The Complex (6 page)

Turo slid to a halt and screamed. Shaggy clutched his arm and urged him on. Without stopping, Ron bent over, snatched up the briefcase, and ran for the car. Bullets pinged off the pavement and the surrounding automobiles. Then Shaggy and Turo started running again.

“You boys know who you’re fucking with?” Genova shouted.

Ron’s car roared to life. Seconds later, the tires squealed as he barreled out of the parking lot, baring down directly on the gangsters. The gunmen scattered as he rocketed toward them, recovering fast enough to shoot out his rear windshield. He screeched out onto the road, his rear bumper banging off the asphalt, and then zoomed away.

By then, Shaggy and Turo had fled through the parking lot of an adjoining Taco Bell, behind a dry cleaners, and into a stretch of woods bordering an industrial park. They ran all night, hiding in culverts and garbage dumpsters, plowing through forests, and racing across highways, fields, and vacant lots. They babbled to one another in shock and fear about Jimmy’s fate, and the fact that Ron had abandoned them, and how they were going to get home, and what the hell they would do now.

They’d made it back to Red Lion just before dawn, exhausted, sweaty, and dismayed. Seeing nothing suspicious around their apartment, the two had gone inside. Then Ron called, informing them that he’d stashed the money inside an old iron ore mine out in the woods near LeHorn’s Hollow. He apologized for leaving them behind, saying he’d been in shock after seeing his brother gunned down, and wasn’t thinking clearly. He assured them he was all better now, and that all they had to do was lay low for a while, and when the coast had cleared, they’d split the money between themselves.

That had been four days ago. Shaggy and Turo have spent much of that time stoned or drunk or both. They’ve waited to hear from Ron, or the cops, or the people they robbed. So far, they haven’t. They’ve been afraid to go outside, afraid to make a phone call, afraid to do anything but sit and drink and smoke and play video games.

Now, all of that has changed.

“Let’s make a break for it,” Shaggy says, crouched behind the sofa.

“And go where?” Turo parts the vinyl blinds with one finger and peers out the window. So far, the yard outside their apartment, which borders a small stretch of woodland, is empty.

“I don’t fucking know. Anywhere but here!”

“How? We ain’t got no fucking car, no fucking driver’s licenses, and no fucking money. How far we gonna get?”

Turo lets the blinds fall shut, sinks back down to the floor again, and tries not to cry.

Shaggy stands up, still clutching the .45, and snatches the spare magazine off the table. Then he heads for the door.

“Stay here if you want,” he says, “but I’m leaving while I still can. I’m betting they killed Ron, and I’m also betting he fucking gave us up before they did. Probably tortured him and shit.”

“Dude, for all we know, Ron took off with the fucking money.”

“Bullshit, motherfucker.” Shaggy shakes his head. “He wouldn’t do that.”

“Shaggy, please. Don’t go out there.”

“I’m fucking going. The question is, are you coming, too, or you gonna stay here and wait to get shot?”

He opens the door. Instead of responding, Turo lurches to his feet and hurries after him. The two creep out of the apartment and glance around. Shaggy eases the door shut behind him, and doesn’t bother to lock it. The yard is still empty, but three figures emerge from the nearby woods. All of them are nude. One of them is covered in blood. Another carries a hunting rifle. Spying Shaggy and Turo, the naked gunman raises the stock to his shoulder and aims at them.

“Go!” Shaggy pushes Turo, who is still trying to come to terms with their nudity.

They run around the side of the apartment building as the shot echoes behind them. Too late, they realize they are now running directly toward the sounds of the original chaos. They round the corner and skid to a stop. The parking lot is filled with more naked people, many of whom are armed with a variety of weapons—everything from guns and knives to a frying pan and a weed whacker. There are several dead bodies lying on the pavement. All but one of them is nude. Another naked person is slumped over the hood of a car, bleeding out onto the metal from a gunshot wound to his face. More dead nudists are sprawled in a pile in front of apartment 2-D. That apartment’s front windows are busted out and shards of broken glass sparkle on the ground.

Shaggy and Turo’s neighbors are also armed. Sam the writer and the old lady that lives three doors down from him both have handguns. As the two would-be stick-up men watch in disbelief, the old lady shoots a naked person in the stomach. The naked person staggers and his mouth curls into a grimace as blood spurts from the wound, but he doesn’t drop the axe he’s holding until the old lady shoots him a second time.

The tranny who lives in the apartment between Sam and the old lady is standing outside, watching all this go down. She has a butcher knife in one hand, and judging by the blood on the blade, she’s recently used it. Shaggy still occasionally gives Turo shit, because Turo once remarked while high that he thought the tranny was “kind of pretty, but not in a gay way.” Next to her are a young red-headed woman and a kid, both of whom look like they’re in shock. The kid has his hands pressed tight over his ears. His eyes are wide as half dollars. His mother has bitten through her lip, and blood dribbles down her chin, but she seems oblivious to it.

More naked people are converging on the apartment complex, wandering out of the surrounding woods and alleys and backstreets. The other neighbors don’t seem to notice, because they’re too preoccupied with the closer opponents. They also don’t seem to notice as a naked little girl, probably eight or nine years old, charges toward Sam. She’s grinning and snarling, and clutches a butcher knife in her hand.

“Look out,” Turo yells.

Shaggy is yelling, too—nonsensical words, the language of panic. He raises the .45 and shoots the little girl in the leg. The hollow point round shreds flesh and shatters bone. She spins and falls, crying out in both pain and rage. Her grin is gone, replaced with an indignant expression, as if she can’t believe Shaggy just shot her. Shaggy can’t believe it himself. His legs are shaking and his mouth has gone dry. When the little girl starts crawling toward Sam, dragging her injured, half-severed leg behind her, his stomach roils at the trail of blood in her wake.

“Inside my apartment,” Sam shouts. “All of you…run, goddamn it! Run!”

The redhead and her kid glance around in confusion, and the tranny guides them toward Sam’s open door. Sam and the old lady follow, keeping their guns trained on the advancing horde. Shaggy and Turo hurry along after them. The little girl is almost upon Sam now, and Shaggy points at her, unable to speak. Sam scurries out of her way and follows the rest of them into his apartment.

“Move those bookshelves over to the windows,” Sam orders, as he slams and locks the door. “Don’t worry about the books. Just dump them on the floor. We need to move fast.”

“What about the kitchen?” the old lady asks. “You’ve got windows in there, too.”

“We’ll use the fridge.” As Sam starts toward the kitchen, he glances at Shaggy and Turo. “Don’t just stand there. Move!”

“Mommy,” the kid wails. “Make them stop!”

Her only response is to sob.

Outside, a chainsaw sputters, chokes, and then roars to life. The naked people begin battering the door. The blows are almost as loud as the gunshots were. The door rattles in its frame, and the knob jiggles, but the lock holds. The rumbling of the chainsaw draws closer.

Turo and Shaggy’s eyes meet, as the pounding on the door increases.

“Dude,” Turo gasps, breathless. “What the fuck is going on?”

“I don’t fucking know,” Shaggy replies, “but whatever it is, we’re deep in it now.”

Six - Grady Hicks: Apartment 6-D

Grady Hicks hasn’t had a dream about Vietnam since 1988. Years of therapy and counseling—not to mention two divorces and three decades of sobriety—have seen to that. And he’s not dreaming about his time in Vietnam now, either.

Instead, he’s dreaming about what happened to him after he got home.

Grady made it back to the world in April of 1967, but still had a year left on his enlistment. That July, Grady was asleep in his apartment off-base, his first wife resting next to him, when he got a call telling him to muster at his barracks with full gear in an hour. The next thing he knew, Grady and the rest of the 82
^nd
Airborne’s 3
^rd
Brigade were on their way to Selfridge Air Force Base near Detroit. Two days later, Governor George Romney and President Lyndon B. Johnson deployed them to help quell the 12
^th
Street race riots.

Grady saw a lot of things during his time in Vietnam—the type of things a person spent the rest of their lives trying to forget. But in some ways, what he saw during those two days in Detroit were worse than the most savage atrocity committed by the Viet Cong. Detroit, and particularly 12
^th
Street, was a war zone. There were storefronts and row-homes instead of bamboo and mud huts, Molotov cocktails rather than punji sticks, concrete instead of rice paddies, and Saturday Night Specials instead of M-16s, but it was a war all the same.

They mustered at a local high school, where Grady and the other black soldiers were given the option of not going out onto the streets. Instead, they were informed that if they wanted to, they could pull service duty instead—laundry, kitchen, communications, and other jobs around the temporary base. Grady had declined, knowing that if he opted for a support role, he’d never see himself the same again from the eyes of his fellow soldiers. Maybe they wouldn’t think less of him, but he would expect them to, and that was just as bad.

And so, armed with rubber bullets and sheaths over their bayonets, they’d marched out into the city, showing force and guarding utility workers and emergency responders. Within two days of their deployment, the riots ended, leaving more than forty people dead. During those two days, Grady witnessed police officers—the same police officers he was there to support—abusing citizens in their custody. He was attacked by both blacks and whites, and called an Uncle Tom and a race traitor more times than he could count. Worst of all was the mindset of the rioters and looters, the frenzied madness which seemed to claim them all. Their grievances were legitimate. Grady agreed with them, intellectually and emotionally. He even empathized—to a point—with their desire for violence. But what he saw occurring had nothing to do with justice or revolution or even simple payback. It was more a pack mentality, an animalistic mindset of violence for violence’s sake—a whirlwind that sucked in everyone it came into contact with.

That’s where he is now. In the dream, Grady is back on 12
^th
Street, being spit upon and taunted by his own people, being called a sellout, while rape and murder and arson and looting occur all around him. He smells gasoline and smoke, hears people screaming, flames crackling, sirens wailing, and gunshots ringing out in the night, and somewhere behind it all, a chainsaw roars.

The sounds continue when he wakes, lurching upright in bed and immediately gritting his teeth at the pain the sudden movement has spurred in his bad back. Pain flares in his hands and knees, as well—his arthritis letting him know that it’s awake, too, and ready for another day.

Wincing, Grady slowly inches to the side of the bed and puts his feet on the floor. He feels disoriented. He takes a nap most evenings, but he doesn’t usually wake feeling like this, and he rarely has bad dreams during those naps, either. Outside, the sirens and the drone of the chainsaw continues. Someone screams. Staccato gunshots echo. Grady shakes his head and rubs his eyes. At first, he thinks the sounds of chaos are just leftover impressions from his nightmare, but they don’t fade as he comes fully awake. If anything, they get louder.

One of Grady’s friends from the war, another black man named Johnny Walker, used to suffer from occasional flashbacks—or at least, he did until ten years ago, when cancer ate him down to nothing. The doctors at the Veteran’s Administration said the cancer was from smoking, but Grady knew the truth. Johnny had brought that cancer back home with him from Vietnam, and it had lurked inside of him all that time. Grady has never had a flashback to the war, or to anything else from his time in the army. But he’s convinced he’s having one now—a flashback of the riots.

His knees pop as he clambers from bed, and his sciatic nerve is as taut as a guitar string, but he ignores the pain, focusing instead on what he’s hearing. It all certainly sounds real enough. The sirens have stopped, but the other sounds have definitely increased. His first urge is to call 911, but the phone is all the way in the kitchen. Grady used to have one of those little cellular flip phones, but his arthritis made operating the tiny buttons an exercise in futility, so now he relies on his old-fashioned rotary phone. His daughter, on her twice-annual visits, thinks this is funny. He likes to remind her that arthritis is hereditary. She doesn’t find that as amusing as his phone.

Instead of making the call, Grady decides to check the bedroom window. The thought occurs to him that this might still be part of the dream. Grady recently turned seventy, and the shadow of dementia weighs on him. His mother died of Alzheimer’s, and in his opinion, burning to death in a burst of clinging napalm would be preferable to that. These days, he’s inclined to worry any time he momentarily forgets something, be it putting his keys in the ashtray next to the door where he also keeps his spare change, or the name of the girl he had a crush on in fifth grade. If the sounds aren’t real—and how could they be—then…