The Benders (29 page)

“There,” she says, pattin’ the inseam of my pants. “All set. Let’s go.”

“Go where?” Another boom rocks the building, closer this time. The window panes rattle. Something downstairs falls off a shelf and shatters.

The girl looks out the door. “We got a Jeep, but neither of us know how to drive.”

“That’s not true!” the boy says.

“You can’t even see over the steering wheel!” she scolds.

“Can, too!”

“Hey,” I shout, makin’ my noggin throb harder. I place a hand on the bandages. “Sounds like the world’s crashin’ down around us, and you two are arguin’ over this?” They both look at me. “Can you drive?” I ask the girl. She shakes her head. “Well, then”—I say, slowly walkin’ around the bed—“I guess the boy will hafta see over the steering wheel.”

They say nothing and lead me out of the room and down the hall. The house is silent. For some reason, I keep thinkin’ someone will pop out, someone who wants to stop us, but no one does. We walk down the stairs, me pausin’ once to steady my head.

I stop on the front stoop. In the dusk, fires throw up light off in the distance, a thick smoke, too, like the whole place is burnin’. I search my brain to see if I know where this place is and come up blank. As I’m starin’ at the smoke and orange fire, gunfire rattles down the street. Someone screams. I stumble back into the girl who grips my arm tight. She thrusts something cool and solid into my hand. I hold up the gun and look at her.

“I hope you remember how to shoot,” she says, her eyes trained on the road.

“What’s happenin’ out there? I scan for the source of the gunshots. A Jeep tears by a couple of streets away with armed men on the back. “Maybe we should go back inside.”

“No!” they both say at the same time.

“There’s someone even worse than those guys.” The boy points after the Jeep.

I furrow my brow, thinkin’ about the person I kept expectin’ to pop out and stop us. I can’t come up with a face, but a bad feeling surfaces quicker than a bloated body. “Okay,” I say. “Boy, you drive and I’ll try to shoot.” I look down at the gun, testin’ the weight of it. “Did I know how to shoot before?”

“Yes,” they both say again.

“All right then. Let’s go.”

The boy does know how to drive the Jeep, but not very well. He takes out two mailboxes and a bush before straightening the vehicle out on the road. I grip the door handle and try not to tumble out the open doors. Behind us, the girl moans.

“You’re gonna kill us!” she says.

“No, they are!” He gestures at the headlights tearin’ our way.

A green army Jeep barrels toward us like we’re playin’ chicken. Two men in white surgical masks hang off the sides and wave guns in the air. They aim at us as we get closer. My hand goes out before my brain gives it a signal. Three shots crack out of my gun—one blasts through the windshield and into the driver’s chest, another hits a headlight, but the third blows a giant hole in a gunman’s head. The Jeep veers off, crashes into a building, and erupts into flames.

Pumping a fist, the boy cheers. I remind him to keep his eyes on the road, tryin’ to stay calm while my heart’s blastin’ against my ribs. I look down at the gun and wonder how in the hell I did that.

But there’s no time to wonder because another group of mask-wearin’, gun-totin’ fools flies out at us from inside a building. These ones have drawn gruesome skeleton grins on the paper masks. I grip the Jeep’s rollover bar, stand up, and twist back. My body takes over as I stare at the masked attackers. Time slows. My heart thuds in my ears. I feel my arms go out, the cool trigger against my index finger. Three more shots slip out of my gun easy as breathin’. I hit one masked man and clip another. The third drops to check on his injured friends.

“Well, he remembers how to shoot,” the girl says matter-of-factly.

The boy shouts back over the rush of the wind. “If there was anything we needed him to remember right now, it’d be that.”

I sink down in the passenger seat, but my body feels too hot and my head too cool. These people act like I’m some broken machine the girl has fixed. But I don’t feel fixed. Even if I can shoot, I still feel like my brain’s scrambled eggs.

We drive down barren streets, the sun now gone and the stars appearing above. The booms and screams and gunshots seem to have subsided, but we still see people with guns and smoke from fires. The boy takes a few wrong turns, gets stuck in a dead end and runs into the remains of a Jeep with crispy carcasses hangin’ out of it. I wanna ask why the hell they’ve taken me here and who these people are and why they wanna kill us, but the boy concentrates on drivin’ and the girl is mutterin’ crazy talk.

I look over at the boy barely able to see. “You want me to take a hand at drivin’? Maybe it’s like shootin’, it’ll come back to me.”

He flicks a glance at me, runs over a curb, and finally nods. “Give it a try. Can’t seem to figure out how to get outta here.”

He pulls over on a quiet street near an old brick building that reads
Post Office
, but the windows have been boarded up for ages. I get out, walk around the Jeep, and sit in his seat. I stare at the controls and will myself to remember.

“You should go.” He looks nervously over his shoulder.

“Who is it we’re runnin’ from?” I put the Jeep in gear and let my body do the rest. It seems to remember.

“You don’t know who’s after us?” The boy asks, bucklin’ himself in. Apparently he’s not so confident about my ability.

I shake my head. “Nope. All I know is I’m Clay and you’re…”

“Ethan.”

“Ethan and she’s…”

“Betsy,” he says, glancin’ back.

“Betsy,” I repeat. “Oh, and I can shoot like a son of a gun. Hopefully, there’s more bad-ass talents like that stored away in here.” I pat the bandage on my head. It still throbs, but the excitement of gettin’ shot at took my mind off it. Now the pain consumes me. I wince and try to focus on findin’ a road out. I take us through another subdivision of abandoned houses. One garage door reads 2 DEAD in big red letters.

Ethan points right. “Try down that way.”

I turn down a two-lane road, past a burnin’ building, and turn right again. Ahead, a guard post looms large, with high brick walls on both sides.

“There!” Ethan points.

“I see it, little man.” I lean forward. But this ain’t no easy exit. Something big, a big machine, blocks the only opening in the wall. Around it are lumps that I soon can tell are corpses as we drive closer. There must’ve been an epic battle here. An awful feelin’ of dread steals over me. All those people and no one to put them to rest. What kind of maniacs are we dealin’ with here? Are any of ’em still alive?

Behind me, Betsy leans forward. When she sees what we’re drivin’ towards, she leans back and begins to mutter loudly. Something about, “Never, never, never” and “Miss Nessa.”

“Clay”—Ethan says quietly—“are we gonna have to stop?”

I don’t answer for a minute, thinkin’ and lookin’ over our exit. The tank is huge and blocks our whole escape route. We’ll have to move the tank or leave the Jeep and run past all those dead bodies.

“I don’t know, bud”—I say—“but it looks like it.”

Ethan chews his lip.

I sigh big and ease up to the tank framed by corpses. None of this feels right.

When I can go no further, I brake the Jeep. We sit inside, lookin’ at the carnage. Bodies riddled with bullet holes lie in pools of dried blood. One man lies on his side, facing us, his paper mask blown up and his eyes open. Half his chin and neck are gone. Another, a woman, slumps over the nose of a Jeep, her hands still clawed ’round a hole in her chest. I wonder if I should shield the boy, but he seems to be takin’ it as well as it can be taken.

“Do we…get out?” he asks.

I glance back at Betsy and then at the tank. “I guess,” I say, testin’ my legs. They work okay so I get out of the Jeep and offer a hand to Betsy. She looks at my hand and then at me.

“We go on foot from here, little lady.”

She stares at me. “Go where?”

This stops me cold. Go where, indeed. “Well, I don’t know,” I say. “You two woke me up. I thought
you
knew where.”

“To Riley.” Ethan climbs out of the Jeep and comes to stand beside me.

“And where is that, Ethan?” Betsy asks, one lip curled up like a taunting sister. I wonder if they’re related, but they don’t look alike.

Ethan shrugs. “We’ll find her.”

“We’ll find her,” she mocks, crossin’ her arms over her chest. “You have no idea where she is.”

“What d’you wanna do, Betsy?” Ethan asks angrily. “Stay here?”

She shakes her head but stays in the Jeep and pouts.

Gunshots from the back of the compound make her jump. Finally, she climbs out and stands beside us, lookin’ at the bodies. “I won’t touch them.”

I look at the corpses and sigh. “Hopefully, none of us have to touch ‘em.”

But hope fades as we walk closer to the tank. More bullet-riddled souls clog the space to the left and right of the tank. We walk up to the tank, hands over our mouths because of the putrid stink, and assess our options. The wall’s too high to scale in my present condition, but I’ll be damned if I am going to crawl over the dead and bloated to get out. My eyes travel up the tank.

“I think it’s our only way out.” I nod toward the giant green tank. “Up and over.”

“If we go up there, we’ll be exposed. Anyone with a gun will be able to shoot us.” Betsy casts a nervous glance over her shoulder.

I look back. The roads behind us are dark, silent, and empty. “You see anybody?”

She shrugs.

“Look, we’re sittin’ ducks right now. We’ll go up and over the tank nice and easy and then we’re on our way.” I give her what I hope is a reassurin’ smile.

She looks at me and then away.

“Okay.” I tuck my gun in the back of my pants and hope to God it stays there. “Let’s go.”

I give Ethan a boost up onto the tank and the flat expanse of metal that covers its large, chain-covered wheels. His shoes clunk loud enough to make me cringe and I glance back at the dark roads anglin’ off behind us even though I just checked ‘em. “Keep a look out,” I say to Ethan. Then I lace my fingers together and offer Betsy a boost.

She takes a lot more hoistin’ before she hauls herself up onto the chest high platform. Her rear end hovers right in front of my face, givin’ a flash of her kitty cat panties before she swings her last leg over. These are my road companions? Dear God, what’ve I got myself into?

When she’s standin’ beside Ethan on the tank’s gigantic wheel well, I pull myself up and climb to my feet, but my head begins to spin and throb at the same time. This has all been too much—the exertion, the shootin’, the dead bodies—and I feel like I’m gonna collapse. I place a hand on the large gun turret at my waist and breathe.

“You okay, Clay?” Ethan asks.

“Yes, you okay, Clay?” a voice says.

That voice. The hairs on my neck shoot up. I lift my head.

Standin’ on the other side of the gun turret, less than three feet away, is a red-haired woman. The minute I see her face—tight like she’s just tasted a lemon—my heart seizes. I don’t…know her, but I do. I can’t explain it, but it’s like I’m an animal spottin’ a predator.

And when she aims a gun at my chest, I know my instinct’s right.

“Whoa,” I say, holding up my free hand. My other hand holds the semi-automatic handgun down at my side. She has the drop on me, and I’m really not sure how fast I can draw to be honest. “Don’t shoot.”

She keeps the gun trained on my chest, but her angry glare moves to Betsy and Ethan. “You two are idiots. What did you do to him?”

Betsy shrugs, lookin’ like a spanked toddler, but Ethan sticks his chest out. “We fixed him, so you can’t mess with his head any more. Now just…let us go!” He stomps his foot and sends a metal clang down the tank.

The woman chuckles. “You thought you were just going to waltz into the desert, did you?” She smirks. “Brilliant plan, Betsy.”

Ethan sticks his chest out. “It was my plan.”

She narrows her eyes at Ethan. “You were always worthless. I should’ve seen that from the beginning.” She turns the gun on the boy.

I yank my gun up fast and aim for her chest. “Leave the boy alone.”

She snorts and eyes me. “You can barely stand, let alone shoot. Besides, you wouldn’t kill your own mother.”

At these words, my brain seems to shrink inside my skull. Images of her swirl back, along with her name—Nessa standin’ over my bed with a scalpel, Nessa in an apron, Nessa tuggin’ her hair back into its clip.

She watches my face and smiles dangerously. “That’s right. You remember. I’m your mother and I love you. These two are trying to trick you into leaving and dying in the desert. But you want to stay here with me.”

I press my hand to my head as if I can trap all the thoughts that bound ‘round inside. A thick, pulsin’ pain has started at the back of my neck, and I’m seconds from losin’ my lunch. I stare between Ethan and Nessa.

“Clay, she’s lying,” Ethan says, his face pale. “I don’t wanna trick you. I wanna take you back to Riley. Remember Riley?”

Riley.
The name rings like a bell, deep in my head, but I can’t catch it and pin it down.
Ri-ley

“I don’t…remember.” I look between Ethan and Nessa.

“You don’t have to remember, Clay.” Nessa holds a hand out. “Come back home with me and I’ll fix that headache of yours just like I fixed your hand.”

I look down at the pink scar on my palm and flex it.

“It’s a lie!” Betsy shouts. “She broke you. She broke your brain.”

I look between Betsy, Ethan, and Nessa, my thoughts swellin’ into a churned-up tide of confusion. A sweat has broken out on my brow and trickles down my back. My temperature flashes hot and cold like a fever. My stomach roils and even my legs betray me. Leanin’ more heavily on the tank for support, I try to keep the gun level, but it slips down. “I don’t know what to believe.”

Ethan’s chest has begun to heave and his fists are hard little balls. He lets out a growl and runs down the platform at Nessa. “You liar!”

She turns, aimin’ her gun at the boy.

My arm comes up on its own again and that steely calm settles over me. My head clears until it’s a cool, clean slate. When I slip my finger along the metal trigger, it’s as if the gun is just a piece of my arm. Pullin’ the trigger feels as easy as an exhale.