None of the emotions raging within Polly were betrayed by her expression. She stared down at him with all the blankness of the mannequin she had pretended to be: the rage, the years of frustration that had been shoved down so deeply within her, the humiliation and pain. All of this barely touched her face as she watched this twitching, pathetic worm of a man.
She took a deep breath and swung the pipe.
It whistled through the air in a deadly arc and the man’s pupils widened as his eyes seemed to bug out from his head; but the end of the pipe passed harmlessly above him, the breeze from its passing doing nothing more than rustling his hair.
“I don’t think so, prick.”
Polly knelt next to him and closed her eyes for a moment. In the darkness of her mind she saw a blond haired girclass="underline" dressed in a white nightgown spotted with golden princess crowns, the child was solemn and silent; she, too, was kneeling and before this little girl was the crumpled body of a man with sparse gray hair and a milky cataract filmed over his right eye. He was frail and wasted, nothing more than a skeleton hiding beneath skin as thin and wrinkled as tissue paper.
This was the girl’s grandfather from years later: after she’d put on all the weight during her teen years, the cancer had ravaged his body as thoroughly as he had her own. She’d never visited him in the hospital and everyone had assumed that it was simply because she couldn’t bear to see him in that state. That she wanted to remember him as he always had been, not as this zombie-like shell of a man. But still they urged her to pay her respects, to wish him a final goodbye. She would regret it later if she didn’t, they said. But she secretly knew that the only regret she would ever have is that she hadn’t killed the old bastard herself.
The little girl placed her lips close to his ear and prayed that he could actually hear her, that he could comprehend the whispered words coming out of her mouth. But when she spoke, the voice was that of an adult woman and fantasy overlapped with reality.
“You’re gonna suffer so bad you’ll wish you were dead. Mother fucker.”
Polly stood, tucked the pipe beneath one arm as if it were a parasol, and left the man lying on the floor with the screwdriver burrowed into his head, as helpless and scared as an abandoned baby. And with him, she also left something else: a part of her that had always hidden beneath those loose baggy clothes, a part which she had tried for so long to forget had ever actually existed. As she walked away, tears trickled from the corners of her eyes and her steps felt as if she’d just removed twenty pound weights that had been strapped to her ankles for decades. She cried and she smiled… after all this time, the little girl was finally free.
She dressed quickly, slipping into the jeans and t-shirt without ceremony. As an afterthought, she picked out a good pair of track shoes, black as well, and some nice dark socks. That ought to do.
She then picked her way through the department store, slipped out the window through which she’d initially entered, and was back on the street.
She’d keep heading north, see if she could make it out of town. Surely this type of thing couldn’t be happening everywhere. She understood from the news that all of the major cities were entirely embroiled in chaos; but there had to be small town, little villages and hamlets, where life went on as it always had. Places where all the violence and killing were nothing more than pictures on the television, something to worry about and discuss over dinner… but not something that really effected your life. That had to be out there somewhere, didn’t it? It had to be.
So she kept moving forward. Whenever possible she crept through long rows of hedges and shadow, laying flat and still in the dirt when she’d hear the sputtering of a motorcycle or the wild whoops of savages on the rampage. She’d become quite adept now at holding her breath, at taking only the minimum amount of air necessary for consciousness. Her experience in the department store had showed her exactly what she was capable of and the lengths to which she would go to simply survive. She knew that she lacked the physical strength to take on every threat that crossed her path. But as far as she could tell, these were more like rabid animals than human beings. They seemed to attack with little to no reason. Sometimes the victorious looted the bodies of the fallen as if it were nothing more than a mugging taken to the extreme. But, more often than not, it seemed as if they were killing simply for the sake of the act itself.
The two men in the parking lot of Tateman’s Funeral Home, for example. As she hid behind a dumpster, she’d seen them charge one another, each brandishing a baseball bat like a samurai sword and running like shogun locked into mortal combat. Their yells quivered in their throats, breaking and straining as they sprinted full force with the bats raised above their heads.
At the last possible second, both men swung and there was a sharp crack as the wooden weapons smacked into one another. From that point on it was a viscous attack of swings and dodges, blocks and misses, neither man showing mercy as he struggled for dominance.
The larger one, whom she’d begun to think of as Curly, took these shuffling side-steps backward, fending off a particular furious barrage of swings from the smaller man, whom she’d dubbed Moe due to his dark, bowl-cut hair. Maybe she’d moved slightly or perhaps it was something else; but for a split second Curly was distracted and he stumbled over one of those oblong concrete dividers that keep cars from backing into one another. He fell on his rear but Moe showed no quarter, swinging his bat instead with a renewed sense of urgency.
Curly held his own bat by both ends, slightly over his head, and blocked the swings of his attacker again and again as he tried to scoot across the parking lot on his ass. Each time the bats connected there was a loud pop, sharper than the one proceeding it, and Moe’s nostrils had begun to flare wide as his face pulled back into a rigor of unadulterated fury. Again and again he brought the bat down as cracks began splitting his opponent’s weapon lengthwise until, finally, Curly’s bat splintered in half.
Moe seemed to see this as his coup de tat: he shook his Slugger over his head like an angry gorilla and prepared to bring it down with one final sweep. At the same time, however, Curly had tossed the fat end of his bat aside and held the remaining piece by the grip-taped handle. As the little one made his swing, Curly thrust the sharp shards of broken wood upward; his weapon sank into his opponent’s chest at the same time Moe’s bat cracked open his skull. The two men collapsed upon each other, neither one emerging as the victor, both dying as their blood mingled on the asphalt.
And that was the way most of the skirmishes seemed to play out: nothing more than blind rage devoid of any reasoning or strategy as far as she could tell. It was as if the rioters were relying almost entirely upon brute force and animalistic instinct. But Polly, she had cunning on her side. She had the ability to think things through, to not simply allow consequences to dictate her course of action. And that, perhaps, just might be the edge she needed to keep her ass alive.
After witnessing the battle at the funeral parlor, Polly managed to go several blocks before she had to duck into a butcher’s shop. There was a body builder type who was running down the road at full speed. He didn’t seem to have any obvious weapons, but his sheer size made him a big enough threat to warrant evasion.
Luckily, she’d been able to slip into the store before he caught a glimpse of her. She picked her way through the darkness carefully and made her way to the back where she found a shiny cleaver partially embedded into the skull of a man with a bushy mustache and blood spattered apron. There was no way to tell if the blood were animal or human, but it didn’t really matter. The lead pipe had been bulky and cumbersome; it slowed her down when she was on the run and had almost given her away several times with its attempts to roll away. But this cleaver… it was light and deadly, easy to swing without taking a toll on her already exhausted body, and specifically designed for hacking through flesh and bone. Yeah, the clever would work nicely….