The girl fell to the snow. Her head, connected by a scant piece of skin, twisted to the side. Audrey was sick in the ditch. My hands dripped. I picked up handfuls of snow, wiping away the thick, black blood. I dropped the saw and we climbed slowly into the truck. It started without a problem. Audrey twisted the wheel side-to-side, feathering the gas. The truck rocked back and forth and lumbered out of the ditch.
We drove slowly in four-wheel drive, following the winding road west. At least, I thought it was west. I could hardly stay awake. The road was dizzying.
“I have no idea which direction you’re going.”
“Me either.”
“Yeah, but how much gas do we have?”
—
“How much?”
“It’s already on Empty.”
“We might be backtracking.”
“Or we’re dead on.”
The road opened into a white horizon. I reached across the seat and poked her leg.
“You can see the stars.”
She glanced up. “It’s totally clear. When did that happen?”
“Think it’ll be sunny tomorrow?”
“I kind of like it when it’s cloudy.”
We followed the road several miles, mostly straight and flat. A gibbous moon lit everything in perfect yellow.
She slowed down.
“Are we out of gas already?”
“No, look there. It’s a barricade.”
Ahead were concrete dividers high as the bumper and three rows deep.
“Must be a straight shot out of town.”
“Can you go through the ditch?”
She steered off the road and drove alongside a fence parallel the ditch. The front tires flatted and the truck sank. Audrey opened her door and shined the flashlight down.
“It’s a bunch of two-by-fours with nails in them.”
I stretched out my good leg and pressed her foot with mine. The motor roared, the two-by-fours flopped and banged against the truck. The steering wheel drifted left and right, the motor strained. We passed the barricade and Audrey swerved out of the ditch. The tires were gone. The rims scraped and squealed against the icy asphalt. The truck died less than a mile down the road.
Laden with supplies, Audrey and I walked cautiously along the highway. Shortly, she took my hand in hers. Our fingers stuck together. In the ditch ahead, we saw a large cluster of highway signs scraped free of snow and ice. The large one read:
Welcome to Marshall, North Carolina, All-American City 1958, 1978, 1998.
But it had been hastily covered with thick red spray paint:
Welcome to Kill Town, USA.
A SENTRY SHOWED UP TEN MINUTES AFTER WE DID. His headlights floated through the woods, splashing the snow with a dull glow. We hid in the woods and watched the sentry examine our abandoned truck. Audrey wanted me to keep the Winchester trained on the patroller, but he wasn’t armed.
After fifteen minutes of pacing, he picked up his radio and spoke into it briefly. He walked back to his truck and sat in the dark. Ten minutes later, faint headlights appeared up the road. The sentry got busy loading a shotgun from the floor of the truck.
Audrey sighed. “Shit. He was calling for backup.”
A train of lights burned the road. Trucks lined up behind his, all loaded with dirt bikes and ATVs. Several men unloaded from the trucks, rifles hanging across their chests. Slowly, I put my face into the snow. I kept it there until it burned. I took my head out of the snow and wiped the water from my eyes.
“Audrey?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t think I know what to do.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They aren’t law. They’ll kill you. And I’m not a prisoner.”
The ATVs and dirt bikes sputtered in the darkness. Their headlights pointed to the woods where we hid.
“Twelve of them,” Audrey said slowly. “They’ll kill both of us. Because they are lawless. And we are nobody.”
Click. Slide. Click.
The hand of God struck one, two, and took out another with a shot through the hip. The night exploded with gunfire and filled with the smell of black powder. The dirt bikes launched into the woods. I aimed at the single headlights. The bulbs burst and sparked. In darkness, the riders veered into trees. They landed face first into trunks. The bikes tumbled through the brush. Left for dead, the men squirmed in the cold and lonely.
The floodlights reached deep into the woods. They were aimed right at us. I ducked into the ditch and waited for them to move the lights. Over our heads hung the excruciating yellow light. They were torturing us.
Finally, they aimed up the road. Audrey and I scurried downhill, half rolling and half sliding on our asses.
We followed a riverbed, stumbling over cracked shale slabs. The shallow river ran under a bridge then on for a quarter of a mile before being blocked by barbed wire. We scrambled up the bank, following the wire, and got back into a thick patch of trees. We were well out of breath. We listened. There was nothing to hear except the faintest trickle of lazy water. No ATVs. No trucks. No guns.
Audrey dropped the pack and collapsed against a tree trunk. Her breathing was dry and labored. I grabbed the pack and emptied it in the snow. I tossed what we didn’t need. I kept my thermal underwear, the sleep sack, the remaining half-box of ammunition, the pistols, clips, and what little food remained. I released the clips from the nine-millimeters and emptied the chambers. I reloaded them and handed one to Audrey.
“Don’t let anyone touch you,” I said. I showed her the release for the clips. I pressed it several times and slid the clip in. “Then you pull, like this,” I pulled the slide. I zipped the pack and stood. “I think this is it. We’ve run ourselves out.”
“You’re giving up?”
I shook my head. “The strong do what they can. The weak suffer what they must.”
I cinched the pack tightly to my arms and waist and climbed the hill to the road at the top, the same road that crossed the bridge just a quarter-mile back. It had been plowed recently. I stood on the centerline, waved the flashlight, and emptied the nine-millimeter into the air. The echo barked from the trees. I dropped the clip to the road and reloaded, pulled the slide and swung the flashlight around.
Shortly, the headlights flashed. The maniac trucks appeared up the road. I set the flashlight on the asphalt aimed at the vigilantes. There was a heavenly silence to the headlights. They almost looked like stars. And then the monstrous growl of the engines emerged over the silence. They were still a long way off. The tinny exhausts howled.
And then they were closer. Closer still. The centerline glowed. The asphalt looked like glass. I emptied another clip straight into the cross-eyed beams. I stepped over to the shoulder as I reloaded. I emptied the second clip at the line of trucks. I raised the Winchester and aimed, but the first truck had run off the road.
Repent.
This is your God.
Your Salvation.
The next truck screamed past, out of control. It soared over the ditch and into a cedar fence post. The rear whipped around and the truck tipped on its side. The third truck had stopped up the road with a flat and a busted light. The fourth stayed back. Far enough back it didn’t matter. I jogged to the third truck.
“I think I seen him in the ditch here,” I yelled to the men in the third truck.