Pigs

by Daniel James

  Payton wheezed and gasped, his face caught in a frozen snarl of rage and trepidation. He fell against the wall and clutched his damaged wrist, the wispy hair of his balding pate resembling a wild black tumbleweed, and stared with unmitigated wrath at Roach.

  Grace and Fitzy burst in behind them, pointing guns and trying to keep a fragile peace despite the crescendo of angry hoodlum threats in the hallway. They looked from the dazed and bloodied lumps at their feet to Roach and Payton near the broken window.

  Roach turned back to the slime-bag gangster. “Just business, remember. I had to be sure. I’m not exactly tripping over leads here.” He kindly adjusted Payton’s skewed tie, receiving an unappreciative shove in return. Roach slapped a wad of bills in Payton’s hand to cover the damage to the window, then joined his team at the door.

  “I’m willing to let this one time slide, Roach, on account of you being clearly upset.” Payton was still talking through his teeth, body quivering with rage. “You do anything as stupid as this again, well, use your imagination.”

  Roach flapped his coat, buttoning it against the unhospitable cold wind which was fluttering the vertical blinds and notebook pages on the desk. He nodded once in understanding and left the office into the mob-populated corridor.

  The three of them made it to the lift without further violence, but a few of Payton’s roughs appeared eager to act independently, like riled guard dogs.

  Roach carried his quiet intensity into the lift. Grace and Fitzy were quietly shaking their heads and goading one another into breaking the silence.

  Fitzy relented first. “What now?”

  “We hit up the remaining spots and ask around. Someone must know something.” Roach discreetly rubbed his swollen knuckles. “This whole thing feels off. Isaac gets targeted by Wyndorf—who might have some fruit-basket backup in a wolf mask. A professional job getting pulled on Luds in his own damn house. I hate stumbling around blind like this.” He stopped short of punching the lift wall. His knuckles didn’t need it, even if his disposition did. He checked his phone instead, noticing the missed call from Isaac. “On second thoughts, you two snoop around. I owe Isaac a few beers.”

  Killing Time

  Wyndorf lay on his aluminium fold-out camp bed, its blanket half on the floor. It was the only unmade rack in the huge basement-turned-barracks. He was trying to focus on the badly dog-eared survival handbook in his hands, one of the many pieces of prepper literature which was on the bug-out brigade’s suggested reading list. For the past five minutes he had been attempting to read one damn paragraph, only to be repeatedly distracted by the grunting of Higgins doing press-ups in the space between their cheap beds. Even without Higgins’ sharp exhalations, Wyndorf found the prepper material hard to take seriously. He had been trying to read through a short instructional essay on water purification tablets when he got bored, thumbed through a large number of pages and stopped randomly, squinting at an introduction to the joys of black powder DIY. Now this could be interesting.

  Higgins’ almost sexual gasping made Wyndorf slap the book shut. Leaning up, he tossed it onto the floor beside the trim and firm posture of the regimental crew-cut busy descending and ascending, descending and ascending. Higgins huffed and shot Wyndorf a red-faced warning. Even the bulging veins in his forehead looked critical of him. Wyndorf didn’t catch it, he just grabbed an equally dog-eared—if not more so—copy of Penthouse from his bedside drawer. Whacky old Major Thurman’s utilitarian compound had an internet connection and a few well-maintained laptops, but Garland had made it clear during Wyndorf’s induction that they were strictly reserved for coded forum discussions between other cells of the Midnight Frontiers, and not for sexually explicit entertainment. One of Wyndorf’s few pleasures during these claustrophobic years had been testing the boundaries of Garland’s harsh disciplinarian role, but the sense of technological paranoia that pervaded the compound was palpable, so much so that the computers were practically kept under armed guard. So Wyndorf continued to stare tiredly at the corrupted beauties on the pages, finding lust and its promise of quick relief too evasive for his restless mind.

  He was bored of waiting. Bored of constantly being watched, sat on, and treated like a golden goose. All because Major Thurman had a giant meth-flavored monkey on his back. Wyndorf blamed himself for that though. Now, following last night’s collection from Rico, Wyndorf had once again been relegated to bench-warmer duty, superfluous and muzzled, whilst these idiots were charged with running manoeuvres all around Chicago’s doper hotspots, turning profit for the cause.

  He had behaved.

  Now it was time to go see if that cock Roach was hiding Isaac in his bar. Maybe flush them out of there with another fiery piece of stolen ordnance from lock-up, but only if it was one of the more amenable shitheads on duty. The Penthouse joined the prep manual on the floor next to his current babysitter, emphasis on ‘baby’. The kid must have been about twenty, for shit’s sake. Higgins let his slender but steely arms drop, and sat up. He was fighting for breath after that last set, but still managed to drill Wyndorf with those same old tired rules and regulations about keeping oneself and one’s environment neat and tidy. Blah-blah-fucking-blah.

  Wyndorf ignored the young trooper of the coming apocalypse and stared at this rectangle of cinder-block walls. His prison away from prison. His gaze found Higgins’ perfectly made bed—like the dozen plus others down here—and scrolled across to the neatly organised stack of books at his bedside, his lockbox full of various prepper items underneath his bed, then finally landed on his own skin mag and survival guide, heaped on the floor like sagging paper tents. Wyndorf scooped them up just to stop Higgins from whining any further and dropped them on their shared bedside unit.

  Wyndorf stared at the kid—back at his press-ups—and thought about how good it would feel to go Rambo on these losers. They spent their whole lives dreaming of war, so why not give them one? He’d most definitely get shot to shit within a matter of minutes against these boys and their toys, but it could liven things up at least momentarily. Anything beat all this waiting. Cabin fever, that’s what this was. All these bullshit rules and pissy little rants about discipline. Why did any of them still bother preaching to him? He wasn’t a member of their little loony army and never would be. So why couldn’t they leave him to be him, and they could all do press-ups and polish their power fantasies until they gleamed so bright that they went blind?

  Family wasn’t worth shit, Wyndorf censured. One mistake. That was all it took. Just one go-a-bit-crazy-and-kill-a-respected-quack-and-his-family-and-land-on-a-federal-watch-list mistake and suddenly C.B., the meth king of four states, gets all holier than thou. Now here he was, on the margins of his cousin’s business. Forced to fend for himself and reduced to hiring out these borderline goose-steppers to protect him.

  Wyndorf had first latched onto Thurman and a few other Midnight Frontiers cell leaders six years ago at a New York gun and knife convention. They spent time bouncing between camps in the Midwest, doing this and that, for the cause, but mainly for food and water. Then, a little over a year ago, he was bounced back here with Thurman. Thurman and his ultimate authority. Thurman with his ultimate weakness. A boon for Wyndorf. Easy to exploit.

  All things considered, his situation could be a lot worse, Wyndorf supposed. At least C.B. had finally opened his door a crack, permitting this arrangement, allowing Wyndorf to act as liaison between Major Thurman and Rico, thus enabling them to distribute product to Chicago’s networks of psychologically damaged war vets.

  Wyndorf started whistling tunelessly, the ghost song of frigid gusts slicing through a window crack. All this thinking wasn’t good for him. He felt the restless rat clawing at the insides of his skull, determined to get at the cheese. Isaac wasn’t going to kill himself. He plonked his cheap dress shoes down on the bare concrete, fixed the blue tie knotted over his fresh white shirt and sprang off the bed, leaving Higgins to his vigorous extracurricular exercise.

  Marching
out of the basement’s sleeping quarters, he trotted up the steps to the staff-only area of the large gun emporium and firing range, and walked out the back door, feeling the camera watching him. The large rear of Down Range was off limits to customers and the public, but its location in Lyons, Illinois, adjacent to the I-55 and thirty-five minutes out from Chicago, put it at little risk from random nosey punters. The area was laid out like a budget military base: several fair-sized cinder-block buildings used for dining, personal storage, and one for the optimistically titled Command Center; an area of greenhouses and pens for chicken and rabbit livestock; several guard towers; and a modest fleet of vehicles, all surrounded by a twelve-foot-high brick wall with electronic iron gate manned by a guard hut. Wyndorf sneered at a bunch of Frontiers doing laps around the compound in full combat gear: night vision goggles strapped on their heads, rucksacks full of supplies, the works. If The Man ever did track this place down, it would be smashed through like a tank-tread over a child’s crib. But Wyndorf had to hand it to some of these fringe asshats, they would probably fare pretty well operating in a mobile guerrilla fashion, hanging out in the woods and sewers.

  He swung open the door to the mess hall in search of Garland, expecting to find the big old ’roid machine struggling to assuage his ridiculous appetite. Instead, all he found was a cluster of the badly wired militia, hunched around the benches discussing various globe-destroying theories over bowls of greenhouse vegetable and rabbit stew, and drinking from canteens of purified rainwater. Wyndorf backed out of the building, leaving the Omega Man candidates to feed and discuss their backward politics and insane hypotheticals about brewing race wars and mortal combat between the wealthy and the poor.

  He entered the Command Center next door, feeling the room grow suddenly quiet. Like most times when he entered rooms occupied by Garland and Schecter, all conversation was quickly stifled. But it wasn’t just Garland and Schecter in here: three former troopers turned strung-out mules were standing before Garland, awaiting their orders. The five of them glanced at Wyndorf, Garland and Schecter viewing him like a foraging rodent, the other three with an almost reverential light. Wyndorf waved his hand as if to say please, carry on and propped one sole against the wall, waiting quietly, looking like a Jehovah’s Witness on break.

  Schecter, at his desk by the window, returned to his inventory lists. Garland dropped the rucksacks on the scarred and beaten briefing table with a clear measure of disdain. His powerful presence owned the large, sparsely furnished nerve center of the DIY militia. The day’s three scheduled dealers flicked their hungry, reptilian eyes from their superior to the three bags of product and back again. As with any army worth their salt, everything was organised and scheduled, even dealing ice. Garland glowered and folded his arms across his chest, watching each of the three sheep-in-military-surplus-clothing grab a bag loaded with a healthy portion of their latest methamphetamine shipment. Off to the side of the table was a corkboard with a well-used map of Chicago pinned up like a geographical battle plan: red pins indicated the military vet centers, white pins the drug treatment clinics, and blue pins to indicate any other miscellaneous non-profit charity centers and counselling groups established to aid the broken and chewed-up soldiers abandoned by spoilt brat-brained government officials.

  Bruhl, a skinny white-trash poster boy with a mullet, glanced at the board and then to the stoic right hand man of the major. He was awaiting their official orders but none seemed to be coming. Bruhl, like most of the cell’s manpower, had become accustomed to the growing preoccupation in Garland’s stony gaze.

  “Sir? Who’s going where?” Bruhl asked the mute muscle.

  Wyndorf could see the itch take hold of Bruhl. The boy was trying to contain himself. To keep his nails from scratching at the blood ants running riot beneath his pale skin, not wanting to wave his craving in front of Garland, the large reticent slab of killer.

  Wyndorf liked watching Garland continue to struggle with Thurman’s amended mandate. He knew how much the mountainous ex-marine wanted to grab those bags and burn them out back. He knew how the big motherfucker ticked, with his current dosage of anadrol pumping through his system, an ireful rhino frustrated with his own weak obedience, overseeing the transfer of Wyndorf’s toxic salvation into the veins and lungs of Chicago and Illinois’ downtrodden ex-soldiers. That’s why Wyndorf didn’t have big ideas about loyalty. Sooner or later some asshole’s ideas will clash with one’s own, and something will have to give. Fuck loyalty. But watching from the outside? Seeing someone else’s internal dilemma? He enjoyed that. For Wyndorf, half the fun was guessing if Garland would snap and decide to buck Thurman’s new regime.

  “Sir?” Bruhl tried again, squirming.

  Garland turned from them to the map and the pins, an enraged god preparing to obliterate a city from on high.

  Bruhl looked crabby now, wanting a simple command to get the ball rolling. The longer it took to get out there and earn a crust, the longer it’d take to get back to a pipe and an episode of bliss. He glanced at his two perplexed mules, then looked doubtfully at Schecter, the quiet burned man, in the corner of the room, too busy appraising the army’s checklist of food stores and munitions to pay them any mind.

  Bruhl silently promoted himself in the moment and took point with his nasal tough-guy voice. “I’ll take the rehab clinics. Wohler, you fly by the vet shelters. Hunt, you get the rest.”

  With one final baffled look at the statue of Garland, Bruhl grabbed his bag. Hunt and Wohler did the same and followed him out of the Command Center, nodding at Wyndorf.

  Captain Crank.

  Wyndorf rolled his eyes—finally—and stepped away from the wall. “You ladies got a minute?”

  Schecter pretended the peddler wasn’t in the room, consulted his list and reported to Garland. “Apart from a few crates of beans which are nearing their expiration date, we’re loaded for winter. Plenty of canned goods, water and grains. Kershaw’s happy with the supplies of antibiotics and first aid equipment. Gas for the generators is good. We’re ready to dig in at a moment’s notice.”

  Wyndorf glanced at him, taking in the horribly burned skin snagging on the neckline of his NRA t-shirt, and facetiously crossed his fingers, “I’m still just praying for the day you get to live your Mad Max fantasy.”

  Wyndorf got a nice tingle from the combative challenge cooking away in Schecter’s hot charcoal stare.

  “It doesn’t matter to me if your face looks like burned oatmeal. You still have really beautiful eyes.” Wyndorf spurred the man’s hate, curious to see whether he had the balls to finally make a move.

  Schecter continued to prove that he had more self-control than Wyndorf gave him credit for.

  “Man, I guess your sense of humor got scorched away with your face back in that lab explosion, huh?” Wyndorf dared, begged for Schecter to take a run at him, even with that big fucking greaser troll standing by.

  Schecter stared quietly. Under the singed and soft white putty of his scorched eyebrows, he was most likely frowning, but it was hard to tell. Yet his gaze alone was a withering storm of ash. Wyndorf continued to stare right back, having a grotesque fascination with the waxy and distorted mouth of the burned militant, and the wispy clumps of dark hair smeared into the cooked terrain of his scalp.

  “Personally, I’d be blaming the S.W.A.T. team, but if you’re still that sore about how it went down, come on over here and we’ll get to the heart of the matter.”

  Schecter had his fully loaded Sig Sauer on his person, but he was gripping the pen in his hand the way a starving, crazed woodland cannibal might hold a grisly bone knife.

  Garland put an end to the building maelstrom, telling Schecter, “Give me a minute.”

  With a shrieking scrape from his chair legs, Schecter pushed himself away from the table, dropped his pen and left the makeshift briefing room, vanishing into the back room. The sound of an outer door slamming rang off the cinderblocks.

  Garland stood proudly, monolithic, hi
s torso-clinging gray vest and urban warfare trousers helping sell the image of a brutal gung-ho warlord. “We need to re-establish your position here at the compound. Your disruptive influence is blunting the troops. Despite your financial value, some of us here are still taking serious issue with how you’re warping the perspectives of our ideology, how it’s altering our long-term mission parameters. Some are even starting to believe that the meth distribution should become our primary objective instead of gearing up for the inevitable societal collapse. They’re content to act like ass-wipe gangsters, profiteering from destroying patriots, the troubled men and women who should be joining us instead of killing themselves in flophouses and gutters.”

  Wyndorf played the innocent stooge. “I ain’t the boss around here. What your men do, say and think is down to you. Isn’t that the whole army mandate, to erase any sense of individuality? Sounds like you might have to put these troublemakers in their place, boss.”

  Garland’s expression was stone. His biceps swelled to the size of grapefruits, his large jaw clenching hard enough to bite through steel. “Make no mistake, if they don’t re-evaluate why they joined up for this in the first place, they will be discharged.”

  “You mean like you were?” Wyndorf gave a snide quarter-smile.

  “I was dishonorably discharged from the weak, foolish and blind imperialistic regime of the United States Army. A discharge from our ranks is something more permanent.”

  “I’m glad you take all this so super-duper seriously. But you see, here’s the problem. You of all people know most of these “survivors” are gun aficionados or deer hunters. Not real, genuine soldiers. But you’re getting your panties in a bunch because they’ve realised they enjoy making money more than doing jumping jacks. And don’t forget, it’s my connections to our glorious tax-free revenue which has allowed this piss-weak militia to get balls deep in army surplus gear. Thurman makes out okay with the gun store, I get that, and some of you idiots teach that bi-seasonal prepper workshop survivalist bullshit for asswipes who play too much Call of Duty, but I turned the safety-catch off of you guys. Now I’m beginning to feel a little unwelcome around here, so just say the word, and I’ll make the call, turn off the meth tap, and I’ll find some others willing to offer me protection.”