with a handgun from forty yards away. But the guy with white hair was closer, and the last time Blaine had seen him, the man was diving into the ditch beside the road.

Blaine leaned out from behind the Jeep’s grill in the direction of the ditch and saw white hair moving steadily up the highway, crouching low. The guy saw Blaine a split-second after Blaine saw him, and the man fired — too fast — and the bullet ricocheted off the Jeep’s hood and burrowed into dirt along the ditch, but it kicked up enough paint and metal that Blaine felt the heat against his face even as he pulled his head back.

“Nice shotgun!” the guy shouted.

The sound of the Mossberg being racked from the back of the Jeep.

He looked over at Sandra and saw her staring back at him, one hand still clamped over her mouth, eyes wide and afraid.

Save her, you idiot. Find a way to save her.

He looked toward the woods to his left. It wasn’t too far away. Thirty yards, maybe. Probably a little bit more. Sandra was a runner, had been her entire life, from high school to college, where she got a scholarship to run track and field. So she could run. She could really run. All she needed was a chance, and he could provide that.

He stared at her, willing her to listen to him. “When I give the word, you run into the woods. Understand?”

She shook her head furiously back at him.

“You have to!” Blaine hissed, putting as much force into his voice as he dared without white hair overhearing. “You can make it,” he said, calmer this time, trying to be convincing. “You’re fast enough. Remember? You’re fast. On the count of three…”

She was still shaking her head.

“I’ll be right behind you,” he lied.

She finally nodded, though he could tell she didn’t completely believe him.

“I promise,” he smiled, and before she could say anything, he said, “One, two…three!”

Blaine lunged out from behind the Jeep, moving to his right. In the two-second advantage that the sudden, unpredictable move allotted him while the shooters adjusted, Blaine saw the guy with white hair hiding behind the back of the Jeep, the top of his head just barely visible. Blaine took aim, but before he could fire, the guys up the road began shooting first and Blaine felt his right leg buckle slightly.

At first he thought he had stepped into something, maybe a pothole in the highway and twisted his leg, but no, he had been shot in the left thigh.

Blaine pulled his aim away from the guy with white hair and squeezed off as many shots as he could at the three vehicles. That got most of them running back behind cover. Even while he was shooting, Blaine saw from the corner of his eye Sandra running out from behind the Jeep and racing into the ditch, then up and over it and toward the woods.

She was running fast, his Sandra, like the wind.

Faster, girl, faster!

He was afraid they would start shooting at her, but they didn’t. Instead, they concentrated all their fire on him, and Blaine kept moving to his right, drawing their attention away from Sandra.

She was halfway to the woods now, and she was still moving fast. He smiled. She would make it. If nothing else, at least she would make it.

He felt a burst of happiness that was short-lived when a third bullet tore through his right shoulder, and suddenly he could no longer hold the AR-15. Blaine crumpled to the highway on his knees and lowered his head, and waited for the fourth and final bullet to find its mark.

He waited, and waited, but the final bullet never came.

Instead, the shooting stopped, and he heard the guy with white hair shouting. “That’s enough! Hold your fire!”

Blaine couldn’t find the strength to lift his head. He wasn’t even sure how he was still on his knees. Shouldn’t he have fallen by now? He was bleeding pretty badly. Not just from the wound in his side, but the one that had taken a big chunk out of his thigh, too. The third one, in the shoulder, had hurt the most, and the bullet had probably shattered a bone or two. It had to be his right arm, too. What the hell was he going to do without his right arm?

Nothing but die.

Footsteps approaching, then the guy with white hair crouched in front of him, the Mossberg shotgun draped lazily over his lap. “I know what you’re thinking, but don’t you worry about the girl. We’ll find her for you. Hell, you didn’t think we chased you down for you and the old man, did you?” The guy laughed. “Nah. It was always for the girl. How did a bum like you land her, anyway? Must be pretty slim pickings for a ten like that to voluntarily go with a two — generously speaking — like you. No offense.”

Sandra, run like the wind, girl, run like the wind…

More footsteps approaching along the highway, then a new male voice said, “Should we put the poor sucker out of his misery?”

White hair stood up. “No point. Look at him. He’s not going anywhere. If he makes it to tonight, then what?”

“Tasty treat,” someone else said.

Another voice: “What about the girl, Folger?”

The guy with white hair, Folger, said, “We got plenty of daylight. Spread out and start looking. She couldn’t have gone far.”

“She took off like a fucking deer,” another guy said, and there was laughter. “That girl can run.”

“First guy who catches her gets dibs,” Folger said.

“She’s mine, boys!” someone shouted.

Running footsteps all around him. Into the grass. Or maybe already in the woods. No, that was impossible. They couldn’t move that fast. Even Sandra hadn’t been able to move that fast.

He heard Folger’s voice, coming from somewhere very far away now: “Don’t worry, amigo, we’ll treat her nice. We treat them all nice. At first, anyway. Guys get bored easy, you know?”

Then Blaine couldn’t hear anymore, because everything became dark and he must have finally toppled sideways. Suddenly the side of his head was pressed into the hot highway surface, and the only sensations were heat and hardness and the sound of blood pumping free.

His blood. Who knew bleeding to death could be so damn noisy?

Run, Sandra, run…run like the wind, girl…