The Exiled by Christopher Charles Read Free Book Online Page A

torn out, the yard crowded with shopping carts.
    “They’re waiting for the new Ford model,” Dunham said.
    He cut the lights, switched off the engine. The alley went dark.
    “I’ve got two ski masks in the glove compartment. Put one on.”
    Dunham reached behind him, took a pair of aluminum bats off the backseat.
    “Remember,” he said. “The idea is to fuck a few of these skels up so bad the whole block scatters.”
    “Looks like most of them left already.”
    “We need them all to leave.”
    Dunham glanced up and down the alley. Raney stood beside him, felt something greater than adrenaline take hold—power laced with fear, an almost giddy anticipation.
    “Christ,” Dunham said. “We’re about to make some shitty lives a whole lot shittier.”
    They flipped a shopping cart, climbed up through what had been the porch door, and entered a gutted kitchen—appliances gone, sink gone, electrical wire torn from the sockets. A narrow hallway connected the front and back of the house. Two rooms on the left, staircase on the right. Light flickered through bare door frames. A slow and droning conversation seemed to come from nowhere in particular.
    “You want the front or back?” Dunham asked.
    “Front.”
    Front gave him a chance to clear the room before Dunham could survey his work.
    “All right,” Dunham whispered. “If the upstairs junkies slip past us, who gives a shit? We’re looking to send a message. Just make sure it’s a clear message.”
    Dunham pulled the Glock from his waistband. “Fear-of-God time,” he said.
    He fired three rounds into the floor. Raney jetted, suppressed a Hands, hands, show me your fucking hands. Inside, three skels huddled around a garden-pail fire. Skel 1 was tied off, a needle jutting from his bicep. Skels 2 and 3 were roasting marshmallows on chopsticks, calm, as though the sound of Dunham’s Glock had died in the kitchen. Raney spotted a fourth lying under the front window, wrapped in blankets. The Boy Scout skels saw him, dropped their sticks, stood with their hands folded behind their heads. Glassine eyes sunk deep in sallow faces; no meat and hardly any bone. Impossible to guess an age, to say if they were twenty-five or fifty. Their friend was weaving through a heavy nod. Raney fired at the floor near his feet. The man raised himself up, fell face-forward, jerked back when the flames licked his forehead.
    “Get him out of here,” Raney hissed.
    He tucked the gun back in his waistband, lifted the bat over his head, swung at the empty vials scattered across the floor.
    “This is your fucking eviction notice.”
    “Jesus, man. We wasn’t hurting nobody, we just…”
    Raney palmed the handle of his gun.
    “You ain’t hearing me. Run, motherfucker. You don’t live here anymore.”
    They hobbled off, dragging their friend between them, protesting in a flatlined drawl Raney couldn’t decipher. He started for the man in the blanket, stopped at the sound of Dunham’s voice echoing from the other room.
    “Did everyone here just shit themselves at once?”
    Raney heard what sounded like a body hurled against a wall, then a woman screaming. He stepped into the hallway, wondering how he would play it if Dunham went too far, wondering what too far meant. A pair of eyes gleamed down from the top of the stairs. Raney waved the man on, raised his hands as a sign of peace. A small militia of junkies came barreling down the staircase, tripping, bouncing off the remains of an oak banister.
    Dunham:
    “So you’re a hero now? You’d bash her head in yourself if I gave you a dimebag to do it.”
    He let loose another round. The woman lost her voice, started dry-heaving.
    “What? I didn’t touch you.”
    Two more shots followed by a scattering through the hall, one of the junkies yelling, “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” another gripping his head, blood spilling through his fingers. Then Dunham smacking the woman around, taunting her: “It must be easier to suck dick with no