What was it with women?
It was a task he wasn’t exactly confident he was up to. Beverly had been hard to read even before she’d slipped quietly into the night, cast off her sheep’s clothing, and been reborn as the rabid wolf sitting before him now. Dealing with somebody strung out on any kind of drug made things more difficult, but there is still a logic and a thought process at work in an addict’s mind. If a man could tap into it, negotiation was still possible.
As he waited for her to react to his silence, he reviewed every encounter he’d had with the woman while she was with Dan and part of his group. There had to be a moment that would in hindsight give him clues to her true nature, but he couldn’t bring any up out of the dark. She’d been quiet, reserved, never overtly cruel, but not particularly kind either. He now realized that she’d been basically just like Gacy, Dohmner, and the other psychopaths out there, or at least how they were typically described by neighbors in interviews after their carnage had been revealed.
Suddenly Beverly laughed and whispered something into the Man-in-Charge’s ear, then disconnected her IV line from her blood bag. As the nurse hurried over to put it away, the Man-in-Charge smiled, cruelty dripping from his lips.
“Answer her,” he said in a breathy, gravelly voice.
Brennachecke sighed and pressed his knife into the little pirate’s throat, just enough to make the small man squeal. He didn’t want to be having this conversation and hoped the trickle of blood now oozing around the blade would drive that point home and get them to take his request seriously.
“I think they headed this way from town, up Highway 1,” he said, biting his words like they hurt his mouth.
“Oh, do you? Well, I’ll make sure we keep an eye out. We can always use new toys around here. Thanks for the heads up.”
Beverly slid off her seat next to the Man-in-Charge and walked up to her one-time friend and his hostage. She was wearing an expensive-looking long cashmere robe. It had been folded over her body while she’d been sitting, but apparently it did not have a tie, because it opened up as she moved off the couch, unabashedly exposing her naked body underneath to everybody in the room. She may have been hard to read, but Brennachecke was pretty sure by how she walked toward him that the woman enjoyed the men’s reactions to seeing her naked flesh. This was a show. Sex was power too. Especially when it came to bad men.
When she got to him, she slowly reached out and touched his hostage’s lips, and then ran her finger up the line of blood dripping down his neck and tasted it. Brennachecke eyed her, not sure what she was doing but not about to let whatever it was get to him.
Suddenly, she thrust her hands forward and pushed the blade of the hunting knife deep into the throat of his hostage. The knife severed the small pirate’s jugular vein and let loose an enormous spray of blood all over Beverly, who closed her eyes, tilted her head back, and seemed to take sexual pleasure from the sensation of its warmth splashing against her naked skin.
Brennachecke was caught off guard. He’d thought he was prepared for anything, but he hadn’t been prepared for that and certainly was not ready for what happened next.
Beverly’s hands rubbed the blood over her naked breasts and down her flat stomach to her porn-star trimmed privates, where she rubbed at her clitoris, gently bringing herself to climax in a matter of seconds. Brennachecke’s hostage died before her berserker-blood-fueled, human-blood-soaked orgasm had finished shuddering its way through her body.
The Man-in-Charge, grinning ear to ear, politely waited for her to return to the real world from the ecstasy overload she was experiencing, so she wouldn’t miss his men taking Brennachecke out, or the satisfaction he knew she’d get from watching the bloody smears being laid into the carpet as they dragged away the bodies.
The world switched into slow motion for the old soldier. His mind flashed through what he’d just witnessed, grabbing on to details he wished he could let go of forever.
Blood. Splashing across Beverly’s face.
Her hands. Rubbing furiously between her legs.
Her breasts. Undulating as her body shook.
AR-15s. Pointing at him. About to fire.
“Wait!” he said.
The Man-in-Charge held up his hand slightly, and the pirates in turn held their fire.
“There are still planes and fuel at the old airport next door. I can teach your men, or just you if you prefer, to fly them,” Brennachecke blurted out, hating the way his voice sounded in his own ears, almost as much as he now hated women in general.
* * *
The morning was still crisp but finally starting to warm up enough to dispel the visible vapors of Dan’s breath. Last night had been cold and uncomfortable. He hadn’t expected Brennachecke to return anytime soon (or maybe at all), so he’d tried to get some sleep before the sun came up. Curled up in the small departures and arrivals building with no heat and only his thoughts, however, he’d found rest elusive. Instead he spent the night fighting a constant tug-of-war in his mind between his urge to flee (if only to find a place he could actually get warm) and his urge to rush into Vedic City and get Brennachecke out before it was too late, because the likelihood of the old man coming out of this mission in one piece felt lower and lower with each breath he watched come out of his mouth. But he’d managed to stay put, just like Brennachecke had told him to.
Now, basking in a shaft of sunlight pouring in through the one remaining pane of glass in the wall of windows facing the runway, he soaked in the warmth on his face and hands and wondered if this bizarre cold in the middle of July was just a fluke event or the new normal.
He remembered reading something (or maybe watching it) about global warming and climate change and how it didn’t always mean things would get hotter. He couldn’t remember the details—something about the directions of the ocean currents reversing when the amount of freshwater displaced the amount of salt water, which was happening because all the polar ice caps were melting and falling into the ocean. Or maybe it had something to do with the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. He’d seen that movie Al Gore had made while folks were still trying to deny the facts, the one with the stupid title, which he couldn’t for the life of him remember at the moment. All that had stuck with him was the idea that global warming was making the weather more and more extreme and might somehow cause an ice age. The hows and whys may have been over his head, but he sure as hell could say one thing: it was colder than a witch’s tit in a snowstorm last night, and it was the middle of July.
He pulled a Tupperware container out of his pack and opened it. Boiled potatoes. Breakfast of champions. He popped one in his mouth, packed the rest away, and stood up, trying to stretch the stiffness out of his body. He climbed up a ladder and through the access hatch in the ceiling, then scrambled onto the roof of the building. He could see the edges of Vedic City poking up behind the trees to the west. The place was still asleep, most likely, but he put the field glasses to his eyes to check it out just the same. He could see only a few homes and not the Raj from his vantage point, but the structures didn’t interest him much anyway. He cared only about the roads, and there was no traffic on them yet.
He turned and looked out across the runway to Highway 1 in the distance where there too all was quiet. He looked to the hangar Brennachecke had chosen. They’d opened the doors and rolled a Cessna 172 out last night before they’d split up. Dan didn’t know much about planes, but Brennachecke obviously knew what he was doing with the thing. Dan wondered why the old man hadn’t taken advantage of having aircraft at his disposal, but then he realized that it was probably for the same reason the group hadn’t settled down on one of the farms. Nomadic scavenging was just safer. If crops and electricity put a target on your back, Dan could only imagine the unwanted attention a plane would bring. He wondered if Brennachecke had that in the back of his mind when he planned this little invasion of his. Was he trying to bring down the blood pirates by making them draw more attention to themselves? Th
at seemed too convoluted to be the actual plan. Besides, they were there to get Jen Kessler and her creepy little sister. Brennachecke had expressly said so. But as an added little bonus? he thought. Hell yes.
Though Brennachecke didn’t actually seem to be doing much crusading against the squatters in Vedic City, Dan thought. And for that matter, the pirates had left them pretty much alone too. Not that his group had sought out conflicts with them—at least not until now. After Beverly had been snatched, Brennachecke had actually refused to inquire if anybody in Vedic City knew anything without some kind of evidence pointing in that direction. Dan had been pissed off for weeks about that, but once the old soldier made his mind up about something, God himself couldn’t change it.
Dan looked at his watch. It was almost nine. Not that it meant anything anymore, but he found it comforting to keep track of the time. He popped another potato into his mouth and grabbed his bow, arrows, and field glass from the floor. It took him a second, but he eventually found a nice spot in the sun to wait for something to happen.
He didn’t have to wait long. Old routines and schedules still haunted the lives of most folk. The collective consciousness of America still had 9:00 a.m. ingrained into it as the time when work was supposed to start. It still had noon ingrained as the time to eat lunch. It still had 11:00 p.m. ingrained as the time by which folks should be in bed. It was the circadian rhythm of a society that no longer existed, one that had no real purpose anymore—except maybe for the folks who farmed—but it survived nonetheless. Even for depraved and psychotic folks like blood pirates, the daily routine was remarkably ordinary. By 10:00 a.m. Vedic City had gone to work.
Dan watched a small convoy of vehicles drive out of the town and head toward him. He smiled, ready. But the convoy didn’t turn into the airport; instead it kept going out to Highway 1. He put the field glasses up to his eyes and watched as the four cars and two vans set up to intercept folks who didn’t know better than to take alternative routes. Folks like the Kessler girls. Dan shifted his observation toward the MUM campus just on a whim. He was too far away to make out anything. Even the glint of the golden domes in the distance was beyond the range of his vision. But he found himself suddenly convinced that Jennifer and Bobby-Leigh were not captives or victims of blood pirates just yet. He didn’t know where this intuitive hit was coming from, but it was strong.
Had they jumped the gun? Had Brennachecke gone into the beehive and shaken things up before the honey had even been made?
If the girls were not in Vedic City, Dan wasn’t sure how the plan would play out. He supposed that Brennachecke could still make his offer. He’d probably have to just to get out of there alive. But then what? It seemed unlikely that the pirates would be inclined to do much for them once they’d gotten their flight training.
Suddenly, Dan realized he didn’t even know how long it took to teach somebody how to fly. He assumed it was like driving. The mechanical part was easy enough to learn quickly. Right foot on the gas, left on the brake and working the clutch. Clutch in while you shifted. Clutch out when you accelerated. But what really mattered was experience. You had to learn to feel for how long it takes to stop at different speeds. You had to learn to feel the clutch engaging and disengaging and how that worked with shifting and applying the gas. You had to learn to feel how fast you could take a corner without losing control. How much of that coaching did the old soldier intend to do?
He should have asked more questions. All Dan knew was that Brennachecke was confident he could get the pirates to take him to the airfield, and from there it was up to Dan to make a hole to escape through if it became necessary. They’d never talked about how long it would take. Dan had just assumed it was something that could be done in a day.
He looked out toward the meditation domes again and saw a disaster in the making. Two lone figures, one significantly smaller than the other, were just visible on Highway 1 through his field glasses. Jen and Bobby-Leigh. Of course, he couldn’t be sure, at least not in any kind of scientifically accurate sense of the word, but he’d bet the house (if he had one to bet) on it if he could. It had to be them.
They were still a couple of miles away from the blood pirate’s ambush point, but they were definitely going to be walking right into it.
Maybe Brennachecke had gone out with the road crew. Maybe when he’d asked for the girls and been told that they weren’t there, he’d managed to convince them to let him—
He couldn’t even finish the thought it was so ridiculous. Whatever plan they had was fucked. End of story.
But he was wrong. It wasn’t the end of the story at all. This was just the midpoint of the first book in the chronicles of a very long apocalypse.
Part Two
Blood Pressure
Give man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.
- Terry Pratchett, Jingo
Those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.
- Ernest Hemingway, "On the Blue Water”
The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.
- Source unknown
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
- T.S. Elliot, “The Hallow Men”
Chapter Five
The Beast in the Wild
Emmett was really not a bad man. He was really not a bad father. Really not a bad husband. A bad brother. Friend. Prisoner. He just wasn’t particularly very good at being any one of these either, which was about as kind as folks could be when it came to referencing a guy who’d gotten drunk and driven his whole family off the road and then proceeded to shoot his wife to death in the snow.
That said, the man did have one thing going for him. He could talk. Not in a car salesman kind of way, or a therapist kind of way, or a politician kind of way. It wasn’t something folks would be able to put their finger on, or would even notice for the most part. He talked to folks the way hot-bodied cheerleaders talked to rough and rowdy football fans. Emmett (once he’d quit drinking) opened folks up and stoked their inner fires in a way not very many people left on the planet could. Black Jesus had found that conversations with him would stir the pot of whatever stew was cooking inside his brain. It wasn’t in what he said or how he said it. Emmett’s gift was in what he didn’t say. How he heard what folks meant, instead of just listening to the words that exited their lips while waiting for his turn to talk.
Black Jesus was committed to doing his duty by all the convicts in his care, regardless of what he thought about them or the circumstances that had put them behind bars. But over the last few days, he’d started to actually like Emmett. Not enough to release him early or anything like that, but enough to come up with reasons to pass by his cell and have conversations.
Unfortunately, today’s conversation was not one of the good ones. Emmett’s obsession with his wife’s fertility doctor had reared its ugly head again, and now Black Jesus was having a hard time finding an opening through which to walk off without being rude—which was utterly ridiculous and he knew it. There were no rules of etiquette when it came to COs talking with inmates. Inmates talking to COs, on the other hand, was an entirely different matter. In that case the COs might as well be gods and the inmates ants.
And yet, this particular god didn’t want to hurt the ant’s feelings if he could help it. Kessler’s obsession made Black Jesus uncomfortable. It was obviously unhealthy and didn’t serve him. And it would certainly wind up getting the man in trouble if he couldn’t reconcile with it before he was released. But, if he were truly honest with himself, Black Jesus simply didn’t see how listening to another rant on Kessler’s theory of the apocalypse would help the cat move on.
That said, the inmate’s notion of why the world had fallen apart was much more interesting than the general bullshit everybody else had to say about it. So even though he didn’t want to stay there and liste
n to him go through it yet again, part of him kind of did. It was crazy, sure. All the theories out there were. But once you started down the rabbit hole with him it was hard to tear yourself away from the logic of it all. Unfortunately, it was that very logic which was biting Emmett Kessler in the ass, and Black Jesus didn’t know if he could keep from trying to explain that to him again.
“If your doctor man was inclined to partake in blood swapping, he could be in pretty choice shape still, even at—what would it be? Almost a hundred years old?”
“Oh, I’m sure he’s doing that. He probably was the one who invented the fucking shit,” Emmett said.
Black Jesus had been extremely troubled the first time he’d run into blood pirates and witnessed the brutality of their harvesting. Emmett had been the one he’d confided in. That conversation had been one of the good ones. Maybe even the best one. By the time it was over, he’d come to terms with how he felt about what he’d seen and felt like a better man because of it. He wished this conversation would take a turn in that direction, but he supposed Emmett needed to be heard as much as anything else. Though what he really needed to do was listen, even if just to himself, the CO thought, as the man’s words continued to gush out of his mouth. Emmett was picking and choosing the dots he was connecting, and you just couldn’t do that. Not if you really believed what you were saying.
“I still don’t think you can hold one man responsible for all of this, though,” Black Jesus couldn’t help himself from chiming in.
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