Chapter 22
Dave was a bit melancholy when he left the guest room and met Tony in the kitchen.
The kitchen was equipped with a wood burning stove, which Dave knew from personal experience was one of the hardest contraptions ever invented to master.
“Was that with the house before the blackout?”
“Yes. My wife…”
It was a slip of the tongue that gave so much away, yet left so much more unanswered.
But he was committed.
“My wife was a chef. She cooked on wood sometimes because she said the flavor couldn’t be matched on some things. Like these steaks. I have a natural gas stove too, but it’s pretty much worthless these days.”
Dave waited for more, but there was no more coming.
So he turned his attention to the steaks.
“Well those smell pretty damn good, so she must have known what she was talking about. If you tell me they’re human, though, I’m walking out of the joint.”
“Nope. That’s something I’ll never do is stoop so low I’ll eat human flesh. I know there are some out there who do. But I’m not one of them.”
“So where’d you get the steaks?”
“From a rancher I know who happens to have a cocaine habit. He craves blow. I crave beef. It’s a pretty good arrangement.”
“And the house?”
“I bought the house six years ago. Are you surprised?”
“A little bit, yes. Was that before…”
“Before I started selling dope? Yes. This house, as a matter of fact, was one of the reasons I started selling. I got laid off about the same time a good friend of mine got busted for manufacturing. I knew where he stashed two kilos of meth. He was going away for twenty years, and it seemed too good an opportunity to pass up.
“It was either that or going homeless. The bank, you see, wants to get its money and has very little tolerance for excuses.”
“And your friend? He didn’t mind?”
“Like I said, he was going away for twenty. And as it turned out, he went away for life instead.”
“Oh?”
“He was stabbed to death in prison.”
“Oh.”
“The funny thing is, he wasn’t confrontational. Not at all. I knew him for years and he was a peacemaker. They had a gang war going on when he got there. One night they piled bunks against the door of the pod to keep the correctional officers out for a few minutes. Then all the shanks came out and started flying.
“As I understand it, he tried to stop it. He cornered his own leader. The pod leader, a big dude named Bubba. He tried to convince him it wasn’t worth it.
“Bubba stabbed him. His own guy. For trying to keep the peace. The other guys pounced on him too. Said he was a traitor. Left the blacks just watching, amazed that the whites would turn on their own like they did.
“Anyway, the guards finally got the door open and came in with an assault team. There were a couple of other guys on both sides who were bloody. But only my friend died.”
It was obviously a fresh wound.
And Dave didn’t know what else to say.
So he changed the subject.
“What was your wife’s name?”
Silence, then: “That’s a subject I don’t talk about.”
“Fair enough. I won’t bring it up again. But if you ever do want to talk about it, I’m a good listener.”
“How do you want your steak?”
It turned out Dave wasn’t the only one adept at changing the subject.
“Medium well. Anything I can do to help?”
“Yes. As a matter of fact, how about peeling those four potatoes over there? Then slice them up and put them in the blue pan. There’s some vegetable oil in the first cupboard.”
“French fries? Wow. I haven’t had fries in well over a year. Should I ask where you got the potatoes? No, wait, let me guess. You have a farmer friend with a wicked affection for crack?”
“Not even close. I grow them myself.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. I’m not. Go look out the back door. See for yourself.”
Curious, Dave walked over to a sliding glass patio door and pulled back the draperies.
Sure enough, the back yard was a lush green, with a variety of plants.
And not only that, it was huge.
As though Tony read his mind, he elaborated.
“The house behind me and on either side of me were abandoned. No, I didn’t chase anybody out. It just worked out that way.
“But I didn’t waste any time in taking advantage of the situation. I had a couple of guys tear down all the fences so I could turn all four yards into my personal garden. It’s my hobby. It’s what I do when I’m not meeting with my suppliers or making my deliveries.”
“But… don’t you need a special type of soil to grow potatoes?”
“Well, you need a better soil than we have here, for damn sure. I paid those same two guys to take my Polaris when I wasn’t using it. It took them almost four weeks off and on. But they were able to go to a soil company half a mile away and haul back about four tons of rich topsoil a little at a time.
“Then we mixed it with the soil I had, and made something that was pretty respectable for growing most vegetables.
“For what I call the soft beds, where I grow my potatoes, peanuts, radishes and carrots, we mixed in forty eight bags of potting soil as well. It softened the earth and keeps it from clumping and choking everything out. And it added a lot of nutrients that make everything grow bigger.”
Chapter 23
“But why?”
“Why what?”
“You can have people bring you food. Why do you go through all the trouble of growing your own?”
“I was a health food nut even before the blackout. That’s why I don’t use any of the dope I sell. I figured even after the blackout I gotta eat. I can eat the canned goods from the trucks and hope they’re not tainted. Or I can grow my own food and know it’s safe.
“Besides, it gives me something to do. I can’t watch TV anymore.
“Well, I could. I mean, my prepper friend brought me a TV and DVD player and a box full of DVDs to watch. But I never was much of a movie guy. I liked sports and nature shows. And those things no longer exist.
“Watching my plants grow is my nature show now. Wrestling the crops out of the ground is my sport.”
After dinner they retired to the den.
“Sit down, Dave. We’re going into the lion’s den in the morning. The worst of the worst. We need to discuss strategy.
“Would you like a drink?”
“Sure. What do you have?”
“A little bit of everything. I’m a dope dealer, remember? I can get things other people can’t.”
“Whiskey is fine.”
“Neat?”
“Ice, if you have it.”
“Oh, I definitely have it.”
“On second thought, How about a glass of ice and a bottle of water? I haven’t had ice water in a year, and I can’t imagine anything possibly tasting better than that.”
“You got it.”
Tony dropped ice cubes into a tall glass. Just the sound of the cubes against the side of the glass made Dave’s mouth water.
It occurred to him that one didn’t truly appreciate the simple things in life until they were taken away from them.
Tony poured himself a double shot of whiskey.
“I thought you all about being healthy,” Dave remarked.
“This is my one and only guilty pleasure. And I never drink to excess. One double each evening to relax me and knock off the road dust. That’s all.”
“Yet you surround yourself with people who cannot control their urges or their addictions. Are you ever tempted to just break down and say the hell with it and get totally wasted?”
“No. That would be an end to my hopes and dreams.”
“You’re set. You live like a king. At least, compare
d to nearly everybody else out there. What could you possibly have hopes and dreams about?”
“Another thing I’d rather not talk about. Let’s just say that someday soon I plan to take a journey. A very long journey, to try to recover some things from my past.
“Some things that were very dear to me.”
“Wow. Could you possibly be any more mysterious?”
Tony laughed.
“Probably not. But you have to understand, Dave, that I’m a very private man. It doesn’t appear that way, I know…”
“Ya think? Everybody on this side of town either knows you or knows of you. People run for you when they hear your vehicle approaching. You’re the closest thing I’ve seen to a celebrity since the lights went out.”
Tony sighed.
“That’s all true, yes. But that’s not the way I intended it. They run for me because I can give them something to ease their pain. At least for awhile. I can help them escape reality. It’s not because they like me. Many of them hate me. But I have something many of them need.”
“You said we needed to plan, because we were going into a very bad place. Where, exactly, are we going?”
“Into the pits of hell, I believe is the phrase I used. The only part of Albuquerque I’m afraid to go into.”
“Why? I thought all the factions gave you safe passage.”
“They do. Even this one does. But they’re real iffy. And they’re the only ones in the whole city who don’t seem to be afraid of killing me and starting a turf war. That’s because they’re crazy sons of bitches. And because they like to kill.”
“Who is ‘they,’ exactly?”
“They’re called Dalton’s Raiders. They came from Alabama. Good old boys. Only they’re not so good. They patterned themselves after some of the renegade Confederate armies of the civil war. The ones which stormed into the southern cities and raped and pillaged and killed, and then burned the cities to the ground on their way out.
“Before the lights went out they were merely a biker gang. They were run by a man named Dalton. Nobody knows his first name, and nobody has the guts to ask. They were based out of Birmingham before the blackout, and even the local cops were afraid of them. Every time one of them got arrested, a cop’s family member disappeared within a couple of months. Just disappeared without a trace, never to be seen again. After it happened for the fourth time the cops finally put two and two together and realized the two things were connected. The Raiders never took credit for the disappearances, or bragged about it even to other gangs. But everybody knew what was going on.
“Finally, the cops just stopped arresting them. The word got around that as long as they didn’t kill or maim somebody, the cops would let everything else slide.
“The Raiders were king of the mountain after that point. They literally owned Birmingham.
“Then the blackout happened and screwed everything up. The cops who lost family members formed their own gang, with other cops who hated the Raiders. They started shooting them from rooftops with sniper rifles.
“Dalton lost a third of his boys before he got smart and got the hell out of Dodge. Or Birmingham, I guess.”
“So what did they do?”
“They swept their way west on horseback. Horses they stole from a rancher, after they shot his seven member family dead. And they did just like the rogue armies did in the confederate days. They left death and destruction in their wake.”
“Finally, six months ago, they landed here.”
Chapter 24
“Okay, so they’re bad dudes. But what makes them worse than the other factions?”
“Dalton is insane. I mean certifiably so. As in, the dangerous kind of insane. Men like that usually don’t gain power of a group the size of his and keep it very long. Usually other members of the group will take advantage of their leader’s craziness, find a weak spot, and exploit it. They’ll overthrow him and usually kill him in the process.
“In this case, most of his lieutenants are as insane as he is. I don’t know how it turned out that way, but most of his muscle should have been locked up long ago. In the kind of cells with padding on the walls.
“They’re like sharks in a frenzy. They feed off each other. One will come up with a crazy idea. Like, for example, they’ll go through the neighborhoods and burn down every third house. Even if there are people inside.
“Just for the fun of it.
“And then another one will up the ante. He’ll say that in addition to burning every third house, they’ll shoot every third person who comes running out of a burning house.
“Another one will say, ‘Okay, that’s all well and good. But our guys are horny. So in addition to shooting every third person, we’ll capture every fourth person and rape them. Man, woman or child, it doesn’t matter.”
Dave was skeptical.
“Okay, so they’re all crazy enough to come up with such plans. But do you think they’d actually do it?”
“That’s just it, Dave. I know for a fact they would. Because I’ve seen them do all kinds of crazy shit. A month ago they called every one of their men together for a loyalty test. They all drew numbers and the five with the lowest numbers got sent out of their territory late that night.
“They had simple instructions: They were each to bring back the head of a rival faction member. They didn’t care how they obtained the heads, as long as they were back before sunrise with their trophies.”
“And if they didn’t make it?”
“They were told that if they didn’t make it back they weren’t to come back. That they were no longer a member of the Raiders and that they’d be shot on sight.”
“Ouch. That’s kinda harsh.”
“And they meant it, too. One of them didn’t make it back until after sunrise. The shot him in the gut and let him bleed to death in front of them.
“He begged them to shoot him in the head, to put him out of his misery. Dalton laughed at him and said he didn’t want to mess up his ‘pretty little head.’ Dalton wanted to preserve it. And sure enough, his head got put on a stake, right next to the head he’d brought back with him.
“I heard that Dalton went around singing a little song and dancing, because he got a ‘twofer’ out of the deal. Two heads instead of one.
“I’m serious, Dave. This is the only area in Albuquerque I hate to go into. Because even though I supply many of their men with drugs, I figure it’s only a matter of time before they kill me.”
“So why don’t we just go in there last? Then if we find the pickup before then we won’t have to go in at all.”
Dave smiled and crossed his arms in front of him, sure that he’d come up with the perfect solution.
And proud of himself for coming up with it before Tony did.
But it turned out Dave wasn’t as smart as he believed himself to be.
“You don’t get it, Dave. I have to go in there. I have no choice. I have my regular deliveries to make. And there’s another reason we need to go.”
“What’s that?”
“This is the last territory in Albuquerque that’s adjacent to Interstate 40. We’ve covered all the rest and nobody has seen your horse drawn pickup.”
“And that’s important why, again?”
“Because you said they came into the city on I-40, headed west. If they ever left the highway and entered Albuquerque, they had to have entered in Dalton’s Raiders’ territory. It’s the only place left for them to have exited the highway. We’ve covered all the other bases.”
Dave suddenly got a knot in the pit of his stomach. And he shuddered when he thought of his Beth being subjected to the wanton cruelty of the men Tony just described.
Chapter 25
Dave was frightened. Not for himself, for he was a hardened combat veteran who feared no man.
No, he was frightened for Beth.
He had to have the answer to a single question. And he dreaded what it might be.
“Have they been known to harm c
hildren?”
“Not to my knowledge, no. That may be the only line they haven’t yet crossed. But…”
“But what?”
“But they won’t hesitate for a second to shoot the old couple driving the wagon. Either to take the wagon from them, or just out of meanness or boredom.”
“But… if they did that… if they shot the old couple, what would happen to Beth?”
“I don’t know, Dave. I suppose they’d likely make a slave out of her. Make her do their cooking and cleaning for them.”
Tony went no further than that. But silently he was thinking the same thoughts Dave was.
That such brutal and sadistic men might not settle for Beth doing their chores.
That they could rob her of her innocence and her dignity.
No, Dave wasn’t afraid for himself, even if going up against a thousand such men.
But he was afraid for his daughter.
And he was ready for war, or anything short of it, to get her safely back where she belonged.
“Okay. So what’s our plan?”
“I was thinking about it on the way back from town. I think it’s a good one, but you’re not gonna like it.”
“There’s absolutely nothing about this whole situation I like. Tell me about it.”
“I’m going in without you.”
“You’re what?”
“Hear me out, Dave. You heard what the other factions said about me bringing you onto their turf. They all bitched about it because they don’t like strangers. They don’t trust them.
“We were able to talk our way in despite that distrust because the other factions are run by more or less reasonable people.”
“Luis didn’t seem so reasonable when he said he was going to cut off my head and throw darts at it.”
“As big and bad and scary as Luis was, Dave, he’s a pussycat compared to these guys. If we go in there together there’s a good chance their gatekeepers will just blow us away before we can get a word out to explain.
“And if we do get past the sentries, Dalton will probably order us executed. Just for having the nerve to deviate from his usual comfort zone.
On Desert Sands: Alone: Book 6 Page 7