MOLON LABE; Or, Come And Take Them

August 2028

It was a dark and stormy night, the kind of storm that had already sent all the sanest residents of Fort Lauderdale scurrying north and inland, as far from the coast as they could get. They were carrying just what they could cram into their cars, jamming up the highway for miles and miles around. You could hear them leave before the rain started, wailing on their horns as they tried to squeeze themselves off the on ramps and onto I-95, where no one left a single inch of space to let them join the parade. Now that the rain had started in full, slapping down in sheets carried by gusts of wind, the cars couldn’t be heard above the rush of water. They were still there, still barely moving, their faintly-seen headlights the only evidence of their passage. Even now, people continued to try to leave, though it probably was better to hunker down and wait it out at this point. 

Klyde had seen the endless line of them earlier, when he and his cousin Jay had taken Jay’s beat-up white van out to scout the streets through the torrent, checking to see how many cops were still out in this weather. Looking up at all the people leaving, Klyde thought it was insane to risk being stranded in a car on a highway in a crowd of trapped vehicles with no place to go in the worst storm in at least a decade, but that was the chance that people were continuing to take. 

The truly sane had left days ago, when it was still sunny and bright, as soon as the weathermen had started really warning that this would be The Big One: a hurricane that crawled north through the Atlantic rather than swooped, gathering power as it went. It hovered over the tropics before mozying up towards Florida. The sane people were gone long before the governor said to evacuate. But perhaps sane could be substituted by rich : people who had jobs they could up and leave, people who had cars and could pay for gas to idle on the highway for hours, people who had a place to go— inland and north— or who could at least pay for a hotel.

Klyde was not one of these people. Nor was Jay, nor were Jay’s friends who were all sitting at the counter of the Waffle House, the one on Powerline Drive, chatting with the cook. 

Jay was tall and good looking, with his dark brown hair slicked back into a tight ponytail at the back of his head, baby hairs at the nape of his neck fraying out against the spiderweb tattoo that sprawled around his throat. He controlled the conversation he and his four friends were having— when he said something and smiled, the rest laughed; when he drummed his calloused fingers impatiently on the red fiberglass counter, everyone else listened to whatever pronouncement he was going to make. The cook was his friend from way back, high school maybe a decade ago, and he gave them all free eggs and pancakes and glasses of orange juice: the power was going to go out, and anything left in the fridge would have to be thrown out when people came back in to inspect the damage. Might as well feast while they could. Still, Jay slipped the cook and the lone waitress crisp bills, ones that never made it into the register. 

The floor of the restaurant was littered with mop buckets strategically placed beneath drips in the ceiling, and every so often the waitress, usually sitting on the other side of the counter from Jay and ignoring all the men by looking at her phone, had to get up and empty them. Whenever she opened the door to dump a bucket out into the rain, more water flooded in to pool on the linoleum than she was getting rid of. It was a futile endeavor, and she might not have bothered. As soon as she left, the buckets would fill to overflowing. But they were all just killing time, waiting for the same thing, and she might as well empty the buckets while she was there. 

The waitress was thinking about going home to feed her dog, and how she was going to take the little shivering ten-year-old chihuahua out to shit in this weather. The cook wanted everybody else to leave so that he could squeeze his station wagon in the exact gap between the dumpster and the side of the building, the safest place he could picture in this weather, and lay down in the back to sleep the whole thing off. Everyone could leave when the lights went off; everyone was waiting for the power to go out.

Klyde was by himself at a booth, drinking his fourth or fifth mug of coffee, staring out the window and jiggling his knee so violently that it caused the silverware left on his plate to rattle. Through the haze of rain he could make out the Sunoco across the street, its price sign glowing red, all the numbers zeroed out— no gas left there. This road was nearly empty: one or two cars went by a minute, their tires spraying near-continuous rooster tails of water. It was already an inch or so deep on the road, even as flat as the roads were. The ground was too wet to absorb any more of it, and yet it kept coming down. And this wasn’t even the worst of the storm, which wasn’t supposed to arrive until tomorrow morning. Klyde didn’t understand how the world could hold so much water in it. The cup overfloweth.

Thunder shook the windowpanes of the Waffle House, though through the rain Klyde hadn’t even been able to see the lightning.

“Are you really bringing the kid with you?” the cook asked, loud enough for Klyde to hear that he was being discussed.

“I’m fifteen,” he said under his breath. 

“He’s been staying with me the last month and a half,” Jay said. “He can consider it rent money.” He glanced behind himself at Klyde. “You’ll make it worth it, right?”

“Yeah.”

Jay turned back to the cook. “Well, he asked to come, anyway. It’s not like I’m forcing him.”

The cook laughed. “Didn’t want to be left home alone in the storm, Cody?”

“Klyde,” he said.

“His codename,” Jay clarified, with an indulgent tone of voice that made him reconsider the whole thing. “Like Hurricane Bonnie and.”

“With a K,” Klyde said, which made Jay’s friends and the cook laugh.

“Whatever,” the cook said.

The thunder roared again, and the lights flickered, though they held out. For the moment, anyway. Jay looked at the glowing face of his watch, a chunky retro thing he wore as a fashion statement, and said, “Probably just a few more minutes.”

“Why don’t we just get moving?” one of his friends asked. But it was such a stupid question that Jay didn’t even deign to give it an answer. They wouldn’t be able to start their break in until after power was out and cameras were down, and things like automatic gates could only be lifted by hand without detection if they were turned off completely.

“Man if you can’t be patient now, I don’t know how you’ll survive prison when you get caught and thrown in there,” the cook said. “Oh—” And the lights flickered, once, twice, three times, and then everyone held their breath for a long second, and the lights didn’t come back on. “Guess you didn’t have to wait after all.”

The remaining light in the building was eerie: the battery glow of the emergency exit signs providing the main illumination, along with the waitress’s cell phone flashlight that she shone around. The light glinted off of the whites of eyes and teeth, and flashed on silverware as one member of Jay’s crew shoveled the rest of his breakfast-dinner into his mouth, even as Jay stood up and pulled on his windbreaker— feeble protection against this weather.

“Finish your coffee, Cody,” Jay said. “We’re going.”

“Klyde.”

“Finish your coffee, Bonnie And.”

“Hey— man— if he doesn’t want to go, I can give him a ride home,” the cook offered. 

Everyone did the man the favor of ignoring this comment. Klyde stuffed his hands into his pockets and stood a few steps behind Jay’s shoulder. The rest of his cousin’s crew swarmed around him, easy where Klyde was stiff, familiar where Klyde was lost. They shoved each other and kicked water from the puddles on the linoleum at each other’s legs, swerving around Klyde like he was a piece of the scenery, a load bearing column that they just had to dodge. This continued until Jay told them all to cut it out, and they shuffled out into the weather together.

The rain and the wind hit the instant that they stepped outside, making everyone hunch involuntarily. It was a physical force, ice cold despite the heat of the summer, making it impossible to keep moving in a straight line. The wind would push your feet out from under you as you picked them up off the ground; you had to shuffle to avoid your body becoming a sail. It tried to tear Klyde’s thin shirt from his body, but the rain plastered it to his skinny chest, and whipped strings of his hair into his eyes. He glanced behind himself at the dim interior of the Waffle House, the building looking like a solid and warm refuge against the wind that was trying to shove him down to the ground. The journey from the door to the van must have only lasted seconds, but it felt like an eternity of raising his arm to shield his face. Down the street, there was a wobbling, thrumming sound: the wind vibrating the metal street signs as easily as someone might shake a laminated piece of paper. It wouldn’t be long until they ripped free. The trees were throwing down their palm leaves and bowing towards the throne of God. 

They splashed their way to Jay’s ratty white van, with the decal of a long-defunct catering service on the side. The van had been abandoned at the body shop where Jay worked, and it had become his by habit rather than any exchange of money or title. The registration was years out of date, the plates from who-knows-where, and if the thing was ever towed it would never be retrieved. Jay’s friend German took shotgun, leaving the remaining four to climb into the back, sitting cross legged on the felt-carpeted interior. As Jay coaxed the engine to life, Klyde looked with no small amount of jealousy at the front seat.

A few days ago, he had ridden shotgun, as he and Jay had gone around taking stock of what areas would make the best targets. They faked being a delivery service to get into the gated community, and so they were let through onto the still pristine, still quiet streets. On that evening, in the sweltering heat and bright sunlight of the Florida August, Klyde sat without a seatbelt on, his skinny legs sticking to the leather underneath him as he knelt on the passenger seat, leaning out the open window as they drove slowly through the neighborhood. He scanned the driveways and open garages, looking for bumper stickers on cars in the shapes of guns, MOLON LABE, hunting racks on trucks, easy targets. Wrote down the addresses as they passed. It had been fun, then, the wind in his hair and the radio fuzzing out far too loud for the van’s shitty speakers to handle. Jay slapped the steering wheel and sang along, and he quirked his lips in an approving smile whenever Klyde spotted a promising target.

“They’ll definitely all be gone when we get here, right?” Klyde asked over the roar of the music.

“Yeah.”

“And if they’re not?”

“You don’t have to come.”

“Come on, man.”

“We won’t go up to any house that’s got a car. Pretty simple.”

“But what if somebody stayed behind?” Klyde asked. They slowly passed a house where the black Ford parked in the driveway bore an I PROTECT WHAT’S MINE sticker. He dutifully wrote down the address. “Like, to stop us.”

“All bark and no bite,” Jay said. He cocked his head, the sunset-light throwing him into profile as Klyde looked over at him. “They’re not real.”

Klyde didn’t know what he meant, but it felt true, in the way that most things Jay said felt true. Jay was real— maybe the only real person in the world.

His jotted-down notes were still sticking out of the glovebox, and now German pulled them out to begin reading them to Jay, giving him directions and telling him the best way to avoid the highway until Jay told him to shut the fuck up, I know where I’m going.

The rain beating down on the sides of the van made it too loud to talk, so they rode in silence, bracing themselves as best they could against the walls and pressing their hands to the floor to stop themselves from being knocked around. Jay drove slowly, but holes in the road were now invisible; turns became dangerous with the slick of water covering the ground; and when the car was pointed across the wind, every gust threatened to roll it. Only once, when they turned towards the ocean, did Klyde crawl onto his hands and knees to get a good look out the front window. In the eerie storm-light, the van’s headlights carving out the barest sliver of road in front of them and lightning providing the rest of the illumination, he could see the waves slopping up onto the beach, crests as tall as buildings, hungry hands that threatened to take cars right off the shore road if they weren’t careful. Jay drove on the wrong side of the road, avoiding the deeper water closer to the ocean that lurched up towards their tires. Their van seemed to contain the only living things for miles around.

When they passed a semi-truck that had rolled onto its side like a beached whale, its headlights still on, spilling light like blood onto the watery road, one of Jay’s friends grabbed Klyde’s collar and hauled him back down into a sitting position in the back of the van while they made a particularly perilous turn. Klyde fought him off until he let go, whacking his arm, but sat back down as the van made a particularly hard turn, and sent him crashing into the wall with a thump that bruised his side. 

When they reached the gated community that was their destination, they stopped the van in front of the abandoned guard station. A tree had fallen down across one side of the road, caving in the roof of the little hut, and the sign bearing the name of the community had been ripped from its wooden posts, but the other side of the road was still clear. The mechanical gate was down, and so Jay and German climbed out of their seats into the rain to shove it upwards, fighting the wind the whole way. One of the guys from the back of the van climbed into the driver’s seat, and moved the idling van forward into the gated community. Jay and German climbed back into the rear of the van, bringing in a new drenching of water as they went. 

They lurched forward along the winding streets. The houses provided some windbreaks here, but there were trees downed across the road at multiple points, and the guy driving the van had to take alternate routes through. German climbed back into the passenger seat to give directions, which Klyde didn’t pay attention to. He instead looked into Jay’s face in the dim light in the back of the van. Jay leaned on the front seat, kneeling, and looked out the windshield, pointing and occasionally saying something to the new driver. Only once did he turn back towards Klyde, giving him a tight lipped smile. Klyde resisted the urge to look away.

“Are you ready?” Jay asked.

It wasn’t fair— Jay wasn’t asking that of anybody else. Klyde shrugged and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I’m here, right?”

“It’s fun,” Jay said. “You’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly.” And he broke into a radiant smile, impossibly genuine. It would be fun.

The van lurched to a stop at the side of the road, in front of a house with windows dark like eyes, and no cars in the driveway or signs of life anywhere. This whole neighborhood was deserted— nobody this close to the water, with money enough to own this kind of place, was dumb enough to stick around. Klyde didn’t blame them. The wind almost bowled him over as they exited the van, and the doors nearly slammed shut on his leg— only Jay hauling them open, leaning with the full weight of his body, stopped them from smashing inwards. 

They left the car idling with one person in the driver’s seat— they wouldn’t be at this house for long.

Carrying flashlights and bags from the van, they all staggered their way around the back of the building, ignoring the front door. There was the in-ground pool, its water frothing with the wind like a miniature ocean. The grill was tipped over, and the lawn furniture had blown into the pool itself, some of it tangled in the low steps to enter the shallower end. This side of the house had a glass door, and it was this that German smashed with a crowbar, then reached through the hole to undo the latch to let them all in.

They stumbled into the living room, leaving muddy footprints all over the clean white carpet. The place smelled like flowers, and the roar of the rain was muted. It was like they had entered into a different world. One of Jay’s friends flopped down onto the leather couch and kicked his feet up on the coffee table. “Damn, nice place here.”

“Get up,” Jay snapped. “Let’s be fast.” For the first time, there was a note of stress in his voice, and it came out in the command. This didn’t stop his crew from obeying him— if anything it impressed upon them the seriousness of the moment. There were fifteen houses on their list— if they could get through half of them before the weather got too bad to drive away, it would be a miracle, and they would have to move fast to do it. They started fanning out through the house, looking for the gun safe.

Klyde tagged behind Jay, who glanced at him, annoyed, but didn’t say anything. They could cover more ground in the house if they split up. The annoyed look but lack of comment made Klyde feel patronized.

“I don’t have a flashlight,” he explained.

Jay gave a half laugh and handed his over, shoving the chunky yellow light into Klyde’s hands.

“You want me to hold it for you?”

But Jay pulled his phone from his pocket and turned on the thin flashbulb, shining it at Klyde. “I’ll see just fine.”

It was a dismissal, a real one now, and so Klyde split off from Jay in the hallway, glancing behind himself just once as Jay walked away into a dark room. Klyde headed upstairs by himself. He didn’t think he had ever been in a house this nice before, and when he swung his flashlight around, family photos leered out at him from the stairwell’s walls, strangers’ eyes on him. Not real , he reminded himself, and stomped further up. He didn’t have a good intuition of the layout of the house, and so the first door he tried ended in a bathroom, and the next in a child’s bedroom. The third door was his intended target: the master bedroom.

He didn’t really know what he was looking for, or where it would be located. Jay didn’t own a gun safe, he just kept his piece in a drawer of his desk in his place. Klyde knew where it was, and he had seen Jay strap it underneath his shirt when they left his apartment this morning. Jay hadn’t meant for him to see it; he had gotten dressed while Klyde was still sleeping, but it was a studio apartment, and Klyde had been on the couch while Jay had the bed. The sound of him waking up in the morning and fishing through the drawers of his beat up rolltop had made him crack his eyes open, barely seeing what Jay was doing in the dim light coming in from the bathroom. It had been too early, and Klyde had been too tired, for it to make him nervous then— the idea that Jay might want to be prepared for trouble. It seemed now like they wouldn’t need it; this house was empty, and the other ones would be, too.

Now, Klyde looked under the bed and saw nothing but dusty plastic boxes, then opened the closet and pushed past clothing in bags. Out of curiosity, thinking that it wouldn’t take more than a minute, he opened the drawers of the dresser and looked through them for cash or jewelry— it wasn’t what they were there for, but it couldn’t hurt to grab. There wasn’t anything interesting: socks, underwear. With a careless swipe, he tossed the contents of each drawer on the floor, strewing intimates everywhere. He grabbed a fistful of the silk bedspread from the king bed and pulled that to the floor, too— a wave of casual destruction.

Over the roar of the rain and the cracking of thunder, he heard a whoop of victory from downstairs, and he abandoned his search of the bedroom, tumbling back down to the first floor. He met the rest of the group in a dark-wood paneled office, deer heads and diplomas on the walls. The gun safe was in a cabinet, recognizable now that he understood that this was their quarry, and one of Jay’s crew had already gotten the lock open. Jay turned and smiled when he saw Klyde come in.

“Check it,” he said, and held up a big, heavy looking gun, all black metal, lit by the dizzying sway of flashlight beams as the rest of the group rifled through cabinet drawers for ammunition.

“Sick,” Klyde said. “Can I have it?”

Jay didn’t bother to answer the question. He tried stuffing the gun into one of the big duffel bags they had brought, but it didn’t fit, so instead he slung it over his shoulder.

“Think that’s it for this place.”

There were no basements in houses around here, not so close to the water as they were, so the sweep through the first floor had probably revealed all that there was to reveal. They left the way they had come in. As they passed through the broken glass door towards the pool, Klyde caught a glimpse of his reflection strutting along behind Jay’s— a grin stuck to his face that even the torrential blast of rain didn’t wipe away as they ran, laughing, to the van.

They clambered in and were on to the next house (safe empty), and then the next (they couldn’t get the lock open), and a third (guns in an easy glass-and-chickenwire case that they just smashed their way through).

By the fifth house, Klyde was exhausted, though the smile was still wired through his face, and the excitement from the last place was carrying him along. This house was a sprawling single story and didn’t have a glass door, so they had to break a window. Since Klyde was the smallest of their number, he was the one who got hoisted up on slippery wet hands and shoved across the windowsill, landing in a puddle on the inside, so that he could undo the lock on the front door and get everyone else in. 

The weather— which had already been unimaginably bad— was getting much worse. Driving the car forward had been a challenge, and it had gotten knocked towards the side of the road several times, even moving as slowly as they were. This would be the last house they hit, and it would be best to get through it quickly. Everyone understood this, and they spread out, crashing through rooms and banging open every door.

Klyde helped them find the safe, but when it was time for them to crack the lock, he instead wandered towards the kitchen, where he tugged open the doors of the slick, silent refrigerator and helped himself to a beer on the lower shelf, and some cookies from the cupboards. He sat on the marble island and looked out the window at the rain. Down the opposite end of the street, not the way they had approached from, a line of decorative palms had toppled down, blocking the road. The beer tasted awful as he sat there, and the chocolate chips only made it worse. Nevertheless, it suffused him with warmth, despite the dripping chill of his clothing, and the screaming of the storm outside.

Down the hall, he heard a cry of victory as they got the safe open, and he raised his beer in a silent, tired toast to their success. As he tilted his head back to finish it, he heard another sound. Barely audible between the drone of the rain and the roar of the thunder, past the walls of the house, came the reedy blare of someone leaning on their car horn. 

Klyde dropped down from the kitchen island and leaned over the sink, craning his neck so he could see outside. The van was still sitting out front, but in the very far distance, flashes of red and blue light were caught in the raindrops and bouncing off the white stucco house walls.

“The cops!” Klyde yelled. “The cops!” Again, for good measure. 

His voice was high and tight with panic, squeaking out of his throat and cracking as it left his mouth. But his screams and the sound of his feet pounding through the hallways of the house got the attention of Jay and everybody else, and Jay herded everyone out of the room, out of the house, into the gale, into the back of the van. He hardly noticed the rain or the wind or the cold as they moved— a sudden strength making him run in a straight line, or perhaps the wind had just calmed for a second, enough to allow it. They left the front door of the house yawning open behind them, rattling in the wind, flooding the building with water.

Klyde didn’t make it into the back of the van— Jay shoved him towards the front, and he ended up riding shotgun next to the driver, who peeled out into the street before all the doors were even closed, making a wild and sharp turn at the downed trees that Klyde could feel lifting the left-side tires off the pavement, leaning the van precipitously. It would have taken only one gust of wind in the wrong direction to topple them over, and he squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his fists in preparation for a hard roll onto the side, but it didn’t come. All that came was a squealing of tires on the road and a flare of water that covered the whole windshield, reducing visibility to zero, but the driver kept going anyway, foot on the gas pedal, gas pedal on the floor.

The cops were right ahead of them, but the cops were much more cautious drivers, and Jay’s van swerved right by them as they tried to turn around. 

At first, everyone in the back of the van was yelling incoherently, but Jay shouted them all into silence, and then there was nothing but the engine’s roar and the rain drowning out their hard breathing. Klyde could see the cop cars, faster than the van, gaining on them in the rearview mirror. 

The driver tried to take them out the way that they had come in, but downed trees littered their earlier route, forcing them to take unexpected turns. They were hopelessly lost in the endlessly winding streets, where all the houses looked the same, or nearly the same. They had some distance on the cops, enough that if they could make it to a main street they could probably get far enough away to ditch the car and get somewhere safe on foot, but as many turns as the driver took, there seemed to be no exit from this suburb. It was constructed like a labyrinth, and even when he drove up onto lawns to skirt downed trees across the road, it didn’t seem to get them anywhere closer to the exit. They might have been heading deeper inside.

Klyde realized this at the same time as everyone else did, but he didn’t say it aloud. Instead, he glanced in the rearview, searching for Jay’s face, hoping to glean some confidence from it. If Jay thought it would all be alright, that they would be able to get out—

But when Jay caught his eyes in the reflection, he leaned forward in between the driver and passenger seats, kneeling on the soaking wet van carpet. He put his hand on Klyde’s arm.

“Cody— we’re going to turn around. When we slow down, you’re going to jump out and run.”

“What—”

Jay didn’t give him the space to process it. He just kept talking, his voice low and steady, an act put on that didn’t match the situation at hand. If he had been yelling, it would have been harder for him to realize it was a false confidence that Jay carried on his shoulder. “Your mother would kill me if I got you in jail. Get out and run. Find a house and break in— you know how. Stay there until this clears up.”

“But you—”

“What will you being with me do to help me?” Jay asked. 

It was a damning thing to say, but it was painfully true, and there was nothing he could say in his thin voice other than, “But I want to help.”

Then the van was making a sharp u-turn, and Jay reached around to the passenger door and yanked the handle to open it, and there was just the yawning chasm of the ground outside as the van veered, and Jay pushed him— not even hard, not hard enough to knock him out of the van if he even tried to hold on, but he didn’t— and he tumbled out onto the ground. He didn’t hit the pavement: thick mud and grass like soup broke his fall, leaving him with nothing more than bruised elbows and knees as his whole weight tumbled down. He crawled out of the way, trying to pick himself up to avoid getting run over as the van left. He had a second— the van was spinning its wheels out on someone’s lawn, trying to get purchase as it turned away from the wreck of some trees. Its tires found grip and it veered away, leaving him in the mud on his knees. 

He picked himself up and stumbled blindly towards a house, the nearest one. The wind helped him along, though this help nearly knocked him off his feet. He knew that the cops probably couldn’t even see him through the rain. Without a light on him, he was invisible. No one.

He had lost his flashlight somewhere, probably left it on the kitchen island of the last house. His fingerprints were all over it, but he tried not to think about that as he stumbled blindly through the darkness towards the walls of the nearest building. Flashes of lightning gave momentary instructions: step forward, climb over the low fence, avoid the knocked over lawn chairs and children’s toys, there is the wall, there is a window. Get your fingers under the screen, use the whole force of your shoulder to pry the window up, haul yourself inside.

He landed on plush carpeted floor, his cheek pressed against it, smelling dog fur embedded into it, and old cigarette smoke. He just lay there for a long, long time. The rain blew in the window across his back, until the carpet around him was drenched. His thoughts followed Jay, mentally watching the van as it broke free of this place, speeding out on the main street, getting back somehow to Powerline Drive, roaring back to the Waffle House. They could pull in to the parking lot, go back inside, finish their dinners. Tomorrow, when the weather cleared up, Jay could peel the decals off his van. Switch out the plates— but there was no way the cops could have read the plates clearly in this rain anyway. It would be alright.

He told himself this, but he didn’t believe it. Still— there was something about Jay that made it impossible to picture him in handcuffs. He was too real for that.

Jay wouldn’t want him to lay here on the ground forever. He’d want him to make a plan. He got up off the ground, closed the window. In the flash of lightning that lit the old fashioned living room he was standing in, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, his shadow stretching long behind him. The thin figure there was real but unrecognizable, smeared in mud and with a look of fear still etched on his face. No Jay— just Cody, and the hurricane outside.