Cooperman knew it, though. It was the look folks got after they’d killed somebody, justified or not. It was the look that comes only after a person has realized that there really is no such thing as sanctity of life. That killing is just another thing a person can do, like eating a cupcake. It was hard to see that look in such a little girl, but he preferred it overwhelmingly to the look girls usually had after somebody snatched them, the one that came after a girl had been violated for the first time. That one meant she’d internalized the violence of the rape to the point that she’d never see herself as anything more than the human-shaped piece of meat she’d been treated like. Bobby-Leigh had fought back—and somehow won—and while, yes, the little girl would never be the same again, she was still whole. Unbroken. The old man wanted to cry in relief, rush to her and pull her into his arms, but he didn’t. He knew better. Instead, he nodded to Jen to approach her sister and with a look told the rest of the men to keep back.
Bobby-Leigh watched all this without any response of any kind. Jen took a step toward her, desperately trying to think of the right thing to say but coming up with nothing as her sister went back to what she’d been doing when they found her: looking at hair dye.
“You find anything good?” Jen asked softly, immediately wishing she’d said just about any of the other things she’d thought about saying before she decided to say that. Bobby-Leigh ignored her. Jen didn’t know what to say next, so she just approached slowly and silently.
“Thinking about a color change, dude?” the big sister asked the little one.
“I want black. But they don’t have black.”
Jen looked at the boxes of hair dye. There were at least seven different kinds of black, so she didn’t know what the fuck Bobby-Leigh was talking about.
“What about this?” she asked, showing her sister a box of Revlon that said “Soft Black.”
“I don’t want soft. I want black.”
Jen pulled down the box next to it.
“Blue black?”
“No. Black.”
“Okay. Well, I’m sure they have one that is just black,” Jen said, totally confused about what was going on in her little sister’s head, and terrified of finding the answer at the same time.
“This one just says ‘Black,’” Jen said, pulling down a box of Clairol and handing it to her sister.
Watching them from the edge of the aisle, Jimmy turned to Ace and asked what he thought they were doing. Ace told him he had no idea. Cooperman told them both to shut up.
“That looks good. Thanks,” Bobby-Leigh said, putting the box in her cart.
“I see you got a couple new outfits there, dude.”
Bobby-Leigh looked at her sister with a look Jen couldn’t read.
“Well, I can’t really wear what I’m currently wearing out of here, can I?”
“Dude, I wasn’t trying to give you a hard time or anything. I think this stuff is nice.” Jen didn’t think the stuff was nice at all. It was creepy, like some kind of doll outfit. And what was up with the makeup? And the dog collars? She wanted to ask what had happened, but she didn’t. Maybe because she knew that the answer, whatever it was, was going to scare the crap out of her and change the way she looked at her little sister forever. Maybe because it just seemed like such an out of place question in the moment. Maybe because she thought there was a chance that Bobby-Leigh would break if she talked about it.
“The dressing rooms are going to be dark,” she said.
“No, they won’t, the tops are open,” Bobby-Leigh countered.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Um, yeah. Okay. Let’s get you some new shit, dude. Let me just tell the guys what the plan is.”
Jen walked over to the guys and tried to communicate with her eyes that Bobby-Leigh was okay, but not okay. Maybe really not okay. Jimmy touched her hand and she didn’t pull away, at least not immediately.
“She wants to change her clothes.”
“Okay. That seems pretty reasonable.”
“Do you think anybody else is here?” Jimmy asked nobody in particular.
“No. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t. Obviously, we weren’t alone before when we thought we were,” Cooperman said and shot Ace a look making it clear that he held the young man personally responsible for dropping the ball on this one.
“Don’t let us out of your sight. But maybe, you know . . .” the implied instructions to follow at a distance were directed at all of them, but it was only Ace who answered.
“We got it.”
“Thanks.”
Jen went back to her sister, who without a word headed off toward the dressing rooms. The guys followed but kept their distance. Jen checked back over her shoulder several times, wishing one of them could somehow signal to her what she should say or do, but even if they could have sent some kind of message, they didn’t know how to deal with what had happened to Bobby-Leigh any better than she did.
At the dressing room, Jen moved as if she was going to enter the little room with her sister, but Bobby-Leigh stopped her. The little girl had been right. The rooms were all open at the top and the skylights actually did light them just fine.
“I’m okay,” Bobby-Leigh said.
“I know, dude. I just . . .”
“I’m really okay,” she said, and Jen felt tears welling up in her eyes and a sob climbing slowly up her throat.
“I’m not,” Jen said. “Can I just come with you, dude? Please. I’m afraid to . . .” She didn’t know what the end of that sentence was. Afraid to let you out of my sight again, she guessed, or maybe it was Afraid to not be there when you need me again.
But Bobby-Leigh didn’t care what the rest of the sentence was. At the moment she didn’t really care about anything except being somebody else as quickly as possible, and if that meant her sister had to watch her metamorphosis, well that was just fine with her.
“Whatever.”
When the girls exited the dressing room, Bobby-Leigh was decked out in her first attempt at the Lolita-goth look she’d carry through her coming teenage years and then some, except for the dyed black hair, which Jen would do her best to fix that night when they got back to camp, though they’d never be able to get all of her original red out.
The risqué clothing and dark makeup made the folks back at camp uncomfortable—well, that and the ax that never left the little girl’s side from that point on. But the only part of the whole thing that bothered Jen were the two dog collars her little sister insisted on wearing around her neck from that point forward.
Bobby-Leigh never volunteered what had gone down in the back of that superstore. She never offered any explanation for any of the elements of her outfit, and, in spite of her fear and curiosity, Jen never asked. In fact, she made sure nobody else ever tried to talk about any of it with her little sister either. Jennifer Kessler had firsthand experience in keeping demons locked away, and respected the practice.
* * *
Night had come. The girls took a break from listening to the Chinese greatest hits to meditate, then they set off to find something to eat, which took them several hours of going through six different apartments, and even then all they ended up with was a bunch of candy bars hidden away in some chick’s closet—the secret stash of a hidden eating disorder, no doubt. They were stale, but still sweet. It was enough to keep them going. In fact, it was kind of a treat after the potatoes Brennachecke’s group ate on a daily basis.
“I lost my knife with Jimmy,” Jen said as they ate and flipped through a photo album of their absentee Chinese host, trying to guess who was who in the pictures.
“What knife?”
“The knife,” Jen said.
Bobby-Leigh smiled and pulled the karambit blade she’d held against Jen’s throat in the trashcan earlier out from somewhere in her dress.
“You mean this knife?” she said.
“Lucky. You still have yours.”
“I know,” Bobby-Leigh
said, then laughed. “But this one isn’t mine. This one is yours. I grabbed it before you even berserked out. Uncle Allen would be pissed if I let you lose it.”
“You’re a rock star, dude.”
“Yeah, I am pretty cool.”
“You know what I like most about you is your modesty, though,” Jen teased.
“I know, right? I am amazingly modest.”
Both girls smiled. For the thousandth time, Jen almost asked her sister about what had happened at Walmart, but didn’t. Instead, she turned back to the CD collection and the photo book and tried not to think about Jimmy, or her father, or Uncle Allen, or Brennachecke.
Before they’d had a chance to realize how exhausted they actually were, the girls had fallen into an uneasy sleep. The sounds of muffled Chinese hip-hop spilled from the earbuds by their side as they drifted away, making for some extremely strange dreams.
The next thing they knew it was dawn.
Chapter Four
The Blood Pirates in Vedic City
Brennachecke stood in the bookstore café once called Revelations waiting to have one himself. It’d been pretty easy for Ace to track the two this far because Jen was bleeding. But they’d tended to their wounds with book pages and now the trail was harder for Ace to follow. Brennachecke’s intuition told him they’d go to their uncle Allen’s farm. If not right away, eventually. It was the only place left for them.
Brennachecke had actually learned TM himself just as the shit hit the fan. His wife had been on him to do it, and twenty minutes twice a day was a small price to pay if it made her feel more connected to him and got her to shut up about how great it was. Meditating had made her happy, and knowing he was doing it too had made her even happier. But she was dead now. And he didn’t meditate anymore. It wasn’t that he’d disliked it. He just always seemed to have something more pressing to do. Still, the TM community in Fairfield was a close-knit one. Brennachecke hadn’t exactly been friends with the girls’ uncle, but he’d known him. More importantly, he knew where the man’s farm was. Brennachecke also knew that a particularly large band of blood pirates had set themselves up in a TM community known as Vedic City on the outskirts of town and that they were actively hunting along Highway 1.
All the nonviolent groups that were active in eastern Iowa knew better than to travel on, or too close to, the interstate highway. It was the equivalent of a suggestively dressed drunk young woman walking alone through New York City’s Central Park late at night—back before the park was burned to the ground by a nuclear blast, along with the rest of Manhattan. Sure, maybe you’d get through it okay, but if you did you’d be one of the lucky ones. And the number of folks left who got by counting on being one of the lucky ones was thinning quickly. Luck, it would seem, was suffering from a catastrophic drought.
Folks had been using Highway 1 to move around for a few years now and word had traveled. News of the safer route to and from Cedar Rapids had then found its way into the more violent communities, and they’d descended upon Fairfield to harvest the misery as best they could.
The blood pirates, being the worst of the worst, had arrived shortly thereafter and soon were the only nearby marauders to Fairfield’s north. Brennachecke would have traded them for a thousand of the earlier hostile groups if he could. But they were here to stay. Vedic City had been upgraded over the years, and now the western parts of the community were nearly completely off the grid. It was sustainable. It was defendable. In times like these, it felt like a paradise—as long as you were one of the pirates. Folks who ended up there as “guests” were a little more likely to find themselves envying the damned in hell.
Brennachecke fully intended to kill Jennifer Kessler, but he had no intention of being cruel about it. If he could get them before they got beyond the MUM campus, things would be pretty easy. But if they made it up Highway 1 and ended up in Vedic City, or Blood City as it’d been rechristened, then the plan got all muddy. His people, all fourteen of them, would follow him down any road he led them. But getting too close to the blood pirate stronghold put everybody at incredible risk. Even if it hadn’t posed such a threat, the futility of saving Jennifer from being tortured, raped, and mutilated while they milked her of her monster blood, only to put a bullet in the back of her head, was painfully apparent. And yet, if they couldn’t find them that was exactly what he intended to do.
“Eric,” he called out and the boy appeared by his side instantly. “After dark, you’re going to go up B Street, past the burned-out Eco Village where Sweetwater used to be, get on Mahogany Avenue, and head up to the farm that’s just past 110th Street. That’s Allen Kessler’s old place. That’ll be where Jennifer and her sister are heading. You wait for them.”
“By myself?”
“No. You’re going to take everybody. You’re in charge. If the girls show up, just watch. Don’t let them know you’re there. Don’t do anything to them. Just wait for me. If the farm’s been destroyed, you still wait for me before you do anything. Understand?”
“What if they come and then leave? You still want me to wait?”
“I’ll only be a day or two at most behind you.”
“But what if that’s all the time they stay?”
Brennachecke smiled. Eric had a good head on his shoulders. Always had. Never got emotional. Never got wrapped up in relationships. Never failed to do right by his father. Eric would be able to lead the group just fine if something happened to him. Jimmy on the other hand, well, Brennachecke wasn’t surprised at all that Jimmy had been taken first. He’d always been his mother’s boy.
“Track them, but send runners back in relays until I get there,” Brennachecke said, and almost added, Unless it takes me more than a week to show up, then put a bullet in Jen’s head and move out toward Cedar Rapids like we’ve been planning, because I’m not coming. I’m dead. But he didn’t say it. He didn’t say it because he didn’t have to. Eric knew better than to stay in one place for too long. Brennachecke told himself that they’d all be safer on this mission than on the suicide one he was going on to enter Blood City and attempt to negotiate for the girls. But safer was not by any means safe.
The old soldier called the rest of his people over and explained the plan, reminding them to stay off the road and use the dead cornfields for cover. Daniel Patterson, a thirty-seven-year-old real estate salesman in his former life, insisted on coming with Brennachecke to infiltrate Blood City.
“We’re not going there to stir up trouble, Dan.”
“I understand.”
Brennachecke believed him, but he also knew that after the blood pirates had taken Vedic City, Dan’s fiancée disappeared. It was a logical assumption that she’d ended up there. However, if she’d been snatched it wasn’t logical to think she’d still be alive. Daniel obviously saw a chance for revenge.
“I’m serious, Dan. If you come with me and do something that puts what I need to do at risk . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence.
“I understand the mission, sir,” Dan said.
Brennachecke thought it over. If he ordered Dan to head to the farm with Eric, he knew the man would do as he was told. At the same time, he was about to walk into hell, and a little backup might be what allowed him to walk back out again.
“Okay, fine,” he said. “We’ll head out at dusk. Let’s get ready.”
Brennachecke sat down as his group began what at this point was a familiar routine of moving camp and setting up in a new building. His mind drifted to Jimmy. To Jen. To Jimmy and Jen together. His head dropped to his hands as grief consumed his heart like an infestation of maggots. But no tears dripped from his eyes. His mouth didn’t tremble. He held his pain tight in his chest and let himself feel its weight, but he showed no sign of it on the outside.
His youngest son was dead. He’d failed as a father, just like he’d failed as a husband to protect the boy’s mother. But the worst part of it all was that he’d loved watching his boy fall in love with the pretty potty-mouthed girl. And Bo
bby-Leigh, though weird as hell ever since the incident at Walmart, was the toughest little girl he’d ever seen, and smart as a whip. He’d been excited to watch her become the powerful matriarch of the group one day. He knew that Jennifer hadn’t intended to murder his boy. If it was in him to forgive, she might even have been allowed a second chance. Unfortunately, the old soldier’s heart was broken long ago, and while he had compassion and even empathy for the possessed girl, it was duty that moved the blood through his body now.
He called Dan over and the two men set about making a plan. Dan was an amazing bow hunter. With a compound bow he could kill a deer easily at a hundred yards, and he’d taken game down from as far away as 240 yards. The problem was that a bow does not make for a particularly well concealed weapon. The pirates were not going to allow them to walk into Vedic City and address the Man-in-Charge with Dan armed like that. But at the same time, a bow—especially at distances like Dan was capable of—could take out an enemy pretty much completely undetected. It was a lot like having a sniper rifle, only there was no sound of a gunshot. No muzzle flash, no smoke. In the right position, Dan could pick off folks until he ran out of arrows and probably never have his location pinned down. That was the only advantage Brennachecke was going to have, aside from what he intended to offer in exchange for the girls.
* * *
At dusk, the air was extremely cold for a July evening in Iowa. Brennachecke’s group could see their breath as they said good-bye to Dan and the old soldier. Eric watched his father and the real estate salesman head out to infiltrate Vedic City. Dan was loaded down with a bow and arrows, and Eric’s father was apparently armed with only his service pistol—a well-worn M9—and a hunting knife.
Eric’s eyes burned as he watched them disappear into the shadows. He would never openly question his father, but this whole business was fucking bullshit, he thought, purposely thinking words his father would not approve of. As if somehow that little act of rebellion, even if it was only in his own head and heart, mattered when he was just going to do as he was told anyway.
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