“Thought you might be thirsty,” she said, smiling. It looked like she was wearing makeup.
He tilted the cup back and downed every last drop.
“Appreciate it,” he said, handing the empty cup back to her. He was wearing a broad-brimmed hat to protect from the scorching sun, but staying hydrated on a day like this was just as important. On the ground next to him sat the fully loaded shotgun as well as his Ruger.
Dale continued mixing the concrete with a rake as she looked on, fanning her face with her free hand.
“Any word on Colton?” he asked.
“My mom’s taking care of him. The bleeding’s stopped and it doesn’t look like anything vital was hit.” She watched him work. “What are you doing?”
He stopped long enough to wipe away the sweat building on his forehead. “Randy and his men came up the drive in their patrol cars like they owned the place and I aim to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
“You’re creating concrete posts?”
“They call them bollards,” he explained. “And they’re sometimes used to prevent cars from driving through pedestrian areas. I’ll pour a handful, setting them in these thick cardboard tubes, and stagger them. Any car aiming to reach the house will need to do a slow slalom course. Either way, it’ll give us plenty of time to react.”
Nicole looked confused. She was bright, but not so much when it came to home defense, it seemed. “Can’t they just walk up?”
Dale kept mixing. “Sure, but they won’t have their cars to use for cover.”
“Oh,” she said, suddenly concerned. “We don’t intend to shoot more deputies, do we?”
“We never planned on shooting any in the first place,” he replied, struggling to keep patient so she could grasp the seriousness of the situation. “The sheriff and his brother were the ones who created this mess, but now it’s quickly spiraling out of control. Where’s everyone else?”
Nicole shrugged. “I think Daddy and Brooke are grabbing the barbed wire from the barn you asked them to get. My mom’s with Colton.”
“And Shane?”
“Uh, making something to eat, I think.”
Shane showed up a moment later, holding a sandwich.
Dale straightened his back. “You know, the food we have needs to be rationed.” The irritation in his voice wasn’t lost on his younger brother, whose mouth dropped open.
“What? I needed something to eat.”
“You were there when Clay opened fire and was shot in the chest,” Dale said.
Shane looked on in silence, wondering where this was going.
“Don’t you get what’s going on here, Shane? The sheriff’s brother is in the hospital and at some point he’s gonna get his wits about him and come to even the score. When that happens, I don’t plan on being caught flat-footed again.”
“Trust me, I see what’s going on,” Shane said, “but there’s another way to handle the situation. I mean, the town wants some water and we have more than enough.”
“Enough for what?” Dale shot back. “You know how these things go. You offer an inch and they’ll take a mile.”
His brother’s hands went up. “Hey, I’m on your side, I’m just saying maybe a compromise would make everyone happy.”
“Maybe it would. But I never want to be in a position where I’m asking a town government filled with crooks for permission to drink from my own well. Maybe back in the day when Joe Wilcox and Mayor Curtis Long were in charge, my feelings might have been different. Men like Randy Gaines and Hugh Reid, they’re a different breed altogether.”
“That may be so,” Shane admitted. “Just seems to me that all men can be reasoned with.”
“Words that look mighty fine on paper, but what’ll you tell Nicole’s parents when the water runs dry? What’ll I tell my daughter? ‘Sorry about that, now we wait for the National Guard to show up and save us?’ I don’t think so.”
Nicole touched Dale’s elbow. “We didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I’m not upset,” Dale said, although the tone of his voice said otherwise. “I need everyone on deck and committing a hundred percent. There’s plenty of work ahead of us and not nearly enough time to get it done.”
Shane glanced back at the house. “Sounds like something Dad used to say.”
Resting on his rake, Dale shook his head. “Maybe it is. I guess both of us got stuff from the old man.”
“You got way more than I did,” Shane said quickly. “Working around the property was therapeutic for him. He always had some grand project on the go. But I also see him in the little things you do. The way you clear your throat before saying prayers during supper. The way your mouth drops open and your eyebrows pop up when you’re trying to be silly. Mostly in the way you take things so seriously.” He paused. “To be honest, I wish I had some of those traits. I wish I could still call the old man and ask for his opinion, even when I knew I wouldn’t like what he had to say. I miss the way Mom wouldn’t let me leave without an armful of leftovers.”
In spite of himself, Dale found himself grinning with the reminiscence. “You’d just moved out on your own,” he said.
“That’s right. Which will make it ten years this July when the house burned down.”
“I was speaking to a fireman friend of mine in Encendido,” Dale told him, “who said most of the time, folks in a fire don’t die in the flames. They suffocate from the smoke. They probably passed out and never knew what hit them.”
It was a somber thought, but one Dale’s mind often seemed to return to. Barely two weeks after Shane got his own place, an electrical fire had broken out in the middle of the night and engulfed the whole house. Went up like a pack of matches. Their parents never had a chance. The loss had been devastating for all of them, Shane in particular. He and the old man hadn’t seen eye to eye very often. Their mother had coddled him as a child, enamored by her adorable baby who had grown into a handsome young man. Dale wasn’t bad to look at by any means, but there was an almost magnetic quality about Shane. It was something nearly impossible to put your finger on, although you felt it from the first moment you met him. Whatever you called it, that charisma had landed Nicole without much effort, along with a string of other attractive women throughout the years. In many ways, he lived the life of a young Maharaja, indulging in many of life’s pleasures which had been handed to him on a silver platter.
Unlike so many others, Dale and their father hadn’t been fooled, which had resulted in strained relations between Shane and them. It was perhaps for this reason that his father had willed Dale the land. There was no doubt who was the more responsible custodian, even if for Shane it had proven a difficult pill to swallow. Following their deaths, Dale had used what little money he had inherited to rebuild the family home and continue the Hardy family legacy.
As though reading his mind, Shane reached out and shook his brother’s hand. “No hard feelings, right?” He was talking about his lack of participation, but he might as well have been talking about their long and sometimes complicated family history.
“Not in the least,” Dale replied. “Now go get a pair of gloves off the shelf in the garage and give me a hand, would you?”
Shane offered up that winning smile, his teeth impossibly white, his hair immaculate. “Sure thing.”
With all but Colton assembled, Dale set out his plan.
“I’d been meaning to put up a split-rail fence around the property for some time now,” he said, “but never got around to it. Stacked over by the barn are a large number of wooden posts with no rails. That part was still on my to-do list, but it’s looking like plans have changed. We’re gonna replace the wooden rails with strips of barbed wire.”
“You looking to cover all thirty acres?” Walter said, sounding overwhelmed.
“Definitely not,” Dale replied. “We don’t have enough posts for that anyway. I do think fencing in the front and circling around the crops behind the house and then back up to the road again is
doable.”
“This is a big job,” Shane said. “Might take a while, especially with Colton recovering.”
Dale nodded. His brother was right.
“Not to mention we definitely need someone on watch,” Walter said. “We can’t afford to be caught with our pants down when the sheriff returns.”
“Maybe he won’t,” Ann said, hopeful.
“No, he’ll be back,” Dale assured them. “There’s a history between Randy and I. Something akin to bad blood, you might say, and I’m sure he’s itching to even the score. Maybe at first when he was enforcing the mayor’s orders he might have only been doing his job, but now it’s become personal.”
“Colton only shot to protect us,” Nicole said, glancing around in amazement that such a thing could happen.
“And that young deputy, Clay, clearly shot first,” Ann added.
“Prove it,” Dale said.
They grew quiet for a moment, stunned by his response.
“What do you mean?” Shane asked. “We saw it with our own eyes.”
“I mean just what I said. And you’re right, most of us saw what happened. Clay lost his temper and did something stupid, but do you really think any of that matters? I’m sure those deputies remember a completely different sequence of events. In their minds, Colton went haywire and Clay happened to be in the line of fire.”
“But that isn’t what happened,” Nicole protested.
“I know it isn’t,” Dale said. “We’re not talking about a rational situation here. A deputy’s been shot and Randy’s got a choice to make—either accept they were to blame and leave us alone, or convince himself and those around him that we were the aggressors and they the victims.”
“Surely they’ll know that’s a lie,” Ann said.
Walter rubbed his gloved hands together. “I’m afraid Dale’s right. The gap between what is and what should be is often too wide to breach. They’ll work hard to spin a story with us as the villains. We can’t do anything to stop that. Maybe that’s the problem when you face down the government and see them blink. It’s a humiliation they don’t soon forget.”
“I’m afraid we can’t afford to lose anyone in order to keep watch,” Dale said. “Which means Colton will need to be propped up by one of the front windows and given a pair of binoculars and a walkie-talkie.”
“That’s something we can do,” Brooke said, motioning to Ann.
They left and Dale watched them walk away, hoping that everything they were doing in the end would help keep them safe. It was bad enough that Clay had been shot by one of their own. But what Dale hated most was how quickly the situation had spiraled out of his control. He was a man who searched for order in everything that he did and now he was facing a powder keg just waiting to explode.
Chapter 15
Zach
Zach reached Pueblo, Colorado on his journey toward Interstate 25 and noticed the town was far more active than Canon had been. A handful of cars were on the road, navigating through intersections without bothering to stop or even slow down. Small groups of people were also moving in and out of broken store windows. But it wasn’t electronics they were after. What good was a stereo without power?
On the other side of the boulevard, he watched a patrol car pull up to the store, lights flashing. At once, those pillaging inside came scurrying out like cockroaches, running in every direction.
Zack quickly turned off East 4th Street and into a suburban neighborhood. While he felt comfortable the cops weren’t out looking for him, he also figured there wasn’t any point taking chances.
He cruised down narrow streets, punctuated by small two-story houses with pointed roofs. He made three more rights before settling on the one he would burglarize. If there was one thing he knew for damn certain, he wasn’t going to make it to Encendido driving an ambulance and dressed in a hospital gown.
Climbing down from the cab, Zach gripped the back flap of his gown to keep from flashing the neighborhood. He might not keep to the law, but at least he intended to keep his dignity.
A quick eye up and down the street revealed a distinct lack of activity. Either folks were hiding or they were already dead.
Circling around the back of a small white house, he went straight away to the sliding glass door. It was locked and he swore. A large, inviting rock sat less than five feet away, but without any shoes, shattering the glass would only slice open the soles of his feet. He opted instead to hop the fence, trying two more adjacent houses, before he found an unlocked back door.
Pushing his way inside, he crept through a narrow laundry room, his nose hit at once by the smell of fabric softener. The odor was pleasant, reminding him of the home life he’d lost so many years ago. Lori had said she loved him, had said she’d never leave him, and yet she had committed the ultimate betrayal by going to the cops and telling them everything she knew. It didn’t seem to matter that he’d only robbed those banks up in Colorado so that Colton would have a shot at going to university. To provide his son the kinds of opportunities that had never been open to him. Lori would have argued Zach’s lack of job prospects was his own fault and she would probably have a point.
He’d lied when they’d first met in Denver, told a young and beautiful university sophomore who said her name was Lori that he was studying banking, not even sure such a course even existed. That was the life of a con man, wasn’t it? You bent the truth in every which way and the more you believed your own lie, the more others did too. By the time they were married and had a son on the way, it was too late for her to just up and leave. He’d locked her down as thoroughly as Florence Supermax had done to him.
All that mattered was a steady source of income to keep them afloat, and Zach had taken up the challenge, knocking off convenience and liquor stores with the same regularity as normal guys woke up every morning and went to the office. As the bills began to rise, grabbing a few hundred dollars here and there was no longer cutting it and so Zach had gotten three of his buddies together and turned their attention to spearing larger fish—namely the Bank of America.
Zack was passing through the kitchen when he heard the man’s voice.
“What are you doing in my house?” The guy’s sickly skin was the color of a rotting orange. He was an older man—sixties, maybe more—wearing a bathrobe and carrying a Dirty Harry revolver. Zach wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to get on his knees and beg for forgiveness. He decided on a third option, raising his hands into the air, signaling his intention to surrender. Zach let out a cough, feigning sickness as he lunged forward and knocked the gun from the old man’s grip. It made two lazy circles through the air before tumbling to the ground and discharging. The deafening sound nearly broke his eardrums. The old guy pivoted, intent on retrieving the weapon, but Zach, at least twenty-five years his junior, was there first.
Gun in hand, he rose to his feet, eyeing the old man up and down as he trained the barrel over his heart.
A woman’s voice erupted from upstairs.
“Harold, what’s going on down there? Are you all right?”
“Tell her everything’s fine, Harold,” Zach instructed him. “The gun went off on its own, but no one’s hurt.”
Harold did as he was told.
Zach stood in his hospital gown, eyeing Harold from the floor up.
“What size waist do you wear?”
The old man looked surprised by the question. “I’m a thirty-four.”
Zach smiled. “Lucky for me.” His finger twitched and the .44 Magnum kicked in his hand.
Harold hit the ground like a sack of potatoes and that was when the screaming upstairs started up again. The wife knew something was wrong, said she was calling the police. It was something of a miracle she was even still alive, given the sad state Harold was in. Zach wasn’t worried about catching the old man’s flu. He’d been through the wringer already and come out the other side, fit as a fiddle. In medical terms it meant he was immune. Maybe the old lady was too, not that it would ma
tter.
Chapter 16
Randy
Randy Gaines and a deputy named Stan Lewis arrived at the Teletech production plant around three in the afternoon. Ever since leaving the clinic, Randy had been thinking about his brother Clay. One gunshot to the chest and one to the neck had left Clay clinging to life in critical condition. Randy wasn’t sure what he’d do if his younger brother passed away. The one small generator the town owned was being used at the hospital to treat the sick and to keep Clay alive. It was at moments like these that Randy realized how much we took simple things like lights and electricity for granted.
After finding a spot to park his cruiser, Randy killed the engine, took a deep breath and glanced up at the ominous factory.
“Why on earth does Mayor Reid insist on headquartering here?” Randy asked Lewis beside him.
“The hell should I know?” his deputy replied. “Maybe it reminds him of the good ol’ days.”
Although he’d tossed the question out there to rattle off some steam, Randy thought he knew perfectly well the answer to his question. The new mayor was by far the town’s wealthiest inhabitant with an impressive gated Spanish colonial-style mansion off one of the main streets.
In the early days of the virus, Hugh Reid had lain low, the same as everyone else. At the time, the pandemic had been spreading like a grass fire in the prairies, jumping from fathers making final runs on the grocery store or mothers trying desperately to empty the joint checking account to the rest of the family, waiting huddled and terrified back at home. Hardly anyone knew that the faster a virus moved and the faster it killed, the quicker it would cut itself off from finding new hosts. Most of them couldn’t live outside a body―human or swine in this case―for longer than a few hours. For his new boss, Hugh Reid, even the walls around his palatial home hadn’t been high enough to keep out the sickness.
Like the common cold, one never really knew for sure who had passed it on. Somehow, not long after Hugh’s wife had returned from a quick errand, their two twins, Alexander and Patrick, had complained they weren’t feeling well. Soon, they’d discovered Hugh’s wife had it too. They had been quarantined in the eastern wing of the mansion, Hugh visiting them dressed in a gas mask and plastic dish gloves. Hugh had told Randy the kids were terrified of the way he looked. Until two days later, all three of them were dead. Hugh had buried them in the backyard.
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