Strike

  They’re all on the porch now, and fingers scrabble around the floorboards.

  “You said there was a key,” says the young one. Baby Bear.

  “There used to be,” says the smooth, cool guy. Papa Bear.

  “Again, you guys are idiots. The wood’s rotten. One kick and the whole fucking house will fall down.” Sensible Mama Bear.

  “You probably shouldn’t—”

  The door bangs open, and I step into it with my gun up and my flashlight on.

  “Can we help you?”

  God, I sound like a badass. But inside I’m screaming. Matty starts barking like crazy, and Wyatt grabs her collar and pretends to hold her back, his gun pointed alongside mine. I can barely see them in the single beam of light. They’re just ragged, desperate shadows in the night. Whoever was holding the flashlight on their side? They drop it.

  I smell piss and gun oil, and then Papa Bear is cocking a pistol like it means something. “Yeah, you can help us. We’re hiding here. So you can leave.”

  “Wrong answer. Go hide somewhere else or get shot.”

  My jaw is so tense that my teeth are about to crack like popcorn, and I can hear these kids breathing, because they’re kids—they’re our age or maybe even younger—and Papa Bear’s gun doesn’t waver and Matty is barking and when Baby Bear goes for his waistband, I spit, “Goddammit,” and shoot him before something seriously stupid happens.

  But I shot him in the leg, so I guess I’m learning.

  It wasn’t meant to be a killing shot this time.

  He squeals like a baby and falls over, and Wyatt lets go of Matty and slaps a hand over the kid’s mouth to stop his screaming.

  “Jesus! You shot him!” says the girl. She fumbles for the flashlight and shines it on whoever the hell I just shot, and oh my God, I didn’t shoot a teenager. I shot a ten-year-old, maybe. A rat-faced little kid in boat shoes, and his pants are a wet splatter of piss and blood, but at least the blood isn’t gushing out, so maybe I’m not going to hell forever.

  “You come knocking on somebody else’s house after dark, you got to expect bad things to happen,” Wyatt mutters. “She warned you.”

  With a deep sigh, he pulls off his hoodie and ties it around the kid’s leg. I can only stand there, numb, gun flopping at my side, hating myself and feeling like shit. At some point, the kid stops shouting and passes out, and the girl is fussing around with him, shooing Wyatt away, and the weird slurping sound I hear is Matty licking Papa Bear’s gun hand. It’s too dark to see much, but he’s leaning against the door, cool as a stupid cucumber, staring at Wyatt.

  “Sup, Beard?” he says.

  Wyatt’s head snaps up, and he stands, suddenly twice as tall as he should be and exuding menace as he gets in Papa Bear’s face. “Do I know you?”

  “Haven’t seen you since Mikey’s funeral. You don’t remember me? I’m hurt.”

  “Oh, yeah. I remember now. You used to have a shaved head. Pretty sure I got drunk every time we hung out because I couldn’t stand you. What’s your name again? Chance?”

  “Cianci. But Chance is good enough for the apocalypse. Yeah, let’s go with that.” He tucks the gun under his shirt against tight abs and slumps against the door. “Chance,” he says to himself. “And who’s the chick with the itchy trigger finger?”

  “I think you mean the chick who still has fourteen bullets,” I say.

  He just laughs like that’s adorable. Which pisses me off even more.

  I ram my gun against his belly and say, “Dude, I will totally blow you a new butthole. Just pick up your friends and go away.”

  He shakes shaggy, dark hair out of his eyes, which are just shiny black pits in this light. “They’re not my friends. And no.” I think he’s reaching to hold my hand, but he does something with the gun, pushing it smoothly out of my grip before I can react. Holding it up, he grins. “Tonight’s not New Butthole Night. It’s actually Thursday. And you should never touch somebody with a gun unless you’re going to pull the trigger, because you never know who spent a lot of time in juvie practicing disarming techniques.”

  Still holding my gun, he walks past me and into the house, whistling.

  Wyatt and the girl drag the kid I shot (The kid. I shot.) into the house and onto our sleeping bag. Turns out my bullet (My. Bullet.) went right out the back of his thigh, leaving a clean wound that didn’t hit anything major. Which makes me a monster but not, at least, a monster who murders little boys.

  “I don’t blame you, Zooey. I wanted to shoot him, too,” Chance says, settling in on the squashy sofa and splaying out in the way of boys who want to seem bigger than they are. “But Gabriela wouldn’t let me. So here we are. And now I ask you: Do you have any food? Because I’m dying here.”

  “My name isn’t Zooey,” I say.

  “I don’t want to know your real name, and you look like Zooey Deschanel’s trailer-trash sister, so we’re going with that.”

  “I wish I’d shot you instead.”

  His grin is so annoying that I click off the flashlight.

  “Lots of people say that, Zooey.”

  Gabriela grabs my flashlight and props it up with hers so she can inspect the kid. It’s not a pretty sight. Wyatt and I are standing just outside the hallway, watching and incompetent, and it’s horribly awkward. Not as awkward as that time I wasn’t wearing pants and he got a pajama boner while trying to slash my throat with a steak knife, but close.

  “We can take him to the vet tomorrow,” I say, and Wyatt shakes his head.

  “We can’t go back there. And we’re broke. Except for the card.”

  “But a vet wouldn’t turn away a bleeding kid. Hippocratic oaths, right?”

  Chance sits forward, a gun in each hand, his and mine. “Zooey, do you honestly think oaths mean shit in this world? All contracts are void, and God bless Valor.”

  I stare at him, hard. “Were you . . . ?”

  “A Valor assassin? Yep. I did my ten. Had to shoot the kid’s parents right in front of him, and Gabriela McBigheart brought him along like a dumb puppy. And when we all went home to be a happy family, our house had burned down. Coincidence? I think not.”

  But I’m not listening anymore. My hands are fisted in Wyatt’s shirt, and I’m on tiptoes, pulling him close and murmuring, “We have to go. We have to go now. We have to go to my house. My mom. She needs me. They can’t. They wouldn’t. Wyatt. We have to.”

  He pulls me close like he can hug the pain and panic away. “You know we can’t go back. You knew that when we ran. You knew after Amber. Just try not to think about it. We have to keep moving. Right? That’s what you said. We have to go on.” His whisper trickles into my ear, and it should make me feel better, but it doesn’t. He’s right. We can’t go back, not for good and not for bad. For the first time, it occurs to me that if my mom knew what I’d done, she’d be horrified. It was bad enough, doing what Valor demanded. But now I’ve shot a kid for no reason at all. Would she even recognize me?

  “I’m a monster,” I whisper.

  “You’re Patsy.”

  I can’t unclench my fists, and he helps me, gently untangling me from his shirt like I’m a panicked kitten. My fingers shake, and I drop to sitting cross-legged, suddenly light-headed and lost. It’s one thing to have hope, and it’s another thing to know that you never had hope and were just fooling yourself all along.

  “Holy shit! It wasn’t you, was it, Beard? It was her.” Chance leans down, elbows on knees, grinning at me like a shark. “How many?”

  “Leave her alone, man,” Wyatt warns, but Chance doesn’t budge.

  “How many?”

  My eyes roll up to him. “As many as I had to.”

  “And you haven’t been home.”

  It’s not a question. His eyes meet mine like the click of teeth.

  “Me and Valor didn’t end things on the best of terms,” I finally say.

  “Valor doesn’t end anything on good terms,” says the girl, pushing her way into the tight cir
cle of our conversation. She’s about my age with medium-dark skin and a faded purple fro-hawk.

  “You too?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “Nope. Just went with my brother to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid.”

  I look from her to him, Gabriela to Chance, or Cianci, or whatever, and the only thing they have in common is that they’re angry. He’s tall and lanky; she’s short and curvy. He’s tan, but she’s brown. His eyes are shifty gray; hers are maybe dark hazel. They can’t be related.

  “Yes, she’s my sister. Yes, it’s a long story. Point is, would you like to adopt the nerd you shot? Because we’re on the run, and he can’t run anymore, and it’s kind of your fault.”

  “I can run,” the kid whimpers.

  Chance stands and saunters over to nudge the kid’s leg with his boot tip. The kid howls and sniffles. “No, you really can’t.”

  I look up at Wyatt, unsure what to say.

  “We have plans,” he says for me.

  “So do we.” Chance looks pointedly at the door. “And they’re happening now.”

  “I don’t want to go with the girl that shot me!” the kid wails.

  “I can shoot you, too,” Chance offers, flopping his gun in the kid’s direction.

  “No, you can’t. You’re out of bullets.”

  If looks could kill, Chance just turned the kid into pulp.

  “Did I mention he’s a tactical genius?” he says, shoving the gun into the front of his jeans. It’s a black Glock, of course. Just like mine, which he pulls out instead. “I’ve got fourteen bullets now. You want one?”

  The kid just sniffles and glares like he knows that Chance is an asshole but not a monster. Lucky him.

  “So you’ve got bullets now. Take your kid and go. There’s another building in the park. Stay there. But don’t come back here, or we’ll aim higher,” I say. “We have more guns.”

  “Where are you headed?” Gabriela asks, too quick.

  My hands go into fists. “Wouldn’t you like to know? Let me guess. You want our supplies.”

  “Yeah. I’m just really excited about half-eaten hamburgers and a fat dog. And is that a freaking snake?” She shakes her heads and puts a hand on her hip. “Look, I’m just saying . . . if you’re in the same boat we are, we might as well see if we can help each other. We have nowhere to go, no one we can trust. You don’t, either. Maybe there’s safety in numbers.”

  “I promise we won’t eat your dog,” Chance says, but that’s obvious. Matty is on her back, licking his knuckles while he rubs her belly.

  Wyatt and I lock eyes. He shakes his head no. And I know that he knows more about this Chance kid than I do, and if their only connection is Mikey, that means Chance is a connection from Wyatt’s bad-boy phase. Could be drugs, destruction, or punk shows. Could be worse. But I shot this kid, and they look desperate, and I can’t help thinking about what it would feel like to go home and see your house on fire. There’s a connection here—a common enemy. In the new world Valor is fashioning, connections like this one might be the only way to survive. I don’t trust these kids. Not a bit. But I don’t know if my conscience can take three more lives, three more strike marks. If we send them away without money, without food, without medicine, with only fourteen bullets against the world, I will hate myself even more.

  Chance slides out my clip, flicks a bullet out with his thumb and rolls it around in his palm. “These aren’t Valor issue, are they?”

  I say nothing. Wyatt curses under his breath. Chance slides the bullet back in, snaps in the clip, and aims the gun at me. “Where are the rest of the bullets?” he says slowly.

  Wyatt’s gun is ready, aimed at Chance’s chest. “None of your goddamn business. Now, she asked where we were going, and that’s nowhere. So where are you going? Because now would be a good time to leave.”

  Chance measures us with his eyes, stares around the dark room as if taking inventory. Roy’s shotgun pinned under my foot, Wyatt’s Glock pointed at his chest, our bags, our dog who is clearly not a guard dog, a glass box full of snake. He gives me a lopsided smile.

  “We don’t know where we’re going, okay? We were going to figure that out here, tonight. I mean . . . what’s left? Can’t go home. Can’t go back to school. Don’t know who’s in on the takeover and who’s not. This place is turning into the Wild Wild West.”

  “I forgot how much you and Mikey liked crappy movies,” Wyatt says. “Idiot. It’s nothing like that.”

  “There’s no law, the law there is went corrupt, and you can shoot anybody without consequences. That’s pretty fucking Wild West to me, bro.”

  “Why don’t you just go join the Citizens for Freedom?” I say, hoping to scrape them off.

  Gabriela looks up from beside the kid. “The what now?”

  “Okay, so we found out about this meeting—” I start.

  “Don’t!” Wyatt puts a hand on my arm.

  “Ugh!” I wave my arms around and pace up and down the hall. “Why not? What do we have to lose? They’ll see the flyers one day anyway. Let them go. Maybe the Citizens have medicine for the kid.”

  Wyatt leans in to whisper, “You want them to go to the meeting?” He inclines his head toward Chance. “Look, I know this guy, and you don’t want him on our side.”

  “If I’m a bad guy, you’re a bad guy, too, bro,” Chance says lazily, turning the gun around like he’s looking for the gold stamp.

  “Why don’t we all go?” Gabriela says. “If you were going anyway. Strength in numbers.”

  Wyatt’s voice is strained. “I don’t like this.”

  Gabriela stands and walks to me. “Okay, so let’s work this out without the gorillas. Do you trust him?” She motions to Wyatt, and I nod. “Well, I trust him.” She points to Chance. “So if you and I can trust each other, maybe we can all live. But if we dick around, I’m pretty sure the kid’s not going to be okay. And we don’t have a car.”

  I look at the kid on the floor, and he’s so pale he stands out against the darkness of the rotten house. He’s painfully small and still, just as floppy as Amber was. I don’t want to be haunted by another ghost. And even if Wyatt doesn’t trust Chance, I like Gabriela. And I think she’s right. Maybe it’s because I lost my best friend this week, but I want to agree with her. And if it all goes south, we’ve still got more bullets than they do.

  “Seriously, you’re not considering this?” Wyatt puts his arm around my shoulder and turns me away, but I notice he keeps his gun on Chance. His whisper is even softer this time. “That guy is bad news. Seriously bad news.”

  “He hasn’t shot us yet.”

  “That doesn’t mean much.”

  I turn around and raise my voice, because I’m so damn sick of this tension, of the way the temperature in a room ratchets up as soon as someone aims a gun.

  “Look. Here’s my final say. I don’t trust them, and they don’t trust us, but I’d rather join forces than shoot three more people. They can come with us to the Citizens for Freedom meeting tomorrow, or they can leave right now, or we can kill them. I just want to go to sleep and forget today happened. Prey animals live in groups for a reason. So come on or get out.” I plunk down on the sleeping bag and shine my flashlight in Chance’s eyes. “And give me back my goddamn gun.”

  Chance reaches into his pants and gives me his gun, his empty gun, and it feels all wrong in my hand even though it’s a Glock just like the one Valor gave me.

  “This is not my gun.”

  “So fill it with bullets, and then we’re all on the same page. I’m not letting my sister sleep in the same room with two armed strangers and me holding my dick.”

  It’s probably the sleep deprivation and insanity talking, but I kind of see his point.

  All this time, Gabriela’s been dealing with the kid, but now she’s hunting around the room for something.

  “If we’re sticking around, we need to elevate his leg,” she says.

  I grab a few moldy pillows from the corner an
d put them under his foot.

  “Blankets?”

  I point at the sleeping bag. “That’s our only one.”

  “Spare clothes?”

  “Not that would fit him.”

  Gabriela stares daggers at me like I’m totally useless and tries to prop the kid up. He whimpers like he’s having a bad dream.

  Which . . . I guess he basically is.

  “Yo, Cianci—” Gabriela calls.

  “Call me Chance from now on. It’s cooler.”

  I can almost hear her roll her eyes. “How about you share your bounty?”

  Chance gets up and strolls to the door. Wyatt follows him, and their angry whispers carry down the hall in the still night. The slap of flesh suggests they’re bumping chests or something similarly apelike. I kind of wish I could see it. I’ve never seen Wyatt talk to anyone our age except me, and everything about the way he walks and talks and acts changed the second he saw Chance. He’s gone full silverback.

  “Don’t fuck this up,” Wyatt finally says.

  Chance saunters back in and squats beside us, tossing a ratty duffel bag on the ground. When he unzips it, the inside rattles around. Dozens and dozens of pill bottles.

  “What the hell?” I say.

  He hunts through them, pulls out an orange bottle, and knocks two white pills into his palm. Gabriela hands the kid a half-full bottle of water and helps him swallow the meds.

  “You’re a drug dealer?” I ask.

  His stare is flat and judgmental. “I’m a businessman. The kid’s in pain. I can help him. The insurance system is effed up. I help people, connect them with what they need. This isn’t meth and crack. It’s all real. I’m like . . . the Robin Hood of Big Pharma. What if your mom couldn’t afford insurance to get her meds?”

  My mouth drops open and I choke. My eyes are swimmy, and I’m hot and cold all over, and Wyatt hurries to me, his arm heavy on my shoulder.

  “Guess I’m a telepath, too,” Chance murmurs, zipping up his pack. “Your folks dead? Natural orphan or Valor?”

  “She told you. She hasn’t been back to find out,” Wyatt growls.

  The old house goes eerily silent, as if all our ghosts rushed in at once to haunt us.