Clean up, aisle nine. Darcy, clean up…
Half a second, this girl’s horrific death, and this absurd resurgent image from the time before flooded Sophie’s mind. She blinked, and large pieces of the girl’s skull were still falling down through the greasy wind, like pumpkin rind.
“Love of God, Sophie, get us out of here!”
It was Silas’ yelling that snapped her back to reality.
She exploded, her face, her entire skull above the teeth. Silas, her head exploded…
“— Out of here!”
She could barely hear him. Hot and icy crimson washes of rage, horror, disgust were still welling up inside her.
The H4 kept careening forward. With her left hand she was tilting the steering wheel a little, it was slick with a film of sweat. The gun handle was gripped in her right fist.
I’m going to throw up. Pass out. Can’t, can’t…
The girl’s almost-headless body actually took four more staggering steps toward the Hummer before it collapsed, arms outspread, one leg up at the knee and twitching wildly. Sophie never forgot that, it haunted her forever.
The other women had slowed, the men were still running toward her. There were wails, shouts, even gales of brutish laughter as the headless body fell. Skull splinters and bone matter had splashed up the H4’s driver door, up through the open window. Hot blood and some kind of unseen fruit pulp speckled Sophie’s cheek.
That’s when, turning left so that she could see both where she was driving and the men charging toward her, Sophie managed to raise high the submachine gun, cross her right arm over her chest and out the window, and pull the trigger.
The other women had all fallen back, cowed, whipped, throttled and guarded. Seven men were looming over them, many more were running nearer to the Hummer as it wheeled around through the scrap-yard.
There were dozens of men then, all armed. Some were huge, others frail, many limping. Most were bearded, scabbed, ashen. Hispanic, black, white, bandaged beyond recognition. Some were little more than children themselves.
And where was Zachary?
Shots were being fired. They had been, all along. Silas was screaming.
One of the hulking men on the crest of the swarm had halted. He was beaming, gloating over the girl’s mutilated body. Some other were pointing at the guarded women or Sophie herself and hollering, their faces twisted in leers of rage.
“She’s getting away!”
Sophie had never killed anything larger than a roach, a spider. Aiming as best as she dared to in that second, she selected the gloating man as her virgin kill.
She intended to spray bullets left to right, to sweep the swarm of men, to avoid hitting any of the women, to kill as many of them as she could. And why? For slaughtering the girl, for imprisoning the women, for shooting at her, for terror and torture, for the dread of shame and fear, for Zachary’s mellifluous spite, for despising Silas for nothing but the color of his skin.
For everything.
There was no justice, only fury. Vengeance both for horrors seen and those imagined. She did not need a good reason. The fury was burning out of her, the thrilling, electric spirit of Patrice was at last in resurrection, clawing its way carnally and free, from the fire, screaming hatred of the men, a horrible broken sound that carried even over the cracking of guns and the auto-fire of the SMG.
Left to right? No. The bucking kick of the barely-braced gun caused Sophie to fire an erupting stream of bullets in an arcing vertical stream. The first shots chewed ashy craters out of the pavement, the next went between the grinning (then grimacing) man’s legs and ricocheting out into the crowd of men.
Two men’s bodies surged up and then down, frantic puppets strung up on the air on gouts of blood. Pieces of the hand and arm of a third man sprayed back into the fuel bay. The next bullets caught the grimacing man himself up in the thigh and then belly, stitching up under the ribcage, and swelled there.
The last bullets flew through the space where his head had been. His shattered body blew back. The men behind him fell to earth, cowering and screaming. Other men were diving to the ground, leaping back into the fuel bays, limp-leaping behind stacked tires or dented barrels.
Sophie’s gun fired for almost two seconds. The thrumming barrel clanged as it hit the top of the H4’s window frame, still firing until it bucked and juddered out of her hand. She reflexively flipped her sweating hand around to catch it — You fool — and while she could not grasp it, she slapped its butt-stock with her fingertips. It flew farther back into the H4, bounced off the center console and back into Silas’ shoulder.
He cried out in surprise.
The H4 had completed its careening turn, was almost aimed back at the opening between the lines of trucks where they had first driven in. Sophie had less than a hundred feet to correct her course at thirty miles an hour.
Some of the men behind were back up and firing then, but not at her. No. Sophie gaped at the flaring light of crimson imagery in her side mirror. Two of the naked women had somehow secured a dead man’s bloody rifle, and both had lain hands on it. One was firing it at a man’s face, the other woman was getting stabbed in the belly.
Off to the right, dozens more men were storming out of the gusty fog, where the truck stop ruin was turning into a labyrinth of doorways. They were wearing winter parkas, cut ponchos, rags, duct tape, garbage bags.
Surely there were other women trapped inside. Were any of these men innocent? Yes, almost certainly. Was there anyone there who could hope to overthrow the others’ tyranny? Were there children?
Any, I cannot save you, Sophie thought. She tried to melt the infernal vision of the girl’s staggering, headless body out of her mind. She never would. Can’t save any of you, any, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Lacie, my Lacie —
She pressed the brake, somehow steered the H4 into the gap between the trucks, swung a hard right. Silas grunted as he hit one of the windows.
Blindness, a glare of sparkling light. More men, a flatbed trailer off to the left. Shotguns and capped-off emergency flares were popping off, gold and scarlet. Holes blew open in the back of the H4, shattering supplies.
Silas was sitting up, with blood and opened bandages spilled down into his lap. He had lowered the left back window all the way and he was cracking off shots with the fully-loaded assault rifle.
Sophie’s ears rang as the deafening shots erupted behind her head.
Screams blew in from the flatbed trailer. Sophie caught frantic glimpses of the carnage Silas was causing, one man going down without a face, another without a throat, more men whose legs had all been flensed into scarlet clouds and strips of shattered bone.
Godless, she thought without any coherence, I thought people were made of meat, just flesh and bone but they explode, Patrice. They explode, like paint balloons.
There was giggling, guttural sobbing under the gunfire. Sophie realized that until then, she had been screaming.
That horrible weeping, choking, suppressed vomit struggling to find its time. Gagging. Is that me?
Still twenty miles an hour, much too fast for blind and spiral tunnels. She raced between the lines of semis, almost colliding with a crumpled and black delivery truck. No!