by John Shirley
“Ha!” said a wolfish looking man, taller and skinnier, behind Dickie. “Militia!”
“And that’s Mike Sten,” Brand muttered musingly. “Some of these others I don’t know. Except Cholo, him I’ve met. The Grummon brothers I know by sight.”
“Those other boys, those are Lucas and Remo and Chuckles,” Dickie said proudly. “Just got ’em with us about an hour ago. They were out at the ranch waitin’ for me and—”
“Dickie,” Ferrara told him, abruptly. “Just let me deal with this.”
Dickie’s grin only widened—he exchanged a wink with Sten.
Not good, Russ thought. It was clear that Dickie didn’t take Ferrara seriously. Which meant Ferrara couldn’t control Dickie’s bunch all that well. They were playing Ferrara, in some way.
Somehow, Russ knew these were men you either controlled—or you ran from. There was no real neutrality with them. He just knew that, looking at them. They were like some gangbangers Russ had known back home. Just a different variety.
Russ looked up at the still imposing wall of interlocked debris, to one side of the passage they’d cleared. The wave had mortared it together with seaweed, mud, and arbitrary swatches of trash. Russ could see the detached side of a house, up there, bizarrely angled, with part of a window still in it.
One day you’re sitting in your house, the next day it’s taken apart, the wall decorated with your kid’s pictures jammed into a pile of debris a quarter mile up the hill. Where were the people belonging to that house? Dead probably. Broken and drowned.
Russ looked back at Ferrara—and Dickie, whose face was lit from below in the indirect glow of flashlight beams. This Dickie guy seemed to Russ another kind of force of nature. Just another point man for death.
“What’s this plan you allude to, Ferrara?” Jill asked.
“In the present circumstances I feel it’s important you call me Mayor, or, if you want, Mayor Ferrara.”
“And I don’t feel like it,” Jill said, instantly. “Because you’re not acting like a mayor, you’re blocking the way out of a bad situation with guns and razor wire. You’re part of the problem.”
Man, Russ thought. These people are armed and dangerous. That woman’s nervy.
Ferrara looked steadily at her. “Lost your glasses, I see, Jill.”
“Yeah. I did. But I still have my sense of smell.”
Russ smiled. Ferrara pretended not to understand her. He stepped to one side, raised his voice to be heard over the crackling of the bonfire. “First, we simply can’t let people just walk away from town till we know for sure if any of those people have been looting! We need to make sure no one is getting away with what you folks have left! Second—we can’t let Freedom become a ghost town! Third—we can’t accept help from Big Government because their help isn’t really help. So we need our own plan—and my plan is to get everybody working in a new company. I call it the Freedom Corporation! What we’ll do is, we’ll privatize the restoration of the town. That means we pool our resources. I mean to rebuild this town! I lost everything in that wave. Either in it—or because of it!” He seemed to lose control of himself, in that moment. Something feral flickered in his eyes. “I lost every . . . fucking . . . thing!”
He was breathing hard—and Russ stared at him. Russ’s father, Brand, Pendra, Jill, Dale. They all started, realizing that something had happened to him in the tsunami. If it wasn’t madness, it was close.
“Your insurance didn’t cover tidal waves, I expect,” Jill said, after a moment. “You’re not alone in that.” Sounding like she was trying to calm him down. “But there’s FEMA help coming, there’s—”
“No!” He stabbed a finger at her. “See, I don’t have any insurance at all because that’s really just one arm of Big Government. Insurance commissioners, it’s all smokescreen! The insurance companies pretend to be independent but they’re not. Look at the AIG bailout!”
“So, since you chose not to insure—you’re going to make the town cover your losses?” Jill said, the words mixed with sad laughter. “How about cash assets, in banks? Stocks, that kind of thing? You must be able to . . . ”
He grimaced, shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about that. That’s a personal matter.”
“I heard you overextended yourself, building the brewery and that little casino in Deer Creek that you invested in—they wouldn’t license it and you lost all that money . . . ”
“Jill—that is personal business—we’re here to talk public business! Now, I’ve got a plan for the corporation written out—I’m going to post copies of it. We’ve got a generator going up at Mario’s place and I’ve got a copy machine there. But—now don’t interrupt, let me get this out, let me say it plainly to everyone—I said it before and I mean it! This town is not taking any help from FEMA! I have made that clear to the authorities at Deer Creek. Told them to pass the word on to FEMA that we’re okay. We are flat-out not taking any help from the US government or state government. These people from FEMA are planning to put anti-socialist Americans into detention camps! We are not going to trust them and we don’t need them! We are independent! We are Freedom!”
“Oh God, Lon!” Jill stared at him in shock—then covered her open mouth with her hand. “You told FEMA not to come?”
“They’ll come anyway,” Dad said.
“Actually, not for a while,” Brand pointed out. “They are sure to be way overextended right now. Stretched to the limits. Some town mayor says we don’t need help, they’ll check on them last. Maybe not for weeks. I mean—millions of people are displaced down the coast . . . ”
“We don’t need them ever!” Ferrara insisted. “Letting Big Government overrun us is not what this town is about! This is an opportunity to increase our decentralization from the power centers! Eventually we might even partner up with some other communities in the area and secede from the country—”
“Secede!” Dad burst out. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Lon!” He shook his head, laughing bitterly. “You are out of your fucking mind!” He groaned. “I mean—seriously—you are having a nervous breakdown of some kind. You don’t need our help—you need a doctor’s help, Lon!”
Dad was probably right. Ferrara probably was. But it made Russ nervous when Dad spoke that way to Ferrara. Dismissively, angrily. Because Ferrara had a shotgun in his hands and he was backed up by other armed men. Including that Dickie guy.
Ferrara glared at Russ’s father. Seemed to be controlling his temper. Then he said, “We’ll just see. Government might be pretty weakened by this whole thing, they might just shrug us off. There’s precedent for that. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First off, we create a company. We’re all going to be employees of it, see! We invest whatever we have in goods, right here, and in a special account at a bank over in Deer Creek—it’ll be invested by the Freedom Corporation. We’ll have a completely privatized town!”
Jill spoke up sharply. “That bank—you mean Deer Creek Savings and Loan? And who’s going to oversee that account? You?”
“Someone has to. That’s just practical. You’re getting hung up on petty—”
“Where did you get the razor wire?” Brand interrupted harshly, looking past Ferrara at the crisscrossing wire glimmering in the bonfire light. Something in his voice suggested it was a more important question than it seemed.
“The wire?” Ferrara shrugged. “It’s your standard antipersonnel stuff. For emergencies. I had some town goods, leftover stuff, stored in a shed out by the brewery. We got these coats, some emergency supplies, there was some wire . . . ”
“Wait—emergency supplies?” Russ burst out. Hardly aware he’d spoken aloud. But immediately aware that Ferrara and Dickie were now looking curiously at him.
“Who’s this?” Ferrara asked.
“That’s my son,” Russ’s dad said distractedly, frowning at the bonfire.
“Hey,” said another man, stepping up, catching Dad’s eye. A Remington hunting rifle cradled in his arms. “We met bef
ore. I’m Mario, Lon’s brother. You’re Drew, right?”
Mario Ferrara. Russ could see the resemblance now. But this Ferrara didn’t dye his hair, he let it go gray. And his eyes looked sadder, his face heavier, as if the sadness had collected like fat to sag in his cheeks.
“Yes,” Russ’s dad said, looking at the hunting rifle. “Mario. I remember. You worked at your brother’s bar.”
“Yeah—I’m looking for my own kid, about the same age as yours. Boy named Antony. With his friend. They’re just a couple of college kids.”
“Sure,” Dale said, stepping up. “Antony. He and his friend went for help. Said they were going to take some motorcycles—dirt bikes. Take the trails past the blockage.”
“Did they? They—” Mario broke off, blinking. “Dirt bikes? Did you see ’em on the dirt bikes?”
“No, no, they were going up to your place and getting those bikes. Not that long after the wave hit. We haven’t seen ’em since, so we thought they’d gotten through . . . ”
Mario shook his head, frowning at his rifle. “People from Deer Creek say they haven’t seen them. Found out on their own the road was blocked, so they started up the rescue. Nobody had to tell ’em.”
“Could be the bikes didn’t have any gas in them,” Dale said. “They might’ve gone by foot. Or they went somewhere else. Lot of places they could be. But I tell you one thing for sure, they didn’t die in that wave. We saw them after.”
Mario nodded slowly, brow furrowed. “I just don’t see why they wouldn’t be in touch with me by now.”
“Fuck this noise!” Dickie said suddenly. “Mayor—you going to give them the plan, or what? I’m hungry, and I want to set up a fucking watch on this pass and go back to headquarters.”
Dad snorted. “Headquarters!”
“Wait—” Brand interrupted. “Ferrara—‘Mayor’—let’s go back to these emergency supplies. Does that mean medical supplies?”
Ferrara shrugged. “Some. Just some old stuff from . . . when we closed the fire station.”
There was a collective gasp from the crowd behind Russ; he heard Pendra mutter, “Jesus fucking Christ.”
Brand and Russ’s dad looked at one another—then both turned to stare at Ferrara. “When did you come into medical supplies? When exactly were you going to make it available to people in town?”
“Doesn’t matter when.”
“Sure as hell does!” Brand shouted. “People died! People died in my arms and that stuff might’ve saved some of them!”
Ferrara sniffed. “I had to think ahead. We’re going to be here for a while. Now listen—we’re getting off-track here.”
“No, we’re not getting off track!” Russ’s father said, his voice taut.
Russ was still trying to get himself to believe that Ferrara could have sat on medical supplies during the emergency. With people dying.
“What supplies were they?” Dad demanded.
“Not going to discuss that.” Ferrara’s face twitched. “That’s . . . that’s off-track. What we want to talk about—”
“What we’re going to talk about with the State Attorney General’s office,” Dad grated, “is prosecuting you for holding out on medical supplies in an emergency! We’re going to talk to the families of people we lost about suing you, Ferrara! You think we’re going to partner with you? We had no emergency services in this town because you got rid of them!”
“That tsunami was bad timing—I didn’t make the tidal wave!” His eyes had that feral flicker again. “I don’t make earthquakes!”
“No, you make us helpless when we have one! Now you tell me this—I’ve got a wire cutter right here in my coat. I’ve been using it to get people out of tangles for days—while you were AWOL. Now if I step around this fire and cut that razor wire there, what are you going to do? You telling me you’re going to shoot me for cutting that wire and walking through this pass? I don’t think so. You have no authority to do this.”
Dickie stepped closer—and suddenly there was a pistol in his hand, pointed at Russ’s father. Inches away from his head. “We could make an example right now, Mayor Ferrara. This is an emergency. What you call a crisis. We got, like, martial law. We can—”
“Put that damn gun down now!” Dale barked, seeming to swell with rage.
“Easy, Dale,” Brand said. Raising a hand for caution.
Russ’s dad just stood there, the muscles working at the corner of his jaws, glaring at Dickie. But when he spoke it wasn’t to the man pointing the gun at him. “Ferrara? You in charge or not?”
Jill said, calmly, collectedly: “Lon.”
Dickie grinned. He steadied his gun-hand with his other hand. The firelight gleamed on the blocky chrome plating of the pistol, still pointing at Drew Haver’s forehead. They could hear waves rising and falling, behind them, just a susurration at this distance; they heard the bonfire hissing with damp wood.
Russ’s father had arms rigid at his side, hands fisted. He was staring at Dickie. Seemed to be trying to figure out which way to jump. Russ thought he looked more angry than scared.
But staring at the gun, Russ felt hollow, like he might crumble in on himself. I have to stop this. But if he tried to rush Dickie he might prompt him to pull the trigger.
“Oh God,” Pendra said. “Russ?” She moved closer to him, taking his right arm in her hands. He could feel the fear in her touch.
I’ve got to do something, Russ thought. But what?
Lon Ferrara reached out—and slowly pushed Dickie’s gun-hand down. “Just—hold your fire, Dickie. Christ. We’re disagreeing here, we’re not fighting.” After a moment, he added. “Not yet.”
Dickie was looking at Ferrara now. His mouth was pressed into a line; his eyes shiny. He looked like he wanted to raise that gun—at Ferrara this time. But finally he stuck it in his waistband, and smiled. “Time and place for everything. I’m going back to headquarters.” He turned and stepped to one side, spoke in a low voice to several of the gunmen.
Ferrara glanced at Dickie—a quick, cold look. Then he turned back to Russ’s dad. “One thing’s for sure here—we’re serious. We’re not going to let you go through that wire. That’s right—that answers your question. We’ve got emergency rules here. We stay in town for now till we figure things out!” The last four words were shouted—seemed to escape of their own. He seemed startled by the sound himself, and spoke more quietly. “And—and we’re going to take a vote on the corporation.”
“A vote?” Jill said. “Really. And who counts the votes? You?”
Ferrara made a dismissive wave of his hand. “I’ll pick a committee to do it. I’m the mayor.”
“Ferrara,” Brand said. “You want, you can ask these people here if they want to sign up for your company. Hell, why not.” He turned to the small crowd. “How about it? Anybody want to sign on with him?
Dr. Spuris opened his mouth—then closed it. And looked fixedly at the ground. No one said a thing.
Brand nodded, and turned back to Ferrara. “I’ll ask around—but I wouldn’t count on it. And don’t ask me to call you Mayor, again. You’re not a mayor. You’re just a local bully who’s got a screw loose. You’re out of control, Lon.”
“Now look—”
Brand turned his back on Ferrara and gestured, drawing Russ’s father, Jill, Russ, and Dale to one side. “I think we should go and discuss this blockade. Privately.”
Dad nodded slowly. Russ could see he was relieved to have a good reason to back away from the confrontation.
Russ didn’t blame him. It must be just now sinking in for dad how close he came to being shot.
“Sure,” Ferrara called out, as they turned away, heading back to the high school. “You . . . you think it over! I’ll post those notices in the morning!”
No one responded. They just kept going. They walked away from the fire, faces turned to the clammy, fetid wind. The other townspeople followed in a separate bunch, whispering as they all went back down the hill.
Russ and Jill and Pendra and Dale and Dad and Brand stuck together in a tight group. When they got partway down the hill, Russ heard his dad mutter, “I think Ferrara’s lost his mind. I mean—literally. Snapped.”
“Totally,” Pendra said glumly. “That dude is fucking nuts. Maybe not all the way there but . . . He’s on his fucking way . . . ”
“I was thinking that too,” Russ said. “And I think that Dickie guy knows it.”
Dad nodded. “Dickie’s playing some kind of game with Ferrara. And Dickie’s a truly dangerous man. If we push them—someone’s going to get shot. But we can’t stand for this either.”
Jill said, “Lon had very little cash left before the tsunami. He was way overextended. Anyway—that was the rumor. And you could tell it was true when I asked him about it. Now he’s had his businesses destroyed. He’s in debt. He’s panicking. And—maybe the whole experience broke something in him. He was always kind of borderline . . . nutty.”
“That stuff about the FEMA detention camps,” Russ said. “What was that all about?”
Russ’s dad chuckled grimly. “It’s this urban myth that these anti-big-government fanatics like to bandy about on the Internet. I never heard that one from him before, but—seems like he’s ready to believe it now.”
“It looked to me,” Russ said, “like his brother wasn’t happy about the whole thing. Like he was going along because he didn’t know what else to do.”
Jill looked at him and nodded. “Or maybe Mario’s got his own reasons. Like maybe he’s wondering what happened to his son . . . ”
Dad looked sharply at her. “You think Dickie did something to those kids . . . ?”
“Could be. He didn’t like the subject.” After a moment she added, “I know Lon Ferrara pretty well. There’s no way that he really believes deep down any of this stuff about his new company, his corporation, making us do all this—about anything he said really. It’s a crazy scam to get back what he’s lost. I don’t say crazy lightly. He’s basically gone out of his sad little mind. I mean, when I fell off that roof, he never even glanced at me. Didn’t say a word. He was like a zombie. In his right mind, even Lon Ferrara would never believe that what they’re doing is going to work.”