Leon felt the kind of shame a man cannot show, and the threadbare couch and bare walls and the gunfire outside accused him of being failure as a husband and father; in his most important job, to provide a safe place for his family, he had fallen miserably short.
Clutching the tattered bear he’d won at a fair for his boy, Leon knew he’d let everyone down. He raged against the poverty and the racism and the feeling of being stuck in quicksand from the time he got out of bed in the morning until the moment he shut off the lights. His children deserved better; they deserved a chance, and it seemed they would never get one. This complex was a shithole before the country started to kill itself, and he hadn’t been able to find a way to extricate himself from it. There was never enough money. There were not enough jobs. He had been living hand-to-mouth since he’d gotten out of the army, and they’d all been drowning in slow motion, gasping for air and hope.
From the unit next store came a sudden burst of shouts and the sound of a door being kicked in. A woman was screaming. Leon knew the matriarch in passing; a kind, churchgoing lady raising her grandkids. The two older boys had dropped out of school. The young girl, Leisha, played with Leon’s boys. He heard the child howling through the thin walls, the grandmother yelling for intruders to get out. Leon guessed it was some kind of gang-related thing. Retaliation or a drug grab or guns. The kind of thing that went on with frequency in poverty-stricken areas all over the country and got ignored by the media because it was not sexy violence. If a pretty white woman kills her husband, that’s national news, and the trial will become a media circus. But when poor minority kids kill each other, no one cares beyond the grieving families.
Leon put the teddy bear on the easy chair, checked the .357, and went outside.
“Where they at?” one punk was saying. He was small, wearing a red bandana on his head. Pants sagging halfway down his butt. He and another kid, maybe fifteen, maybe twenty-five, were standing just inside the doorway to Leon’s neighbor’s apartment.
“I don’t know. They ain’t here. Now you get on outta my house. Go on GIT! Both of ya.” Leisha was screaming in the background.
That might have been the end of it. Maybe they would have left on their own without hurting anyone.
One of the gang members held a sawed-off shotgun. He turned to face Leon.
“Mind you business, old man,” said the young man. His mouth curled into a sneer. He pointed the shotgun at Leon’s chest. “Unless you want some of this.”
“Put a cap in his ass,” said the other punk. Eager. It was all a joke. A video game.
Leon stepped forward until the shotgun was almost touching his chest. He looked down at the dark-skinned man-boy in front of him. One of the Spiders.
“I’ll blow a hole through you, Army. You don’t scare me. Now give me your piece. I know you strapped.” He laughed, a high-pitched, girlish laugh. Leon wondered if he always laughed like that.
“You leave that man alone!” said Grandmother.
“Go on outta here,” Leon said. The gun in his waistband. He hadn’t come out the door holding it because he was afraid of what the gun would do in his hands.
“Shoot him! He crazy!”
“Leave. Now.” Leon bored into the kid with his eyes. He’d do it. Right here, shoot this damn kid in his big, mean mouth.
“You see this gun? Right?” The stubby barrel touched Leon’s chest.
Maybe it was because he had already killed a man, or maybe it was the feeling of failure that was in him. But Leon, at that moment, did not care much about anything. Maybe that’s how the punks felt too.
Leon moved with unhurried fluidity, drawing the revolver from his waistband and placing the barrel of the nickel-plated .357 against the punk’s forehead. He put his left hand on the stock of the shotgun and pointed its muzzle away from his body. The punk stood staring at him in surprise and fear.
“That’s what I thought,” Leon said, taking possession of the shotgun. “If I see you again, I’ll drop you on the spot. I don’t give a damn if your momma was a crackhead and your daddy whipped your ass with coat hangers. You got no excuse being the punk-assed bitch you are.”
Leon pressed the barrel against the boy who claimed to be a man’s temple. “You mess with me or anyone around here again, I’ll find you. You send your ‘posse’ or your ‘crew’ or your ‘spiders’ or whatever the fuck you call yourselves because you’re too much of a pussy to do it yourself, you’d best hope they kill me. ’Cause I’ll find you. You get me?”
“That dude’s crazy,” one of them muttered as they scurried down the hall, grabbing sagging pants so they didn’t fall down completely, trying not to trip over themselves as they slunk away.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Grandmother said. “But thank you.”
“You should leave,” Leon said. “We’re getting out of here.”
“Where is there to go?”
“To the mountains.”
CHAPTER TEN
Smoke and Shadow
COLORADO
There are dreams which become nightmares, and nightmares are often born in places that once seemed heavenly. Colorado was a twisted hell, the sharp scent of pines and mountain air, forever mingled in Henry’s mind with the burning and dying in the way that haunts a man for as long as he dreams. Henry, Carlos, and Martinez trudged across much of the state because of the roadblocks, abandoned vehicles, and seemingly random airstrikes against civilians on the road.
They had climbed into a four-wheel-drive truck on the side of a state highway. On the outskirts of a small, nameless town, a missile tore apart a minivan half a mile in front of them. They had been following the van for about twenty miles, at times closely enough to wave at the children in the backseat.
The missile, fired from a drone or a jet, smashed into the white van, too fast for the eye to follow. Henry had been driving. He floored the accelerator and when they arrived at the van, it was already too late. The vehicle was an inferno, twisted and on its side.
From then on, they traveled on foot, staying close to the trees lining the roads, moving steadily south.
The next afternoon a column at least ten miles long rumbled past. There were Abrams tanks, infantry piled into armored personnel carriers, and support vehicles at the end of the column. Supply trucks, medics, and engineers. An army. At the tip of the column were heavy vehicles with oversized wheels and shovel blades shaped like a cowcatcher on a train. These behemoths cleared the road of burned-out husks of cars and trucks that had been left to the winter.
Helicopters flew overhead, circling like buzzards to provide air cover for the column. Far above the helicopters and the mountains, fighter jets ripped the day.
The Wolves retreated into the woods and watched the army pass. American flags had been replaced by colors Henry had never seen before.
Jets screamed through the sky. Before the rebel column appeared, Henry heard the terrifying sound of an AC-130 Spectre gunship unleashing holy hell. He could not see the aircraft, which was beyond the next low mountain. The heavy minigun made a distinct sound, a vibration deep in the chest even from that distance. Its 105mm cannons whumped and rained fire. He knew the sounds, had once welcomed them, because it meant that some jihadis were getting blown to shit. Terrible in a good way, then. Now, just terrible.
There were thuds from artillery and mortar rounds and bombs dropped from the jets. By the time the first vehicles churned up the frozen road, an oily smoke hung in the sky seven or eight miles away, hugging the mountain and drifting down into the valley.
Henry was burrowed into the snow and covered with spruce branches, and still he felt naked and very small. The force moving past was an entire division, ten to fifteen thousand troops.