“Who the…?”
Bobby threw himself at the man as the children screamed.
BANG!
Footsteps from behind him as he got a sense of Eve moving toward the play area, but Bobby was focused on the big man as fat hands pushed him away, then closed around his throat.
The rifle swung and bullets sprayed through the smashed window as Bobby brought his fist down, trying desperately to grab the revolver. Then metal flashed as, with a roar, the big man pulled the dagger from his belt and, in one move, began a downward thrust.
More metal, this time from the right. This time with a boot on the end of it.
Linwood’s prosthetic leg connected with the man’s head as he reached down to pull the rifle away.
“Thanks,” Bobby gasped, as the window filled with people jumping through.
“Yeah, well. Don’t you leave me out again. I was wounded in Afghanistan, not crippled.”
He helped Bobby up and they stepped back as the glass-strewn restaurant front filled with the relieved cries of children. Three figures grabbed at the hostage taker as he came around. He cried out in fear, but he got nothing back but stony silence as he was hauled to his feet.
Bobby put his arm around Eve, and they were about to make their escape when one of the three who had the shooter turned around. “Thanks, man. Please, come with us so we can talk a little. We owe you the lives of our children.”
Others gathered around—men, women and children—and the three of them were guided through the open window and out into the parking lot.
An arm grabbed Bobby. “Over here, friend.” He nodded to Linwood and they headed over to a corner of the parking lot.
Five men and one woman gathered around the kneeling figure of the hostage taker. His nose was bloodied from a wound Bobby didn’t remember either himself or Linwood inflicting.
“I’m Brandon, and this here’s Eugene Scrubbs, according to his driver’s license. Figured he’d rob the Burger King during all the chaos, but didn’t reckon on the damn fool girl behind the counter puttin’ up a fight. Charlie’s her name. Charlie Cooper. So, he took that revolver and he shot her. No warnin’.”
Bobby cast a glance at the kneeling man, quietly sobbing and dripping blood on the asphalt.
“So, Curtis, he came to fetch me, and we ran down. We were just packing our cars, about to head off before the bandits came back. They’re over at the base HQ, stealing and burning.
“Anyway, we found this scum holding the kids and a couple of moms hostage. Wanted a Humvee and a driver to get him away. Fool doesn’t know much about how this place works if he thinks I could just go get one even if I had a mind to. We were just fixing to rush him when you turned up. Thank you. Thanks to both of you.”
He put out his hand and, as he took it, Bobby noticed the man standing behind the trembling form of Scrubbs. He looked as though he were made of stone, his expression devoid of life, his skin as pale as death.
“That’s Curtis,” Brandon said. “Curtis Cooper. Charlie’s dad.”
Bobby shook his head. “I’m so sorry.”
Cooper gave a hardly perceptible nod.
Taking him by the arm again, Brandon led Bobby to the side, gesturing for Linwood to follow. “Truth is, every one of us might have lost like Curtis has if you hadn’t done what you done. Both of you. But you’re the only level heads among us right now. Curtis wants to put a bullet through that scum’s head. But maybe you could persuade him to go through the authorities.”
“What authorities?”
Brandon shrugged. “There’s the governor, I suppose.”
“The likes of him don’t deserve to live,” Linwood muttered. “When you got a rat problem, you’d best get exterminatin’ or you’ll just end up with more on your hands. But I guess you’re right, we should make sure he gets justice or we ain’t no better than he is. What d’you say, Bob?”
As Linwood said this, Bobby had been looking at Curtis Cooper, who stood with his fist wrapped around Scrubb’s collar, staring at the ruins of the Burger King where his daughter had been murdered. And Bobby’s mind wandered to Maria. How would he feel right now if it had been her? If he were where Cooper was, a gun in his hand and his daughter’s body going cold only yards away. Bobby hadn’t asked for the responsibility and he wasn’t sure he truly had any. Brandon was a good, law-abiding man who wanted Scrubbs handed over to an officer of the law to deal with. Oh, he wanted the man dead, but he wouldn’t take responsibility, and Bobby didn’t blame him.
Bobby Rodriguez was also a law-abiding man, and had been since he’d taken the rap for his uncle. He’d made promises to God and his family that he would go straight, and he’d kept them both for fifteen years.
But in the absence of law enforcement, a man had a duty to make sure justice was done.
“And you’re sure he did it. One hundred percent?” he said to Brandon.
The man nodded. “Yeah. We got a witness who got herself out of there and Charlie’s body is right inside. Single bullet wound to the head from close range, and he’s the only one with a gun in that Burger King.”
“Single gunshot to the head?” Bobby repeated. Brandon was looking for an officer of the law to take responsibility, but he’d turned to Bobby as someone with no skin in the game, someone who could make the decision. He was no officer of the law, but he could be the instrument of justice.
Curtis Cooper’s head swiveled slowly in his direction, his eye locking on Bobby’s.
And Bobby Rodriguez knew exactly what he meant—what he was doing—when he held the man’s gaze for a moment.
And nodded.
He, Linwood and Eve were on their way out of the parking lot, heading back to their car when they heard a single gunshot.
Eve grabbed at his hand. “What was…? Oh, my God!” She began turning back toward the restaurant.
“No, Eve,” Bobby said, holding her tight.
“They’ve shot him? And you knew?”
“It was the right thing to do,” Linwood said. “The world don’t need men like him runnin’ around and, besides, it’s biblical. Eye for an eye. Don’t forget the poor young girl.”
Eve wiped a tear from her eye as she kept her attention on Bobby. “Why didn’t you stop them?”
“I couldn’t, and it’s not my place anyway,” Bobby said, electing not to point out that it was he who had given the go-ahead. He could hardly bear the look of disappointment on her face. A look that was punching through the numbness he felt as his mind adjusted to what he’d enabled.
“Brandon’s coming,” Linwood said, nodding back the way they’d come.
Bobby turned away from Eve, who stepped back a little.
“Bob, I wanted to catch you before you go. We’ve got a little tidying up to do—garbage disposal—and then we’ll hold a ceremony for Charlie. I’ve seen her now. Poor kid. She was so full of life. But justice has been done and I thank you for your part in that.”
Brandon released his hand. “You didn’t say what you’re doin’ here.”
“We’re heading for Vegas. Looking for my daughter,” Bobby said, feeling as lifeless as Charlie Cooper’s father. Would his search have the same ending, he wondered.
Then he felt something pressed into his palm. “I figured it was something like that. Here. That scum parked his truck over there. It’s yours now. Maybe it’s got enough gas to get you where you’re goin’.” He gripped Bobby’s hand again and strode away.
Chapter 3
Idyll
“So, it was you!” Buzz stabbed a finger at Jodi, who sat looking defiant, if a little scared, at the kitchen table. Behind her, Anna Frey’s jaw dropped open and the wooden spoon in her hand stopped rotating.
Jodi gathered herself together and nodded again. “Yeah.”
“Have you got any idea the damage that boy has done? No? He’s been snooping into places he’s got no business going.”
“What have you got to hide, Uncle Buzz?”
“Who the hell d’yo
u think you are to talk to me like that? Do you know how much I risked to bring you here? How happy I was when you started recovering? And now I find you’ve been helping this kid who’s got no idea what he’s getting himself into.”
“Perhaps if you talked to him a bit more, he wouldn’t have gone sneaking around behind you back.”
“It was none of his business! It’s none of your business!”
Anna pushed the saucepan off the stove top. “What’s gotten into you, Buzz? I’ve never heard you talk to Jodi like that.”
“Well, she’s never betrayed me before.”
Jodi snorted as her underlying personality reasserted itself. “You’re a total drama queen. So what if I gave Max the flash drive? It was his work.”
“His illegal work! Jodi, you’ve got no idea what we’re dealing with.”
“Then you shoulda told me! I still don’t know why you had to lose your sh—”
“Jodi!” Anna hissed. “There are children outside!”
Jodi snapped around and opened her mouth, ready to spit more invective, but Buzz got there first.
“Anna’s right,” he said. “Let’s talk about this outside.”
Jodi shrugged, gave Anna a withering look and slunk through the kitchen door.
“What you’ve got to understand is that Max is a clever boy. A real clever boy. But at the moment, he’s flipping stones in the desert and, sooner or later, he could find a scorpion.”
They walked out toward the chicken hut where the recovering Dom was scattering food. He was inadequately trying to fill Hank’s considerable boots and, not for the first time, Buzz found himself missing the older man. He’d been the price for getting rid of Max, and Buzz was now wondering if it had been worth paying after all. He’d been relieved when Ellen and that half-wit actor had agreed to take the boy, but he’d come to rely on Hank more than he’d realized. Perhaps there was a lesson there.
He exchanged a greeting with Dom and led Jodi out past the barns, ignoring the insistent mooing of the cows and pigs’ hungry snorting before reaching the paddock containing their small herd of goats and larger flock of sheep.
Jodi followed him, knowing that the only way through this was to have the argument out. Buzz leaned against the wooden fence of the goat enclosure and gestured out over the wide field formed by the sides of the valley as they met at its end.
“This is ready to plant,” he said. “Potatoes, beans, peas and brassicas—cabbages, kale, that sort of thing. Good source of iron so we don’t have to slaughter so many of our livestock. Maybe some more root vegetables and even some grain along the valley slopes if we can. But we have to get going—most will be cropping in late summer and autumn, but only if they’re in the ground in the next couple of weeks.”
“I know all this, Buzz. I helped with the plowing.”
Buzz took a deep breath. “My point is that we’re doing this for the long term, but it all depends on us escaping the attention of others.”
“What’s that got to do with Max and the dongle? I legit don’t get you. I mean, who would come looking for us? The FBI’s got bigger problems.”
Buzz turned to her, leaning on the fence. She was still pale, and she hadn’t regained the weight she’d lost while she’d been at death’s door, but at least he could recognize the niece he loved like a daughter now. “Do you know what’s the first thing people do when a disaster happens? Once they’ve survived it, anyway.”
She looked at him, her eyes narrowing behind the stars and stripes sunglasses. “I dunno. Start rebuilding?”
“No. They look for someone to blame. And the more powerful they are, the more they look to deflect the finger pointing in their direction.”
For a moment, she held his gaze as if trying to connect the dots. Then she gasped. “You’re saying you’ll get the blame?”
Buzz nodded. “I reckon so.”
“Why? I mean, I guessed a while back you must have known something about all this or why build this place?”
“I built it for your dad.”
Jodi tilted her head on one side. “I know that’s the story, and I guess it’s part of it. But it’s not the whole truth, is it?”
He took a deep breath and looked out again at the plowed field. He’d been up for hours already and it was barely nine, but he could feel the burden of guilt shifting on his shoulders, threatening to either overwhelm him or, perhaps, to lighten with the sharing.
“I knew.”
“For real?”
Buzz shrugged. “Yeah. Well, I like to kid myself that I couldn’t be sure, that my superiors had to know more about it than me, but, in my heart, I knew there was a chance, a big chance.”
“Why didn’t you do something?”
“I did! I flew over to Bonn, ambushed the project director, and nearly got sacked for my trouble. I bombarded everyone I could think of with emails.”
“But it wasn’t enough, was it?”
Buzz shook his head. “Obviously not. I kept trying to convince myself I must be missing something crucial, something the others knew.”
“So, you built this place and made sure I was on a boat when whatever happened happened.”
“Yeah. I wasn’t supposed to know the precise date, but I guess I can do my own hacking when needed. I just wish I could have saved your dad.”
Jodi slumped against the railing, pushing back the head of the goat that had been nibbling at her pocket. “He was in Morocco, wasn’t he?”
“Making a movie about the fall of the Roman empire. Sickeningly apt. I told him to stay away from the coast, but he said that’s where most of the shooting was scheduled. He’d have had to get a long way inland to escape the water. I’m sorry, Jodi. But I don’t think he truly believed me.”
Jodi wiped her eyes. “It’s okay. He sent me a WhatsApp the day before I got on the boat, said he was shooting just outside the Game of Thrones city. You know, the Unsullied? I’m pretty sure that’s on the coast.”
They stood looking out on the plowed fields set within the tree-lined valley end for a few minutes, each lost in their thoughts of Joel Baxter, movie star, father and brother. Well, he was good at one of those three.
“But what’s this got to do with Max?” Jodi finally said.
“Like I said, I reckon my former bosses are looking for me right now.”
“Why?”
“Well, partly because I’ve always suspected they’d try to blame me, and also because a helicopter landed here last week and while they might have been carrying out a census as they claimed, they might also have been looking for me.”
Jodi grunted dismissively. “I never had you down as a conspiracy nut. Or paranoid.”
“I know these people. But, anyway, Max was hacking into the institute where I worked. He’s a clever boy, but if he thinks they won’t detect the intrusion then he’s also unbelievably naive.”
“And you think they’ll track you down through him?”
“They’ll assume it’s me, and they’ll get a rough location from the IP address he used, but the more often he goes back, the more they’ll be able to refine their target location.”
Jodi thought about this for a moment. “But he’s not here anymore.”
“Yeah, well, that’ll puzzle them. They’ll figure it out eventually, though.”
“Oh, my God,” Jodi said, slapping her hand to her lips. “They’ll go after him! And Ellie and Pat!”
“And Hank.”
Jodi cursed. “So, that’s why you took the laptop away from him!”
“Not entirely. Since we’re being honest with each other, I was angry and embarrassed that he could discover my role in all this. And I was frightened by his talent. I thought it was safe to give him a laptop so he could complete his map project, but it never occurred to me he’d manage to crack Denver’s security. He’s dangerously smart, Jodi. Dangerous to himself, the people he’s with and us.
“I mean, look at this place,” he said, turning so his hand swept across the fields
and back to the farm buildings. “We’ve built somewhere safe and, if we work hard, self-contained for the foreseeable future. But it depends on staying off the radar. Down here, in this valley, we can only be seen by a helicopter flying directly over us, and only if it’s low enough. There are no cities above water for hundreds of miles and we’re just one of a thousand newly created islands.
“Without Max’s actions, the greatest risk was from pirates randomly coming across us and stealing what we have, and the longer we remained undetected, the more likely it would be that order would be restored before we’re found at all. Now, we have to keep a watch on the skies in case they come for me. And if they take me, who’s to say they won’t take everything?”
Jodi took his hand. “I’m so sorry, Uncle Buzz. I didn’t realize.”
“There’s not much we can do about it anymore, so let’s just hope for the best.”
They wandered back toward the cluster of buildings as Tom walked from the house to the barn with a bucket of pigswill swinging from his hand.
“How’s Jo doing?” Jodi said, following Tom with her eyes.
Buzz glanced across at her as they walked. “She’s getting slowly better. I don’t really understand why she got it so much worse than anyone else.”
“Except Harper.”
“Yeah, of course.” He’d tried not to feel guilty about the kid who’d died, but doing that had made him even worse. He’d been affected enough as they’d buried her on the open ground near the Colonial house where he’d encountered Dom and his family. Anna had wanted her to be laid to rest within the farm grounds, but Buzz had insisted there wasn’t enough room. While that was true, the main reason was so he wouldn’t be confronted by his guilt and reminded of his failure to save the child every time he left the house. And, after all, they were likely to need more space at some point.
“You probably think I’m some sort of machine,” he said as they reached the animal barn.
Jodi held her nose, but sneezed anyway as she went to reply. “Achoo!” She laughed and wiped her face. “No, I don’t think you’re a machine. You did all of this for me, after all. Or, at least in part for me. But I think you have a tough time caring about people just because they are people, like.”
Survivors: Deluge Book 3: (A Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Story) Page 2