THAT NIGHT
The blast did a hell of a lot more damage to the wall I parked my car next to than it did to me. Well, sort of.
I pushed a pile of bricks off my chest and tried to sit up, my legs still buried under a bricklayers nightmare of jumbled and broken rectangles. I must have blacked out, but it couldn’t have been for more than a minute. My car spat big orange whips of fire and dust still fell from the remains of the carport wall. From my back I could see the slumping sunshade overhang take another dip toward the ground with a crack of masonry and I didn’t feel all that safe underneath.
That would suck to survive a bomb explosion only to be killed by poor roof construction.
My head pounded, my ears rang and my body ached all over, especially my breasts which took a hit from what I think was a hubcap right as my car exploded. Parking so close to that brick wall saved my life. It acted as a sort of blast shield and although I got covered in heavy bricks and dust, their attempt to kill me was a failure.
I pushed the bricks off my legs and forced myself to my knees. Something dug into my ass and I reached around into my back pocket and pulled out my cell phone. Cracked case, shattered screen, no numbers to enter my passcode and wake her up. That’s when I saw two things: a pair of guys walking from the far end of the parking lot looking at me like I was a zombie or something, and another figure, a woman, standing on the other side of the burning car and looking about as dazed as I felt.
She was the same size as me, same hair, same build. I knew I should be worried about the two guys walking toward me because even through the smoke I could see the confusion on their faces, wondering why I wasn’t dead. But I was too interested in the woman.
She turned and her face lit up in the firelight, bending in warps of heat. Somehow the fire glow looked good on her, like it was the only lighting she should ever have. As I looked at her face I started to think about concussions and brain damage. Something sure as hell went wrong with my head, my eyes, the whole shebang.
The woman standing in a red-orange pool of color—was me.
Well, she looked like me. A whole hell of a lot like me. She even had my same outfit on. But, I knew it was crazy. Just the brain injury talking, or seeing. Hallucinating after a head trauma was a bad sign, right?
I set down my hands so I was on all fours. Too early to be too upright. I lifted my head and looked at her again. Through the fire her image wavered and I knew it had to be a trick of the light. I didn’t have time to work it all out. My brain was working slow, if it was really working at all. And more urgently—our two friends arrived.
Young Latinos, mid-20s, dressed casually as if planting a car bomb was something they did alternating Saturdays of each month. Blow some lady up, go catch a flick. No big deal. Fat semi-automatics sprouted from the waistlines of their low-riding pants inviting jokes about over-compensating for something.
They didn’t act like they had seen the other lady. All eyes on me, the rage of their failed bomb. I tried to stand, but my legs weren’t quite into the idea. I spit, trying to clear the masonry dust from my mouth.
The two men looked down on me with utter confusion. I looked back at them like, hey I’m as surprised as you I didn’t die in the blast, but wait until you turn around and see another of me. Please tell me you see it too. I don’t want to have permanent ghosts in my vision.
“You are one tough cockroach to kill, lady,” said the fat one on the left. He said it with something resembling respect.
I tried reaching into my bottomless bag of retorts and insults I saved for scum like him, but I came up blank. The needle skipping grooves in my brain was different than regular blanking out. A feeling I can’t describe, but it was as if I couldn’t insult him. Not that I couldn’t think of anything bad to say, but my mouth wouldn’t have let me say it even if I did have the perfect zinger. Even a not-so-perfect “fuck off” caught somewhere deeper than my throat, down around my intestines or something.
I got to one knee so I looked less like a sorority girl barfing up a night of too much vodka and more like a soccer player taking a knee to get bitched out by a coach. As my brain cleared a little I remembered my gun. Standard issue—all DEA agents carried them. That came back to me too. I am Samantha Whelan, special agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency. I have a gun and I know how to use it.
Of course that gun sat in the glove box of my car. I knew better than to walk in to a meeting with Calder and Rizzo packing a Beretta.
I moved toward the car, reaching out for the door, and then my muscles stopped obeying orders. At first I thought my arm was caught on something. I tried again. Move fast or these guys will finish the job up close and personal. Old school cartel style.
But I couldn’t. I froze up solid as Lot’s wife. That damn feeling again. My body wouldn’t let me reach for my gun.
And it wasn’t just that. In some deep and cobweb-filled part of my brain where you keep all the stuff you know you know but don’t have to think about knowing, right next to riding a bike and saying excuse me after you burp, my brain understood something new. Shooting people is wrong. And I couldn’t do something wrong. Instantly I knew if I did something as small and stupid as raising a middle finger to these two, my body would intercept the message and set a match to it, drop it in an ashtray and never let it get through the dark catacombs of my mind.
I was worried. Some connection in my brain seemed to have severed in the blast. Maybe that hubcap hit more than just my chest. Maybe it and a few bricks zinged off my head and knocked loose a few wires.
Understanding didn’t do me a lot of good against the two guys who were drawing their guns on me. I got the impression how I died wasn’t important, only that I did. The car bomb wasn’t any sort of big construct, just what they happened to pull out of the hat today. A .45 round to the brain would do fine.
But they didn’t figure on the imaginary lady.
I don’t know what part of the car she hit them with but it was long, hard and on fire.
The fatter guy on the left got it first. The flaming metal sword slapped the side of his head and he tipped into his partner, knocking him off balance. I sank down on my butt in my nest of broken bricks and watched her work, thinking again how much she looked like me. My brain seemed to be projecting some sort of wish fulfillment. This badass girl was what I wanted to look like. Cracking skulls on some bad guys and looking like she was walking a Paris runway while doing it. Apparently violence was not off limits for her. She really seemed to enjoy it.
Her foot came down on the fat guy’s face, pinning him to the concrete while his hair burned and sent noxious fumes into the air. The toe of her black boots pinched his cheeks so his cries of pain and pleas to extinguish his hair were muted and easily ignored. She stomped her other boot down on his gun hand, pinning him at the wrist and rendering his weapon useless.
Using fat boy as a stage, she raised the flaming hunk of car and plunged it down, Xena Warrior Princess style, into the skinny one’s chest. He squawked and then quickly went quiet.