by Jen Blood
“He had been since he was six,” he continued. “I told him where burgers came from, and that was it. The kid was crazy about animals.”
“So, you stopped eating meat…”
“I haven’t had so much as a fish stick since the day he died.” He got quiet and looked down, rubbing his palms on his jeans. “You know me better than anyone, Sol. You always have.”
We sat there a second more before he stood abruptly. He lay his hand lightly on my head. “You should talk to Juarez. Let him be nice to you. Who knows—you might actually like it.”
He walked away.
I sat there with my coffee and my chocolate and my bruises. I could still feel the weight and the warmth of his hand.
Chapter Fifteen
DANNY
Danny sat on the cool ground with zip ties cutting into his wrists. He didn’t know what time it was. He’d been fuzzy about details when he first woke up, but they were getting clearer now. Behind him was a cement wall. A big, thick steel door was the only way in or out. Above the door, angry red numbers below a bare red light bulb counted down:
24:09:52
He’d been watching those numbers so long he thought he’d lose his head. When he first woke up, they’d been at 38:42:20. He’d memorized that number. Couldn’t get it out of his mind now.
His body ached. His mouth tasted like he’d swallowed a wool blanket.
Just like he’d been doing since he woke up, he thought back to the night before. Tried to remember what happened. He remembered talking to Dougie over to Casey’s house. Playing guitar. Smokin’ up.
He remembered somebody calling to him from outside. A lady’s voice. Familiar, but none of the girls he knew. Saying sweet things that made him leave the garage like he was a puppet on a string. I been watchin’ you, Danny Durham, she’d said in a low, whispery kind of way that made him ache in a way he never had before.
He’d taken his stuff—his backpack and his cell phone and his keys. Gone out into the dark night.
It all went black from there.
And he woke up here.
His backpack was gone. So was his cell phone, and his smokes.
“Hello?” he called out again. He’d been calling out since he got here. Nobody ever answered, though. His voice echoed in the small room.
Quite a pickle you got yourself into, boy, his daddy said. He sat down on the floor across from Danny, stiff ‘cause his daddy never sat on the floor. He was wearing jeans and that flannel Rick and Danny got him for his last birthday—not the ugly brown suit they buried him in.
Tears needled behind Danny’s eyelids. “Quit hauntin’ me, old man.”
You really wanna be alone in this place?
Danny shook his head. Fear knotted up his insides.
Nah, his daddy said. I didn’t think so.
Somewhere above him, Danny heard music—he’d been hearing music for awhile, actually. Not too bad, either: mostly classic rock, but a little of that indie stuff Diggs always sent him. Sometimes, he heard footsteps off in the distance. He wondered what would happen if he made a racket—a big one. Took off his shoes and threw them at the door. Screamed bloody murder.
“You think they’ll kill me like they done you?” he asked his daddy.
His daddy just looked at him. I don’t reckon they brought you here for a game of checkers, son.
Part II
THE COUNTDOWN
Chapter Sixteen
SOLOMON
24:00:00
At exactly midnight, someone blew up the power station that generated electricity for Justice and its outlying areas. Juarez got the call, and I watched a shadow fall over his face. He hid it well, but the fear in his eyes in that split second before he regained control spoke volumes. Juarez isn’t the kind of guy who scares easily.
“They’ve called the National Guard in,” he told Diggs and me. We were outside the hospital, standing in an ambulance bay far from prying ears. “They’re talking about evacuating the town.”
“Forget it,” Diggs said. “Nobody will go with you. They don’t like outsiders telling them what to do—and if they think there’s a holy war coming, they’re sure as hell not gonna want a bunch of Feds telling them they have to leave.”
“That’s what we assumed,” Juarez said. “They’ve also taken out a cell tower, so communication is spotty. I’d like you two to stay back here until we can get you out of the area.”
He said it like he was giving us a Christmas wish list: A shiny red bike, a new sled for Jimmy, and for you two to stay the hell home. Not surprisingly, Diggs shook his head.
“You know I can’t do that,” he said. “Danny’s missing. These people are family to me.”
I didn’t mention that Einstein was still with Mae, and there was no way I was sitting back and letting my dog get swept up in a zombie apocalypse. Einstein was occasionally a sore spot between Juarez and me.
Juarez held up his hand. “I know you won’t stay. I said it was what I’d like—not what I thought would actually happen. Agent Blaze wants you both back at the station, anyway.” He looked at Diggs. “You know the area, which could prove invaluable for us. That and your knowledge of Barnel and several of the key players in this plan mean Allie isn’t anxious to see you go just yet. But it’s my job to let you know the risks.”
“We’re fine,” I said quickly. “We’ll go.”
Diggs nodded, his decision already made.
We moved out.
22:48:01
About an hour into the drive, Diggs made me tune the radio to WKRO and his Buddy Crazy Jake came over the airwaves.
“If what our friend Reverend Barnel tells us is true,” Crazy Jake said, “and we’ve got just a few hours left here on the planet, you know there’s no place I’d rather be than right here, brothers and sisters. I’ve got a generator, a six pack, and a carton of smokes to carry me through, and to celebrate the end of the world as we know it, I’m spinnin’ the full length, top twenty-four records of all time…”
I could all but feel Diggs perk up. “Damn. This’ll be good,” he said from the back seat.
“We just heard Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Jake continued. Diggs groaned. “By the legendary Simon and Garfunkel, and now we’re into an album that started as a rock opera but never quite—”
“Who’s Next,” Diggs said. Juarez looked back over his shoulder. I rolled my eyes when, sure enough, Jake listed the Who’s sixth album as number twenty-three in his End of the World list. Diggs reached up front and turned down the volume.
“So, let’s have it,” he said. “Top twenty-four records of all time, you two. Don’t think, just go.”
Juarez started to speak. “Don’t let him bait you,” I said. “It’s a trick. You start listing your favorite records of all time, and pretty soon you’re in a lengthy debate over popular music and the decline of civilization and whether Frank Zappa could kick Tom Waits’ ass in a fight.”
“I resent that,” Diggs said.
“But you don’t deny it,” I returned.
“Not completely,” he agreed.
I turned the music back up. We drove on. Shortly thereafter, Juarez stopped the SUV and a bright white light moved toward us. It was raining outside. I’d been lulled into a kind of trance state between the music, the rhythm of the windshield wipers, and my own exhaustion, but the white light brought me out of that. A man in fatigues and a rain poncho appeared, rifle at his side.
He stopped at Juarez’s window and shined a MagLite inside.
“ID, please?” he asked. He lowered his light seconds before my retinas burst into flame.
Juarez handed over his badge. “Special Agent Jack Juarez. What’s the status?”
The man grimaced. He was early forties, clean cut, military posture. “They took out another cell tower—there’s still some reception, but we may need to switch to sat coms before the night’s out. Slippery bastards. Whoever they are, these sons of bitches are organized: they know the countryside a whole lot
better than we do, and somehow or other they’re having no trouble getting around us. We’ve got people covering every road in or out of town, but it’s a lot of territory. Looks like it’s more widespread than we thought, too—maybe the whole county.”
“Thanks for all you’re doing,” Juarez said. He took his ID back. “Be careful—I don’t have a good feeling about this.”
“Agreed,” the soldier said. “And you watch yourself, too.”
The night was taking on a distinctly surreal quality.
“Can I ask you a question?” Diggs asked after we’d been on the road for a few minutes.
Juarez nodded. “Of course.”
“How the hell is this happening? I mean… What about the Patriot Act? Wire tapping and satellite surveillance and all the rest—isn’t that specifically to guard against something like this? Something this organized, shouldn’t there have been some chatter?”
It was a fair question—one I’d been asking myself since the local Dairy Queen went up in flames. True, Diggs’ tone could have used some work, but I was too tired to defend Juarez’s honor.
“We’ve been hearing some rumblings recently about something happening in this region, and Allie—Agent Blaze—has been following Barnel’s activities for awhile. But there’s never been anything to suggest a plan of this magnitude. Someone new must have come on the scene, because we’ve watched all the old players. No one is sophisticated enough for something like this.”
“But you don’t have any idea who this someone might be?” I asked.
Juarez shook his head, not happy to admit he was in the dark on this one. “I welcome any suggestions.”
I had none.
22:00:06
By two a.m., the rain was coming down in sheets and Crazy Jake was just kicking off The Allman Brothers at Fillmore East. Apparently, Jake wasn’t a fan of anything recorded after 1975. The wind blew hard enough to take down branches and blow wayward woodland creatures hither and yon. Diggs, Juarez, and I were all wide awake now, bouncing between the police scanner and WKRO as Diggs directed us along deserted backroads.
When we were still about half an hour from our destination, I saw flames up ahead. Juarez slowed down. In a field to our right, someone had erected and torched a giant cross—upside down, of course. They were nothing if not consistent. Juarez called in his location and pulled over.
“You know whose house this is?” he asked Diggs.
“When I lived here, it belonged to a guy named Dickie Johnson.” Clearly it wasn’t the time for jokes, but still… “He cooked meth in there last I knew. Has half a dozen kids. Not exactly a pillar of society.”
Juarez nodded, his hand already on the door handle. I grabbed his arm.
“What are you doing?”
“I need to go in and check on everyone. Evacuate the place. If that’s a meth lab, a fire that close to the house could kill everyone in there.”
“Shouldn’t you wait for backup?” I had no idea when I’d become the voice of reason in this trio, but I wasn’t loving it.
“I don’t know when they’ll get here. We’ve got people spread all over the county at this point. I’ll be careful.”
Diggs got out while Juarez and I were arguing. I followed.
“I’m not sitting here in the truck while you guys get blown up,” I said. “Besides which, if there are a bunch of kids in there, you’ll need help getting them out.”
“Yeah,” Diggs agreed. “Haven’t you heard? Kids love Solomon.”
I couldn’t even summon a proper glare. Juarez took the lead, with Diggs close behind and me bringing up the rear.
The cross was burning only about ten feet from the house—which wasn’t so much a house as a westward-leaning shack built on a hillside. The smell of gasoline fumes was strong in the air. A hound dog was chained outside, barking his head off at us. Beer cans and toys littered the yard. A garbage can had toppled over and animals had gotten into the bags, leaving soggy wads of trash drowning in the mud around us.
Juarez ordered us back behind a rusted-out car with no tires while he knocked on the door. I couldn’t figure out why he didn’t have his gun drawn, until I realized any spark from firing could send the whole place sky high. As realizations go, it wasn’t a heartening one. I realized I wasn’t breathing. Seconds later, he pushed the door open. Diggs crouched beside me in the rain. He didn’t appear to be breathing, either. Finally, after I lost just under a decade of my life, Juarez reappeared at the door and waved us inside.
The shack smelled like a heady combination of backed-up sewer, chemicals, stale cigarette smoke, and beer. Dishes were stacked high in the sink. Three fly strips hung from the ceiling, the most recent victim still buzzing as it tried to free itself from the glue.
I stopped in front of the refrigerator. A picture from a Dora the Explorer coloring book was held in place with a magnet advertising towing services for a local garage. The picture was colored in with precision—not a single mark outside the lines. At the top, written in a child’s hand, were the words:
To Daddy
Love Megan
I stared at the picture for a long time. My eyes burned. Juarez came over, took one look at the picture, and guided me away with his hand at my elbow.
“No one’s here,” he said.
“You think they were taken?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know—but they’re gone now. The fire crew should be along in five. I just checked in.”
“What about the dog?”
He looked at me blankly.
“There’s a dog outside, chained up. Is there somewhere we can take him?” I turned to Diggs.
“He’s better off here right now than the pound,” Diggs said. “We’ll leave him some food and water. It looks like he’s got shelter out there—we can check on him again tomorrow.”
I tried to think of an alternative.
I couldn’t.
We repeated the same procedure at another shack in the woods just down the road, with the same results: no one home, no indication whether the occupants had been hijacked or had taken off on their own.
The third time, Diggs spotted the cross first. “Shit,” he said under his breath, just loud enough for us to hear.
Juarez pulled over. This place was different from the others, surrounded on all sides by sturdy steel fencing, topped by a line of barbed wire. We were deep in the woods, the house barely visible from the road.
“What is this?” Juarez asked.
“A clinic,” Diggs said. He got out without elaborating. He didn’t have to. In this area, I was guessing abortion clinics didn’t exactly hang a neon sign out front.
The gate leading in was closed and locked, but the cross was burning on the other side—which meant clearly someone had gotten through.
“There’s another way in around back,” Diggs said over his shoulder, already on his way. Juarez got out his flashlight and we followed Diggs into the woods, traveling along the fence line.
It took twenty minutes, traveling through dense brush and half-obscured trails before he finally found what he was looking for. There was a gap maybe a foot wide, a creek running right through.
“The woman who runs the place is named Sally Woodruff,” Diggs said. “She uses this when she doesn’t want anyone to know she’s gone.”
I looked at him quizzically.
“She’s not real popular around here—tends to get in trouble when she leaves the property, so she tries to fly under the radar.”
Right.
The air was cool, rain falling a little less ferociously now. I followed the fellas through the creek to the other side, barely registering the ice water seeping into my sneakers.
Diggs didn’t bother waiting for us once we were through, instead loping across the open yard toward a pretty, two-story brick house. Gardens that I suspected had been well tended were now in shambles, an arbor torn down, flowers trampled. A cherub that had obviously once topped the antique fountain at the head of those g
ardens had been knocked off. It lay in a pool of muddy standing water, one wing broken.
The cross continued to burn, the flames deep orange against the night sky.
The front door of the house stood open. We followed Diggs inside, and were greeted with chaos: furniture thrown, spray-painted epithets on the walls, more inverted crosses as far as the eye could see.
“She left,” Diggs said. He sounded relieved.
“How can you be sure?” I asked.
“Sally has dogs—she rescues pit bulls. Has at least half a dozen of them. If they’re not here, it’s because she took them and ran before anyone got here.”
He shook his head, running his hand through his hair. I tried to think of something comforting to say, but came up with nothing. It was five a.m. According to Barnel’s timetable, we had nineteen hours left until “judgment.” I wasn’t sure any of us were prepared to deal with whatever his followers had in store for those nineteen hours.
18:46:02
We stopped at the Durhams’ after Sally Woodruff’s place. Morning was just breaking, gray and drizzling. It felt like the night had gone on for years. I lowered my visor and looked in the vanity mirror, watching as Diggs stared out the window, his forehead tipped against the glass. I tried to imagine the kind of sanctuary the Durhams must have represented for him—a teenage boy whose parents had both as much as told him he’d ruined their lives with one stupid, disastrous mistake.
Given his background, I could understand why it might be appealing for him to disappear here for those five years when he’d married Ashley. Try to start a new life as an official member of the Durham clan.
Juarez stopped the car and cleared his throat. Diggs looked up. I snapped my vanity mirror closed again.
“We’ll just run in and check on them, and get our stuff,” Diggs said.