If anybody had any special requests: Nyquil, pinto beans, cookies, or whatever, the leader of the horsemen made note of it. They made no guarantees, but would make an honest effort to watch out for those items.
The evening’s festivities always ended the same way. Judge Moore would say a prayer, and most of the town’s residents immediately went home to start their fires and feed their families.
Those who didn’t rush away typically stayed at the pavilion and discussed the local gossip or news.
The number one topic of conversation was always the blackout, and how long it would take to get the country running again.
Chapter 33
The daily gathering, as the townspeople began calling the five p.m. meeting at the pavilion, worked well from the start.
Judge Moore was born and raised in the town, and knew virtually all of its residents. He knew which ones were disabled and couldn’t make the daily walk or horseback ride, and appointed caregivers to collect their share for them.
As for the visitors in Lillian Montgomery’s boarding house and the Motel 6, they were treated as equals.
Judge Moore asked Mrs. Montgomery and the motel manager each day how many guests they had, and made sure they were given enough food to feed them.
“Blanco is a friendly town, and should stay that way. We wouldn’t be so friendly if we turned our back on the needs of others, just because they were visiting.”
The process at the daily gathering worked because Judge Moore made sure that all residents and visitors alike received a daily share of food that was sufficient to keep them alive.
Of course, some of the town’s residents foresaw the day when the Walmart truck and others like it ran out of provisions, and went out on their own to bring back their own food.
And that was fine, according to the judge. There was nothing to stop them from doing so. But when the judge found out about it, he called them on it.
“Stanley Morgan, you say you’d like a case of Ramen noodles. But I heard a rumor you rode to the truck yourself yesterday and brought back a case of chili and a case of beef stew. Is that true?”
“Well, yes, your honor.”
“Why don’t we give the noodles to someone who doesn’t have anything to eat?”
“Yes, sir.”
After a few days, a curious thing began to happen at the daily gathering.
People went missing.
And it brought to light a very troubling trend.
Every few days, someone would say, “Hey, where are Bob and Mary Lou Jenner?”
Or some of their other friends and neighbors.
And they’d look around desperately.
A pall would come over the crowd, and for the rest of the meeting everyone’s general state of mind would be gloomy.
When the meeting broke up, the Blanco Chief of Police, a man named Whitey Slade, would jump on his bicycle and ride to the home of the missing.
Or, if the meeting broke up too late and it was almost dark, he might wait until morning.
He didn’t particularly look forward to the trips, and there didn’t really seem to be any sense of urgency to find what he expected to discover.
What he found, in almost every case, were the dead bodies of those who failed to show for the meeting.
Sometimes they’d used guns to take their own lives.
Sometimes they used pills.
Occasionally he’d find one who hung himself, from a shady oak or a stair railing.
He preferred the ones who used the less sloppy methods, for it made his next job easier to deal with.
Chief Slade could have opened an official investigation into each death. Filed a police report and done a mountain of paperwork.
But under the circumstances, he saw no need to do so.
Unless there was something glaring that struck him as foul play he just wrote it down as more poor souls who’d reached the end of their ropes.
He’d jot down their full names, and the time and manner of death.
Just in case their loved ones or friends asked later on.
For Chief Slade was nearing sixty now and although he was of sound body, his mind wasn’t what it used to be.
Sometimes he forgot things.
Once he wrote down the pertinent information, he searched the home of the deceased until he found their shovel.
A shovel was one thing every rural home had, somewhere.
Some had several.
Once he found the shovel, Slade found a nice place to bury the dead.
He learned by trial and error.
The first graves he’d dug were under shade trees.
Because that was where he’d have wanted to be buried.
But then he learned that shade trees had root systems.
Root systems that were sometimes very difficult to dig through.
His more recent graves were still in the shade, but far from the nearest tree.
Mostly on the shady side of a barn or other structure.
Of course, he’d check first to see if there was a family burial plot.
Some of the ranches and homes outside the city limits had their own tiny cemeteries within their fences. Some of the gravestones were quite ornate, and dated back to the early 19th century.
Once done with the digging, he’d wrap the bodies in blankets and drag them to their final resting places.
Or, in the case of Big Bill McClintock, he’d ride back into town for help in dragging the body.
Once the bodies were in the graves, he’d say a brief prayer, sing his own off-key rendition of Shall We Gather at the River, and fill in the graves.
Even when Slade found the bodies in the evening, he never started the process until first light.
And he never finished the process before early afternoon.
When there was more than one grave it took even longer than that.
It was a taxing job, both physically and mentally. And it was wearing him down.
He was not a complainer by nature.
But the townspeople could see that it was getting to him.
He was walking stooped over, and wasn’t getting much sleep.
Lately he was arriving at the scenes and finding that some of the deceased had dug their own graves for him.
He appreciated the gesture.
But still, it was just a matter of time.
One afternoon, Judge Moore called the afternoon gathering to order and everyone expected Slade to take the steps to report the latest suicide, and to ask for a moment of silence in honor of the deceased.
But Chief Slade was not present.
Some of the women wept.
Some of the men cursed and kicked at the dirt.
After the meeting broke up, Butch and a couple of the surviving city council members walked half a mile to Slade’s home on the outskirts of town.
It was easy to find the body, hanging from a low branch of a huge oak tree.
Hanging directly over a freshly dug grave.
He wanted his own burial place to be shady, even if it meant fighting through the blasted root system.
Slade knew how difficult it was to recover a body whose head had been partially blown off by a handgun, and he spared his friends that much.
He even had the foresight to cover his head with a pillowcase.
Butch and the others appreciated this thoughtful gesture.
It made the recovery a lot easier.
No one judged Chief Slade. Most of the townsfolk had known him most of their lives. They knew he was tough as nails.
And perhaps that was why his death hit Blanco particularly hard.
Because everyone in town knew that if the disaster that the blackout became could break someone as tough as Chief Slade, it could break any of them as well.
The chief's wife of twenty two years was unable to bear children, and she died of cancer just a few months before. So he left behind no living relatives.
He did leave a note, though.
It s
aid simply:
I'm off to be with my Lord and my dear Millie. I'm sorry for the trouble I've put you through.
Just because he left behind no children didn’t mean Chief Slade broke no hearts when he died. He was a kind hearted and generous soul, and well-loved in the community.
Red, particularly, would miss him.
When Red’s mother died, the chief wasn’t yet the chief. Back then he worked for a private security company in Austin. But he was a close family friend, and did his level best to help Butch raise Red.
She called him “Uncle Whitey,” and thought it cool he had the same red hair and fair skin she did.
“I loved that man,” she told Russell. “He was like a second father to me. Damn this cursed blackout for taking him away from us.”
And under the ruse of wanting to exercise more, she began a new daily ritual: walking with Rusty to Whitey Slade’s home each morning to place fresh flowers upon his grave.
Chapter 34
Jesse Luna couldn't help but smile when he realized this would be the easiest job he'd ever pulled.
He sat in heavy shrubbery on the edge of the forest overlooking the Cullen ranch.
It was, as Savage had said, a very impressive place.
It was the kind of place Luna would like to retire to someday, when all his killing was finished. But that was later. For now he had too many places to go. Too many jobs to do.
And although he'd never admit it to himself, and certainly not to anyone else, the killing was still fun.
He pretended to those who knew him, even those who knew him best, that the murders he committed were merely his job. The fact was, snuffing the life of another gave him a thrill. It always had. He'd tried alcohol, drugs and sex. And they were all fun and pleasurable in their own right. But his ultimate high was in knowing he'd taken a human life. It gave him a sense of power and euphoria he'd never been able to match with anything else.
And it came easy for him.
Even in the early days, when he was sloppy and in great risk of being caught, he enjoyed pulling the trigger. Or shoving the knife deep into someone's heart.
Or flipping the switch which detonated a car bomb.
And he found that the more hits he carried out, the better he got.
And that amazing rush he got the very first time never went away. Never diminished. It grew even stronger with time, as he considered himself more and more invincible.
Maybe at some point in the future, if he got tired of traveling or the rush finally went away, he'd hang it up and retire.
Perhaps he'd even come back here to do it.
The Cullen place would belong to John Savage and his bank by then.
But it wouldn't be hard to take. Luna would simply march into the bank and demand it.
The fat little man wouldn't put up a fight. He wouldn't dare. For Luna had seen the fear in Savage's eyes during their two previous meetings. Savage wouldn't just let Luna swoop in and take the Cullen ranch off his hands.
He'd kiss Luna's ass the whole time Luna was doing it.
Yes, indeed. This would be the easiest job Luna had ever performed.
Because the Cullens were incredibly stupid.
He looked again through the high-powered binoculars.
It was an hour before sunset and the sun was behind his back. He had a well-lighted view of the west side of the house.
And there were no surveillance cameras anywhere.
The Cullens were preppers, sure.
But they weren't very good at it.
Luna knew other preppers. He also knew the smart ones planned ahead, for the time after their disaster came to pass, and the preppers lived in a chaotic world where they had things that others wanted. And the others would grow more and more desperate as each day passed.
The smart preppers spent as much time and money on security measures and self-protection as they did on their food and water stores.
The smart preppers stockpiled not only food, water and fuel. They also stockpiled weapons and ammunition.
They built booby traps around their compounds. High fences with barbed wire. Heavily armed sentries.
And they installed surveillance cameras, trip wires and alarm systems.
Luna saw no evidence of any of that.
The Cullens may have thought they were smart to put aside provisions.
But they were rank amateurs.
And they'd pay a very heavy price for it.
Luna stayed frozen in his shrubs as the sun went down behind him.
He watched as the back door of the ranch house opened and Bill Cullen emerged. The man might as well have been on a Sunday stroll. He was unarmed as far as Luna could tell. He had no backup inside the doorway with a rifle, in case there was trouble.
He didn't even check to see if there was anyone waiting to ambush him before barging outside.
This would be like taking candy from a baby.
Chapter 35
Luna continued to watch in disbelief as Cullen pissed against a pecan tree in his back yard, then zipped up and walked over to something hidden beneath a large plastic tarp.
He dragged off the tarp to reveal a large generator, perhaps three thousand watts. Then he refilled the fuel tank from a gasoline can next to the generator, checked the oil level, and turned the generator on.
Lights in the living room and kitchen, as well as the back porch, instantly came to life.
It was then that Luna noticed the heavy duty power cord that ran from the generator to the house and through a dining room window.
Luna shook his head, amazed.
The generator should have been protected by a locked structure of some type. Preferably one that was booby trapped, or at least alarmed. For two hundred bucks the Cullens could have had the unit hard wired into their electrical system. For two hundred more they could have installed a remote power switch so they could have started it without leaving the house.
He felt disgusted. Almost insulted, in a way, for being tasked to kill someone so far beneath him.
There was no one to hear him, but he muttered, "Damn idiots. At least show me you have enough sense to close the damn blinds."
But they didn't.
Luna could easily see Cullen return to the recliner in his living room, pick up a magazine, and read what would be his very last article.
He watched Joanie Cullen rise from her own easy chair, kiss her husband good night, and walk up the stairs.
A light came on in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Then in the bathroom next to it.
Luna waited five minutes for Joanie to prepare for her shower.
Then, right on schedule, he saw the faint silhouette of her body through the sheer bathroom curtains as she stepped into the shower and closed the shower curtain behind her.
He stole quickly through the yard, unworried about being seen in the increasingly darkening night.
He made his way to the generator, hit the kill switch, and then pulled the power cord running to the house halfway out. But not far enough for it to fall onto the ground.
Joanie immediately squealed from the shower.
"Honey, everything's dark!"
Bill, ever his wife's hero, called out loud enough for Luna to hear him outside.
"Stay where you are, honey. Let me find a flashlight and I'll go check the generator."
Bill made his way through the darkened house to the kitchen, where he took a flashlight from a drawer and walked out his back door.
Again, it never dawned on him to look around as he went out to see if there were any threats.
He went directly to the generator and checked the fuel tank. He knew it still had fuel in it, but it was hard to tell how much. So he picked up the can and refilled the tank.
It didn't take much.
Puzzled, he tried cranking it again.
It sprang instantly to life.
Had he been a smarter man, he'd have wondered why a generator that started so easily would have died with no warning.
But Bill Cullen wasn't that smart.
He looked at the house and noticed the lights still weren't on.
He wiggled the cord and the lights flickered.
He pushed it all the way in and they stayed on.
Had he been a smarter man, he'd have wondered about the odds of the cord working its way free from the generator at the exact moment the generator died.
But Bill Cullen wasn't that smart.
Actually, he was pretty proud of himself for fixing the problem so quickly, and would brag to his wife later about his mechanical skills. But that was later, after he retired to bed himself.
As he returned to the house and locked the back door behind him, he heard his wife call out from upstairs.
"Thank you, honey."
"You're welcome, sweetheart."
Chapter 36
While Bill was tinkering with the generator, Luna had made his way around the side of the house and to the front door. He picked the lock, entered the living room, and hid in the dining room where he had a great view of the back of Bill's recliner.
Sure, he could have just killed the man in the back yard. But he had to make it look like a suicide.
When he walked into the house he could hear Joanie humming to herself as she sat on the edge of the tub, trying to calm her nerves while waiting for the lights to come back on.
Thinking of her up there alone, and naked, reminded Luna that he hadn't been with a woman in several days.
She wasn't bad looking when he saw her through the living room window, as she headed toward the stairs.
She'd have been easy prey, especially once her husband was dead.
But Luna dismissed the thought as quickly as he'd considered it. He considered himself a professional at his craft. And as such he made it a policy never to mix business with pleasure.
Luna had no guarantees that Bill would return to his recliner, of course. But he continued to make it almost too easy by doing so. He finished his article, put the magazine aside, and leaned back.
It was the last thing he’d ever do. A moment later Luna pulled the trigger on his .38, sending a sizeable portion of Bill’s brains out a massive hole on the other side of his head and all over the walls and living room furniture.
Red: The Adventure Begins Page 10