by D. J. Molles
When he had gained his breath back again, he looked at the two men that Clyde still had covered with his rifle. Though all three of them—Clyde included—were staring at the body on the ground, their eyebrows raised, eyes wide. Noses wrinkled. Shock and disgust.
How do you feel about that?
I’m not sure.
Of course you’re not.
When he spoke, his voice was a croak. “Which one of you is Beatty?”
They looked up at him. Blank eyes.
“Beatty,” LaRouche repeated, now with irritation.
The smallest of gestures, one of the men raised a single finger. He was the shorter of the two, somewhat stocky in build, with a shock of almost white-blond hair and a slightly darker, almost reddish beard. He was wearing a pistol, and it did not escape LaRouche when his fingers twitched toward it. Sure, Clyde might gun him down if he went for it, but it had to be better than having a whiskey bottle jammed down your throat.
But LaRouche had already completed his job. He’d passed his test.
He nodded to Beatty. “Chalmers says that you’re in charge now. He says that he trusts you to get this camp back in order.”
Beatty looked briefly terrified. But he drew himself up and nodded.
Then LaRouche and Clyde walked out of the motor home, leaving behind a mess for someone else to clean up.
They hitched a ride back with the same convoy that had taken them. While they waited for all the supplies to be off-loaded from the van, they sat outside of it in silence. Men from the camp passed them by and LaRouche got the distinct feeling that they had no business where they were apparently going, but were walking by to simply walk by and take a look at the two strangers.
Rumors were already spreading.
Good. Let them spread.
Once the supplies were out of the van, LaRouche and Clyde climbed in, taking a seat in the far back. There were no actual seats, and it wasn’t much more comfortable than the bed of the pickups, but at least they weren’t exposed to cold wind. It was heading swiftly toward dusk and the wind was kicking up from northwest to southeast, bringing even colder air down from the mountains. The temperature had already dropped noticeably.
It’ll be below freezing tonight, LaRouche thought. And then, needling through the back of his head, a thought that didn’t come in words, as though he were afraid to voice them even in the sacred privacy of his own mind. He pictured the girl with the green eyes. Pictured him sleeping in a mound of blankets, maybe with her beside him. There was no sexuality to the image. Rather, a keen desire for some human contact that was not born of conflict.
As the van trundled out onto the road, LaRouche studied his hands for a while. Across from him, Clyde was reclined against the wall of the van, looking out the back windows at the flow of the terrain as they passed it.
LaRouche ventured lightly when he spoke. “What will you tell Chalmers?”
Clyde almost jerked, as though he had been half asleep. He turned himself to LaRouche, at first with a frown, and then with a blank look. A poker face. Clyde was hiding his true feelings from LaRouche. “I’m gonna tell him that you did what was asked of you.”
LaRouche took another moment before speaking again. “Are you going to tell him how I did it?”
Clyde shrugged. “If he asks.”
LaRouche folded his arms across his chest and looked away, out the same back windows Clyde had been fixated on. “Did I pass my test?”
“That’s up to Chalmers.”
LaRouche wasn’t sure if he actually wanted this. But did he have any choice?
There’s always a choice.
Yes, there’s always a choice.
Silence in the van, and for a time, silence in his mind.
Clyde seemed to have taken LaRouche’s silence as worry for whether he had actually passed his test. The other man sighed, shifted his rifle in his lap. “I can’t think of any reason why he wouldn’t think that you passed your test.”
LaRouche glanced back at his odd companion. He nodded once and then they were silent the rest of the way.
THIRTEEN
BAD DECISIONS
ANGELA SOUGHT ADVICE FROM the one person she felt had the best sense of Camp Ryder. She found her at a small folding table near a fire with two others—an older man and a younger woman—engaged in something she had rarely, if ever, seen her engage in: recreation.
Each of the three at the table was holding playing cards. There were more playing cards in the center of the table, some of them faceup. There was also what appeared to be a “pot,” and the three players were literally playing for beans. Black beans, actually. Angela had never been much of a card player herself, so she had no idea what type of game they were playing, but Marie seemed to be the one that was winning, as she had the most beans piled on her side of the table and the other two seemed morose.
Marie took her eyes off her cards as Angela reached the small table. A big smile broke out across her somewhat extreme features and she put her hand of cards facedown on the table. “Angela,” she said brightly. “You wanna join us for some Texas Hold ’Em? Buy-in is fifty.”
Angela returned the smile but shook her head. “No, I’m not much of a card player.”
The older man pushed in a small cluster of beans, seeming proud of himself, and then stared hard at Marie.
To Angela, Marie said, “So, what can I do for you, hon?”
“I just needed to talk to you about some things.” Angela said it still wearing her smile, but Marie must have picked up on the tone of her voice.
Marie’s own cheery expression dampened and she looked back to the game.
“Bet’s to you, Marie,” the man said, his foot tapping overeagerly under the table.
Marie quirked an eyebrow at him. “Yeah, I fold, Hank. You’re a horrible bluffer.”
Hank looked offended for a split second, and then recovered. He scooped the pot to him. “Maybe I wasn’t bluffing.”
Marie stood up from the table. “Hank, Jess, I’ll rob you blind another day.”
Rolling eyes responded to her.
Marie zipped up her jacket and she and Angela began walking. There weren’t many places of privacy around Camp Ryder, one of the only ones being the office upstairs. But Angela had taken enough bullshit in that office for one day and she wanted desperately to be outside where the dark, motor-grease-stinking walls didn’t seem so cloying.
Marie’s game face seemed to fade as she walked. “So, you seem very serious, Angela. What’s on your mind?”
“Leadership,” Angela said simply and without hesitation. “Camp Ryder needs someone to take charge of things here.”
Marie looked at her a little queerly. “Are you uncomfortable with the job Lee is doing?”
Angela felt something go through her like the vibration of a tuning fork.
Jenny, saying over her shoulder, About Lee, of course.
“No,” Angela said, and she was pleased that she sounded sure of herself. “Not at all. But I had a conversation with him earlier about this very same thing.” She rubbed her hands together and blew into them. The temperature seemed to be dropping rapidly. “Lee and Tomlin don’t want leadership of Camp Ryder, or the Hub, or anything else. Lee has made it very clear with me that he’s here as a support. He doesn’t want to take over.”
Marie seemed to be mulling something over in her head. “I hate to presume, Angela, but if you were going to ask me…” She grimaced and began rapidly shaking her head. “No. Not a chance. Not gonna happen.”
Angela took the other woman’s arm and gave it a squeeze. “Marie, I think you could lead this camp, absolutely I do. But I wasn’t going to try to talk you into it. I was actually wondering how you felt, and how you think Camp Ryder would handle an election?”
Marie’s pace hesitated, but she picked it back up. Eyes on the ground now. “An election,” she said thoughtfully.
“Rather than having someone ‘step up,’ that maybe not everyone wants in a leadership p
osition, what if we opened it up to a vote?”
“Nominees?”
“No, just a straight vote. Writing in the names.”
Marie did stop this time and looked at her friend. “Angela, there are a lot of different groups in this camp. Cliques, you might call them. You’ve got all the original Camp Ryder folks—some of them supported Bus, and some of them supported Jerry. Then you’ve got the rest of the young people from Fuquay-Varina who were with Professor White before he disappeared. And the folks from Dunn who do whatever Old Man Hughes tells them. And then the people that came in with Jacob, the people that fled from the Followers. And their leader is pretty much Brett.” She looked at Angela very pointedly. “They’re all just going to vote for the person that they know best, and since all these groups are roughly equal in numbers, if you do a straight vote and let someone win with twenty percent of the vote, all you’re going to do is piss off the other eighty percent.”
Angela had considered this, but only briefly. “But we need someone calling the shots here, Marie. We’re just wandering around in the dark with no one leading us. And we can’t just appoint someone to take control of the whole damn camp. I feel like that would have worse reactions than if someone like Old Man Hughes was voted in with twenty percent.”
Marie didn’t verbally respond, but she made a face that said, Well, you’ve got a point there.
“I don’t want there to be any campaigning,” Angela said. “It’s just going to lead to more infighting. And we have to come up with something that is going to prevent us from… getting torn apart again.”
Marie nodded, her curly brown hair stirring around her face. “You’re right about that. But the only way you’re going to avoid campaigning is if you hold a vote so quick that no one has time to do any campaigning.”
“Okay.” Angela waited, because it seemed that Marie was nursing an idea.
Marie looked thoughtful. “Plus, whoever wins needs to win by a vast majority. We have to make sure that the majority of people in Camp Ryder want this person running things, if we ever hope to keep a split from happening again.”
Angela nodded in agreement as Marie spoke. Their conversation continued, as well as their walk. They eventually found themselves at the rear of the Camp Ryder building and for a time they were focused on the conversation and forgot the things that had happened there. As the talks went on the two women began to arrive at the same conclusions. Ideas were passed back and forth and some were discarded and some kept.
Gradually, they settled on the plan for how Camp Ryder would elect a leader.
As the focus of the conversation began to abate, the memories of the place where they stood seemed to creep back on them. The people that had been killed here. Some murdered, some simply died while fighting. All the bodies that lay buried in the ground not twenty yards from where they stood, the hills of earth marked by crude wooden crosses. Some graves had patchy grass and weeds growing over them, but some were fresh.
The two women stood in the quiet for a time.
Perhaps it was the unsettling mood of the place that brought to mind an earlier unsettling for Angela. She worked some moisture around in her mouth—the cold always seemed to dry her out quicker than heat did. Then she said, in an almost conversational way, “You spoken to Jenny at all recently?”
Marie shrugged in a disinterested way. “Me and Jenny never really… hit it off.”
“So you don’t talk to her?”
“Well, I don’t give her the cold shoulder or anything,” Marie said. “But I don’t make a habit of sitting down for long chats with her. I still say ‘hello’ when I see her. And if I’m walking past the medical trailer I’ll pop in and ask her how she is. I’ve done it a few times over the last couple days. Since I heard about the whole Greg thing.”
Angela nodded. “How do you think she’s doing?”
Marie made a face. “Oh… hell, I don’t know. Are you asking me if she seems a little weird? Yeah, she seems a little weird. But what the hell do you expect, given what she’s been through? She’ll be all right with enough time. But honestly, you probably have a better idea of how she’s doing than I do. You two were always a bit closer.”
Angela pursed her lips, hesitant.
“Why do you ask?”
Because she seemed a little… unstable?
“Nothing,” Angela said, forcing a smile. “Just checking on her.”
“Well, don’t take my word for it,” Marie said, pulling her jacket around her. “Go ask her how she’s feeling if you want to know.”
“Yeah,” Angela said, but she didn’t think that she would.
Jenny sat alone in her shanty. Alone in the dark.
It wasn’t truly dark. Only dim. But it felt dark, with no windows and the tarpaulin door pulled shut against the world beyond. The sunlight was muted, but it still made the blue plastic glow with strange ghost lights that grew stranger as the time passed. In the darkness, her eyes played tricks on her, and often, her ears as well.
Beyond the thin walls of the shanty, the voice of nearly every person in Camp Ryder seemed to be audible. That alone might have been enough to irritate her at times, but she’d grown used to it and when it did bother her it was in flashes of impatience. But sitting there alone, silent save for her own breathing, oftentimes she would think she had just heard Greg’s voice.
Greg, coming to pull her tarpaulin door open.
Greg, coming to fuck her after his guard duty was done.
Greg, coming to drag her into the office where Jerry could “question” her.
Whenever she heard that phantom voice she wondered if she felt terrified or excited. Maybe it was both, and perhaps those two things were so closely intertwined that there wasn’t enough difference to distinguish them. She’d read once that the areas of the brain that light up when you’re scared are the same areas of the brain that light up when you have sex.
Sex and fear. Not much different in the animal part of their brain, it would seem.
Sex and fear and pain and all kinds of other stuff, just getting mixed around in a great big soup pot called her brain. She wondered what haywire receptors were going off inside her gray matter, what confusion of chemicals and electronic impulses were firing back and forth. She pictured it like sparks and arcs of blue electricity jumping through jumbles of copper wiring. Pure chaos.
She sat at the edge of what could be called her bed and wondered where box springs and mattresses and down comforters had gone. Why was she sitting on cardboard and dirty blankets that smelled strongly of a dead man’s sweat?
Jenny looked off to her right, sniffing against her nose, which seemed to run perpetually in the cold. It was ridiculous, really. It never stopped. Cold, cold, cold, everything was cold and she was always cold and there seemed to be no real way to get rid of it. Except to wait for summer to get here. Months away. Long, long months that may as well have been years. No wonder earlier generations cursed the dark and cold of winter and longed for summer, no matter how hot it would get. Freezing temperatures were only charming when you had central heating.
On the right-hand side of her shanty, there was a pile of items.
Greg’s things.
They hadn’t been given to her, and she hadn’t asked for them. But she’d gone into his shanty after the assault for Camp Ryder was over and she stood there for a while, wondering how she felt. Twenty-four hours before that point, she would have been crushed by the death of Greg, but that was before she realized that Greg didn’t really give a shit about her and was just using her as a warm place to stick his dick every night.
Still…
Anger, sex, fear. Interesting cocktail, there.
Standing in his shanty, she’d kicked around his stuff, figuring no one would really care. She’d found some things, maybe some things he kept for himself, or didn’t want anyone else to know about—she’d found them squirreled away in a jumble of old jackets—and she’d appropriated them, along with the jackets and anything el
se she could use. In her mind, she kept saying, I might as well get some use out of the fucker, but it was a cold, brash thing to think, and she knew that in her heart she really didn’t feel that way.
She felt abandoned.
That was it. That was the fear and the anger part, anyway. Oh, she was pissed at Greg. She was angry at him, and he would never again draw a breath with which he could apologize, and for that reason she would never forgive him for what he did to her. Even if he could have apologized, forgiveness might have been beyond her. The way he’d made her feel, standing up in that office, feeling dumb and used like a fucking breeding heifer that wasn’t good for calving anymore.
But there were other times. Times when he had looked at her with actual tenderness, when he had spoken gently to her and seemed to love her. Yes, those moments were few, but they had been there nonetheless. And they had been there in a time when even those small things were needed so badly that they seemed monumental.
So how was she supposed to feel about Greg?
Conflicted, apparently.
She shook the object that she held in her hand, and it rattled noisily. It was a good sound. A full sound. She opened her fist and looked at the label on the orange bottle, but she already knew that it had been scratched off. Inside was just a mess of different things, like the inside of a kaleidoscope. Ovals and circles and triangles and rectangles, in white and pink and blue and yellow. She wasn’t sure what they were, but she’d already taken two.
Two magic candies.
One she was pretty sure had been Adderall, and the other was a mystery.
She was well aware that many of the people in Camp Ryder had developed a taste for pharmaceuticals. Their lives were miserable, with no hope of getting any better. Why wouldn’t they want to get high? People complained about their lives and got high when they were living in two-thousand-square-foot houses, watching fifty-inch TVs without a real care in the world. Why wouldn’t this ragged band of survivors want to take a mental break every once in a while? And she was well aware that Greg had been happy to supply that habit. It was one of those things that most everybody knew about, but nobody really talked about for fear that someone like Angela or Marie or Lee would hear and put a stop to it.