It would be what it would be.
As the men with the AR-15s started to come up, Brennachecke stepped forward and pushed the barrel of one of the assault rifles into the chest of a tall pirate so fast the man didn’t even know it had happened. In fact, it wasn’t until Brennachecke’s leg launched out behind the guy and swept his own out from under him, sending him down to the ground backside first and leaving his gun in the hands of the old solider, that he even realized he’d been attacked.
A boot to the head cut that realization short.
Brennachecke didn’t pause long enough to even take a breath before continuing the attack. The other, shorter, pirate was not any faster and found himself without his weapon and with the stranger’s hunting knife against his throat before his friend on the ground had even started to bleed.
“Kneel,” Brennachecke said. The short pirate complied without a word. Never taking the blade away from the man’s neck, the old soldier checked the pulse of the pirate on the ground and stripped his gun away from him.
“He’ll live,” he informed the short one.
“Maybe. But you’re fucking not gonna,” the pirate hissed.
Brennachecke smiled and nicked the man’s neck, not enough to sever an artery, but enough to make him feel it. “There’s no need for that kind of language. I have an offer for your boss. You can take me to him, or you can die. Choice is yours.”
The little pirate didn’t say anything, which didn’t surprise Brennachecke in the least. The man was obviously trying to calculate his chances, but without the years of practice and training Brennachecke had, the man’s doubts were getting the best of him. Brennachecke had seen it in a number of soldiers over the years on his tours of duty. The pirate wouldn’t have lasted long on a real battlefield, he thought. He knew that was probably going to be true of most of the men he was about to be facing off against. In fact, he was counting on it.
“Take me to your leader,” Brennachecke commanded after another second or two of waiting for the man to decide what he wanted to do.
The short pirate finally moved. In his head, Brennachecke breathed a sigh of relief. He needed to be in front of the Man-in-Charge before the tall one woke up, or he’d end up having to kill one, if not both, of them. Murdering folks only made things harder. This was already complicated enough.
With the two AR-15s slung over his shoulder, his knife digging into the soft tissue of his hostage’s neck, and ice water in his veins, Brennachecke walked into the light spilling out of the lobby of the Raj.
“Kill me,” the women strung up on the pillars behind him cried.
“Kill me, please!”
“It hurts so bad. Please! I can’t take it anymore!”
“Curse you, you fucking cruel son of a bitch.”
One of the women managed to spit up a bloody chunk of something at him, but it didn’t make it very far from her mouth and just ended up dangling off her swollen and bruised lips, more a testament to how much she wanted to die than to how angry she was at the man for not fulfilling her wish.
Brennachecke ignored it all. He didn’t look back even once at the women screaming for death behind him. But they certainly looked at him, and their continued curses would prove to be remarkably prophetic.
* * *
Eric looked through the brown long-dead stalks of corn at the Sthapatya Veda house that legally belonged to Jen and Bobby-Leigh’s uncle. He could see his breath in the cold night air and was shivering, but thoughts about how odd the weather was for a July night in eastern Iowa had been pushed out of his brain for the moment. He was preoccupied with the sliver of light he could see coming from the windows of the house and what that meant. Jen and Bobby-Leigh were already there. Or if not them, somebody else was, which would be worse.
The cold, even if he wasn’t wasting time wondering about the weirdness of it, did actually matter (or at least it would soon). It meant they couldn’t just wait outside indefinitely like his dad had ordered them to do. They’d all dressed for a cool summer night—light jackets over short sleeves—not expecting the temperature to continue to drop like it had. It wouldn’t be long before hypothermia became a real issue.
“What are we doing?” Ace asked.
“Waiting,” Eric said flippantly.
“For?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, it’s cold as fuck out here, man.”
“The house is not empty,” Eric said.
“Jen and Bobby-Leigh wouldn’t leave a candle going like that,” Roger said.
“I was thinking the same thing.”
“So what are we doing?” Ace said again.
“I’ll go and see if I can get a head count,” a woman’s voice said. The voice belonged to Maddie Love—or “Mad Love” as most of them called her—a fifty-nine-year-old former librarian who was probably the smartest woman Eric had ever met.
Folks had always underestimated women, and the end of the world hadn’t changed that fact. Mad Love would not appear to be a threat to anybody. If she were spotted doing her reconnaissance, she’d probably be able to stall until Eric and the rest of them could get to her. It was a good idea, but before Eric had a chance to agree to it, the door opened and an occupant of the house came out.
“Eric Brennachecke!” the voice of the dark figure on the porch shouted. It was a voice Eric had never heard before, and he would have remembered it if he had. The distinctive accent (was it African?) of the woman on the porch was as strange in eastern Iowa—even in the once eclectic little town of Fairfield—as the cold front they were experiencing in July.
“How do you know me?” he shouted, stepping out into the open but signaling to the rest of his group to wait in the shelter of the corn.
The Sthapatya Veda architecture endorsed by Maharishi and popular in the TM movement had a number of features not particularly common to farmhouses in Iowa: geometrically proportional rooms, east-facing entrances, and a brahmasthan space at the structural center of the building among them. But the feature that suddenly caught Eric’s attention in this moment was the little steeple on the top of the house, called the kalash. On this home in particular the kalash was atop a tiny glass-windowed belfry-like structure, which at the time Allen Kessler had built it had been designed to light the brahmasthan inside with shafts of sunlight during the day, but now apparently served as a crow’s nest for a sniper with a laser-guided targeting system. Eric saw the tiny red eye of the beam blinking at him from the darkness above and looked down at his chest to find the telltale red dot of light painting him as its target. The dot then disappeared, but Eric knew that the gun was still tracking him. Modern laser-targeting no longer required a continuous beam to follow home; these days snipers just used the red beams to mark the desired impact point for the bullet. After that the trajectory guidance circuitry of the gun would take over and a miss was just about impossible regardless of what the victim did.
“I need your people to come out of the corn,” the African voice said. “So long as your intentions are peaceful, nobody needs to get hurt.”
Eric didn’t know if his intentions were peaceful or not. The house was supposed to be empty, or if occupied, it should have been with the Kessler sisters, not this foreign lady with her snipers and all-seeing eyes. From the doorway two more blinking red eyes of laser target painters popped on, and two more dots appeared on his chest and then vanished.
Jesus, he thought, who are these people? Military?
He didn’t think so. Those guys were usually only interested in occupying cities, where the resources were plentiful, not tiny towns in Iowa. Or so he’d been told. Brennachecke’s group hadn’t crossed paths with a military faction even once in the entire time they’d been together. They’d heard stories about them, of course—horrible stories, second only in depravity to the ones folks told about blood pirates—but they’d had no firsthand experience. If this woman and her group were military, he reasoned that they must have been deserters. That would explain the app
arent firepower and tech. Eric liked the potential poetic irony of coming across a group of real deserters while members of his own group were threatening to leave him, but his intuition told him this woman was not a soldier, at least not in any formal sense.
“We come in peace!” Eric shouted. “But my people are not coming out into the open until we know who you are!”
There was a long pause before the African voice responded. From the distance he was to the house, Eric couldn’t make out any words from the discussion she was having with her people, but he knew what they were talking about it—or at least he thought he did.
“Where is your father?” the lady finally asked.
The question had so much wrapped up in it that Eric almost just didn’t answer it. As his mind raced to quickly unpack its significance, he found that he had no idea what the right answer was because her question begged a bigger, broader, more pressing question of his own: How did she know his father was not with them? And that question quickly spawned an avalanche of additional ones: Did she know who was with them? Did she know all their names? Did she know what they were packing? Did she know about—The questions rolled down his mind until they threatened to cover everything else.
Maybe she can somehow see through the dark and the corn, he thought, but even if she had some kind of night-vision tech working for her, that didn’t seem like it would give her the intelligence she was obviously in command of. And if it wasn’t technology that was giving her the information, then what was? Was she a witch? A psychic? Satan’s sister? Eric didn’t know, so he did the only smart thing a man could under the circumstances. He told the truth.
“He’s trying to find the Kessler girls in Vedic City.”
“What the fuck are you doing?” Ace hissed from the corn behind him.
Eric wished he knew, but since he didn’t have any answers, he just ignored him. Two spotlight beams suddenly shot out of the open doorway, blinding him. He squinted into the light, trying to shield as much of it away with his hand as he could. There was movement on the porch. Somebody—the woman, he guessed—was approaching him. He heard Ace pulling the hammers back on his shotgun, ready to fire.
“Stand down, Ace,” he whispered. But the man wouldn’t, Eric knew that as well as he knew they were in way over their heads here. “Our side does not shoot first,” he said, loud enough for his whole group to hear, but hopefully still quiet enough to not share the order with the lady and her people marching toward them from the house.
“Your father took James and Daniel with him to Vedic City?” the woman asked when she got to Eric, her people still shining their spotlights in his eyes so that he couldn’t make her out.
“Jimmy is dead,” Eric said, relieved that the woman didn’t know everything after all. Then suddenly his adrenaline surged again when he realized that, while she may not have known that Jimmy was dead, she did still know that both he and Dan were not with them, and that normally they would be. Who the—
The lights lowered, suddenly breaking his train of thought and allowing him to see again. There were three people standing in front of him, a woman and two men, but it took him a second to register that the woman was actually a woman. Her body and face were obviously female, attractively so, but her hair was cut so short, his own shaved head had almost as much hair as hers did. Had she been white, Eric probably wouldn’t have done the double take. But she was black. And not TV-appropriate Tyra Banks and Kerry Washington black either; this woman was dark-skinned African black. The kind of black that the predominately white mainstream-media gatekeepers could barely tolerate in men and almost never allowed significant screen time for in women.
This was the first black person Eric had talked to, or even seen up close in person, in years. Even before the apocalypse began, Iowa’s black population was just barely over one percent. Eric wasn’t so much racist as he was naive and sheltered, but nonetheless, he stumbled back, nearly falling to the ground, when he saw her. This was a reaction the woman must have had before, because she just smiled a sad, knowing smile and sighed loudly before she spoke again.
“My name is Anoona,” she said. “The Kessler women are welcome here if your father gets them out of that cesspool, as are the rest of you, but understand this in no uncertain terms: this farm belongs to us now. If you can’t agree to that, then you’d best be on your way.”
Eric just stared at the black woman, trying to make sense of what was happening and coming up short. Anoona and the two armed men with her patiently waited for him to respond.
“How do you know me and my father?”
“I need you to acknowledge what I just told you and agree to it before I can answer any of your questions, Eric.”
“Okay, yeah, just give me a second here. How did you know that Jimmy wasn’t with us? How did you know that my people are in the corn? Who are you?”
“Eric, like I said, I am happy to answer your questions. All of them. But I need you to acknowledge your understanding that this farm is ours. Right now, before we do anything else. Because I am well aware that it used to be Allen Kessler’s. I’m going to need you to convince me that you understand and agree to our ownership rights here, so that if your father shows up with Kessler’s nieces we can have a reasonable expectation that nobody in your group—those young ladies included—is going to attempt to challenge our position here. Of course, that is not to say that your group is not welcome to join us. We have the capacity to take you in either short term or permanently, whatever you’d like. Just as long as you understand that this place is ours.”
Eric agreed.
* * *
Standing in what was once the library of the Raj, Brennachecke decide once and for all that he hated women. Sure, some might be okay. Some might even be freaking great. But it wasn’t enough to make up for how miserable they collectively had made his life.
The short pirate had taken him to see the Man-in-Charge just like he’d asked, but the man wasn’t at all what he’d expected. The square-faced, beady-eyed leader was a plump, redheaded man sporting a comb-over even Donald Trump would have called him out on. He looked too soft and slow to be running things, and yet here he was. But the real surprise was that the man was not alone.
Dan’s fiancée was with him.
And as far as he could tell she was not a prisoner. No, not a prisoner at all; she was sitting pretty just like a modern-day Lady Macbeth. As he silently took in the scene, it seemed to Brennachecke that she might even be the one running the show, with her soft whispers into the eager ears of power. After all, she was the one who spoke first, not the supposed MIC.
“Sergeant Brennachecke,” Dan’s fiancée said.
“Beverly. You look good, considering most of us thought you were dead.”
The woman laughed without any humor, but her eyes sparkled. Both Beverly and the MIC were hooked up to blood bags, getting transfusions of berserker blood. Some kind of nurse was attending them, but the man’s mouth had been sewn shut and he wore a collar that looked like it probably had an explosive charge in it of some kind, so he guessed the man was not there willingly—though if that was true, the attendant didn’t let on. Brennachecke was actually a little surprised at the clinical nature of the whole thing. He’d expected something much more gritty, dirty, more horror-show like, but to an untrained eye this would have looked almost civilized. It almost didn’t even feel out place here in the Raj, where back in the day all kinds of Aryuvedic treatments had been offered. It was like they’d just added berserker blood transfusions to the list of standard spa services.
Brennachecke thought protecting the health spa aesthetic must have been Beverly’s influence. He had always been aware of the probability that Dan’s fiancée had run off rather than been snatched. The fact that they’d never found so much as a trace of her pointed in that direction. When folks were taken against their will, there was almost always some evidence left behind. Signs of a struggle. Blood. Witnesses. Rumors. Something. Beverly had just vanished into t
hin air.
“Mmm, so . . .” she said. “How’s Dan?”
“Probably better off thinking you’re dead.”
The woman laughed again, it was still humorless, but now held a seductive undertone. “For sure,” she said. “You know, for years and years I wondered if he’d ever figure out who he was really with. What kind of woman he’d been about to marry. But then you know what? One day I just woke up and didn’t give a fuck anymore. I mean, seriously, how do you stand being around him? The man is such a bore.”
“Oh, I like the man, Beverly.”
“Really? Okay, well, how about this, then? And tell me honestly too because your opinion really does matter to me here: What did you think of my sirens out the front?”
She knew Brennachecke would know she was referring to the dying women strung up around the pillars at the entrance to the Raj, but the man didn’t give her the satisfaction of letting her know it. Apparently he didn’t want to engage in a debate as to what was appropriate and what wasn’t during an apocalypse.
Oh well, fuck him. She knew her brilliance and wit even if he wouldn’t acknowledge it. I mean, come on! she thought. I am using naked dying women to lure good men to their deaths just like in an old Greek myth, for the love of God. It’s fucking brilliant. Inside her head, she growled. If Brennachecke didn’t start being more fun real fast or at least have something worthwhile to offer, the asshole would have to die in the arena. And then after that maybe she’d send a squad out to kill Dan too just for the hell of it.
“What the fuck do you fucking want, Brennachecke?”
“I’m trying to find the Kessler girls.”
“And you think I’d tell you if they were here?” She laughed.
Brennachecke didn’t bother to answer. He just waited. Dawn was breaking outside. In an hour it would be morning, and if the girls were not here yet, they surely would be by the end of the day. His gut told him his little hostage was not going to be much of a deterrent if push came to shove, so he was going to have to manage to keep Beverly from escalating this, which he could see she clearly wanted to do.
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