by Jim Heskett
Which was true, since they’d stashed all of the gasoline and other valuables back at the car, which they’d hidden among a collection of old and lifeless cars in a nearby parking garage.
“Wait, Izzy,” Sutter said. “I know them.” Then, to the two silent visitors, he said, “what do you want?”
The buzzcut woman took a step forward. “Mrs. Rappaport would like to speak with you.”
Sutter and Dave and Isabelle all shared a look. Zach was still yawning and working on sitting up. Sutter lowered his gun, but Isabelle didn’t, so the military woman kept her own weapon trained on Isabelle.
Sutter waved the elderly woman forward, who was draped in a fur coat. She clicked her heels across the marble floor and dropped a handkerchief in front of Sutter so she could kneel to meet his eye level.
The woman narrowed her gaze. “Why are you looking for my husband? I know this isn’t the first time you’ve come asking after him. I’ve heard about you, Mr. Cop from New York.”
“I already told you, at the bar,” he said.
The woman reached into her purse, and Isabelle chambered a round in her pistol. The military woman tensed, and Mrs. Rappaport held up her free hand to wave off the bodyguard. “I’m just getting my lip balm. Everybody calm down.”
Dave leaned over to Isabelle and put a hand on top of her gun, then gently pushed it down.
“So what do you think is going to happen if you talk to my husband?” Mrs. Rappaport said. “You’re going to give him some impassioned speech and he’ll parade through the streets like a holy Washington crusader?”
“Something like that,” Sutter said.
She applied the lip balm and spent a few seconds staring at Sutter. “Well, I’m sorry, son, but it’s not going to be possible. Ian passed away from a stroke more than five years ago.”
Sutter’s shoulders slumped. He’d feared this, after so much time looking for the man with no luck. For some reason, Rappaport’s death had been kept secret, or else Sutter would have heard about it. Why were they keeping his ghost alive?
“That’s not possible,” Dave said. “He hired us to do a job just last year.”
“You mean someone hired you to do a job on his behalf?” Mrs. Rappaport said. “I’ve been acting as him for a couple years now. Not that it’s done much good. It’s not like it used to be in the old days when the right name meant power. People don’t accept the same kind of leverage anymore.”
“But you must still think the Rappaport name counts for something,” Sutter said, “or you wouldn’t have kept his death quiet.”
She sighed. “Like I said, I’ve tried, and now here we are. But, since you put out all this effort, I’d feel bad if I didn’t at least hear your speech. So go ahead.”
Sutter cleared his throat. “It’s time to take back control of the country.”
The old woman smiled, the moonlight highlighting the wrinkles around her eyes. “And how are we supposed to do that with those burned people running around, causing so much havoc? I thought with LaVey gone, we might have a chance. But not with those crazies out and about, terrorizing everyone.”
“But,” Sutter said, “you must still have connections, right?”
“I do,” she said.
“Is it true that there are hundreds of former secret service and national guard in DC? I’ve heard rumors, but never anything definitive.”
She paused, chewing on her lower lip. “There are many who are loyal to America if that’s what you’re asking. But that doesn’t mean they’ll all jump at the chance to go to war with a cult that seems to have an endless supply of suicidal soldiers to throw at us.”
Sutter grinned. “That's what they want us to believe, that they have millions of devout followers, but I don’t think it’s true. The Infinity are weak now. The groups have lost contact with each other. Now is the perfect time to strike. If we cut off the head of the snake, they’ll have no way to regroup and retaliate.”
Dave drew in a sharp breath as Isabelle scowled at Sutter.
“Wait a second,” Dave said, “what are you talking about with the ‘cut the head off the snake’ thing? That’s not the plan, Sutter.”
“Then maybe we should change the plan,” he said. “Maybe we’re thinking too small with protecting the fort and we need to make our defense better by going on offense.”
“I don’t know about this,” Dave said. “What you’re talking about seems crazy. Like what, assassinating the Infinity leaders?”
“Well,” Isabelle said, “Zach here does know where they live.”
Sutter leaned forward to get Mrs. Rappaport’s attention. “If we do this, will you help? Will you use your name to gather people and supplies so we can wage a war against the stragglers?”
The old woman laughed. “I admire you, son. You remind me a lot of Ian when he was a young politician.”
Sutter didn’t break his gaze with Mrs. Rappaport. “What do you say, ma’am?”
She nodded. “Okay. You have yourself a deal.”
7
The next morning, Isabelle went for a walk around the reflecting pool. After Mrs. Rappaport and that dyke guard had left, they’d all drifted off to sleep in silence, but she knew a discussion about what had happened was coming. Sutter didn’t get to change their whole mission and think everyone would suddenly be all hunky-dory with it and not say anything.
As she rounded the pool near the leaning Washington Monument end, Dave came jogging up to her. “Babe,” he said, panting, “we’re not going to go through with this, are we? This crazy rah-rah restart America bullshit that has us assaulting the freaking Infinity compound?”
She collected her thoughts as he fell into step next to her. “I don’t know. He blindsided us, for sure, but it’s not any crazier than the plan before. Maybe Sutter’s right. Not about reforming the government… that’s a lost cause. But maybe we can disrupt the Infinity so much they fade away if we can kill their leaders while we have a shot at it. Maybe they’re really as lost and aimless as he thinks.”
They walked in silence for a few seconds while Dave started and aborted his next train of thought a few times. Finally, he said, “what if we get there and there’s three or four hundred of them waiting for us? We going to go in there guns blazing then?”
She stopped short and grasped him by the arm. “Listen to me: whatever happens, we’re going to take care of us. It’s you and me and we’re going to do what we’ve always done to survive. If the situation looks bad, we cut our losses and split. Find a new home.”
He nodded reluctantly and tapped on his cheek, the signal for her to give him a smooch. But Isabelle caught sight of a group of guys carrying baseball bats appear from around the back of the Washington Monument. At first, the group was wandering, kicking trash on the ground, but then they all came to a halt when they noticed Dave and Isabelle watching them.
They were only a couple hundred yards away.
Dave pointed. “That doesn’t look good.”
“No, sure doesn’t. I think we might have overstayed our welcome.”
***
They argued about the merits of the plan the rest of the way to Philadelphia. Mostly Dave and Sutter, because Isabelle seemed happy to take on any kind of fight, or at least to keep her mouth shut without having anything useful to say. Zach liked that about her.
He stayed silent in the back of the car, sunglasses on, staring out the window as the endless ruins of Maryland passed by in a blur. Near Baltimore, he saw a man on the side of a road speaking from a raised wooden stage. The stage was a gallows, and as the man spoke, three charred and still smoking bodies swung from ropes behind him. He was speaking into a bullhorn as a crowd of twenty or thirty looked up at him. Some local Infinity judge/executioner, perhaps, dishing out roadside justice?
Zach blinked and it faded into the background, then he didn’t think about that scene again. He was too consumed by thoughts of going to find Cassie in Philadelphia, and how he’d feel about seeing her in person. Isa
belle’s earlier comment about how he’d been rejected trying to get into her panties still stung.
Yes, he’d been attracted to Cassie from the moment he and Sutter met her in Yonkers. And yes, she’d spurned his advances. But that wasn’t it… maybe she reminded him of Yvonne, the girl he’d rescued from the Infinity house in Red Bank, the one who’d later abandoned him when he’d needed her most. With Cassie, it had started out as flirty teasing comments, then bloomed into passive-aggressive jibes, then outright insults at each other. The kind of war followed that neither of them could have pinpointed back to a single moment when things went wrong.
Either way, he was not at all excited about seeing that bitch again. There was something off about her. Something not right.
From Baltimore to Philadelphia took another three hours by car, mostly due to one blockade at the Delaware border where some local thugs had set up shop to demand tolls to pass on the highway. Two cars had been parked nose to nose in the middle of the road.
They found themselves in a line of three cars and waited patiently for a long time while the lead car hadn’t moved.
Finally, Isabelle spoke up. “Screw this. I’m going up there.”
“Are you sure?” Dave said.
She turned to Sutter. “Want to come with me?”
Sutter nodded, and Zach thought it odd she hadn’t asked her boyfriend Dave to come instead. Maybe she was expecting trouble, and everybody knew how useless Dave was with a gun. Not that Zach thought himself much better.
After Sutter and Isabelle had armed themselves, they slipped out of the SUV and walked on opposite sides of the car ahead, toward the blockade. The people in the cars up ahead gawked and braced themselves, maybe thinking a bloody gunfight was about to break out. Which was fitting, since that’s exactly what Zach figured Isabelle and Sutter might do if these yokels didn’t open up that blockade.
Alone in the car with Dave, Zach said, “Isabelle’s pretty ballsy, right?”
“She’s been through a lot,” Dave said, drifting off at the end like it was all he had to say on the matter. Everyone had been through a lot, obviously, and saying so was like commenting on the weather.
What happened next passed by in a series of beats. With the windows up, Zach couldn’t hear, only see.
Sutter and Isabelle approached the blockade. Three men came out from behind the blocking cars to talk to Isabelle. Sutter stayed a few feet back. From their vantage, Zach could see Sutter’s hand creep toward the back of his pants, where the pistol was lodged in his waistband.
Isabelle was talking, then one of them raised his hands above his head, yelling and pointing.
One of the other men lifted a baseball bat from a holster on his belt.
“Oh, shit,” Dave said and leaned into the back seat to get his gun.
Dave’s movements distracted Zach, so he didn’t see the first shot. But he heard the crack of a bullet, then when he looked up, the baseball bat man was toppling backward, and Sutter held the gun at arm’s length. The closest man sprinted at Isabelle, who jabbed him in the mouth.
By this time, Dave had the car door open and was running ahead. Sutter fired two more shots, one into the man who was still reeling from Isabelle’s punch, and another into the second blockade man, who had apparently been dealing with a jammed pistol. By the time Dave got within striking distance, it was all over.
The three of them came back to the car and slid inside.
“Was there some kind of trouble?” Zach said with a smirk, as the people in the cars ahead looked on in stunned silence.
“That’s funny,” Isabelle said, in a very unfunny tone. “They weren’t going to let us pass.”
“They would have accepted Isabelle as toll,” Sutter said. “Either that or they could have killed us. Those were our choices.”
“Shitty deal,” Zach said as Dave started the car and pulled around the other cars, who were still waiting for someone to tell them they could leave.
***
Cassie’s place was in a cluster of brick row-houses on Fulton Street in South Philly. While Sutter had never been one of those New Yorkers who believed it was the cultural center of the universe, he still hadn’t ventured outside the city often.
He’d only been to Philly a few times, and had only been to this area once when they’d helped Cassie move in. The neighborhood seemed quiet then, the kind of place that was trashed enough that most scavengers wouldn’t give it a second look, but solid enough that you could actually find some reasonable places to squat.
He’d had enough time to readjust to a world without turn-by-turn GPS directions, where maps were often sought-after and valuable commodities. Thankfully, Dave knew Philadelphia well (Dave seemed to know how to get anywhere), and Sutter felt that innate sense of navigation once they turned onto Fulton.
They parked the car in an alley off 5th, since Fulton was narrow and lined from curb to curb with garbage. Nobody misses the garbage men until they’re not around anymore. At least gangs like the Red Streets kept parts of New York relatively clean.
On foot, Sutter noticed how quiet everything seemed to be. Odd for a city this size.
Zach pointed at a house on Fulton and they kept close together as they approached the building. It had been boarded up, which he didn’t remember, but that didn’t mean anything.
Sutter rapped on the plywood barrier in front of the door. It rattled back at him. They waited one minute, then two, and there was no shuffling of feet, no sounds coming from the other side of the door.
“What do you think?” Dave said. “Could she have moved?”
Sutter ran his hands over the plywood, considering it. “Maybe, but I don’t think so.”
“Is there a place people go during the day around here?” Dave said. “Like a park, or something like that? It’s a nice day, she could be outdoors somewhere.”
Sutter and Zach looked at each other, but they both shrugged.
“What about a market?” Isabelle said.
“Yeah,” Dave said, “that could be it.”
“I saw a school a few blocks back,” Zach said. “There were some people hanging out on the street, so I’ll bet there’s a market there. In the gym, or cafeteria, or whatever.”
Sutter remembered seeing a few people back near the school, so it was worth a try. With no better option, they all agreed to walk there.
The building was a five-story red brick rectangle with a smattering of useless air conditioners poking out of the windows. Two parallel lines of trash cans created a pathway through the parking lot to the entrance to the gym. Zach had been right.
Inside the market, Sutter took in the chaos of capitalism, one of the last bastions of that faded ideal. Hundreds milled about, perusing clothing and tools, dried meats—some of which were honest about the content while some claimed real “beef” and “pork”—and fresh vegetables. A decent amount of light spilled in from the ample windows on one side of the building.
Sutter counted fifteen rows of booths, each about two hundred feet long. “Let’s split up. We’ll meet back here in ten minutes.”
They went their separate ways, and Sutter pushed straight ahead into a line of booths selling basic tools and clothing. The first few stalls contained jeans, shirts, dresses, mostly dirty and torn and not appealing in the slightest. He remembered going to the market in Chinatown not long after the fall when people sold high-quality clothing for actual United States currency. Everyone thought the economic situation was temporary. That lasted six months, maybe a year, before the only thing dollar bills were good for were kindling or wiping your ass.
He entered a cluster of booths of people knitting and saw a woman hunched over a table, knitting needles clicking in her hands. He knew her by the back of her head.
“Cassie?”
The woman paused, then eased around in her chair to face him. She smiled.
“I’ll be damned,” she said. “You came back.”
8
Several days before his r
eturn to Red Bank and that long-neglected mansion he called home, Victor and his followers had stopped for a rest at the edge of a large city. Traveling always made him weary.
And not just the traveling. The lengthy rehab period from his spinal injury made him yearn for home, and that yearning was also exhausting.
While camped, his assistant Norman came to him, to tell him of some people in the area who wished to join the Infinity. This happened from time to time; locals became disillusioned with life, they found no purpose to anything. That nihilism made them perfect recruits. And whatever awful things they may have heard about the Infinity, they knew that once they were in, they were cared for. Made to feel like family. You couldn’t say that about any other existing social or community organization.
And that was how the Infinity would take over the country. Family. Purpose. The fear, intimidation, and flames would only meet those who were not worthy.
Victor and his small group of travelers were squatting in the remains of an office building. Standard wide open room with cubicle dividers sectioning the space into small rooms. Some collection of people had lived here before and rearranged the cubicles into barriers at either end. Defensive position for some sort of war with neighboring building inhabitants, perhaps? As if holding on to a piece of concrete and brick would stave off acceptance of the inevitable futility of life.
In the end, the truth always bubbled up to the surface.
Victor rolled his wheelchair into what appeared to be the office’s break room and kitchen. A collection of framed pictures lined one of the walls. Headshots of people who’d worked here, each one designated employee of the month. Had they felt special as if the work they were doing was important? Victor didn’t even know what kind of product or service the people in this office had created. Not that it mattered.
He spent some time in quiet reflection, then at midday, Norman brought him two men and a woman. These potential recruits had explained to Norman they wanted to join the Infinity family and leave behind the world of possessions and desire and pain. He lined them up while Victor parked the wheelchair at the break room table.