“Morning, Mike.” He tipped the remains of the water bottle over his head as the foreman stepped alongside him. “They good for anything?”
“The three Cs. Construction. Christmas trees. Carbon capture. What are you doing out here?”
Regretting he hadn’t woken earlier. “I’m not lost. I know where the camp is. What are you doing out here?”
“Making sure you don’t get lost.” Possible but not likely. Why hadn’t the gang boss made himself known earlier? “You can’t go wandering off.”
He should’ve wandered faster. Too dangerous at night even if he had a light source, he’d be too easily discovered. Twenty-four days to get that phone. Plenty of time still. If they were lucky, Rory would have found the signal jammer, or a cache of confiscated tech and he wouldn’t have to make up some excuse to go strolling through a forest.
“We should head back if we don’t want Chuck eating our breakfast.” Mike said.
They walked for a while in silence, the sun getting higher in the sky. The tightness in his muscles from unaccustomed physical work and sleeping on the ground had worked its way through and having Mike to himself was an unexpected bonus. He was one of the founding settlers and ran Abundance’s construction and maintenance projects.
“Why here?” He meant why build more cabins so far out, a good hour’s drive in pickups from the main town center.
“Need to be ready.”
Thanks, Vaguey McVague. He was about to come at it a different way, when Mike said, “This new neighborhood will be for refugees.”
“Aren’t we all refugees?”
“We are the chosen. They won’t be free settlers like us. Not Continuers. They won’t have paid their way. They won’t be equal, and they won’t have choices. Those who we allow to live here will need to prove their value by serving the rest of us.”
The bad taste in his mouth had nothing to do with morning breath. Mike just described slavery. “What do you mean they won’t be equal?”
“How could they be? They’re part of the problem. Brought what happens on themselves. We’ll take the best of them, those with special skills. Give them shelter. Those that can earn their keep can stay.”
God, for this alone they had to break this place up. “And those that can’t?”
“You don’t need to worry about that. They won’t be a drain on our resources.”
Which was as good as saying the penalty would be loss of life. This was all theoretical right now, not something he could act on. He had to choose his words carefully, not let horror show in his tone. “When things get really bad, how will we stop from being overrun?”
“You don’t need to worry about that either. Orrin will protect us.”
“But he’s one man with an electric fence, and no way of knowing how bad it’s gotten out there.”
“We have more than a fence.”
“Weapons?”
“We have what we need.”
It wasn’t enough for his purposes. But it’s not like Mike was going to say, oh hey newbie, let me show you my secret weapons bunker since you asked so nicely. “I’d like to be trained in how to protect us.”
“City boy who’d shoot his own foot off given half the chance.”
“I need to know I can protect my sister.”
“You already did that by bringing her here.”
“I don’t know if it’s enough.”
Mike stopped and scanned the horizon. “See those mountains. Riddled with caverns and old mining tunnels. We have enough room, provisions, to move the whole settlement there and live for months if we need to, a year if we have to. You’re safe. You’re a hard worker, surprised me. Didn’t expect you to be able to keep up.”
He didn’t want to ask what might happen to him if he hadn’t been able to keep up, if he got injured or sick, or caught retrieving a cell phone from a forest of mountain spruce. He didn’t have a good grip on the demographics of Abundance, but he’d bank on it being made up of able-bodied people under fifty. The utopian future didn’t have room for troublesome disabilities or pesky old age at any price.
“You don’t need to worry about your sister. She’ll be bonded before long and since she’s a pretty thing, might be she’ll match for life. Some do. Makes her another man’s responsibility then.”
He hadn’t known Mike had seen Rory. The idea she was being watched made his skin prickle. Imagining her as any man’s responsibility almost made him laugh. They had to find a way to get inside those tunnels, find out exactly what was hidden there.
“Are you married?” he asked.
“We don’t call it that. People weren’t made to be monogamous. That’s another reason for the rot out there. We have a choice who we lay with for the joy of it and who we have children with. The only thing we ask is that all women have children so we grow our own second generation. A pregnant Continuer is near about the most sacred thing we have here.”
Creepy thoughts on an empty stomach were even more sickening. An uncomfortable tingle ran up his spine. He didn’t know what Rory thought about having kids, now there was no Cal in the picture, but he’d never figured on being a father. He could cause enough ruckus as Uncle Zeke.
When they arrived at the camp, breakfast was ready, and it was midmorning before work stopped as a truck approached.
Mike whistled for a stop as Orrin got out of the truck. Zeke watched as the crew downed tools to gather around, coming to stand in a loose circle around Orrin as Mike talked through their progress. Zeke kept to the outer edge and watched the body language. Other than Mike, who was shifting around, pointing this way and that, the other men mirrored Orrin’s posture. Feet planted wide, arms folded, chins tucked down. It was unconscious. A deferral to Orrin’s power, a desire to be seen as his equal.
Zeke shifted into position, widening his stance, lowering his head. He was taller than the men in front of him but if he looked Orrin directly in the eye it might be taken as a challenge and that’s the last thing he wanted.
Orrin asked questions about progress and Mike answered, deflecting to others when needed and then signaled the crew back to work while he took Orrin on a tour of the pegged-out site.
“He looks pleased,” Ted said to general agreement when Mike and Orrin were out of earshot.
“Is he a hard man to please?” Zeke asked.
“Wouldn’t you be if you were building a new world, city slicker?”
“He seems like a reasonable man.” That got a laugh. “What?”
“You’re new so you’re excused. This time. Reasonable is for Sunday rest days and how strong your tea is. Reasonable is for clean sheets and a full belly,” Ted said.
“Air you can breathe and earth that won’t poison you,” said Chuck.
“A good woman who treats you right and doesn’t make a fuss when it’s time to move on,” said Lindsay. There was a chorus of agreement at that.
Ted stooped to pick up a saw from the ground. “Orrin is the most unreasonable man you’ll ever meet and that’s why we will survive,” he said as he passed it to Lindsay.
“Go on, Zack, ask the big one,” Chuck said.
Did you guys know Orrin is a fraud? Stole your money. Peddles lies. Probably has an arsenal somewhere that’s military grade. Did you know he was dangerous? Probably not the questions they were thinking of. “What’s the big one?”
“When is doomsday? That’s what you want to know, right? You want to know so you can have a countdown.” Chuck’s hand came up and he scribbled in the air. “Write it on your little calendar and check off the days.”
The other men laughed. He could only play so dumb with this crew. If he looked too weak he’d become the one they dumped on. If he looked too strong, they’d resent him. Either way, being too deferential wasn’t going to help. “Yeah, all right. I do want to know.”
“It’s not a single day, it’s a time, an age, an eon and we’re already in it and every day the decay hastens. We have no time to lose getting our new world ready,” T
ed said.
“He means get back to work everyone,” Chuck added.
Zeke went back to the foundation he was digging. Did they see Orrin as a king? Did they genuinely see woman as tools to discard when you were done with them? Were they all okay about the idea that the cabins they were building were meant for slave laborers?
He stopped to adjust his glove when he realized he was bleeding into it from broken blisters, and when he looked up Mike and Orrin were standing there.
“You were right to want to know about doomsday, Zack.” Orrin motioned for Zeke to turn his hand over and inspected the torn skin. “There have been groups before ours who predicted a certain date. Those dates came and went and the groups floundered, broke up because they didn’t have enough clear sight to see what I do. I made a study of their madness. We know better and we’re stronger. Ready for the worst.”
Orrin Epcot was slicker than your average megalomaniac with an end of the world kink. “They were false prophets,” Zeke said.
“I’m not a prophet,” Orrin said sternly. “Don’t wander off out here. Get some ointment and bandage that hand up. Don’t want it to get infected.”
Orrin turned to leave, and Zeke called after him. He didn’t know how much access he’d get to the man, how many opportunities to push his own agenda. “I want to help protect us against outsiders.”
Orrin didn’t turn, but he didn’t walk on either. “Mike will have told you not to worry about that.” Confirmation Mike told Orrin everything that got said. Good to know.
“It doesn’t seem right that I don’t help.” The sooner he understood how armed this camp was the better.
Now Orrin turned to face him. “You’re helping now. Doing good work.”
“I worry about Rosie.”
“You don’t need to worry about anything here. Just doing a solid day’s work and finding a good woman to start the new generation with. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”
How long have you got? The thought put furrows between his eyes he felt pressing on his skull. “No, sir.”
That earned him a curt nod and Orrin left the campsite, not stopping to speak to anyone else. Zeke went in search of ointment and a bandage because a busted-up hand was one infection he could fight straight away.
Chapter Six
This was the fifth night Rory had stood in her corner of the kitchen doing nothing while dinner was prepared. It was at least the tenth time she’d tried to get Macy to speak to her without a conversation consisting of Rory saying, “Please let me do something,” and Macy saying some version of no.
One time, Macy even said, “You’re doing a great job staying out of my way. Keep it up.” All the eye-rolling.
It was the thousandth time she’d put her hand to her pocket for her phone.
The torture she’d imagined for Zeke was exactly the torment being visited on her. She was irrelevant. Worse, she was a public example of being useless. People stopped by her window to stare at her as if she was put there for educational purposes. She’d flinched the first time it happened. Now it happened so regularly she’d perfected a glare that made most of the rubberneckers react as if she’d reached through the glass and poked them. She would if she could.
Cadence had no wisdom for her but remained cheerfully upbeat about a better solution to her plight showing up out of nowhere, and positively fearful about any attempt to force a change. Cadence’s fear was worrying. Her belief that everyone’s best interests were being taken care of infuriating. Cadence’s certainly weren’t. She was in a dead-end job, with no prospects of a better life than the circumstances handed her. Except she thought she’d been saved.
Rory’s attempt to force a change had gotten her nowhere with the added aspect of having scared her breathless. After Macy’s keep it up comment, she’d marched into HQ determined to find someone in charge who could reassign her to literally any other job available. She’d clean toilets, pluck chickens. It was also a scouting expedition in search of the elusive signal jammer.
She’d been met with polite resistance, administrative fumbling, an offer to take her issue up the line, no visible evidence of anything remotely resembling a signal jammer, and Zeke’s suitcase sitting inside the open door of a storage cupboard that was slammed shut the moment it was clear she’d seen it.
All the concern she’d felt for him, the competing narrative of he can look out for himself versus where the heck is he, morphed instantaneously into a cold shock that made her limbs go stiff.
Cal had drilled into them both how dangerous cults could be. How they couldn’t ever think they understood everything going on, how the rules were likely to be inconsistent and change to suit the leader’s objectives. How friendships were unreliable and agendas confusing. His last words before the farewell party had been stick together.
“Where is my brother?” she’d asked the woman on the main desk. “Where is Zack?”
“He’ll be about the place. No need to worry.”
“I want to know where he is.”
“I’m sure he’ll show up.”
Cal’s voice was in her head. It’s easier for them to fuck with you if you’re alone. “Tell me where he is right now.”
The woman stood up and wagged a finger at her. “You can fuss all you like, honey. That’s not how we work around here. You need to learn that things have their own timing and reason and it does you no damn good to fight against that. That’s the stink of the decay on you, that is. Thinking you can control things. There’s no place for that here.”
Being cooperative wasn’t going to get her anywhere. It was squeaky wheel time because why was Zeke’s suitcase shut in a cupboard? Why didn’t they want her seeing that? And how hard was it simply to tell her he was out cutting trees or planting yams or wrestling bears?
Sticking together didn’t mean they’d be joined at the hip. She knew they’d have their own paths to forge, but none of that logic meant anything if Zeke was in danger like Cal had once been.
Cal was nineteen and Zeke seventeen when they infiltrated a religious cult. The two of them had nearly starved as part of their punishment for being ungodly. Cal was beaten to within an inch of his life before he and Zeke were able to escape and bring the authorities in, stopping the cult leaders from going ahead with a suicide pact.
Zeke had to fight with Cal to get this job approved and Cal had grilled her mercilessly about signing on for it, wanting to make sure of her resolve. There was no moment where listening to her fear and rage and speaking out was inappropriate.
“Orrin,” she’d shouted. “Orrin Epcot. I need to speak to you. Come out from wherever you’re hiding and answer my question.”
Her shouting had gotten her escorted none too gently outside between the grip of two armed men who’d come running and treated her to advice to quit caterwauling.
Orrin had been watching from an upstairs balcony, staring impassively at her as she fought her way out of the grip of his henchmen. It took all her willpower not to give him the finger.
So here she was, in her corner, at her window, where no one would speak to her, with nothing to read, glaring at the looky-loos and sick to the stomach worried about Zeke. She’d barely slept since her assault on HQ, taking her frustration out on long runs around the town center and its rows of cabins, as far as the sports field and the greenhouses and the barns.
She took her dinner break, in the lull between the two seatings when fewer people were in the dining room. Filling her plate and finding an empty table to sit at. The whole week no one had made any attempt to sit with her or introduce themselves, and people had actively turned away when she’d tried to engage them. Apart from Cadence, Macy, and Clary, the guy who did afternoon shift in the bakery, she hadn’t formally met anyone else. It was clearly by design and tonight it suited her well; she wasn’t in the mood for company.
But she did want to know what the commotion at the back of the hall was about. Heavy footfalls, male voices, uproarious laughter, someone boo
ming, “City boy wants his mommy.”
She stood and turned to the sound. A troupe of filthy-looking men coming into the dining hall, shouting and shoving each other like they were ten-year-old’s. She checked their faces; big smiles, beards and greasy hair, looking for her city slicker, her stomach rioting.
He came in last, eyes up, scanning the room. He was suntanned and his T-shirt was torn at the shoulder, the rest of it molded to him. He was dusty and scruffy and very much alive and someone behind her said, “Sweet Jesus. I’ll be his momma,” the sheer thirst of that comment making her groan.
She was moving towards Zeke when his gaze lit on hers and caused a chemical reaction in her body. Sent it soaring like she was an untamed thing, made of heat, relief and gratitude and nothing could hold her back.
The men separated as she pushed through them and Zeke dumped his pack.
“Hey Rosie.”
He looked like he’d been wrestling bears and the bears lost. She put her hands to his chest and shoved him and his hey Rosie hard enough to make him take a step backwards. “I thought you were dead.”
The words were out and the reality of the them nearly buckled her knees. Anything could’ve happened to him here, where they didn’t control the game. He was one man and not invincible, and damn, she’d not done enough to find him. And she couldn’t ever lose him. Not now that she had him as her wingman again.
“I only smell dead.”
The laughter, deep and hearty, around them should’ve grounded her, but she was mad at herself, furious at this place for making her feel this out of control, even knowing it was being done on purpose, and thrilled to see Zeke, her skin sizzling with it, her body shaking.
She went to shove him again, needing to touch him, not knowing how, but consumed with the desire to hold his safety in her hands. She caught a hold of his shirt instead and pulled herself into his chest, felt his breath come fast and stilted against the thud of her heart, smelled the earth, sweat, grime and exhaustion in him, and looked up into his eyes, the deepest blue with shots of gold. Eyes that had always seen her clearly and never judged.
The Mysterious Stranger (The Confidence Game Book 3) Page 5