The Complex by Brian Keene Read Free Book Online Page B

Sam scurries out of her way and follows the rest of them into his apartment.
    “Move those bookshelves over to the windows,” Sam orders, as he slams and locks the door. “Don’t worry about the books. Just dump them on the floor. We need to move fast.”
    “What about the kitchen?” the old lady asks. “You’ve got windows in there, too.”
    “We’ll use the fridge.” As Sam starts toward the kitchen, he glances at Shaggy and Turo. “Don’t just stand there. Move!”
    “Mommy,” the kid wails. “Make them stop!”
    Her only response is to sob.
    Outside, a chainsaw sputters, chokes, and then roars to life. The naked people begin battering the door. The blows are almost as loud as the gunshots were. The door rattles in its frame, and the knob jiggles, but the lock holds. The rumbling of the chainsaw draws closer.
    Turo and Shaggy’s eyes meet, as the pounding on the door increases.
    “Dude,” Turo gasps, breathless. “What the fuck is going on?”
    “I don’t fucking know,” Shaggy replies, “but whatever it is, we’re deep in it now.”

Six - Grady Hicks: Apartment 6-D
     
     
    Grady Hicks hasn’t had a dream about Vietnam since 1988. Years of therapy and counseling—not to mention two divorces and three decades of sobriety—have seen to that. And he’s not dreaming about his time in Vietnam now, either.
    Instead, he’s dreaming about what happened to him after he got home.
    Grady made it back to the world in April of 1967, but still had a year left on his enlistment. That July, Grady was asleep in his apartment off-base, his first wife resting next to him, when he got a call telling him to muster at his barracks with full gear in an hour. The next thing he knew, Grady and the rest of the 82 nd Airborne’s 3 rd Brigade were on their way to Selfridge Air Force Base near Detroit. Two days later, Governor George Romney and President Lyndon B. Johnson deployed them to help quell the 12 th Street race riots.
    Grady saw a lot of things during his time in Vietnam—the type of things a person spent the rest of their lives trying to forget. But in some ways, what he saw during those two days in Detroit were worse than the most savage atrocity committed by the Viet Cong. Detroit, and particularly 12 th Street, was a war zone. There were storefronts and row-homes instead of bamboo and mud huts, Molotov cocktails rather than punji sticks, concrete instead of rice paddies, and Saturday Night Specials instead of M-16s, but it was a war all the same.
    They mustered at a local high school, where Grady and the other black soldiers were given the option of not going out onto the streets. Instead, they were informed that if they wanted to, they could pull service duty instead—laundry, kitchen, communications, and other jobs around the temporary base. Grady had declined, knowing that if he opted for a support role, he’d never see himself the same again from the eyes of his fellow soldiers. Maybe they wouldn’t think less of him, but he would expect them to, and that was just as bad.
    And so, armed with rubber bullets and sheaths over their bayonets, they’d marched out into the city, showing force and guarding utility workers and emergency responders. Within two days of their deployment, the riots ended, leaving more than forty people dead. During those two days, Grady witnessed police officers—the same police officers he was there to support—abusing citizens in their custody. He was attacked by both blacks and whites, and called an Uncle Tom and a race traitor more times than he could count. Worst of all was the mindset of the rioters and looters, the frenzied madness which seemed to claim them all. Their grievances were legitimate. Grady agreed with them, intellectually and emotionally. He even empathized—to a point—with their desire for violence. But what he saw occurring had nothing to do with justice or revolution or even simple payback. It was more a pack mentality, an animalistic mindset of