by Lopez, Rob
“That’s the way I’ve always been with him. I see it as my duty to ride him like that. If I didn’t, he’d ask me what I’d done with the real Scott.”
“I know he’s your war buddy and all, but I don’t like thinking of you two as enemies. I mean, it could happen. He’s getting far out with his ideas, and I’m not convinced he knows what he’s doing himself. It’s like he’s making it up as he goes along. Someday he’s going to make a big mistake, if he ain’t made one already.”
“Don’t underestimate Rick,” said Scott. “I’ve been in a lot of situations with him. He knows what he’s doing even when he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“I don’t know,” said April. “I’m just feeling vulnerable right now, but I don’t know why. I’m happier than I can ever remember being – yeah, I know that sounds strange, but it’s true. I just don’t want anything to break it now.”
Scott kissed her. “Ain’t no breaking going to be done here unless I’m the one doing it. I won’t let anything happen to you or Daniel. That’s a promise.”
*
Rick passed Scott’s door during his watch patrol. From inside he heard the creaking of springs as the mattress bounced up and down. He made a mental note to ask Packy for some condoms.
Carrying a kerosene lantern, he continued his rounds. When he reached the cafe, he put the lantern down, stepped out onto the gallery and listened. There were no crickets to be heard at this time of year, and the night held a deadly silence. A cloud bank moved from in front of the moon, and Rick looked out over the monochrome landscape and waited for his eyes to adjust. Nothing moved in the shadows, but he could hear, very faintly, the sound of the creek flowing through the golf course.
A streak of light across the heavens caught his attention, then another as a meteor shower passed through the atmosphere. Rick thought back to the night of the solar storm, remembering the otherworldly colors and the lightning. It seemed so long ago. He wondered if he’d likely witness such a spectacle again. If the sun was going through a particular phase – and he didn’t pretend to understand any of that stuff – maybe they’d be hit by another such storm. The irony was, it would be harmless. It wasn’t like an earthquake, where the after tremors could still cause damage. The sky could light up as much as it wanted now. There was no technological vulnerability to add fuel to its fury. Without mankind’s progress, the biggest solar storm imaginable was, frankly, no big deal.
Rick returned inside and maintained his sweep. The sound of something grating caused him to freeze. Hooking the lantern onto his forearm so he could grip his rifle properly, he listened.
The grating came again, followed by a drawn-out rasp.
Rick padded gently along the hard floors, following the sound down the stairs until he reached the foyer.
There, by the light of a candle, Harvey was trying, and failing, to saw a piece of wood. Still weak from his ordeal – his self-inflicted ordeal, Rick reminded himself – the security guard struggled to draw the saw.
Rick watched him for a while, seeing the determination, and frustration, on his face.
“This isn’t the time for that,” he said.
Harvey redoubled his efforts to deepen the cut.
“Harvey. Stop.”
The security guard sagged as he gave up for a second. “It’s got to be done,” he said. “Time’s a wasting, and we got to prepare.”
“Prepare for what?”
Harvey turned his hollow eyes toward him. “The four horsemen are coming. Millions are gonna die. The angel told me I had to prepare. This is my penance.”
Rick looked at him for a moment longer, then turned away. “Go to bed, Harvey.”
29
The farmhouse burned. The raiders had attacked it at dawn with Molotov cocktails and shot everyone as they tried to escape. A line of them now ferried food supplies out of the burning building, including two hogs and some chickens from the basement, who were dragged squealing and squawking into the light.
As this spectacle went on in the background, the older farmer – Jamie Lee – was on his knees in the yard, his arms bound behind his back. He’d been wounded and his head was bowed, crying for the loss of his family.
Dee hid at the back of the group of mothers as they were herded to watch, not wanting to be recognized by the poor man. She couldn’t bear to look at the fruits of her treachery. She’d left the farmhouse the day before, as soon as the rain stopped. The farm’s inhabitants hadn’t wanted her to go, especially the farmer’s wife, who urged her to rest awhile. Dee had insisted, her fear of being found out lending urgency to her requests, and the wife provided her with dry clothes to replace her wet ones. Jamie Lee had given her directions to Wadesboro and her fictional cousin, and personally escorted her to the edge of his property.
The wife now lay dead by the back door, near the body of her daughter, whom she’d been carrying out of the fire. Multiple gunshots had killed them both.
Dee had told Axel there were only two firearms at the farm. It didn’t matter. Even if they’d been armed to the teeth, the farm inhabitants were doomed once the Molotovs sailed over. They were just ordinary folk, and the farmhouse was wooden. Dee wasn’t needed to explain their vulnerability. Not really.
But the fact remained. She, and she alone, had betrayed them. No amount of rationalization was going to make that go away. Shocked and ashamed, she crouched at the back of the group, hugging her baby.
Boss stood near the captive farmer. “You were given the chance to surrender,” he intoned. “All we wanted was your food. You would have been free to go. But no, you had your stupid pride.”
Axel stood by him, grinning. He hadn’t lost anybody in the assault, and he was pleased with the haul. Dee wasn’t sure who was crueler – him or his lover.
“I want the word to get out,” continued Boss. “To defy us is death. It’s basic marketing. But you’re dying, so … you’re not really much use to me.”
The farmer sobbed, his tears soaking into his blood-stained shirt.
“Axel,” said Boss, holding out his palm.
Axel drew a pistol from one of his holsters, withdrew the magazine, and handed the weapon over. Boss checked the chamber to make sure there was a round loaded. He turned to his 'mules’, still roped together and forced to kneel like the farmer.
“It turns out I don’t need all of you,” Boss said to them. “I have a wagon now.”
In the barn, they’d found a little painted wagon. The kind that could be pulled by a small pony. Dee imagined it belonged to the little girl. Maybe someone on the farm had made it for her. Perhaps it was a gift.
“I need an even number to pull the wagon,” said Boss, “and right now I got odd. What that means is one of you has the chance for promotion. But you’ve got to earn it.” Boss held up the pistol. “Whichever one of you volunteers to put a bullet in this man’s head and put him out of his misery, gets to sign up as a soldier, not a slave. Pull the trigger and it’s done. Who’s game?”
The prisoners were in a sorry state. The females taken from the camp had been divided up among the raiders. Dee hadn’t seen much of them, but it was obvious what they were being used for. A couple even walked freely in the group, perhaps having accepted their role. The male prisoners, on the other hand, were near exhaustion, worn out by the beatings and the weight of the packs they had to bear. Some looked like they weren’t going to make it much longer.
“Don’t all rush at once,” said Boss. “It only takes one.”
The prisoners stared back at him with sullen eyes. For a moment it looked as if, unanimous in their misery, neither of them would volunteer.
Then one man raised his bound hands.
Boss nodded to Axel, who strode over and untied the rope from the man’s neck. Pushing the barrel of a gun up under the base of the prisoner’s skull, Axel marched him over to the sobbing farmer. Boss pressed the pistol into the prisoner’s tied hands. “The safety’s off,” he told him helpfully, stepping back.
“Now it’s you or him,” said Boss.
To emphasize the choice, Axel pressed the gun a little harder.
The prisoner remained frozen in indecision.
“I’m going to count to three,” said Boss impatiently. “One …”
The prisoner pointed the pistol and there was a sharp report.
Dee had looked away, not wanting to see what would happen. When she returned her gaze, Jamie Lee lay dead on the ground, blood pooling around his head.
Boss took the pistol back. “You’ve made a commitment,” he said. “Your former comrades? They hate you now. You can never go back. From this point on, you’re one of us.” Boss looked around at the rest of the group, and this time he directed comments at some of his own raiders. “For the doubters among you, hear this. We’re in this together. If we fail to find food, we die. It’s as simple as that. We can’t grow crops. We can’t sit around waiting for a solution. There are hardly any supplies left out there. To find them, we have to keep moving and searching. There might not be enough for the state of North Carolina, but there will be enough for us. And only us. Anybody who quits now is only going to die of starvation.”
Boss handed the pistol back to Axel, who slammed the magazine in and racked the slide to put a round in the chamber.
“Anybody feel like quitting?” asked Boss.
Nobody replied, but Dee noticed for the first time the looks on some of the raiders. They weren’t all ruthless sadists like Axel, it seemed. Some wore traces of guilt. Others appeared thoughtful, as if until now they had been questioning their commitment to the group.
“It’s not a game,” said Boss in a bored tone. “And it’s no longer a crime. It’s survival. Remember that.”
But it was a crime, thought Dee. And they, by doing what they’d done, were complicit now.
As was Dee.
Boss was only right about one thing: there was no going back.
30
Rick watched Harvey closely. Initially, he made sure that either he or Scott remained present in the clubhouse at all time. Recognizing Scott’s obvious antipathy, he took to doing the job himself while the others went out in two hunting teams: Lauren shadowing Josh and Scott taking the other air rifle with April. Racking up the kills, the hunting parties ranged farther and farther as they exhausted the resources closer to home. Chuck reasoned that they should reduce the cull in some areas, to allow for breeding stock to repopulate the areas come spring. It made sense, but Rick was anxious to have surplus food to preserve for the winter.
It wasn’t his only anxiety.
Everybody regarded Harvey as unhinged. Everybody except Sally, of course. In a curious role reversal, she’d become as bitter and guarded as Harvey had once been. She wasn’t doing much, but Harvey now worked hard enough for both of them.
He was pushing himself to his limits at a time when everybody else was starting to relax a little. Food, water and fuel stocks were okay, for the near term anyway, and everyone was in relatively good health, in spite of the frigid weather. Sally was conducting daily health checks, albeit sullenly, and Janice was making sure they all had a range of nutrients in their diets. They hadn’t encountered any new people, or threats, on their patrols, and Packy was providing a few luxury items that boosted morale considerably. The Hatfields, as Scott insisted on calling them, remained in their bunker, and were no trouble to them. Rick imagined that they’d be driving each other nuts in their enclosed space, but that was their affair and so far he had little cause for complaint, though he would have preferred more cooperation.
Harvey, on the other hand, continued to mutter his warnings of Armageddon. Rick didn’t have a religious bone in his body, but he found himself sharing Harvey’s forebodings. It wasn’t just his military inclination to prepare for the worst when things appeared to be going well. A nagging unease ate at him as he looked at the clubhouse’s defenses. The first of the barbed wire had been laid along the back of the clubhouse, covering the approaches from the green. The pool area sat atop a raised terrace, offering some protection, but the walled drop to the sloping green wasn’t insurmountable. Packy had promised more barbed wire, which Rick hoped to put to good use, and the job of nailing chain-link to the outside of the clubhouse windows was nearly complete. The front of the clubhouse, however, looking as it did toward the parking lot, the club fitness building and hotels, provided too much cover for would-be attackers. The derelict cars needed to be moved and the trees felled, but a sniper in any of the opposing buildings would still be able to give them a hard time.
These were standard site precautions that Rick would have undertaken regardless, but what irked him the most was the lack of information on what was happening beyond the suburbs. He desperately wanted to begin long-range reconnaissance patrols. What exactly was happening in the camps? Had any semblance of authority begun to coalesce? What about the masses he’d seen drifting toward the mountains? Were they being taken care of? Or had the cold started to drive them back down to the Piedmont? And were any thinking of sheltering in Charlotte, in spite of the radiation warnings?
These and other questions kept Rick awake at night. He felt blind and he didn’t want to wake one morning to find a crowd of hungry people camped on his doorstep. Armed hungry people even less. The apparent strength of the Myers Park club was an illusion if he lacked the numbers to man it adequately or conduct the kind of reconnaissance he deemed necessary.
So he had a little sympathy for Harvey and his mutterings. Not much, but enough to get him wondering.
He sought Harvey out, expecting him to be sawing wood, but instead saw him at a desk, working on the dismantled chainsaw.
“You seriously think you can get that working?” said Rick.
“If the Lord wills it, I surely can,” said Harvey absently, pulling melted insulation off a cable. Several black components lay on the table, along with a spark plug. There appeared to be more components and cables than could possibly fit inside a chainsaw housing. That’s when Rick noticed, looking out of the window, the raised hoods of most of the cars. Harvey was clearly not relying on heavenly will alone. With deft fingers that belied his condition, he began putting components together, seeing what would fit and what would not.
“Why do you think trouble’s coming?” asked Rick bluntly.
“Because I was told,” replied Harvey, still focusing more on his work than on Rick.
“By God, I assume?” said Rick skeptically.
“No,” said Harvey, snapping a piece of plastic in two. “By Sally.”
Rick narrowed his eyes. “When?”
“Three years ago.”
Rick frowned. “One hell of a prediction,” he said sourly. “How come you didn’t prepare before, if you were so certain it was coming?”
“Because I forgot,” said Harvey, twisting some wire together.
“You forgot the end was coming? There’s a whole book in the Bible about that. You lost the pages, or something?”
Harvey stopped what he was doing and stared straight at Rick with rheumy, bloodshot eyes. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
Rick saw no reason to deny it. “You look crazy. You’re as stubborn as a mule and you don’t make any sense.”
Harvey pondered that for a moment. “You’re an honest man,” he said. “You’re honest people.” He stared off into the distance. “Sometimes that’s hard to take.”
“How so?”
“The sin of pride. That was my affliction. I was closed when I should have been open. The Lord could have spoken to me, but my ears were sealed. I didn’t want to hear.”
“Again, you’re making no sense.”
“I was a fool. Is that enough? Do you want an apology from me?”
“No. Tell me about this prediction.”
“Weren’t no prediction. It was a story Sally told me once. As a good Christian, she volunteered her services as a n
urse in some country in Africa. I don’t recall which one. There was war there, and there was famine. She told me afterwards it was the first time she truly understood the Book of Revelations – the power of it. The four horsemen were there in that country, and it was devastating. She told me that at the UN station she was working at, they were afraid to give the refugees too much food, because a man or woman with a sack of grain would become a target. So they handed out only small amounts of food, in case the people needed to run. The gangs lived in the forests, and they would rob villages and passersby. They weren’t after money or nothing, just food. When the rains failed again, the gangs banded together and swept whole areas. Like locusts. Folks would have their food taken from them and then come to the aid station with their starving children. When it got too dangerous, the aid agencies pulled out, and the refugees were left to flee into the forest. Sally said that when she left on the last truck, she could see the armed men waiting among the trees. Said that the image stayed with her.” Harvey resumed his work with the chainsaw electrics. “It was a story about some faraway place that didn’t interest me much, so I forgot about it. Then I had my dream.”
“Your dream?”
“Sure. My crazy man dream, as you might like to call it. You were in it, by the way.”
“I was, huh?”
“Surely was. You were the devil.”
“Flattering.”
“You was standing over me, looking to rip the goodness from my heart.”
Rick thought that was an uncannily accurate reflection, considering Harvey appeared unconscious at the time. “And what happened next?”
Harvey thought about it. “You disappeared,” he said, “and I felt free. The weight of my sorrow left me, and I kind of floated. Then I had my vision. I remembered Sally’s story, and picturing it. But it wasn’t in Africa. It was here. I saw, like … a tide. And I saw Death, riding through the middle of it. The sinners were on the march, and the innocent, well …” Harvey shook his head. “Too many bad things happened that I don’t want to recall. And then an angel came and said I was wasting my time. I had work to do. The Lord’s work. Said I was here for a reason, and it wasn’t for me to decide to give it up. That weren’t my purpose. If I wanted redemption, I had to earn it.”