Poachers never made easy bedfellows with gamekeepers.
Money was always tight, but they got by. When things got really tough, they still didn’t go to their parents for help. They just worked harder and took on more shifts where they could. Josh’s wages in Jacksonville would cover the mortgage and sundries while Maxine’s student nurse salary would meet most of their bills—but it didn’t leave a lot of headroom. When their car died or the refrigerator expired, it was only their second jobs that gave them the leeway to replace them. And if they wanted to save money towards a better, larger home away from their first, then second incomes were imperative.
Maxine would venture back to West Virginia on occasion, and Josh’s parents would travel from Raleigh to Morehead City. It wasn’t a golden age by any measure, but they worked hard and got by. Maxine was tired much of the time, and Josh often fell asleep on her shoulder on the sofa on the rare evenings when they got together because their shifts meshed.
It was life. And that was okay.
And then there was Gabe.
At first, Maxine didn’t recognize him there on the doorstep as she pulled the door and screen open. He’d filled out and muscled up. He was dressed in a good suit, and his hair had just enough curl to suggest an edgy non-compliance with authority, and he’d acquired a tightly manicured beard.
“Hey, Maxine.”
It was the voice that brought her the crash of recognition. The deep warmth, the sonorous timbre, and the ability to express authenticity without the actions to demand it. That was Gabe Angel all over. Lots of show, with little to show for it.
Maxine almost closed the door in his face as a reaction. In that second, she was back in the roadhouse parking lot, and Josh was beating Gabe for holding and shaking her as his anger boiled over, erupting over the fact that she hadn’t wanted to sleep with him.
“Gabe…”
“How are you doing? I hear you’re married. To Josh now. Wow. Didn’t see that coming.”
Gabe’s eyes were bright, and suddenly she could smell him. His cologne smelled expensive and persuasive.
“I’m doing fine…”
What else was she to say? What was she to do? Things had ended so badly that she was immediately wary. Wary that he’d just turned up in her yard without advance notice, miles from Raleigh and completely out of the blue. She’d heard from friends in Raleigh that, shortly after their break-up and his total humiliation at the hands of Josh, he’d quit the college and traveled to Florida to stay with his father and stepmom. Gabe’s parents had split up when he’d been a young child, and he’d only seen his father—a successful importer and exporter—rarely. So, going to Florida had made some sort of sense for a jock who’d been knocked so comprehensively off his perch.
“Well, that’s good. Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
Water under the bridge? Bygones be bygones? Yes, things had ended terribly, but up until that point, she’d loved him—well, at least that’s what she thought she’d done.
Gabe seemed to take pity on her reticence, and said, “I don’t have to come in. We could go and get some lunch. If you’re not busy.”
This was surreal. Maxine dropped the needle back into the correct groove. “Gabe. What are you doing here? I haven’t seen you for nearly five years. More accurately, I haven’t wanted to see you for five years. What the hell are you doing here?”
His hand was still on the door handle, and it would be the work of a second to close the door on him forever. The rush of horror was tempered by the admittedly good times they had shared, but this was too much. Too great an intrusion.
“You should have called,” she said.
“I only had your address.”
“Then you should have written.”
“Would you have written back?”
“No. Of course, I wouldn’t have.”
Gabe smiled his winning smile again. There was nothing sinister in the smile. It was all warmth and authenticity; the way Gabe always was. “Then it’s a good thing that I didn’t write then, isn’t it?”
“Look, I don’t have time for this now.”
“Then, I’ll come back another time. I’m in town for a few days. Dad’s thinking of buying a warehouse here—sent me up to see the lay of the land, so to speak. I’d heard you had moved to the area, and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to look in.”
Maxine really wished he had resisted.
“I’ll stand you lunch. Anywhere you want. I only wanted to talk.”
“About what? What could you possibly have to say to me, Gabe?”
“I’d probably start with sorry for being such an A-hole, and then I’d go on to wish you all the best in your career, marriage, and life.” Gabe spread his hands. “Maxine I’m not the lunkhead you dated back in college anymore. I have my own career. I have my own life. I’m doing okay. But the opportunity arose to right a wrong that was done all those years ago, and I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t at least try. I’m not that boy anymore, Maxine. I’m different in so many ways. Give me a chance to prove that to you, and I promise you’ll never have to see me again. I’ll leave Morehead when I’ve finished my business for Dad and I’ll go back to Florida. Never to return.”
Would it be best to deal with this now? Just get it over with, let him make his apologies, and wave him goodbye? It was true, he was a zillion miles away from the hubristic jock and self-confident master of the universe he’d come across as in college. He was grown up, he was trying to do the right thing, and if she pulled the Band-Aid off this quick and fast, it might rip a few hairs up off the surface… but the return might be worth the small amount of pain. And anyway, wasn’t everyone allowed the space to show that they’d grown up?
Maxine didn’t have to be at work today, and Josh wouldn’t be home until midnight since he was on a late turn with a few hours overtime. She could manage this situation, and then Gabe would be gone.
She took her hand off the handle.
“Okay. Lunch. Wait there. Let me get my coat.”
9
Pickford lay gray and pale beneath a pall of paranoia and threat as Josh was walked into town by Nose. The enormity of the task ahead of him—going in as one man to rescue another from the clutches of… well, what exactly he was going into, he wasn’t sure—was slowly coming into sharp relief. He knew this was the right thing to do, though—for him as well as Maxine. But that didn’t make the curls of fear being shaved off the block of anxiety in his gut any less unwelcome.
Nose, it had turned out, was named Randy Hart, and from looking at the thin-faced, broken-nosed twenty-something, Josh thought that “Nose” suited him a whole lot better. They walked mostly in silence as the trees thinned and the town picked itself out of the brush. Nose wasn’t in the mood to negotiate terms with Josh, and he might not even have the authority to, but at least he had recognized the importance of the grenades and the mythical ammo dump.
Much of the town’s outskirts had been burned out and left derelict. Josh had seen this pattern repeated along the trail between Parkopolis in Georgia and the M-Bar. The supernova’s initial impact on humanity had been to make everyone fall unconscious a couple of times, and then those who’d woken up and had not been driven entirely insane had had to watch while those around them had gone on murderous and destructive rampages. On the Sea-Hawk, Josh, Tally, and the rest of the probationers had been attacked by members of the crew—those who hadn’t already killed the rest of the crew—and only survived by the narrowest of margins.
Pickford had been hit as hard as anywhere else, but there had been another process here which Josh hadn’t seen play out anywhere else. The population of Pickford, driven on by Creggan, had been made to believe the crisis was not a result of the supernova, but that a devastating communicable disease had been visited upon the world. That meant everyone who showed signs or exhibited out-of-character behavior had been slaughtered.
Randy had taken Josh’s pack—after ordering him to put the grenades back
into it—plus the shotgun and the SIG, and led him into Pickford. There were a few people around as darkness fell. Braziers were being lit in the streets to provide some lights. Armed residents watched as Josh and Randy walked past, their pinched faces full of wary threat. No one came up to speak to them or ask them what they were doing. It seemed that, if Randy was in attendance, they felt no need to check what he was about. He had some authority in the town, after all, it appeared.
The main street in Pickford that led to the town hall had a dozen or more braziers along it. As Josh came closer, the orange light being thrown up by the fires illuminated a nightmarish scene to be glimpsed through the haze and the smoke.
A triple set of gallows had been constructed at some point since the supernova, and men worked around them, checking trapdoors and resetting ropes. The people of Pickford were getting ready for a hanging.
“It’s okay,” said Randy. “We don’t hang all strangers.”
The façade of the town hall, all neo-classical columns and dripping with the trappings of faux antiquity, squatted unburned at the end of the main street. There was a small crowd already gathered outside the building. As they approached, Josh could hear jeering and catcalls. A tall, well-dressed blond man who could only be Dale Creggan, based on the description Maxine had given Josh, was halfway up the steps and waving his hands to quiet the crowd.
Next to him on the steps were five men. The two on the ends of the row held shotguns at the ready. The three men in the middle had their hands and ankles tied in manacles linked through chain belts. Their faces were bruised and their eyes flicked nervously from the crowd to above their heads of the assembled townsfolk, up towards the gallows.
Josh didn’t need a qualification in summary justice to know what was going down in Pickford tonight.
“Fellow Pickfordians!” Dale Creggan shouted over the hubbub. The voices quieted a little, but there was still a simmering tension in the air. “The justified attempt by our sheriff’s department to arrest and detain those people at the M-Bar who were harboring diseased persons and malcontents should not have ended the way that it did. These men you see before you ran away from their duty to you and to this town.”
The three handcuffed men shuffled in the firelight. Their faces were ruddy with sweat.
“Cowardice cannot be tolerated. If we are to survive the plague, every citizen of this town has to be able to rely on those of us who have been charged with upholding the rule of law.”
The hubbub grew again. Generally, the voices were in agreement with Creggan, it seemed to Josh. A cold river was running through his chest as he watched the condemned men through the crowd. Randy’s hand held him back, placed on Josh’s shoulder. It was obvious that the other man wanted him to watch this travesty of justice to the bitter end. Perhaps he thought it would be instructive to Josh, for him to see the way of things in Pickford, or perhaps he just enjoyed the idea of making him watch. Or just wanted to watch himself.
Josh’s skin wanted to crawl off his body at the thought.
“Due process has been carried out,” Creggan continued as the voices died down. “And by the emergency powers invested in me, these… cowards… are sentenced to death.”
“No!” A woman from the crowd was running forward. She was short-haired and wearing a black topcoat, her fingers reaching for the guy in the very middle of the trio. He was the youngest of the three, sporting a blackening eye and a wide dark scab on his cheek. Josh could see tears in his eyes as the woman reached him and clung to his waist.
“You can’t do this, Dale! You can’t. You’re not judge and jury!”
Creggan moved along the line towards the woman. He unpeeled her hands from the man and stood her up. Her cheeks ran with tears and her lips trembled, but the man she had been pawing at just dropped his chin to his chest, droplets from his eyes running and then dripping from the end of his nose. Creggan gently pushed the sobbing woman down the steps away from the men. “Martha, I have been democratically elected by the people of Pickford to lead during this crisis. We cannot rely on the government—they have abandoned us all, so we have to rely on ourselves. Your husband, Philip—” he turned to the crowd, pointing at the faces watching behind Martha’s back, inviting them to nod and agree along with him, “…has let every one of your friends and neighbors down by not completing his mission. If the people from the M-Bar make it to Pickford, and they spread their disease here, how will you face our neighbors, Martha? After what your husband did?”
“Please, Dale, please! I don’t think it’s a disease… many of us don’t. We just don’t know what to do…”
Creggan shook his head. “Of course, it’s a disease, Martha. Who here thinks it isn’t?”
The guards to either side of the condemned men held their guns a little tighter, Josh observed, their arms tensing and their eyes sweeping the crowd.
There was almost universal silence from the assembled inhabitants, apart from the sobbing woman. If any of them sided with Martha, they weren’t ready to admit it right now. Not with guards waiting with their shotguns and gallows at the ready.
Josh had rarely felt so powerless in his life as he did at that moment. There was nothing he could do right now to save these men. His presence here was directed to finding Donald, but the ache of injustice he felt was that of a lawman. Even though it was an injustice being meted out on men who otherwise would have tried to kill him and his family over the last few days, he was gripped by it. These men had not exhibited cowardice; they had been beaten fair and square. In the battle, he hadn’t seen anyone running away before the Defenders had swarmed in. If Creggan’s men had stayed at the M-Bar and continued fighting, they would probably have died at the hands of the Defenders. They were the enemy, yes, but Josh still felt a bitter taste in his mouth at summary executions being carried out by Creggan and his cronies.
A beefy guy with a paunch spilling over the top of his belt and a pistol on his hip walked down the steps from out of the town hall. He moved down the stone steps majestically—his shirt front filled like the sail on a galleon as he reached the condemned men. He rolled his hips past Creggan and pulled a pair of handcuffs from his pocket. He locked them around Martha’s wrists and began to drag her back up towards the town hall. Martha screamed and begged, kicking out and struggling, but the man pulling her forward swatted her legs away as if she were an annoying fly.
The door closed behind them, and Creggan addressed the crowd once more. “It is time for the sentence to be carried out. Gentlemen, if you would…”
The guards pushed the condemned men forwards with the butts of their shotguns. The men clinked forward in their chains. Philip sobbed quietly, but the others remained silent. Their faces were set with a mixture of defeat and fear.
Josh dropped his head. If he couldn’t stop this, he wasn’t going to watch it. He concentrated on Martha’s screams from inside the town hall. It was easier to focus on that than what was going on outside it.
Dale Creggan tossed the grenade from hand to hand as he considered Josh from behind the desk in his town hall office. Creggan’s eyes were alight with possibilities, his cheeks still flushed from the executions he had instigated. He stopped tossing the baseball-sized grenade and studied it between his fingers like a Carny fortune teller might study a crystal ball. Josh could almost see the future in it that Creggan was seeing for himself. More weapons, more power, more means to control those around him. Josh had hit pay dirt with what he was offering, and Creggan seemed more than interested.
“Well, we’re always looking for good men, Mr. Rennie, and those that come to Pickford––free of disease, of course––and with such fine…” he revolved the grenade in his fingers, “…credentials will always find a welcome in our town.”
It was as much as Josh could do not to throw up on Creggan’s desk. The queasy head rush he’d gotten from being in the vicinity of the hangings was beginning to dissipate, but it was still there in the background. Like a fly buzzing around a dead dog.
He leaned back in the green leather chair he’d been offered when he’d entered Creggan’s office, hoping his face wasn’t pale with nausea. Josh had seen plenty of death since the supernova, some of it at his own hands when he’d been defending himself or his children, and in Parkopolis he’d seen the effects of extra-judicial murder hanging from gibbets on the route into the camp… but being present, hearing men sobbing as nooses were put around their necks, and hearing those sentences being carried out took disgust to a whole new level. Josh had never considered himself squeamish, or necessarily against the death penalty for the most heinous crimes, but this… this was something else, and he was having the devil’s own time fitting the size of it inside his head so that he could concentrate on the matter in hand.
Randy had taken Josh into the building when the business at the gallows had been concluded. Josh’s spine still tingled with adrenaline. He’d kept his eyes averted as a scene from another time had been played out just yards away, but not been able to help hearing it all. The shuffling feet of the onlookers. The gasps as the trapdoors had clacked open simultaneously.
The thuds of the ropes snapping taut with their deathly weight had cracked something open in Josh.
Yet again, he was shocked to the core over what the world had descended to in such a short time. Revolution might only be two meals away, but it seemed the moral compass of so many was being smashed beneath the boot heels of a persuasive despot, full belly or not. Blame the outsider. Tell your people they carry disease. Enforce the law with brutality and only a nod towards judicial process––telling the population you’re doing it for their own good and that you’ll keep the other out while clinging to power. Josh knew the form and knew the playbook––it was just knotting his insides that so many would fall for it. Creggan didn’t need there to be a disease. He just had to tell people there was one in a believable way.
Supernova EMP Series (Book 3): Bitter End Page 9