PANIC (4 page)

On the wall of the house, he could hear their shoes crunching on the edges.

The window in the bedroom exploded inward and something hit the hardwood floor and slid across the room. He could hear feet hitting the floor as he crept to the door, listening to see how many feet trod around the room.

Just two. No voices.

The lights all cut at the same time, though it would be no aid to them. He only kept the hall lights on if he could help it, and most of the windows had dark, opaque blinds. They couldn’t have been that stupid if they figured where to cut the lights.

He waited for the feet to approach the doorway, then bashed it in as hard as he could with his shoulder, breaking the top hinge and sending the body tumbling to the floor. It was the big kid, the one who helped finish Obie.

The hairs stood up on his arm as his body stiffened with hate and he abandoned his stealthy pattering.

He thought of the dog, his friend, and ran a kick to the boy’s chest like he were kicking a field goal. He’d aimed for the head and missed.

The boy swung up with the kick to a sitting position, then charged from the squat, crunching on the broken glass.

He caught the kid blind, one rageful swing sent him flying into a dresser but not out cold like it should’ve. The kid took the hit from the pipe like a berserker, looking down at his bruised side and realizing he was meant to be in pain. The inside of his mouth was discolored from years of chewing the leaf; he had forgotten what pain was.

Luis reminded him with the pipe, splitting his head open from the temple to the ear.

The howled tunelessly and charged away from the splintered furniture, throwing his big body at the man and stampeding him into the opposite wall. The impact made Luis drop the pipe from his stiff hands, feeling his spine smack hard wood. If it were drywall the boy would’ve gored him right through it but real pine did not yield to the two crashing bodies.

He flung the boy off and his side rippled with pain.

“My dog,” he growled, “You killed him.”

Gore ran down the boy’s torn ear and spread on his shirt, already rust-colored from the proof of the murder of the dog. His left eye was closed and his shoulder was hunched, but he rammed himself blind into the man again and they crashed through the door, beating it flat into the ground in the hallway.

He mounted the man’s stiff body and shot his injured hand into his throat, pinning him.

His fist thundered down and smacked the man’s face and both groaned with exertion.

Luis ignored the spots in his eyes, then waited for the raised fist to obscure the light in the hall and and he saw it again, making the boy into a dark shadow.

He moved again and the fist crashed into the door with a violent knock, too hard to know his own strength. It didn’t break his wrist like Luis hoped but it fractured and the boy bellowed at the hairline crack.

Spittle mixed with blood flew from the boy’s mouth and Luis reached up to dig his thumb nastily in his eye.

As soon as the eyes shut to defend themselves, he threw his grasping hand into the big kid’s Adam ’s apple, silencing him. He used both hands to choke, feeling his hands struggle to keep their grip in the slick blood flowing over his fingers.

“You killed him!” he shouted, broadcasting his position in the hallway.

He dug his fingers in, not caring that the boy couldn’t feel it. He’d die just the same.

He felt the arms flop down and he pushed the boy off him and the dead weight rolled over and slumped, even though the boy still breathed, shallowly.

23:27

HE MADE IT to his feet and contemplated it for a second, putting his boot down on the boy’s throat to wrench the life from him.

“What do you want?” he shouted down to the yard, loud enough for everyone in the neighborhood to hear. It was silent throughout, in the locked up houses and the abandoned ones beyond, all of them making a ruse to burrow indoors so they wouldn’t be noticed.

He heard the lone barking of a dog off in the distance and it enraged him.

“What do you want!?”

He shouted again and got no answer. No feet crunched on the gravel outside, no feet approached up the stairs that he could hear.

23:30

HE GAVE OVER far too much effort to carrying the boy over to the window, still unconscious and limp, dragging him by his torn shirt and hoisting it up to the ledge. He let his body go by the shattered glass and it tumbled sickeningly. His shirt and pants caught in jagged debris on the window sill, hanging him from the open window like an effigy.

He was too heavy and soon ripped loose and hit the ground with a thud, his head bent at an uncomfortable angle.

Luis stood there in the breach and took in the steaming night air panting, relieved, gloating, ready to shed all the blood in the world if it came to that.

He didn’t feel the bullet graze his neck. He didn’t even hear the shot. A dark figure moved out of sight, down below.

He put his hand there and took it away trembling, then ducked away before a second could smack his forehead and rattle around in his skull.

He got behind the dresser and scrambled to the door on his hands and knees then broke into a pounding jog down the short hallway, bowling over the kid waiting in the hall for him.

He tripped and fell and made a tripod of himself with two hands to keep running and the boy got up dazed, a few seconds behind to follow him down the stairs. He skidded through the house and made it to the second stairwell, then threw open the door to the basement with another boy on his tail.

The other one who got his dog came bursting through the side window, with her arm wrapped in a towel to sweep away the glass. He saw her and she saw him and she flung the towel, with its stuck glass shards. He batted it out of the way and she was already inside.

She missed him by fractions of an inch with a box cutter by sheer luck.

She recovered and slashed his thigh, too close to the femoral, and he put a stop to that, slamming her elbow into the wall.

“In here, yo! In here!” she hollered in her tough girl voice, wincing in pain.

She spat in his face and he swung her into the doorframe by the hair, smashing her nose on the entrance to the basement. He saw the shadows on the outside of the house running across the porch to get into the side entrance she’d opened up.

She raked his face and threw her knee into his crotch, hard, and he went down, holding himself steady on the handle of the open door as she gloated over him.

“Get up, bitch!” she shrieked.

“OK,” he said, wincing, his nerves alive with adrenaline. He steeled himself to muster as much energy as he could.

He brought his foot up swiftly and kicked her square in the chest and watched her tumble down the stairs, flopping in the narrow stairwell, battered by the force of the strike.

The knife she’d dropped whipped past his face and buried into the wall like a nail and he met the kid who followed him down the stairs with a short, clumsy punch to the throat, dropping him and snapping his index finger.

He grabbed the handle and screamed in pain as he slammed the basement door shut and barred the entrance before the kid recovered.

23:52

HE COULD HEAR the guy upstairs, his hoarse voice was sputtering back to laugh after the vicious throat punch and he was banging away at the door. He gave up surprisingly quickly and the feet stomped off. After a few seconds, Luis heard nothing but the scooting of a chair and the feet hitting the floor in the dark, stumbling around for the light.

He took his time walking down the stairs, trying to reset his broken finger. The girl lay at the bottom of the steps, sitting uncomfortably with her shoulders wedged between the wall and the floor.

He crouched down by the girl and knelt gently on her neck, putting his knee in the groove between her clavicle and trachea.

“What are you doing here?”

“F-fuuuck you,” she spat through bloody, cracked teeth.

He was woozy from having his head rung like a bell. He let his weight rest on her, exhausted.

In the dark, the blood bubbling up from her broken face glistened when it caught the moonlight.

“Mischief Night-,” she said, trying to smile.

“Yeah,” he said, annoyed. “I know. It’s not that funny.”

“‘s your night, man,” she mumbled.

“I don’t think so. You’re coming with me and we’re gonna end this madness.”

“F—fu—-fuuuc,” she said, sucking up the words as she faded from consciousness. He hauled her to the smashed in basement window and yelled loud enough for them to hear.

“Hey! Hey! Down here, you little shits.”

Upstairs, he heard the world ending: the furniture being smashed, the wallpaper slashed away, dishes broken, windows shattered, newspapers and books ripped apart and flung around the room, the whole house turned inside out as if by prison guards searching for contraband.

“Hey!” he hollered again, and the sound of the door being bashed didn’t deter him. He saw two feet clad in scuffed sneakers standing in front of the thin strip of window, nearly level with the earth-line where the basement was sunk.

“What you want, man?” he said, calmly. “Quit wasting my time.”

“Your friend out there on the ground got my dog, so let’s call that fair.”

He heard the sucking of teeth.

“My boy wasn’t no dog. You’re just making it worse for yourself.”

“I hear you, man, I hear you,” said Luis, tightening his grip on the girl’s neck to make sure all they’d need to do is let them see the girl. “That’s why you should have a look at this.”

“Oh, shit, man, he got Glori-” said the boy with the punched-in throat. He was outside now, too. The leader of these six interrupted. Not six anymore, four.

“What’s this? To stall me?”

“Don’t lose another. I’ll turn her loose and you all can just go.”

Something liquid ran down the stairs behind them as he negotiated for his life, cascading, a waterfall of sludge trickling over the stepboards.

“I think I’ma just let you die like a rat. How’s that sound?”

“Wait, wait, list—” he began, and the boy swung a crowbar into the tough basement window.

The ankles appeared; no mistaking who that was, wearing cloth sneakers and a bracelet made with shells twined one to the other. She made a stance like pitching a shovel and when she brought it forward, right across the slit of the broken window, something splashed on the hostage and splattered on him, too.

It tasted spent in his mouth, and the girl spat too, through her shattered face.

“Let’s do it, man,” said the girl hostage, and she caught a matchbook so small he couldn’t tell what it was. By the time she had a match out and between the cover and the striker, it was too late.

“Love you, Glori,” said the girl, and it broke his heart to hear, even as the boy in front of her doused her with sludgy cooking oil. The girl pressed to his chest could’ve broken loose if she weren’t so weary from the fight on the stairwell.

“You my fuckin homey,” said his hostage to her girlfriend, going to her fate with heart.

She struck the match and lit the whole book and touched it to her soaked clothes and she went up. He stumbled as she lunged, and the liquid flames jumped from her shirt and spread on the floor and the walls and the beams; hot, shooting flames twisting toward the sucking air of the shattered porthole window, thin and wide, channeling the flames like the vent on a grill.

He got to his feet, disoriented, unable to bolt for the storm door until he planted himself and knew just where he was. The hot grease made crackling sounds on her skin as she roared with flame, filling his lungs with a sweet aroma of
chicarrones
, filling his lungs with smoke, filling his brain with the remembrance of holding his aunt’s hand at the market as she broke off pieces of the fried pig skin for him to eat.

Some of his clothes were soaked too and he whipped them off his back in an instant, panicking over whether to hold onto them, or throw them in a dry corner or directly into the flames. Lose, lose, lose.

His eyes watered and he stumbled into a beam. He averted his eyes from the girl, who gurgled instead of screamed on the dusty floor of the basement as the flames spread and climbed the walls and feasted on the dry, cracking eaves, fed by the oil which spattered and leapt everywhere.

It spat on him and he brushed it away from his arm and his clothes and through the rich, black wood smoke, he could see the path to the storm door. He staggered at it and bashed it with his shoulder.

He rammed so hard that one of the beams propping up the basement split, so weakened by the shooting flames. The storm door flung open, belching smoke and issuing his body forth like a bone caught in the throat.

23:55

LUIS CRAWLED FROM the entrance, squeezing his body through, urged on by nipping flames and the blanket of billowing smoke. He sucks air into his lungs and it’s too much and he hacks up blood onto the dusty patch. The boy’s feet pace casually and two of them trail behind, hopping with adrenaline.

His eyes sting when they pinch close, running with sooty grease.

Behind him, the fire roars, blowing out the windows, flagging away from the building. Two upstairs windows and the back door glow in the inferno, making the block frame visage of a blazing skull.

He looks up at it; the bonfire of everything left in his life, soon to be a forest of charcoaled timber. A pyre for a man who didn’t bend his knee to the new masters, a ritual fire to forge the souls of those brave enough to play on Mischief Night, a horrid diversion in the neverending whirlwind of lawlessness.

The one with the gun, the short one, their chief - he seems the calmest of all, like those boys in war who’ve known nothing but, young face impossibly old. A face like that could be the warlord of this city, ruling this trammeled, ruined place once they’ve finally run out of people to maim and kill and rape.

Maybe the people who live in this human zoo will degenerate into slaves and beasts of burden again; hew up the dead earth and push it into mounds to honor the future resting place of the last man standing.