“Which one?”
“That one. You get that one.”
Heavy footsteps pounded on the front porch. Men yelled at each other. They kicked debris out of the doorway, forcing their way inside. I got to my feet and ran out of the room, toward the back of the house. The men coming in from the front of the house saw me as I slipped around the corner. They fired a shot. Through a window, I saw more men in the backyard. They turned toward the shot and charged the house.
The yelling erupted again. The clapboard house felt like it was going to rattle to pieces in the stampede of so many intruders. I ran through shadows and hallways to the far side of the house, the sound of heavy boots running on the rotten floor coming from all around me.
I ducked into an empty room and spied a window on the opposite wall. I heard voices in the hallway where I'd just come from, and I knew I had to make a move then or die in that house.
Running at the window, I dove through it without bothering to look at what was on the other side. I landed hard on a wood pile, shot through and overgrown with weeds, my ribs on my left side hitting the pile before the rest of me.
My vision blurred from a piercing bright light of pain, and moaning sickly, I rolled off the wood pile, onto my uninjured right side. It took a second before I could make myself move. There was a thick stand of bushes ahead of me, and I pulled myself along on my belly towards it.
Just as I got behind cover I heard the voices behind me.
“Anything?”
“Not back here.”
I heard them trashing the house, and I used the noise to cover my movements as I crawled along the bushes to the back of the house. Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought that Chunk must be around the next corner. That he'd realize we got separated and was waiting for me. But when I rounded the corner to the backyard, I didn't see him.
But what I did see stunned me.
It was the top of a U-Haul-style moving van, dented and worn-looking, but the right size and shape as what Chunk and I were looking for. A fence and some chest-high bushes separated the van from me, hiding the bottom half of it, but my hopes were up, and I ran for it.
“There!” one of the men shouted from inside. “There! In the yard.”
I jumped the fence as a shot rang out and I hit the ground. As I landed, through the panic, I saw the lower half of the van, and my heart sank. It wasn't the van we were looking for. The back axle was up on cinder blocks and the van was ringed on all sides by scraggly hackberry bushes.
A bullet whizzed past my ear.
I hit the ground and crawled for the van and squeezed under it, inching my way forward, where the hackberry was thickest. I was even with the front tires when I stopped crawling, for a new, but much older fear had gripped me. On the ground in front of me, slowly uncoiling, was a dusty, caramel-colored rattlesnake. Its head looked as big as a slice of pumpkin pie, and its body was as big around as my thigh. The muscles along its flank rippled as it glided through the dirt, its tongue licking the air, sensing a living presence, but smelling only rubber and plastic.
I was on my belly, eyes wide open, every muscle in my body frozen with fear. The snake inched closer to me. Its head rose off the ground slightly, and then we were so close we were almost touching, nose to nose. I could see every speck of color in its slitted eyes.
We were motionless, eyes locked together for what seemed like forever, though it couldn't have been more than four or five seconds at the most. And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the snake broke eye contact and glided forward. It crawled right past my ear, over my shoulder and onto my back, its body impossibly long and heavy, disappearing with exaggerated and terrible slowness into the shadows at my feet.
I didn't even breathe.
“Check there,” somebody shouted. “Yeah, there! Under that van.”
A fresh wave of panic took me. I heard the men running across the yard, coming closer. I turned and looked at the back axle over my shoulder. The snake was there, moving towards the daylight.
Voices at the hackberry. Hands pushing the greenery apart.
The snake reared back, its tail alive with the fury of its rattle. A shadow fell over the snake, and a man's face and body appeared above it. The snake lunged for the man's face and he pulled back just in time.
I heard him yell, “Whoa!” and then, a moment later, “Fucking rattlesnake man!”
The others laughed.
“Shut the fuck up,” the man yelled back.
They kept teasing him, but to my amazement, their voices retreated. They were going off to hunt for me in other places.
I watched, thunderstruck, as the snake slithered out into the hackberry, out into the sunlight, leaving me alone. I closed my eyes and let my face mask drop to the ground.
Chapter 12
I stayed as still as possible, listening for more voices. The only sound was the muffled whistling of my breath as it exited through the filters of my gas mask. The looters were gone, I was pretty sure of it. I hadn't heard anything for over a minute, and the cave-like hollow beneath the van where I was hiding was becoming more and more oppressive.
I decided to chance a run for better cover.
I crawled out from under the van, but stayed in a low crouch. As quietly as I could I made my way back to the houses where Chunk and I had been hiding when we separated. I crossed between the houses to the front, where I stayed low behind some bushes, hoping to get a view of our car. Our weapons were still in the trunk, and I figured if I could get to them I could level the playing field a little.
But my heart sank when I saw the car. It had been shot to pieces. There were huge, gaping holes all over it. All the windows were broken, glass everywhere. A thin column of steam rose up from the radiator. Worse, the trunk was wide open, jimmied open sloppily, with a crowbar from the looks of it.
Moving through the bushes once again I headed along the front of the houses in the same direction Chunk and I were going when I lost him. I made it to the end of the block before I heard more voices. Men's voices. They were shouting at each other, slapping their way through an overgrown alley behind the house I was using for cover.
I ran across the street quickly and ducked into a small white house without a front door. Immediately the world around me was thrown into darkness. There was very little furniture to clutter the wood floors, a few chairs, a ragged sofa, a cabinet. Dusty sunlight pierced through the holes in the wall and the roof and the broken windows, making bright white patches on the floor.
I was painfully aware of my own breathing. How loud it was. How much my chest hurt where I had fallen onto the wood pile. The voices were gone, lost somewhere behind me. I desperately wanted to find Chunk, but I didn't want to go back outside. I couldn't risk another encounter with those looters. Not alone, anyway.
I wandered through the entryway, the kitchen, with its piles of unwashed pots and pans and spider webs in the sink, and then into the living room.
There I stopped. In front of me, so still that at first I believed she must have been a mummified corpse, was an old Mexican woman in a rocking chair.
She beckoned to me. “Come closer. You're safe here. Those men won't bother you here.”
“Who are you?”
“You come into my home and you ask me that? Who are you?”
I crossed the room and stood before her. My space suit and face mask didn't seem to scare her at all.
She looked amused. Her thin, wasted smile had only a few yellowed teeth left in it, and though she looked so frail she seemed ready to blow away with the dust, her voice was strong and didn't shake.
“My name is Lily Harris. I'm a police detective. Do you live here?”
