by Mike Mullin
“I’m dead on my feet. Mind if we sit down, get something to eat?”
“Yeah. Of course not. Sorry.” He lowered himself slowly onto a bench in the kitchen area, and I poured him a cup of water and grabbed a bowl of kale chips.
“God,” he said wearily, “I am so sick of kale chips.” “You know what Darla says whenever I complain?” I said.
“Yeah. ‘Beats not eating.’ She says the same damn thing to me. So these prisoners. Why not put them to work? Like a chain gang or something.”
“Still have to guard them. And it seems like a temporary solution.”
“Hmm.” Uncle Paul put a couple of kale chips in his mouth and chewed slowly. “You ever hear about that Truth and Reconciliation Commission they had in South Africa?” “No.”
“Before your time. Anyway, they interviewed victims and perpetrators of violence in the apartheid era—not necessarily to prosecute anyone, just to bring closure. We could try something like that.”
“Have them talk to all the refugees and prisoners— sort out who the really bad ones were and who we might be able to integrate into Speranta?”
“Sure. A commission like that might help us get Mayor Petty’s bunch integrated too.”
“I know the perfect person to run it too. Thanks!” “You bet.”
Uncle Paul turned back to the kale chips as I got up to look for Zik. He was perfect to lead the commission. Anyone who had fought for Red was suspect, and who better to sort out those who might be reformed from the rest than Zik, who’d lived in Stockton and knew most of the prisoners personally? It also would give him a chance to question them about his daughter, Emily, who seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. I told Zik that the top priority was getting rid of the prisoners—they all needed to become members of our community or be exiled as quickly as possible.
I also set up the constitution committee I had promised over a month before when we had held the vote to confirm me as mayor. I tapped Reverend Evans to run it. If he were in charge, I figured he would have a tough time arguing that the constitution was invalid. I insisted that he put my sister, Rebecca, on the executive committee and asked her to keep an eye on Evans for me.
On the evening of the second day after battle, I summoned Anna and Charlotte into the base of the Turbine Tower 1-A, my improvised conference room. When I opened the door, though, Max and Alyssa were already in there. It looked like Max was trying to shove his tongue down Alyssa’s throat. She didn’t mind, though—she was pressed up against him, moaning softly. Their hands were everywhere.
I cleared my throat. Then cleared it again, louder. Max broke the kiss and looked over at me, startled. “I need my conference room,” I said.
Alyssa tossed her hair, smiled, and marched out with her head held high.
Max’s face turned tomato sauce red, and he slinked past me with a muttered, “Sorry.”
I caught his arm, holding him there a minute. “Is she still getting gifts under her pillow?” I asked in a whisper.
“Sometimes,” Max said.
“Did you tell her it’s not you?”
“Um, not really.”
I made a mental note to move Darla and my bedroll closer to where Alyssa slept. I wanted to know who was giving her gifts surreptitiously, before it exploded into some kind of drama. “You should tell her.”
Max shrugged and pulled free of my grip. He nearly crashed into Anna on the way out of the turbine tower. She shoved her way past him, and Charlotte followed her into my conference room/improvised make-out spot and closed the door so we could have a private conference. “How bad is the food situation?” I asked.
Anna spoke first. “We can handle it. If we cut back to survival rations now, go on a crash building program, and borrow some food from the Wallers, we can feed everyone. But it’ll be rough for about three months.”
The most critical project was building greenhouses, so I threw my energy into that. I sent a team led by Nylce to trade with the Wallers for more food. Thelma, who’d started as our hostage but was now our guest, went along as an advisor—she had finally decided we weren’t going to kill and eat her. Now she saved her paranoia for all the other ways she might die: a flenser raid, a rare disease, or a fall from a turbine tower were her three favorites. I normally tried to avoid her. Nylce took Ranaan Kendall—the
Iraqi war vet—along with her too. He hadn’t made the trip to the WalMart warehouse yet and wanted to see it.
After dinner a few days later, Ben approached me. “Mayor Halprin, may I speak with you?”
“You can call me Alex,” I said for the gazillionth time. “And sure, what’s up?”
“The sniper’s nest is above us,” he said.
Okay. That wasn’t like Ben anymore. I mean, yes, sometimes he was way too literal, but he was getting a lot better about interpreting figures of speech. He must have been incredibly nervous to misunderstand a simple expression like “what’s up.” “I mean, what can I help you with?” “Could we talk in private, Mayor Halprin? I am sorry, I forgot to call you Alex, Alex.”
“It’s okay. Sure. Step into my office.” I ushered Ben into the bottom of Turbine Tower 1-A, careful not to touch him. Normally these days a casual touch didn’t seem to set him off, but he was clearly already tense. I pulled the door closed behind us and asked, “What can I do for you, Ben?”
“You can grant me permission to call on Rebecca.” “Call on?”
“May I have your permission to take your sister out on a date?”
I rocked back on my heels in both a literal and metaphorical sense. Where had that come from? “Rebecca doesn’t need my permission to go on a date.”
“It is appropriate to ask the father of the young woman for permission to court her, but if the young woman’s father has passed on, one may seek permission of an older brother.”
“You’ve been reading some really old books on dating, haven’t you?”
“I have read The Marriage Guide for Young Men, Courtship and Marriage: And the Gentle Art of Homemakmg, and The Way to Woo and Win a Wife—”
“No, never mind, that’s okay. I don’t need to know them all. Yes, you may ask Rebecca if she would like to go out on a date with you.”
“Thank you, sir.” Ben held out his hand to shake. I took it—every muscle in his hand was corded and straining. I could feel how much mental and physical effort the handshake cost him and cut it short after one arm pump.
I didn’t catch up to Rebecca until breakfast the next morning. “Did Ben talk to you?” I asked.
She just about bubbled over right before my eyes. I could practically see the hearts rising from her head and bursting, spreading a heady scent around her. “He brought me flowers! Real flowers! What kind of guy plants real flowers in the corner of a greenhouse and tends them for three months just so he can give them to you on your first date?”
“A keeper?” I guessed.
“Hell to the yes!”
“I’m happy for you. You . . . um . . . Mom, she talked to you about, you know, all that—”
“You are truly disgusting, Alex. And yes, she did.” Rebecca flounced off while I heaved a huge sigh of relief.
Chapter 72
Not long after dinner that evening, Rebecca yelled at me from the phone across the room. “Something’s going on in Longhouse Five. You’d better get over here.”
Normally I don’t stand much on ceremony, but did she have to yell it across the entire longhouse? And Longhouse Five? That was where my mom and Mayor Petty were staying—were they in trouble or causing trouble? Everyone turned to stare at Rebecca and the phone outstretched in her hand. I ran over, taking the receiver.
The line was a confused jumble of voices. A woman said, “Throw it up there. Over that rafter.” Another voice said, “The trunk line is over there.” With all the noise, I couldn’t recognize either voice. Suddenly, the circuit went completely dead. Since we only had one party line, I couldn’t communicate with anyone—none of the longhouses
, not even the sniper post nearly three hundred feet above me.
Ed was at my elbow. I hadn’t even noticed him approaching. “Full mobilization, manual protocol. Phone line’s dead.”
Ed ran for the door of the longhouse, unslinging the rifle from his back as he went. He yelled, “All platoons, arm and form up!” and Longhouse One instantly transformed from a relaxed, after-dinner scene to a barracks in the midst of a full mobilization. A few seconds after Ed cleared the front door, I heard three shots—the signal that we were under attack. Several more-distant three-shot bursts sounded moments later: other longhouses acknowledging the signal and passing it on.
I leaned close to Rebecca, yelling to be heard over the hubbub. “How’d you know the problem is in Five?”
“Mom was monitoring the line in Five. She started to report something, and then there was a smacking sound and a crash, and she quit responding. I asked the rest of the operators to stay off the line so we could listen in.” Some invisible cord tightened deep in my gut. I handed the phone back to Rebecca. “Line’s dead. Monitor it in case it comes back.” I grabbed my hat, glove, and gun and ran for the door.
Ed already had four Bikezillas formed up outside and waiting. “Leave half your force here to defend the long-house. The other half converge on Longhouse Three.”
“Yes, sir.” Eight soldiers jumped onto the load bed of each Bikezilla, so we had forty-eight packed onto the four bikes. The others would have to follow on foot.
Because of the pattern we’d built them in, Longhouse Three was the closest one to Five. So Five came in view right before we reached Three. Nothing seemed out of order—nobody was outside either longhouse. I was off the Bikezilla running for the door even before we stopped.
When I pulled open the door, I was in for another shock. Longhouse Three was nearly empty. About a dozen kids and two old women were there, washing and sorting part of our black bean harvest.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
Neither of the adults answered me. One of the kids— a girl of maybe eight or so who had survived the massacre outside Warren—said, “They went to a party.”
“Shh,” the older woman beside her said.
“What kind of party?” I asked.
“It was a Halloween party!” the little girl said.
“Halloween was four days ago,” I said.
“But they took masks and a big rope so they wouldn’t get lost on the way to the party.”
“Quiet!” the old woman said.
“What are they doing!” I said to her, although I thought I knew.
“Nothing but what you should’ve already done,” the woman said. “It should be over by now. Speranta’s in no danger now.”
I bolted from the room.
Chapter 73
I leapt onto one of the empty seats of a Bikezilla. Ed and the two backseat peddlers jumped on while I was straining to get the bike moving. The eight guys who had ridden in the load bed started to come aboard, and I turned and yelled at them, “Off! Now!” We would be much faster without a load.
Still, it took almost two minutes to cover the distance between the longhouses. I was running for the door before the bike had even come to a stop.
Inside, there was pandemonium. The ex-sheriff of Warren, Sam Moyers, was hanging from a rope strung on the rafters in the center of the longhouse.
His face was fading from purple to a mottled gray. His body swung slightly, wavering with the last impetus of his extinguished life. Ex-Mayor Petty was on top of a table nearby, wheelchair and all. A noose encircled his neck, the rope running up to a rafter high above our heads. Francine was behind him on the table.
My mother lay beside the table, a bruise spreading across one side of her face, her hands wrapped around her gravid belly. Another survivor of the Warren massacre—I couldn’t recall his name at that moment—stood over her, training a pistol at her head. My mother wept and pled incoherently, so loudly that I could hear her over the general furor. The room was riotously full. All the Warrenites who were supposed to be in Longhouse Five were packed against the back wall. Men with semi-automatic rifles stood guard over them. Nearly the entire population of Longhouse Three, most of them survivors of the massacre outside of Warren, ringed the hanging tables in the center of the room.
Francine saw me, caught my eye. Then she raised her foot and shoved Mayor Petty’s wheelchair off the table.
I charged, throwing elbows and yelling, trying to clear the crowd out of the way. The rope snapped taut, and Petty’s wheelchair fell to the floor with a clatter. I couldn’t get there in time—the crowd was too thick.
I slammed my right hand down on someone’s shoulder, vaulting onto a nearby table. Petty’s eyes were bulging, and his face was the color of a spoiled tomato. He was dangling so low that if he’d had legs, he could have just stood up. People crowded around him in the tight quarters, but they were cheering and yelling, not helping. I took two steps on the table and leapt, catching the rope above Petty’s head in my right hand, sending us both swinging, crashing into the spectators.
Petty’s face was purple. I reached down with my hook, sawing at the rope above Petty’s head. Every evening without fail, I spent a few minutes honing the edge on my hook. So the rope parted easily, and Petty crashed to the floor. I held on, kicking out at nearby spectators’ heads, trying to clear some room.
Mom crawled over to Petty, ignoring the gun trained on her and the man holding it. She clawed at the noose, and for a moment I was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to loosen it, and Petty would die despite my efforts. Then she pulled it off his neck, and he gasped and coughed, flopping like an air-drowned fish.
“Silence!” I bellowed. The room fell quiet, and I dropped off the rope, bending my knees and landing neatly beside Mom and Petty.
“These are our guests! I promised they’d be safe here!” “They’re murderers!” someone yelled.
“It’s on me, Captain,” Francine said, looking defiantly down from her perch atop the table. “I organized it. I led it. For my dead fiance. For Brock.”
Ed and at least a dozen soldiers carrying rifles filed in. “Out!” I roared. “I’ve got this.” The last thing I needed was any kind of shootout in the packed longhouse. Hundreds could die. Ed saluted and ordered his soldiers out. He, however, stopped in the doorway, leaving the door wide open. The icy breeze was welcome in the heat of the packed longhouse.
“How could you do it, Francine?” I asked. “How could you betray me like this?”
“It has nothing to do with you, Captain. Move on out of here, and we’ll finish what we started.”
“You will not!” I snatched the noose off the floor and put it around my own neck. “When you harm someone under my protection, under our protection, it’s no different than harming me. Than harming Speranta itself. We’ve survived, prospered even, because we aren’t a pack of animals or flensers, because we have laws and respect them, because people can work and live in safety here.”
“We only want justice,” Francine said.
“Justice.” I practically spat the word. “Who appointed you judge? Who elected you mayor? Who asked you to join a jury? You didn’t give Sam justice! This was vengeance. I should exile you all.”
An alarmed mutter spread around the room. “No. It’s on me,” Francine said. “This was my idea. If you’ve got to exile anyone, it should be me.”
I glared at her for a moment. “Everyone out! Back to your own longhouse,” I said. “Ed, collect their weapons at the door. Put guards outside Three. Nobody leaves until we decide what to do.”
Everything was still for a moment. I took the noose off my neck, letting it dangle from my hook. When they finally moved, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Not you,” I said as Francine started to join the procession. “You’re coming with me.” I took the pistol off her belt, checked the safety and chamber, and tucked it into the large pocket in my coveralls.
I clambered up on the next table over to chec
k on Moyers. There was no sign of life. His face was nearly pure gray I stretched out, reaching for the rope. A quick slice with my hook brought his corpse crashing down on the floor beside the table.
When all the interlopers from Three except Francine had left, I got down off the table. Mom was still kneeling on the floor beside Petty He wore a necklace of bruises and rope burns, but he seemed to be recovering.
“Let’s go,” I said. “You’ll be safer in Longhouse One.” “Alex,” Mom whispered, “thank you.”
Mayor Petty was perhaps my least-favorite person in Speranta. I would have been more eager to save anyone else. But I didn’t see any point to telling her that. “Sure,” I said, “you ready to go?”
“Our people are here,” Petty said, his voice so raspy it was unrecognizable. “And we need to take care of Sam.” “At least come get your neck checked out.”
Petty shook his head.
“I’ll stay here,” Mom said. “I need to be with my husband.”
I suppressed a scowl. Hearing Mom refer to Petty as her husband made my gut churn. “I’ll ask the doctor to stop by, and I’ll have Darla send someone around to fix your phone line. I’ll also post a team of guards outside, make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.”
Later that night I met with my team of advisers. We talked around the issue of what to do for hours. I desperately wished that the constitution committee had finished their work faster. We needed a process for dealing with problems like this, a judicial system of some kind.
In the end we decided to choose a jury randomly and dump the problem in their laps. I closed my eyes and flipped through Anna’s census book, pointing at names. Anyone from the massacre survivors or Warren was automatically disqualified—the massacre survivors might be biased toward Francine, and the Warrenites biased toward Petty—so we wound up with a jury of a dozen Stocktonites. I appointed Uncle Paul to serve as judge—he was one of the oldest people left alive in Speranta and more or less neutral.