Story What the Hell Happened? Story Slice- Monica and Tanya's tale

Tanya


“Randal, you need to get up quick and quiet. Don’t raise up, stay low.”

“What’s going on mom?”

“We got company coming and they are on the road we took to get up here.”

Randal sat up.

“What are we going to do?”

His eyes started to focus now. He saw his mom putting stuff back into the bag on the motorcycle. She looked over at him.

“What we are going to do is pack up and get ready to fight or run, or both, but right now I need you to hurry the **** up.”

Randal shimmied out of the sleeping bag in a hurry. He started to cram his sleeping bag into the stuff sack when she stopped him.

“Boots first, plate carrier and belt, then sleeping bag.”

He saw she was already wearing hers and had her carbine slung. When next he looked, she was looking down the hill with her monocular.

“Mom?”

“Get all your shit on and get the stuff in the bag. We might have to fight.”

“Fight? Why can’t we just ride away?”

“We might, but I’m not counting on it. I don’t want to have to hope for the kindness of some stranger to bury me and free my horse.”

At that statement, Randal got a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach.
 
Tanya was standing there watching the people walk up the road. They were an interesting group. There were four of them. She couldn’t be sure boys or girls at this range in this light, and at this point, she didn’t give a shit. They were between where she was and where she wanted to go, and headed her way.

Correction, their way. That’s the part that made a difference. She was looking out for more than herself in this matter. She had Randal to worry about. She looked over at him. He was dressed, had his gear on the motorcycle and was coming up next to her now. She leaned over close so her voice wouldn’t carry.

“I’m going to go out there and see what they want. Be ready to take off. If shooting starts, make sure you grab your pack. You know where the link up point is, right?”

“I’m not going to take off and leave you.” Randal said.

“You can and you will if I tell you to.” Her harsh tone cut the thick tension like a sword. She didn’t have time for this. She needed to separate herself from him to avoid them seeing him and tracking him if it all goes to shit.

She stepped out and started down the hill to intercept them before they came too close.

“Can I help you?” She said in a confident and commanding tone, the one someone would use if they found you wandering loose in their backyard.

Several eyes snapped to her. She saw a mix of expressions a couple startled, at least one angry, and she wasn’t sure of the other one.

“I told you I saw movement.” A male voice said.

“Yeah, you did. Now shut your yap.” Another male said.

“You going to answer my question, or do I have to ask it again.” Tanya said forcefully.

“Keep your pants on for now. I don’t feel like screaming up and down the road. Hang on.” The second voice said to her.

“I’m fine with it being a yelling match mister, so you can stop right where you are.”

“Chill the **** out and hang on.” He said as he kept walking forward, now in the lead.

“Mister, I am chill and if you keep walking towards me, you’re going to be positively room temperature.”

At this the man looked up at Tanya.

“Don’t get your panties in a twist. I’m not yelling and screaming up and down this hill.” He said as he kept walking forward.

She wasn’t sure what it was that made the decision for her. She just knew once she had done it. The pistol came out of it’s holster, right on up into a two-handed stance like her father had her do at least a thousand times as a kid growing up. There was no pause in the whole process. It was smooth, not jerky. Slow and deliberate. Draw, raise, grip, squeeze, bang, repeat because anyone worth shooting was worth shooting again.

She looked over at the other three in the sudden silence.

“Anyone else not want to talk from down there?”
 
As surprising as the shot was to the others, hell it was a surprise to Tanya to be honest, the second shot, while quieter than the first, was a serious shock to them all.

Tanya saw the other guy who had been talking go down, his head a pink mist where his shoulders used to be.

Everybody froze.

Tanya saw a look cross over the woman’s face. Tanya couldn’t help it. She had sat and watched that movie far too many times. It was one of her father’s favorites and one of her too. She remembered the slow-mo when Kurt Russel saw the eyes on the guy at the OK Corral shift and he knew what was about to happen and he was powerless to stop it.

The woman’s hand went to her waist. Tanya’s pistol was already out and tracked right to her. Two, three, four rounds and she stopped all purposeful movement. She wasn’t worried about the fourth guy. She saw in her peripheral vision where his head had also ceased to exist.

Tanya stood there not moving in the ringing silence. Nobody was moving. She looked around with her eyes. Near, far, along the horizon. Nothing.

“Oh for ****’s sake.” She turned back and looked over her shoulder.

“OK, pick up your brass, check and make sure everything else is all packed up. I’ll be right there. We leave in five minutes, ready or not.”

Randal didn’t answer her. She saw him stand up from where he had been resting the carbine for his shooting. It hung now on the sling as he moved around.

Tanya turned back to the four bodies. She went down to search them. She didn’t want to but it would be stupid not to. There had been enough stupidity this day and it wasn’t even full daylight yet.

When she got to them, she tried to put her Medic brain in place. When that didn’t work, she tried the SWAT Team one. Nope. Military? Get real. She was Air Force Aircrew. Serious meant proper drinking establishment or hotel selection.

What would dad tell her to do? What would dad want her to do? That did it. That put things in place.

She dumped out the purse she took off the woman’s body and filled it with the things worth taking; weapons, tools, ammo, sealed food or drink. Several lighters (she left the tobacco of questionable origin), pocket knives, flashlights, multi-tools, pistols, ammo, a folding AK in one backpack along with ammo for it, these were going with her. Left behind on their bodies were jewelry, watches, wallets (why four people needed over a dozen wallets she didn’t know), and all the rest.

She wasn’t sure if Randal could do it before. She was worried she would have to throw herself on that grenade to let him escape, not that she wouldn’t do it for him. She just was worried about what would happen to him if she went down. Now she knew he was up to the task, at least this time. Her father told her the hard part wasn’t shooting your first person. It was shooting your second one, after you’ve had time to think about the reality of the first time.

It would be interesting to see how this plays out. She would do everything she could to help him through it, but in the end, he’s the one who had to go through it. She couldn’t do it for him. She would just have to be supportive and try to nudge things and be there for him. Like her father was for her.
 
Packing the extra bag didn’t take long. She put it with the other one from the guy on the horse. Part of her brain wondered how many more bundles of grief she would end up with before they made it to the house. Why the hell was it taking so long? They should have been able to buzz right there now.

She knew why. She didn’t know if the money laundering guys were looking for Randal. Correction, still looking for him. She also knew that with it all coming apart like it did, the fact she had a running vehicle under her made them a huge target.

It shouldn’t be that way, but all the new cars just had to have the latest everything, all connected to the network. OnStar? A tap straight into the whole car. Integrated phone with the Bluetooth to the car and infotainment system? Done. Built in GPS? Done. Basically anything that talked to something else in machine language is suspect and couldn’t be trusted, either for her own use, or next to anything she was using, lest it infect it’s neighbor.

She hated those four people died. Well, they had done it to themselves. To be honest, the part she hated was that Randal was there for that, much less the fact he was the one to shoot two of them.

Better to have shot them than having to have stabbed them, their blood pouring over your arms, drenching you in the…STOP IT!

She wasn’t fifteen, and they weren’t back there. She had other things to worry about than people long dead a lifetime ago.

Tanya leaned back so Randal could lean up next to her head.

“I’m going to find us a place to hole up again so we can move to the house in the dark. I’d rather not show someone else where we are.”

“Sounds good, Mom.”
 
Down the Road


Randal wasn’t sure what the hell was going on. He felt kinda numb. He knows he saw Mom shoot that guy. The Dumbass! Why didn’t he just do what she told him! All she was telling him was to stop so they could talk.

He had watched it all play out, then she shot him. At that point, he knew he had missed something, some secret detail Mom had saw that made her sure he was a bad guy. He started watching through the scope then. He saw the one guy’s hand move to what looked like a pistol. At least he hoped it was a pistol. It wouldn’t make any sense for him to be making a sudden move towards anything else but a weapon.

The crosshairs were in the right place already. He wasn’t going to…couldn’t let him hurt Mom. He had already watched powerless through the phone as they butchered his dad and couldn’t do anything about it. He didn’t like his dad, hated him for the things he did to people. But that didn’t mean he wanted him butchered, parts of his body literally pulled off with pliers, screaming and howling, bleeding and crying. There was absolutely no way he was ever going to watch that shit again!

It all happened so fast. He was barely aware he had done it before it was all over. One minute there were three people standing in front of Mom, then poof! She was standing there in front of the bodies.

She told him to pick up his brass and get ready to go. He must have done it, because here he was, behind her on the motorcycle and they were headed somewhere to hide and wait for night to get to the house, wherever that was. He remembered that detail, but a lot of the rest is hazy.
 
Monica


Monica had been caught in a loop all day. She and Greta had walked around the property, visiting several of the buildings, and while doing so, Monica had eyeballed several of the ‘hidden spots’ her mother made her memorize. These were spots where her mother had put stuff. What stuff, Monica didn’t know. Her mother never told her what was in them, just where to find them and what kind of emergency to go to them for.

Her mother was like that. She hid stuff everywhere. She blamed it on her upbringing, and her father just nodded and said ‘yes, dear’ whenever she told him she wanted to put something away. What was even more jacked up was she only told Monica about half of it. She told Tanya about another string of locations. She had made them swear to not reveal the spots to each other and to never write them down.

It was all a game when they were little, but their mother never let up on the secrecy even as they got older. Her father supported her mother in this. No surprise, given what he did for a living.

The secrecy built into their lives was something that just ‘was’. All through their youth, they spent most of the time during the school year living at their other house in town. It was a small converted fire station not far from their school. It was close enough they were able to walk to school. On the weekends, school breaks, and the summer were spent out here at the country house. The country house was special. It was somewhere not to be talked about with anyone.

It's location, it’s make-up, hell it’s very existence was a secret. They moved out here full time a couple years earlier than Mom and Dad intended, though. It was around the time of the ‘incident’ at school where Tanya got into the fight.

The fight was horrible. Monica was there and saw what happened. The bad part was Monica knew it was partially her fault. The girls started off picking on her, and Tanya got wind of it. She put herself in the middle of the situation. She said it was her responsibility since she was the big sister, being a year older.

It seemed to take forever for everything to calm down after that, even though it was only a couple weeks. Looking back, if that shit would have happened now? Tanya hospitalized one girl, blinded another by literally plucking out her eye like in a Tarantino movie and would have done more but the school safety officers had to hit her with two tasers simultaneously to get her to stop.

Monica still didn’t know how Mom got everything dropped and fixed so fast. She just remembered being scared for months after the whole thing. That was the next to last straw. Before they moved to out here full time. The last straw was the incident at the sleepover.

Tanya had just turned sixteen and a few of some other girls who were her supposed friends set up a birthday sleepover. Well, turns out some of them were still friends of the other bitches Tanya had ****ed up. The whole thing was a set up.

Typical sleepover type stuff, including some drinking. The problem with that? Monica and Tanya had been exposed to alcohol in sufficient repetition in a safe and controlled environment, and along with their Eastern European heritage and DNA, were practically immune to it’s effects at comparable quantities to the average stock standard teenager who was drinking Boon’s Farm to party. Monica and Tanya were drinking watered down wine with dinner since kindergarten. By their teens, Slivo was available to them at home as long as they did so in a responsible manner.

The girls thought they had enough wine in Tanya to make her an easy target The one-eyed bitch showed up right on schedule with her boyfriend. No one was ever sure what their original plan was, but they made the mistake of letting Tanya get to the kitchen.

This time her father was home and was the one to respond to the phone call from the cops. From what the others said, and the pictures Monica was able to see later, Tanya was in one corner of the kitchen, half-conscious, her clothes ripped and torn in places that suggested seriously bad intentions on the part of the others, but no one will ever know exactly what the plan was, or what all happened. Tanya didn’t remember much other than pain, fragmented images and blood everywhere.

The other three bodies in the room weren’t talking to anyone. One, miss one-eye, had a ten-inch chef’s knife buried hilt deep in her chest along with plenty of defensive wounds. The other girl had multiple slashes and bled out before she could crawl away, the slash to her thigh severing the hamstring and the femoral artery.

The biggest mess was both Tanya’s blood and the guy’s blood. He kept attacking her. Some say the head wound on Tanya was the rolling pin, others say it was the plastic knuckles on the gloves he was wearing. Either way, it wasn’t enough to stop Tanya from defending herself.

The report said when Dad got there, she was in the corner holding a 14” Cimeter, her shirt drenched in blood, gore matting her hair and blurring her vision, ready to take on all who approached her. Dad was able to talk to her in Serbian and convince her it was him and let him help her.

After that all shook out, Mom and Dad moved them out to the farmhouse full time. Once Tanya was out of the hospital, she was old enough to drive to school and Monica rode with her until the next year when she was old enough to drive herself.

Monica remembered everyone kinda tiptoed around the both of them. Not great for the social life in high school. Living outside town, She wasn’t sure what all her dad did, but the whole incident seemed to vanish. No charges filed in either direction. It seemed to be that no one wanted that can of worms opened in public ever again.

It wasn’t like Tanya was going to talk about it. She consistently claimed to have no real details of the incident, whether talking to Monica or anyone else.

She still remembered the one time she saw the pictures. The folder was on her father’s desk. The kitchen looked like a slaughterhouse and the pictures in there of Tanya, covered in blood and gore scared the ever-loving shit out of her. It wasn’t the blood though. It was the look in her eyes.

It was weird. She looked both haunted and feral, scared and hungry.
 
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Tanya


They were moving along when Tanya suddenly though of a new concept. With everything going on, and since their direction of travel went right past there, they could stop in at Mr Fitzgerald’s and hang out until dark.

He was the old man who used to run cattle on their farm years ago and still did the odd jobs keeping the place whole since her and Monica weren’t living there full time. He had sold off his cows when he no longer felt like the hassle, and now just lived on his railroad pension.

She hadn’t seen him in several years but knew he would help her if he could.

That last part turned out to be the problem.

When she pulled into the driveway, something felt ‘off’. She had Randal slide of the back of the motorcycle.

“Randal, pack on, carbine in hand. Anything happens, compass heading 284, go until you hit the ravine and hide. Wait for me for an hour. No more. If I haven’t come or you hear more commotion, follow the ravine to the left until it gets to a fence. Go under the fence then due north to the clump of trees on the ridgeline. Got me?”

“Two-eighty-four to the ravine, turn left, turn north at the fence, go to the clump of trees on the ridge.”

Tanya was both proud and sad. Proud he remembered her instructions and was ready to follow them without question. Sad that he was ready to follow them without question not because of only his trust for her, but out of acceptance that this was what the world has become.

She watched him move to the side of the driveway, ready to bolt, as she prepared her own gear. She had her pistol in hand, her pack on her back and the carbine slung as she walked up to the door. She had no idea what she would find inside, but the old man’s car was here in the driveway and he hadn’t come out to investigate the sounds of tires on the gravel driveway or the sound of the motorcycle’s engine.
 
As she approached the door, she thought she knew what she would find. The house, even outside, had an empty feeling to it. Not like the person was off going shopping. Gone.

Now the worry was if this was something peaceful or violent. That was her big concern now. She looked back across the driveway to where Randal stood ready to bolt. She raised her hand in a ‘stop’ motion. She didn’t want him rabbiting for no reason.

She turned back to the door and tried the knob. Unlocked as always. She turned the knob all the way and pushed the door gently. As it swung open, her nose confirmed what her heart had already told her. He was gone.

She walked carefully inside and looked around, still on guard. Everything was in it’s proper place, exactly where Martha had kept them back before she passed, and he did so out of habit and love.

It was in the sun room she found him. He was sitting in the chair, his morning coffee on the little table next to him. He had been gone since probably the first day. As she thought about it, she knew what probably happened.

He had a pacemaker, one of the newer ones that was both a demand pacemaker and defibrillator. It sent updates to the cardiologist to monitor his heart. In the old days he had to hold the phone handset up to the device to sync and download, but the new ones were wireless and did it all in the background without the person even knowing.

The virus or worm or whatever the hell killed all the computers killed him too, either by screwing it up so it didn’t do it’s job, or actively screwed up his heart. Either way, whichever way it happened, it was quick. He didn’t even spill his coffee or fall out of his chair.

She knew she had to go let Randal know it was safe and they would hide in the barn until nightfall. OK, he would hide in the barn after helping her carry him out of the house and over to the little plot in the shade of the pear tree. She would be busy digging to put him next to Martha.

He loved her every day of his life, even after she was gone. She thought she had a love like that once, but she was wrong. She was glad they were together now. Putting their bodies together was the least she could do.
 
Later


It was hot and hard work. As she dug, she thought about how she had dealt with more bodies this week than in a whole month on the ambulance. Her thoughts were pinwheeling around from fatigue and delayed stress, too, and she knew it.

Randal had seemed subdued as he helped her move the body. He tried to insist on helping her dig, but she didn’t want him out in the open any more than necessary. If it hadn’t been Mr Fitzgerald’s body, she would have just pulled him herself on a sheet ot carpet so he could have stayed safe in the barn entirely, but Mr Fitzgerald deserved better than being treated like a sack of leaves headed for the burn pit.

When she was done and before she went to the barn, she used the old rain catchment barrel’s showerhead to rinse the sand and grime off. It was cold as hell, but she needed the cleansing feel of it. It drove back the angry voice in her head. She didn’t need to have it too close to the surface where it could leap out and snap at Randal. He has been beyond wonderful and didn’t deserve any of that side of her.

When she went into the barn, Randal had a small snack pulled out and ready for her. He was doing what he could, what she would let him do. A wordless hug, a light snak, and then blissful sleep as she waited for darkness.
 
OK, it was supposed to be blissful. Instead, it was full of assassin robots, killer drones and computer commands. She sat up abruptly. Someone was touching her.

“Mom? Are you ok now?”

It was Randal. They were in the barn. It was dark. She tried to make sense of the dream. Nightmare actually. It was full of robots taking over the world, using them like cows or batteries like in the Matrix movies.

“Maybe it’s better all the computers died before AI took over everything. Maybe somebody got smart and pulled the plug before it got the chance to ‘Skynet’.”

“What are you talking about, Mom?” Randal was staring at her now. She didn’t realize she was talking out loud.

“Nothing. Bad dreams. Let’s get everything packed. I want to be at the house tonight.”
 
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