by T. K. Malone
“More responsibility?” Zac said as they drew to a halt before the door.
“Of Connor.” Wesley now faced Zac. “Oh, Zac, don’t you know anything? Everything, Zac, all of it—it’s all about Connor; nothing else matters.” Wesley pushed Zac away, his arms outstretched, their eyes locked. “Now, chin up. Cornelius only respects the strong—in that he’s never wavered.”
“What’s he like?”
“A man changes a lot in fifteen years. Your father will no doubt be able to tell you the exact amount of time you’ve spent apart—quite likely to the hour. It’s an obsession of his, you see,” and now he put his arm around Zac. “You have to understand he’s been kept in solitary confinement for much of his time, the Black City Drone Slayer confined here so everyone else could be kept safe outside. It was an immense effort just to keep him segregated. No one, not even me, knows exactly what those years were like. We just know that when he emerged a few days ago it was like no time at all had passed, other than his now white hair and the deepening of his wrinkles. But look past that, Zac, look into his eyes. There you’ll see the man. They locked him away because they feared him, feared his reputation so much they dared not kill him. But through little more than whispered words, Zac, he still ruled.”
“And now he’s free,” Zac could hardly bring himself to say.
Wesley opened the door. Zac walked into what had clearly been the old warden’s orderly office. It smelled of tea tree oil and old leather. Shafts of light slanted into the room through a barred window, down onto a stout wooden desk behind which Zac’s aged father now sat.
Cornelius’s long white hair was tied back in a ponytail, and his moustache—the type which ran into long sideburns—ruled over a shaven chin. He wore a pair of round, green sunglasses, despite the room itself being dim. His unclad torso was dark, his skin contrasting sharply against the white of his hair, and he had a muscular physique, as though he worked out. Zac walked into the room, up to the desk and stood before him.
“Dad,” he said.
Cornelius Clay looked up. “Hello, son.”
13
Zac’s Story
Strike time: plus 3 days
Location: Black City Correctional
Wesley retrieved a chair, slid it behind Zac and then retired from the room. Zac sat without breaking his father’s stare. So far, his father hadn’t shown any emotion at their reunion, nor had Zac particularly expected any. The man had, after all, ruined his life, Connor’s life and their mother’s. Although, when Zac tried to pin the blame so conveniently on him, he got a bit of a blowback. The life he continued to choose wasn’t all on Cornelius, and Zac knew it. With Billy Flynn he’d carved out a path of his own, with similar aims and similar risks, to a point.
“So, how have you been,” Zac asked, pulling a smoke out of his pocket. “This okay?”
“Smoking?” Cornelius’s expression became a little bemused. “Sure, throw me one over. When did you become so polite?”
“Fifteen years, Cornelius; over that time I’ve become a lot of things. How’s Switch?”
Zac’s question brought out a smile from his father. “You think I’d hurt a club member? Technically I am still in charge, still the MC. Being locked up here doesn’t change that.” He lit the smoke Zac threw him. “You were right to keep Grimes in charge, the lay of the land has yet to settle.”
“You know about that?”
“Who do you think keeps Switch safe?”
Zac paused as he brought his smoke to his lips. “So, you’ve been in contact with Grimes.”
“And?”
“Grimes told you we were on our way to Christmas.”
“Like I said: technically I’m still the MC. Nathan Grimes is a steady hand, but hardly a man of vision, hardly a driving force or a fountain of inspiration.” He exhaled. “Now, these are sweet smokes. Like I said: you were right to keep Nathan Grimes in charge, the other outcome would have caused a small family conflict.”
“How so?”
“Well,” and he smiled, touching the rim of his sunglasses, pushing them tight to his eyes. “I’d have had to have you killed, and that would have been unfortunate. I’ve got big plans, Zac.”
“From here?”
“A spider’s power is not held in the farthest tendril of its web. A spider’s power is concentrated in the center, from there it can strike, from there it can plot and plan. To kill this spider, you have to get to the web’s center, not dance around its edges, and if you were to try that, you’d be gobbled up.”
Zac nodded ever so slightly as he digested his father’s words. “But the spider’s web is the extent of its influence. Only there is it powerful.”
“Only there. When did you grow brains?” He sat up straighter. “No, don’t answer that. Fifteen years—a lot changes, things move forward.”
“And there’s the small matter of those murders,” Zac pointed out.
Cornelius grunted. “Small matter indeed. Then again, I’m relatively sure your hands have a few smatterings of blood on them, at least, might I point out? My garden ornaments; why did you kill him?”
“Because he was suffering for no reason.”
“On the contrary, he was suffering for every reason. He didn’t play nice with some of my friends. That guard deserved to suffer. So, Zac,” and he sat up even straighter, stabbing his finger at Zac, “don’t butt into my art. Those two were my creations of retribution.”
“And the women you suspended from the drones?”
“Art for art’s sake, a diversion to keep the stiffs off my back, and remarkably effective they were too. Don’t forget: my work laid the way for what you’ve got today, my work opened up every single smuggling route, every single pipe, boat and drone.” He crossed his legs, appearing to take stock, to assess. “But you’re right about the spider. It’s too localized, way too small. Now, take the fire ant, Zac, they range far and wide, raiding, pillaging, taking what they want, but they’ve still got a nest, a big old ant hill where the queen lives.”
“Queen? Shit, hard time, I guess.” He smiled, more in challenge than mirth.
“It’s an analogy, nothing more. This place, Zac, this is the new Christmas; this is where we become kings.”
“We?”
“Me, you, Grimes. The world has altered beyond its ability to heal. The grid cities won’t come back, can’t come back. Worker ants with no other point in life except to serve the whole collective, and they’re all dead now. Fire ants; if you’re going to be an ant, be a fire ant, Zac. It’s the way forward.”
“Is that how you see the future? Marauding around like Vikings?”
“Don’t you? Did you or did you not tell Grimes that the only thing he had to trade was muscle?” Cornelius preened his sideburn. “Or have you some greater plan you’re keeping close to your chest?”
“Like what?” but his father had turned away. Wesley had returned with a bottle in his hand and a couple of glasses.
“Ah, Wesley, thank you,” and Cornelius smiled, accepting a glassful. “I take it you’re a whiskey man?” he asked, looking back at Zac. “And try one of these.” He tossed a pack of smokes over. “They ain’t bad. I prefer Saggers’, but Nathan sometimes has trouble getting me his. Now, there’s a man I’d like to meet, given the change in the economic landscape of the country. Picture it, Zac, a limitless supply of Saggers' Smokes—now, that would put the club on the map. I hear he’s just a couple of valleys away. Will you go fetch him for me?” He raised his glass. “Cheers.”
“A whole city is wiped out, nine million customers, and you want to start a brand of smokes?”
Cornelius looked back up at Wesley. “Sit, Wes. Sit, sit. Now, didn’t I tell you he was slow?” and he grunted. “You never had nine million customers, Zac, you had a few hundred, maybe a few thousand—but any one night, a few hundred. Nine million? Ninety-nine point nine, nine, nine, and so on percent didn’t even know you existed, that the club existed; you talk about my drone girls; nine million f
olk knew I existed. Devil’s in the detail—Saggers' Smokes’ll put you on the map, Zac. Won’t they, Wes?”
Wesley was laughing, and Cornelius joined in, a grin slowly crossing Zac’s lips. He raised his own glass. “To Saggers,” he toasted.
Cornelius’ laughter cut short. “And that brings us quite neatly to your future, after all, a peddler of smokes can only go so far. What can you bring to the table? Me? I have an army of a few thousand, but we’re terribly low on firepower. Grimes is arranging a few shipments to solve that little problem, but as we’ve discussed, he’s just Nathan Grimes, no more than a worker ant. I need fire, Zac. Can you give me fire?”
“What for?”
Cornelius shrugged. “I’ve already got a badass team on the way to scout the prepper’s compound. Strikes me, they might just have spent a lifetime building it for me.” He smiled. “So, fire ant or no?”
Zac mulled it over. Whatever he thought about his father, the man had the largest standing army in this—and likely any other—valley, close by. Somehow, after fifteen years locked up, his influence hadn’t shrunk. Yet Zac had heard nothing, not even a whisper that he was alive. Cornelius sat back, with the look of a man who held all the cards.
“I’m changing my opinion,” said Cornelius. “He’s not slow, he’s steady. I’ll bet you, Wesley, I’ll bet you a credit to a corndog that he’s wondering how he never knew I was even alive. He’s wondering how I could be at the center of all of this without a sole knowing I exist—barr you, Wesley, and the poor unfortunates who got to watch me work out every day. And so, Wesley, that makes him steady, not slow.”
“Steady,” repeated Wesley.
“So, how did you?” Zac wondered if he needed to add mindreading to his father’s qualities.
“In here? By whispers. I whisper to Wesley—tell him what I need doing. Wesley whispers to, say, Switch—tells him what the man needs doing, and Switch… Well, so on and so forth. The man is this big, bad persona.” He took his sunglasses off—his eyes wide. “No one knows who the man is—they’re all too scared to ask.”
“And Grimes?”
“Grimes takes his advice from Switch, always has, always will. Now, Switch: there’s a good man to have at your side. Hasn’t once complained about being dragged in here to be my conduit.”
“You had him arrested?”
Cornelius shrugged. “The whole night was a botch. Not your end, out there. Either way, he didn’t complain—hasn’t complained. Anyway, let’s get back to your part in this post-apocalyptic wasteland we find ourselves in. I take it you’re on your way to Christmas?”
“That I am.”
“You’ll be light on guns; most of them are on their way here.”
“I’m not going for the guns.”
“No, you’re not, which brings us full circle. I’ve shown you my hand…”
Zac sat back. He couldn’t quite fathom how fate had put him at this particular table, with his father the serial killer and probably the only person in the world he could trust with his cards. He pulled out another cigarette, a Saggers, he thought, and lit it, sliding the rest over the table. Taking a long draw, he looked from his father, to Wesley, and back.
“There’s three crates marked ‘Nevada Mead’. I want them. The rest you can take.”
“And I take it there’s no such drink.”
“Nope. Listen, we’ve sat here, you’ve told me how good you are, how you’ve got everything all worked out with your army, Grimes and this place, but you had more than the one son, more than just me, and you had a wife. How come you haven’t asked about them?”
“My wife, your mother, is dead, and so irrelevant now, but, Connor… Okay, I’ll play along. So, how is he? Did he survive? I heard he was a gridder through and through—a radio presenter, DJ, whatever you call them. I heard all of that. Did he get vaporized? You see, I do care but he was very young when I was around. Maybe we didn’t bond, didn’t form that whole father-and-son thing, maybe, but I just don’t feel it with him—not like you and me, Zac, and you never even visited. Fifteen years, Zac, fifteen years, twenty-six weeks, two days and a handful of hours—and you never visited. So? Connor? Dead or not?”
Zac glanced at Wesley, Cornelius’ words not matching those spoken by Wesley previously. Another game, another test, he thought. “I’m fairly sure he survived.”
“Fairly sure?” Cornelius said, his voice flat and even. “You’re fairly sure? Fairly sure you protected your little brother?” He banged the table. “Just how ‘fairly sure’?”
“He should have been evacuated, by the government—locals, not feds. Some vast bunker run by a man called Charm.” Zac stopped, something clicking in his mind. “But you know all about him, don’t you. Didn’t Charm put you here?”
“Charm? No, a man called Lester Savage put me here; you know that—we should stop trying to trip each other up, Zac. No, Charm made sure I got caught; Charm made sure I was kept alive, and once again, it seems the man is interfering in my family’s lives. What’s your bargain with Charm?”
“For Connor’s life, for his safety? Not quite what you’d expect.”
“Try me.”
“Another bottle of whiskey? That one’s nearly done.”
“Why not? Wesley, would you do the honors.”
“Sure, boss,” he said, and Zac watched him go, his eyes never leaving the man.
“You trust him?” Zac asked.
“My voice to the world? He brought you here, just like I asked. You, the man who could technically replace him, who could kill and so usurp him. He did that because I told him to. So can I trust him? Sure.”
“Good,” said Zac, watching Wesley return, another bottle in hand.
“The crate has full radiation suits in it, top end,” said Zac. “Hell, put those babies on and you could have walked straight into ground zero the day after.”
Wesley sat and poured out the whiskeys. “And Charm wants you to go in and fetch something?” he said.
Zac’s expression turned from shock that they might already know, to humor that they were quite likely just trying to guess. “Listening, were we?”
“Always,” said Wesley.
“No, he wants me to put something back.”
“Do you know what that is?” Wesley inquired.
“Didn’t ask. Why would I? We’ve been smuggling gear out for Charm for an age. He kept all your routes open for us, made it easy. All he asked was a two-way street. You know all this, Grimes knew all this, so you know it all.”
“I know that my son willingly worked with my captor.”
“You’re a fucking serial killer! You think I looked up to you or something? Think I wanted to be like you? Hell, like everyone else, I thought you were dead and I didn’t cry a single tear. I got into bed with the man I had to. I made the club great, big, rich. We functioned without you, and if it weren’t for a nuke or two, an EMP blast, we’d still be cool. So spider or ant, whatever you think you are, we survived fine without you, and still can.”
Cornelius pushed his chair back and stood. He walked around the desk and put his hands on Zac’s shoulders. “Except, all that did happen and now I’m back in play. Josiah Charm has my son, your brother, and that, Zac, puts us on the same side. Tell me, did you know what it was you were smuggling out of the city?”
“Just crates, nothing bulky. It was part of a deal. He didn’t ask what we were taking in, and we gave him the same respect.”
“Except, one day Connor followed you and something went wrong.”
Zac took a slug of his drink. “Yeah, he nearly died. Charm cleaned it up for me. Had him and the stiff who attended put in a special hospital.”
Cornelius tapped the back of Zac’s chair, then went back and sat in his own. “What happened, exactly?”
“We had dumps, places Charm’s men would put the stuff he wanted transporting. We always got our stuff first—emptied the wagons, brought it all back, then trundled Charm’s gear through. Connor went into the tunnels aft
er we’d gone with our own gear. By all accounts, he saw Charm’s crates and tried to look in. By accident, he pulled one on top of himself and it smashed open.”
“And?”
“Charm always had a couple of ‘overseers’ outside. One must have called the stiffs. One went down—a stiff called Teah. By the time Billy and me got back to take the gear the other way, it was all cleaned up. I only found out about Connor when Charm called later and told me what had happened.”
“This…special hospital, what happened there?”
“Connor had a VPA fitted, erased his memory of the incident. He thinks he was taking some photos and fell in a drain—same with Teah.”
“Teah? A stiff called Teah? Why have I heard that name?”
Zac glared at his father. “How much do you already know?”
“Bits. Pieces. Enough to know that you had a thing for her.”
“Yes, yes I did, but it didn’t work out.”
“No, she just upped and left. What a complicated life you led before this little slice of mayhem, and in all that, my Joan died. I guess she was the one who bore the fruit of my shame.” He smiled. “I know I didn’t,” and then he winked. Putting his hands behind his head, he sat back and looked up. “Fifteen years I’ve lived in this concrete tomb, and I’m ashamed to say, I’m reluctant to leave it now, reluctant to leave this place, but I will, Zac—you can be sure of that. And I can’t promise not to kill, to hurt, to torture, because it’s part of who I am. So I’d suggest, quite cordially, that you go and do what Charm wants you to, and then go and find my son.”
“I thought you didn’t care about Connor?”
“You can’t believe everything I tell you. You know that. I’m used to having limited time to get my information, and so I adapt to get it. Now, you have things to do.” Cornelius leaned back in his chair, now staring and smiling at Zac.
“And what are you going to do?” Zac asked.
“Me? Have a little fun.”
“And that’s it?”
“Well, Switch will be riding with you.”