Getting killed trying to save the girl who killed his brother, just so he could kill her himself—what the fuck was that?
Whenever they’d lost people over the years his father had always avenged the death if it had gone down in a way that was anything less than fair and square. In fact, Brennachecke’s reputation for responding with an-eye-for-an-eye justice was a huge part of what kept the group safe from the lesser marauders who remained in the area. His father’s vengeance was surgically dealt and only fell on the head of the one responsible. There was never malice behind it, just an obligation to balance the scales.
When Dan’s fiancée went missing, the poor man had wanted to go on a killing spree, but Eric’s father had held him back. Suspicions were not enough. Yes, it had probably been the blood pirates to the north who had taken her, but they had no proof. Nobody had seen it. The woman had just vanished in the night without a trace. They’d spent months reaching out to the hundreds of groups in eastern Iowa, trying to find out what had happened to her, but never came across a lead. There was nothing pointing to the blood pirates as the perpetrators of her disappearance and presumptive murder. But the idea that it couldn’t have been anyone else was a hard one to shake.
Of course, there was also the possibility she’d left of her own accord and simply didn’t want to be found, though nobody ever openly admitted to it.
Eric knew that Dan was frustrated. He sympathized, but Eric also knew his father was right to hold the man back. He knew this because he knew something about Dan’s fiancée that nobody else did: The woman had been a sexual deviant. A predator, almost. And Eric knew this firsthand. He was embarrassed by what he’d done with her, even more ashamed of it because she was another man’s woman, but what kept him from telling his father about it was that he’d enjoyed it. Worse yet, he missed it. Fear of judgment kept his mouth shut as the searching began, but he suspected the whole time that she had left in the middle of the night because she was simply unsatisfied by what both Dan and Eric had been able to offer her.
Regardless, Dan was surely going to get a chance to kill some blood pirates now. It would not end up being justice, but since the man would never know the truth, Eric figured Dan would probably get some pretty intense satisfaction out it. What that meant for his dad was not something Eric was prepared to deal with yet.
The group traveled light. No vehicles. No animals. Society and civilization had fallen like Humpty Dumpty and broken into a million pieces, but the world was hardly a wasteland. God had just stomped on the anthill that used to be humanity, and all the angry little motherfuckers who survived were spilling out everywhere without any sense of purpose, community, or civility—biting and climbing and crawling and killing and running and hiding, until order could be restored.
Eric wore his homemade flamethrower rig on his back as he guided the dozen men and women his father had promised to protect away from the town square and up B Street. The little ignition flame of the rig on his back was the only light they had to follow except for the stars and moon that occasionally peered down on them from between the clouds.
Ace and Cooperman walked with him. JP held the rear, mostly because Eric couldn’t stand the man’s constant babble about TM. The nine people between them ran the gambit of what pre-apocalypse life had been; the group had construction workers, a bank teller, a librarian, and a bartender, that Eric knew of, plus a bunch who never talked about their past lives. But there were no children. Bobby-Leigh had been the only child among them. Children didn’t fare so well in the world after the power turned off and the nukes exploded. Folks with means couldn’t protect themselves. Children without means didn’t stand a chance.
“I get that Brennachecke feels like he has to put Jen down, but . . .” Ace began, and then couldn’t finish. The question of what would become of Bobby-Leigh weighed heavily on all of them.
“Maybe she didn’t know she was a berserker,” Cooperman said.
“She knew,” Eric said. The men spoke in hushed voices, trying not to disturb the cover of darkness.
“You don’t know that,” Cooperman said.
“It doesn’t really matter, does it?” asked Eric.
“Of course it matters,” Cooperman replied. “It’s not like she murdered your brother in cold blood, Eric. Your father’s vengeance has always been just, you know? I just don’t see the justice in this.”
“If it hadn’t been your brother, I—”
“My father is a lot of things, Ace,” Eric cut him off, starting to get angry. “But he is not a man who acts on emotion. If Jen had killed any of you instead of his own flesh and blood, he’d be doing the same thing he’s doing now. You know that.”
“Do I?”
“You don’t have to stay with us if you don’t like what’s happening,” Eric said coldly, effectively ending the discussion. In his heart, Eric agreed with Ace, but the young man had locked his heart away the same night Dan’s fiancée had vanished into the night.
They walked on in silence for a few miles until they came to the dirt road between the dead cornfields, just past what was left of the Sweetwater Bunkhouse property and Eco Village—a reminder of why it was better to keep moving.
There were lots of these off-the-grid farms all over the US. Or at least there used to be. The folks who lived on them quickly found themselves with targets on their backs, and as the properties changed from one bloody hand to the next, their old inhabitants would do their best to rip them apart, either in an attempt to keep the technology even though they were losing the location, or just out of spite, so nobody else would be able to enjoy the benefits of having electricity. It was the latter that had ultimately resulted in the destruction of Eco Village.
Fucking assholes, Eric thought, as they slowly and cautiously moved into the thick dead corn. Again the language in his head was an expression of his frustration and anger at his father. He’d never use those words out loud. Just like he’d never tell Ace that executing Jen didn’t feel like justice to him either. Just like he’d never tell Dan about being fucked by his wife-to-be.
“Bobby-Leigh is still one of us, as far as I’m concerned,” Eric said softly to the corn.
“Amen to that, brother,” said Ace.
“If your father kills the girl’s sister, do you really think she’s going—”
“No, of course not. But that choice is on her.”
“But it’s not like you’re just asking her to pick a glass of wine to go with dinner,” said Ace. “What options does she really have? I mean, do you seriously think she could watch your dad execute her only living family left and then forget it ever happened and just pop back into the kitchen and start peeling potatoes?”
“She’s not going to do that,” Cooperman chimed in.
“She’ll defend Jen to the death. You know that,” Ace said.
“Probably,” Eric agreed.
“Look, man, I feel like I need to be explicitly clear here. I am not okay with hurting that little girl, no matter what your dad says,” Ace said. “If that means I need to leave, then I don’t know what to tell you, Eric. I guess that means I’m gone.”
Cooperman didn’t say anything, but Eric could tell he was in agreement with Ace and just didn’t want to say it out loud.
“Me too, brother,” a voice from the back said. Eric knew that voice belonged to Roger Halburn, a thirty-odd-year-old former bartender at the Arbor Bar and one of the original group his father had pulled together in the months that followed Fairfield losing power for good. Roger had followed his father through thick and thin up to this point. His dissent was a dangerous tipping point, and Eric knew it. Mutiny was as dangerous on land as it was on the high seas—not that these folks would attempt to violently remove his father from power. They’d just leave in the night, like Dan’s fiancée most likely had. Brennachecke’s group would be weakened by the losses, but what was worse, if the deserters couldn’t find another group to join, they’d be picked off like tin cans at shooting practice. This
was a lose-lose situation in the making, and the making was happening fast.
Eric really wished his dad was here. Nobody would be questioning anything if he was. Deep down in the pit of his gut, Eric was not completely confident his father would make it out of Vedic City and back to them. He took a deep breath and felt the weight of the world pressing down on his shoulders.
“Nobody is suggesting we hurt Bobby-Leigh, guys.”
“No, but—” Ace began, but Eric cut him off.
“Listen. I don’t have orders to execute Jen. You all know my dad isn’t going let anybody pull that trigger except him. Whatever happens, it’s not going to happen until he meets back up with us. But no matter what, Bobby-Leigh isn’t going to be punished for something her sister did. I won’t have it any more than any of you will.” The words came out louder than they should have, then without thinking he added, “In fact, if it were up to me, I wouldn’t be punishing Jen at all.”
As soon as it came out of Eric’s mouth he knew he’d messed up. It was bad enough when other people broke ranks with his father by questioning his command decisions, but it was pure treason for any disagreement to come from his mouth. He should say something to negate it, he thought. Something like But it’s not up to me, my father’s in charge and this decision is his to make as a commander and a father. Yet he didn’t say that, or anything else. The words just hung there in the oddly cold night air, waiting for him to fix this situation. But he didn’t want to fix it. This wasn’t like any of the other times the group had participated in eye-for-an-eye justice. Jen was one of them. Eric liked her. In fact, if his brother hadn’t been so obsessed with her, he might have even pursued her himself in a year or two, when the age difference had grown a little less creepy.
His words hung in the air unanswered until they were lifted away by the cold air, into the night. At least I shut everybody up, he thought as he moved forward through the corn. It wasn’t much of a consolation, all things considered, but deep down he was starting to not care anymore. They weren’t soldiers in the army after all. They were just a bunch of people trying to stay alive. Military hierarchies of command didn’t even really make sense under the circumstances.
He took a deep breath and for the first time realized just how much he resented his father for leaving them to pursue the Kessler girls. It obviously wasn’t the first time Eric had been angry with the man, but he suddenly was hit with a strong feeling that it might be the last, and his resentment evaporated instantly.
* * *
Vedic City had—ironically considering its current occupants—originally been built to facilitate world peace and had boasted a population of over a thousand people before everything fell apart. It was home to a resort-style golf course. It had a town center, a capital, and several hotels. It was more than just a community. Technically, it was almost its own country. It even had its own currency, not that anybody actually used it. It hadn’t been designed to be off the grid originally, but as the second and third generations of the TM movement returned to Fairfield from all over the country to raise their own kids, it had slowly become more and more green. Most importantly, it was next to the tiny municipal airport—and it was the airport that was going to be the key to Brennachecke’s negotiation with the vile dregs of humanity who had taken over the place.
The airport was in remarkably good shape, all things considered. When things had started to go bad, the folks who’d known how to fly and had the means to do so had flown away toward Canada, where there were fewer guns and more wilderness to hide in. Then there were those who didn’t have the means to fly north and who were stupid enough to try to put avgas into their cars and trucks. Some of those idiots had ransacked the place for fuel in the months of panic after the power failures and the nukes, but those folks were low in numbers and the airport fuel tanks were not empty.
Being stupid didn’t equate to living a very long life these days. Without power, the gas pumps didn’t work and that was enough to send a lot of folks off to find alternative sources for fuel. Of course the pumps could be hacked with a car battery, or if that was too technical, the gas could simply be siphoned from the underground tanks with a hose. But not everybody was that resourceful. Unfortunately for those who did try to use avgas in their cars, the relatively high lead content and chemical additives used to make the fuel safe for planes at higher altitudes slowly destroyed their ground vehicles’ engines. The morons tended to inevitably get stranded in the kinds of places death found them quickly.
Smarter folk knew there were better places to find the things they needed than a municipal airport. In fact, there were still planes in hangars just waiting to be used. Brennachecke had seen them with his own eyes and knew how to fly most of them. Since nobody had seen a plane in the sky for years, he assumed the blood pirates did not.
It was deep into the heart of the night by the time Brennachecke crossed over Jasmine Street and the Vedic City line. He was alone. Dan was perched with his bow high and away, watching with field glasses, out of danger and for the next few hours out of range. The whole plan was risky as hell, but this was the most dangerous part of it.
Brennachecke stealthily moved down Village Center Drive, angling to cut through the thin green strip of trees between the houses and the Ayurvedic hotel and spa once called the Raj, which he’d heard through the wind was now the blood pirates’ command center. This approach allowed him to come at the building from the side instead of straight up the driveway, but it was debatable if a less direct approach would make anything easier.
Blood City was asleep for the most part—the drunken shouting of a pirate resident somewhere sight unseen notwithstanding. There were no security patrols that Brennachecke could see, which meant the pirates either had grown complacent with the size of their numbers or were just plain stupid. Either way it was a good sign. The voices in the wind put their numbers at over a thousand, but like most rumors that seemed to be an exaggeration, unless there were full-on barracks somewhere Brennachecke hadn’t seen yet. With only a couple of exceptions, the homes he was passing now as he approached the green belt around the Raj were obviously empty. He wondered if Vedic City had solar batteries or not. And if they did, just how prevalent they were. Tesla’s Powerwall batteries had dropped to a price point that residential installs had almost started to make economic sense. But then the world had ended, and Brennachecke didn’t have any idea how many homes had power storage beyond a few kilowatts for emergencies. These homes did not appear to have any power, but speculating as to why was just a waste of time.
As he got closer to the Raj, however, it was clear that unlike the homes he’d just passed, the spa hotel did have power. In fact, it glowed softly with light as if the intentions behind its Sthapatya design had finally found fulfillment in the darkness of the world it now existed in. But as he looked closer, he quickly saw that the opposite was true—the structure had been tragically misappropriated by forces significantly darker than the night around it, and the light radiating out from within now only shone forth in irony. Dozens of bodies, naked and all female, had been strapped to the pillars at the hotel’s entrance with barbed wire. At first Brennachecke thought they were corpses, but they weren’t. The women lived, their flesh a bloody and rotting mess. He wasn’t sure if they were strung up as a punishment or as warning. Probably both. His instinct was to put them out of their misery, but he didn’t dare—at least not until he knew what had become of Jennifer and her sister. The women for the most part were stoic in their agony, or at least they were until one recognized that Brennachecke was not one of the pirate residents of the city.
“Please,” she whispered. “Help me.”
The woman was missing most of her left foot, and gangrene had clearly set in. Her entire left leg was rotting, and the stink of sepsis was nauseating. She was dead, but just hadn’t stopped breathing yet. Brennachecke looked around to make sure nobody was watching except for the other women lashed to the pillars, and then pulled out his long huntin
g knife from the sheath on his arm. The woman nodded and smiled. Tears of relief poured out of her eyes and down her bloody cheeks.
The knife cut through the space between her ribs and pierced her heart almost effortlessly.
“Please,” the other women called out to him.
“Please.”
The commander in Brennachecke knew very well that putting an end to the suffering here would complicate his mission. He hesitated to euthanize them.
“Please.”
They begged in rolling waves of pleading that washed over him and threatened to erode the resolve on which he stood. Threatened to pull him under, fill his lungs with sorrow, and make him drown. Then one started to scream and things got complicated in a hurry. Brennachecke realized what they were. They were a test and an alarm built into one. And he had failed.
The two men who came out of the Raj carried AR-15s—arguably one of the best assault rifles in the United States, which was a country that had more guns than people even before the apocalypse. Brennachecke smiled at them and held up his hands. Here we go, he thought, as the nerves that come from years of being on the front lines of one war after another clicked coldly into place.
“Morning, gentlemen,” he said as the two pirates looked him over, both having a hard time believing the balls on the guy, but also perfectly willing to put him down without a word. Brennachecke wanted them to speak before he said anything more, but before either of them did, the taller of the two noticed that one of the strung-up ladies had been prematurely killed.
Complications upon complications. And it was all because of women he had only been trying to help. Why couldn’t he just stay out of things? Brennachecke was not the least bit bothered by the sexism in his own thoughts.
He wasn’t going to have the luxury of waiting for them to speak. He could see it in their eyes, even before the tall one started raising his weapon. The mental calculations flashed by in a heartbeat; there was only one way left to go, and he didn’t waste any time wondering if this was going to escalate things beyond the realm of a possible positive outcome or not.
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