They must have stolen a truck just to crash it through our gate.
I think they must have been pyro addicts— bald people with painted heads, faces, and hands. Red faces; blue faces; green faces; screaming mouths; avid, crazy eyes, glittering in the firelight.
They shot us and shot us and shot us. I saw Natalie Moss, running, screaming, then pitching backward, her face half gone, her body still impelled forward.
She fell flat on her back, and did not move again.
I fell with her, caught up in her death. I lay there, dazed, struggling to move, to get up. Cory and the boys, running ahead of me never noticed. They ran on.
I got up, felt for my pack, found it, and ran. I tried not to see what was happening around me. Hearing the gunfire and the screams didn’t stop me. A dead body— Edwin Dunn— didn’t stop me. I bent, snatched up his gun, and kept running.
Someone screamed near me, then tackled me, pulled me down. I fired the gun in reflexive terror, and took the terrible impact in my own stomach. A green face hung above mine, mouth open, eyes
wide, not yet feeling all his pain. I shot him again, terrified that his pain would immobilize me when he did feel it. It seemed that he took a long time to die.
When I could move again, I pushed his body off me.
I got up, still holding the gun, and ran for the wrecked gate.
Best to be in the darkness outside. Best to hide.
I ran up Meredith Street away from Durant Road, away from the fires and the shooting. I had lost track of Cory and the boys. I thought they would go toward the hills and not toward the center of town.
Every direction was dangerous, but there was more danger where there were more people. In the night, a woman and three kids might look like a gift basket of food, money, and sex.
North toward the hills. North through the dark streets to where the nearby hills and mountains blotted out the stars.
And then what?
I didn’t know. I couldn’t think. I had never been outside the walls when it was so dark. My only hope of staying alive was to listen, hear any movement before it got too close to me, see what I could by starlight, be as quiet as I could.
I walked down the middle of the street looking and listening and trying to avoid potholes and chunks of broken asphalt. There was little other trash. Anything that would burn, people would use as fuel. Anything that could be reused or sold had been gathered.
Cory used to comment on that. Poverty, she said, had made the streets cleaner.
Where was she? Where had she taken my brothers?
Were they all right? Had they even gotten out of the neighborhood?
I stopped. Were my brothers back there? Was Curtis? I hadn’t seen him at all— though if anyone were going to survive this insanity, it would be the Talcotts. But we had no way of finding each other.
Sound. Footsteps. Two pairs of running footsteps. I stayed where I was, frozen in place. No sudden moves to draw attention to me. Had I already been seen? Could I be seen— a figure of darker darkness in an otherwise empty street?
The sound was behind me. I listened and knew that it was off to one side, approaching, passing. Two people running down a side street, indifferent to the noise they made, indifferent to woman-shaped shadows.
I let out a breath and drew another through my mouth because I could get more air with less sound that way. I couldn’t go back to the fires and the pain.
If Cory and the boys were there, they were dead or worse, captive. But they had been ahead of me.
They must have gotten out. Cory wouldn’t let them come back to look for me. There was a bright glow in the air over what had been our neighborhood. If she had gotten the boys away, all she had to do was look back to know that she didn’t want to go back.
Did she have her Smith & Wesson? I wished I had it and the two boxes of ammunition that went with it.
All I had was the knife in my pack and Edwin Dunn’s old .45 automatic. And all the ammunition I had for it was in it. If it wasn’t empty. I knew the gun. It held seven rounds. I’d fired it twice. How many times had Edwin Dunn fired it before someone shot him? I didn’t expect to find out until morning. I had a flashlight in my pack, but I didn’t intend to use it unless I could be certain I wouldn’t be making a target of myself.
During the day the sight of the bulge in my pocket would be enough to make people think twice about robbing or raping me. But during the night the blue gun would be all but invisible even in my hand. If it were empty, I could only use it as a club. And the moment I hit someone with it, I might as well hit myself. If I lost consciousness for any reason during a fight, I would lose all my possessions if not my life.
Tonight I had to hide.
Tomorrow I would have to try to bluff as much as possible. Most people wouldn’t insist on my shooting them just to test whether or not the gun was loaded.
For the street poor, unable to afford medical care, even a minor wound might be fatal.
I am one of the street poor, now. Not as poor as some, but homeless, alone, full of books and ignorant of reality. Unless I meet someone from the neighborhood, there’s no one I can afford to trust.
No one to back me up.
Three miles to the hills. I kept to the starlit back streets, listening and looking around. The gun was in my hand. I meant to keep it there. I could hear dogs barking and snarling, fighting somewhere not far away.
