Her heart beat a little faster just thinking about how she’d endangered their position here by beating up the city councillor’s boy. Papa was right. If it wasn’t for the government in Seattle looking after them - or, to be more accurate, having an interest in them because of their road agent stories - Scotty’s old man would’ve had them out of the loft and probably even barred from bunking down with the Indians over at the railway camp. They’d have been on the road again, run out of town.
Her father and the principal of Northtown High School had decided that she should serve a three-day suspension. And there would also be the supplementary grounding to contend with, of course.
Sofia pulled up the chair where she’d been sitting earlier, at the big table in the open space by the kitchen. They ate their meals here. There was no dining room, no separate living areas in the house. Just their bedrooms, the combined bathroom-laundry, and the communal room here. She found it annoying sometimes, having nowhere she could be alone save for her room. But such thoughts were always followed by a flush of shame that the only reason she could truly be alone these days was because, apart from Papa, her whole family was gone.
She sat down in front of the textbooks she was supposed to be studying and tried to settle herself into a more academic frame of mind. The snow was falling so heavily now, whipped into twisting curlicues and sheets of white that the park was almost entirely obscured. She shook her head and pulled the thickest textbook, which wasn’t very thick at all, over to her.
She opened it at the chapter relevant to her assignment. The history of the Great Depression. Like anyone cared.
Sofia tried to read a short passage, an interview, in which a man described how he’d worked seven hours to earn the money to buy a bottle of baby formula for his kid, and how he’d run three miles to the drugstore for it, only to find the place was closed. As much as she could see that the situation sucked big-time, his story still didn’t compare with what she’d been through.
Sofia flinched away from remembering the day the gang attacked their
An observer watching Sofia Pieraro over the next few minutes would have been astounded by the change that came over the teenager. Psychologists would call it a fugue state. For Sofia, it was akin to time travel. It was what happened when she found herself zoning out at school. She wasn’t simply recalling events. Her mind, her whole consciousness, was back there.
The moaning wind that bent the leafless branches of the trees in the park, she heard no more. She did not see the great white rectangle of the picture window nor the complete white-out brought on by a blizzard for the ages. The Great Depression had never happened. The poor man with the hungry child altogether vanished from history.
She was back in the scrub, in Crockett, Texas. Deep night, and she deep within it, having stolen away from the relative safety of the women’s camp, against Papa’s strict instructions. She had heard the phrase ‘heart in mouth’ before, but until this moment she had never experienced anything remotely like it. But watching her father perform a drunken pantomime as he approached the two road-agent sentries, her heart beat so powerfully and rapidly, and her stomach seemed to contract with such force, that she felt as though she might vomit all of her insides out through her teeth at any moment.
She found it all but impossible to watch the small life-and-death drama unfold through the hunting telescope on her rifle. At least, until she swung the sight off Papa and concentrated instead on the two men he was trying to silence. When she first caught one of them between the crosshairs of her Remington - a fat, ugly pig’s ass of a man, to borrow a phrase she had learned in the refugee camp outside Sydney - it was all she could do not to squeeze the trigger and put a round through his head.
Only the sure knowledge that to do so would alert the other gang members at the clubhouse nearby stayed her hand. She was aware of the ugly scowl that settled over her face as she observed this pair of thieves and killers. The very ugliness of thought and deed that she could see etched into the repulsive features of the man in her ‘scope contorted her own face into a rictus of congealing rage as she watched him. Only when her father plunged his bowie knife into the first of them did her expression change.
She smiled.
She smiled under the cover of night in Crockett, Texas, as the ice and frozen soil underneath her thawed from her body heat, soaking her clothes and chilling her to the bone.
And she smiled at the table of the comfortable, renovated loft she shared with her father a thousand miles away, safe in Kansas City. Her eyes, unfocused and unseeing in the present, gazing nine months back to the same night when she’d not just watched men die, she had taken their lives with her own hands. Not up close, as she would have wished if given the chance - to see the red spark of existence snuffed out of their eyes. But close enough. More than close enough.
She’d almost lost her meagre dinner when the enormous Mormon they called Big Ben had brought a sledgehammer down on his first victim’s skull, in the opening seconds of the attack on the Hy Top Club. Choking down her nausea, she brought out the Remington and waited for a target to present itself. In the excitement, she nearly opened fire on the first thing that resolved in her telescope, bracketed against the fire and torchlight of the camp. That would have meant shooting Orin, one of her own group, not to mention giving herself away. Sneakiness was the watchword of the evening, she reminded herself; sneakiness and not shooting the wrong people. She forced herself to wait.
When the first camp whore screamed, she tracked the muzzle onto her, but a sledgehammer blow silenced the woman before Sofia could fire. The whore’s boyfriend struggled to rise off the couch, where he’d crashed, drunken and sated, on the grass just in front of the tumbledown clubhouse. She recalled him as if he was standing right in front of her in the loft in KC. A bearded, shaggy, potbellied maggot with a red bandana tied over his head.
Sofia brought the crosshairs of her Remington up to Bandana Boy’s unibrow, took a deep breath, and let it out. As she exhaled, she kept the muzzle on target until her finger had completed the trigger pull. Bucking in her arms, the rifle put a single round through the road agent’s forehead, disintegrating the top half of his skull in a spectacular shower of bloody gruel and dropping the corpse back onto the couch. She felt a surge of anger and … something else.
A feeling she did not recognise, but it was powerful. No, it was power itself.
She felt her power over the man she had shot, whose life she had taken. It was a good feeling.
Sofia forced herself to mechanically work the bolt, spitting out the spent .30-06 casing and sliding a fresh round into the chamber. The Mormon men, having now traded the sledgehammers for M16s, took cover, uselessly, behind the couch and exchanged fire with those attempting to run back inside the Hy Top.
She tracked two more road agents sprinting for the door, dispatching the first with a clean torso shot, which spun her target off his feet and into the dry wall facade with a crash that shook the entire front of the building. The other man, she drilled in the ass, slowing him down long enough for the Mormons to pour a stream of tracer fire into his back. So intense was the fire, it disassembled him from the hip up to shoulder height.
She’d expected this to be hard, confronting, and yet she felt nothing beyond a deep sense of satisfaction as she scanned the windows of the Hy Top for more targets. Rifle fire popped around her but she paid it no mind. The adrenaline flow gave her a rush that was far more intense than anything she’d experienced when out deer hunting.
The same rush, attenuated by time and distance, but strong enough to leave her dizzy and gasping for breath, stole over her as she sat at the table in the loft at Northtown, vanished into the past. Her cheeks burned bright red and her eyes were lost, staring far beyond the walls of the apartment.
She heard the
Then she recognised it as something quite different. It was knocking, loud and insistent knocking, on the door of the apartment … Torn out of her pleasant reverie, she pushed her chair back, almost upending it as she hurried to answer the door.
She had no idea who it could be. Papa had his keys; he was wearing them on the ring he always carried at
