Cry Havoc

As the woman stepped closer, Polly could see streaks in the soot on her face. As if she’d been crying and the tears had cleared swaths of clean skin through the grime and grit.

“They turned you away too, didn’t they? Wouldn’t let you leave?”

Polly nodded her head but remained silent, allowing this stranger to do all the talking.

“I have a baby. A baby for crying out loud. I asked… I asked if I could lay her on the yellow line and walk away. If they could wait ’til I left and take her somewhere safe.”

The woman had a slumped and defeated look which deepened with every step, every word… almost as if the story was the only real substance she had left and the telling of it was slowly deflating her.

“They wouldn’t do it. Why wouldn’t they do it? Why wouldn’t they take my baby?”

Funny. This entire time Polly hadn’t even considered the children. Where were they in all this madness? Where they huddled into basements and closets, hiding from the monsters which rampaged just outside their walls? Were their bodies piled among the faceless dead? Or, God forbid, were they joining in on the mayhem, taking out one another just like their adult role models were doing?

“Why wouldn’t they save my baby?”

Now Jane, she probably would’ve thought of the children first thing. That’s just the way she was. And that’s probably what she’d meant when she kept muttering those poor, poor people as they watched the news. God that seemed like such a long time ago…. It was hard to believe it had only been a matter of hours. That things could deteriorate so quickly once set into motion.

“Will you take my baby?”

Polly finally spoke.

“I don’t want your baby, lady. You should get back in that alley and hide. You don’t want to be out here.”

The woman looked around her, as if taking in the street for the first time before turning back to face Polly, who was now only six or seven feet away.

“Why won’t you take my baby?”

“Look, I’ve got enough to worry about on my own without….”

The woman dropped the baby as if it were nothing more than a sack of potatoes and broke into a run. The lost and confused look had disappeared from her face, replaced with a contorted mask of rage.

“I want your fucking shoes, you blond haired bitch!”

There was something shiny in the woman’s left hand, the one that had been hidden under the baby. Something that looked sharp.

The woman thrust the blade at Polly but she, somehow, was ready for it. She’d never really trusted this lady from the start. Something about how she’d kept saying my baby but never actually mentioning the child by name.

Polly pivoted gracefully on her heel, spinning her body out of the path of the knife as easily as if it were something she did on a daily basis. At the same time, she latched onto the woman’s arm and twisted it backward and down in one steady movement. The blade sank into the woman’s stomach and she gasped as her mouth and eyes formed perfect circles. Her fingers loosened from the hilt just enough for Polly to gain control and yank it free.

With her other hand, Polly pushed the woman’s back hard enough that she stumbled and fell several feet away.

“I swear to God if you’re not on your feet and out of here within the next five seconds, I’m gonna cut a bitch to shreds.”

Not a threat. Just a simple, flat statement.

The woman staggered to her feet and scrambled away, hunched over and gripping her stomach as if she could somehow keep the blood from spilling out of her body.

Shit. The damn baby….

As it turned out, Polly didn’t have much to worry about in that regard. What she hadn’t been able to see in the semi-darkness was that the baby’s face and lips were a subtle shade of blue. What looked to be the terrycloth belt of a bathrobe had been tied so tightly around the infant’s little neck that it had practically burrowed into the skin. The poor thing.

She couldn’t just leave it laying in the middle of the street like some piece of rubbish tossed from a passing car. It was true that she knew there was no place for compassion in her heart, not now at least. But she was still human, damn it. And it was the type of animal who did this that didn’t deserve her mercy; the kind who would murder the perfectly innocent and then use its body as nothing more than a prop in some fucked up ruse.

She could just make out the outline of a carriage in the shadows of the alley. The least she could do, then, was to place the baby back into the pram. It wasn’t a proper burial but in this city it was probably the closest anybody was going to get. So she laid the child’s stiff body down gently, next to a diaper bag overflowing with bottles and rattles and…. cigarettes?

She could see the shiny foil reflecting in the bottom of the bag, the red and white logo on the crumpled pack, the perfectly round and white tips of the filters. Like a starving woman who’d just found a candy bar, she snatched them from the bag. And where there’s smokes, there’s fire right? Yes! Just underneath a stack of diapers was a little orange lighter. God, she could really use a smoke right now.

She shook one of the cigarettes loose from the pack and placed the filter between her lips, relishing the firmness of the filter between her pursed lips.

But wait… if she lit up out here the flick of the lighter would be a beacon. The winking ember each time she took a drag would betray her presence in the shadows. Hell, the smell of the smoke might even draw in any crazy mother fuckers who might be lurking nearby. True, there were probably about twelve different kinds of smoke hanging over town: burning rubber, oil fires, gasoline fires, natural gas fires… but she would never underestimate the ability of someone who was really jonesing for a puff to be able to separate that particular smell from all the others. Hell, how many times had she tried to quit? And it was the smell, every time, that brought her running back.

So not here, then. Somewhere more secluded. Where she couldn’t be seen. Or smelled. Where she could enjoy half the damn pack if she chose to. But where?

She pictured a map of the city in her head, laying out the grids as best as she could and matching them up with landmarks. What was she on now? Bentley. Just a little past Jefferson. If she kept going up a couple blocks then she should come to 17^th Street. And 17^th led Oak which led to Hoover Elementary. Perfect. She could sit in the hallway, far from any windows, and smoke to her heart’s content. And she couldn’t imagine that there would be anything in a school that the rioters and looters would actually want. Not when there was an entire city to sack.

So it was settled then: Hoover Elementary. True, it would be a circuitous route. In a normal situation it would’ve been quicker and easier to head back the way she’d just come and loop back around. But she had a feeling that if she took the easier path, she’d be walking into her own death. It was an unshakable feeling somewhere deep in the pit of her gut. And if there was one thing she’d learned out here, it was that you had to trust your instincts.

She just hoped that the hunch she was allowing to guide her wasn’t leading her astray. That it really was the voice of instinct… and not the silver-tongued whisper of addiction coaxing her into a slow and painful death.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Richard still gripped the machete in his hand but he knew that if he tried to use it, he would simply be swinging blindly. The screaming kid made his eardrums tremble with its high pitched keen which, in turn, made it hard to judge exactly where the woman’s voice was coming from. There was a good chance he would swing the blade only to have 700,000 volts zapped into his body. Which would debilitate him completely. It was a chance he couldn’t take.